Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (40 page)

But what would I have done had Cardinal Sean conceded his defeat with more grace and fewer accusations? What would I have done if he had issued a plea for reconciliation as the governor had? What if Sean had said, “Let us turn to the rest of society’s pressing business — poverty, social justice, capital punishment — with the energy with which we took to the streets on this matter?”

It would have cast me adrift. With no “them” to sanctify “us,” my rage would falter.
My God
, I thought,
what if I had to learn to love Cardinal Sean instead of metaphorically smacking him in the head with a baseball bat like he was a cheap piñata?

Fortunately, I’m a bad person, so I knew I’d take the bat every time. I am Cardinal Sean’s brother in rage and indignation. I am his brother in lack of graciousness. I am he, and he is me. Je-RU-salem! I was going to subtitle this book
From Porn to the Pearly Gates
, but perhaps
From Purgatory to Perdition
might prove more apt.

That night, I drove up to my brother Bruce’s house to apologize for a fight he didn’t even know he was in.

Why Catholic? (Part 1)

Triumph gave way to unease. It embarrassed me that the archdiocese had been so badly beaten in a legislature that was 70 percent Catholic. The Church, limping, haggard, once a moral contender, had weakened to a shadow of its former strength. A different Church, one that retained a speck of moral authority, might still have articulated Gospel imperatives that really did bear repeating: poverty, capital punishment, war, goldfish murder, the ubiquitous frat boy uniform of khaki pants and braided belts, and other objective evils.

“The whole structure has to die,” a priest told me, “and it is.” He cited statistics that readers of the
National Catholic Reporter
, a progressive Catholic newspaper, were on average over seventy years old. He said that the average age at a national conference of Call to Action, a Catholic reform group, was sixty-five. Indeed, by nearly every measure — Mass attendance, number of priests, political power, or bingo revenues — the Roman Catholic Church has diminished. Gallup polls showed that 40 percent attended Mass weekly in 2003, compared with 74 percent in 1958. But only 20 percent of Catholics born after 1960 report weekly Mass attendance. One priest told me, “The younger folk aren’t angry. They just don’t take the teachings seriously.”

A task force assembled by Cardinal Sean documented the decline in the number of priests. The task force identified approximately 500 active priests in the archdiocese and projected that that number would decline to 292 by 2015. Similarly, Saint Anthony Shrine had 55 friars when it opened in the 1950s, 40 when Myron first served at the Shrine (1976-1981), and today just 16.

A smaller, weaker, broken Church doesn’t distress B16, the crop of bishops appointed by him and J2P2, or the young priests ordained during their reigns. They seem happy to minister to the center rather than the margin, to exclude large portions of mankind, and to exclude the modern-day lepers. B16 has his priorities straight: host warmonger Tony Blair at the Vatican during the Iraq War and welcome his conversion to the Catholic fold, while proposing excommunication for Spanish politicians who favor gay marriage.

From a priest:

Catholic extremism, especially in America, is a force to be reckoned with. They are represented by a cadre of bishops who basically run roughshod over the other bishops. The bishops as a conference have shown they are unable or unwilling to resist them. Any bishop who tries to speak with pastoral reason is condemned as weak on life issues.

From Father Bozek:

I have no doubts that excommunication and withholding communion from certain persons and all groups of people is a perfect example of many bishops pushing their fanatic, reactionary agenda. Men in pink (the hierarchy) are using the most sacred elements of our Catholic faith to shamelessly promote their limited and outdated point of view, which often has nothing to do with modern, healthy theology. One does not need to be a prophet to realize that such policies will create a church that will be more “Roman” than “Catholic.” More and more Catholics will migrate to other denominations and many, I am afraid, will cut their ties with any organized religion whatsoever.

For these bishops and priests, an empty church proves they have done their job well. Only cowering jellies, helpless dogs, well-behaved eunuchs, and fantastically old people secretly relieved that they can forget about Vatican II need apply.

Reading interviews with newly ordained seminarians in the
Boston Pilot
, Father Butterballino shook his head in disgust at their pietistic sloganeering. “I’m just glad that there are so few of them.”

The More Things Change

WAKEFIELD, Mass. — Rev. Ron Barker, pastor of Saint Joseph’s Parish, banned Harry Potter books from the library of Saint Joseph School because themes of witchcraft and sorcery were inappropriate for a Catholic school. According to one mother,. Barker “said that he thought most children were strong enough to resist the temptation, but he said it’s his job to protect the weak and the strong.”

Cardinal Sean, too, seemed personally broken. Shortly after his appointment, he wrote that “being Archbishop of Boston is like living in a fishbowl made out of magnifying glass.” You’d think he would have shown more solidarity with the goldfish. O’Malley’s father died in 2005 in the midst of the furor over same-sex marriage. People who encountered him reported a stunned, deer-in-the-headlights look. Members of the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry, a group of over a thousand Massachusetts clergy of many faiths united in support of gay marriage, attended an interfaith seder at which O’Malley spoke. Reverend Kick-Me greeted the RCFM representatives and offered to introduce them to the cardinal. One of the RCFM representatives tried to chitchat about how much she had enjoyed the evening. The cardinal turned away.

The RCFM member complained to me that O’Malley hadn’t passed Conversation 101: “I felt like I had to explain to the cardinal, how it works is: We say something, and you say something in return. Because there was this blank dead-in-the-water look, it went nowhere.”

Another person told me, “I used to work at [a hospital], and the bishops would periodically come up. I was amazed at the difference at how he related to people compared to how Cardinal Law related to people. Law is very warm and made you feel good. And I thought Sean O’Malley was a nightmare. He didn’t relate at all to the people, he was very serious. Very different… I was amazed at how distant he was.”

So why do I cling to a broken, dying Church and its broken prelate? I continue, and the G-L Spirituality Group continues, and the pious continue, not because we seek spiritual insurance. We come because we experience something of God at the Shrine, something that moves, a whisper, a current, in a setting that both rings true and is strangely unsettling, decidedly different, where listening is active if imperfect and where acts of corporal mercy always form part of the picture. The Mass offers a chance to “acknowledge the wisdom of listening before speaking, of learning before teaching, of praying before pronouncing.” 50 percent of religion is just showing up.

We don’t always experience the miraculous. It’s not like I can drop a dollar in the collection plate and get a spiritual snack-pack in return from some celestial vending machine. But sometimes bread and wine change into flesh and blood. I witness that miraculous change, and realize all kinds of other miraculous changes could happen, like a new Church arising imperceptibly from the suffering of the old. Broken-ness is an opportunity for the Spirit to enter.

Now and at the Hour of our Death

Stacks of first editions filled the apartment of a now not-so-Hale Mary Flanagan, Projects and artwork in process covered her tables. Yet she informed me, not without pride, that she had been amusing herself lately with trashy reality shows. She was dying. She wasn’t sad, she wasn’t afraid — just old.

The strangling hand of my Irish reticence locked my jaw until my inner Mama Bear emerged. I told Mary how grateful I was for everything she had done for me.

When I moved to give her a hug, Mary manufactured an annoyed expression, waved me away, and brushed off “that kind of talk.” She wanted to discuss what the latest rule changes were for the eucharis-tic ministers so she could scoff and shake her head at Father Bear-Daddy’s infinite folly. We Irish are truly a silent, cramped, maddening, and lovely people.

“What do you want, Mary?” I begged. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing,” she said, then allowed perhaps she’d like a copy of the
Boston Sunday Globe
. She tried to give me a dollar, but I dodged her. She hauled her cancered carcass up from the chair and chased me around her apartment waving the dollar, her knuckles big as marbles, her skin translucent, her head bald, but her eyes as sharp as ever.

“God’s sakes,
take
it,” she said. “It’s not like I need a gold coin to pay my passage!”

I was on my way to her apartment when Mary died ten days later.

The funeral took place during Holy Week, the most solemn time of the year. The priests wore white, and the sanctuary lacked flowers save for the one red rose laid by Mary’s sister on her casket. A waft of smoke from the censer eddied at the altar. One of Mary’s friends climbed to the ambo. Unaccompanied, she sang an old hymn in Irish. The language, strange and beautiful, erased us, conjuring the smell of peat and ocean salt. Her voice wavered and broke, a harrowing sound like a bow drawn over poorly tuned violin strings. Then it gathered strength and body, the solitary voice uncowed by the church’s vastness, growing, invoking something unseen and ineffable. It was easy to believe that Mary’s soul had risen up from her ruined body and tarried just a moment on the way to Heaven to take possession of her friend’s voice and sing with her.

My eyes locked on the useless work of the priest’s hands: raising the bread and breaking it, mixing the water and wine, washing his hands for the cleansing of iniquities. Nothing made a sound, as if we had lost the audio portion of our program. There was only movement — familiar, precise, consoling, effective. It reminded me of watching Gram at work in the slanted evening light among white pines around the lake in Maine: shucking corn, snapping green beans, hulling peas, shelling pistachios, setting a table, frosting whoopee pies, cheating at cards, pouring gasoline on the fire pit, and carping about Catholics.

Being mindful of small things transformed these tiny ministries. They became bigger than themselves, more than their sum. They were calming, enthralling, instructive. It became clear why the snitches made such a big deal out of the rubrics and rules for the celebration of the liturgy. I felt, for just a moment, at one with them. The miracle was that there need not be a miracle — just a slow drip of experience. Mary would have laughed had she known that a few months after her death, Cardinal Sean sent her a letter politely wondering why she had not yet contributed to that year’s annual archdiocesan Catholic Appeal fund drive — and expressing hope that she would.

O’Malley may someday end the Shrine’s ministry. The chancery may fire Father Bear-Daddy or shut the group down. But other churches will welcome us, other places will allow us to convene. People everywhere reach out a welcoming hand; saints — gay and otherwise — buck the trend and speak out:

• A woman breaking her communion wafer in half and sharing it with those who have been forbidden to receive
  

• Father Butterballino’s surreptitious blessing of gay unions
  

• Priests testifying against gay-marriage bans
  

• Bishops supporting their out clerics
  

• Theologians discerning truth a millennium before Church fathers
  

In western Massachusetts, Ann Franczyk helped found Always Our Children, a group for Catholic parents with gay and lesbian children. She approached her bishop (not O’Malley) to notify him. Within thirty seconds of meeting her, he said, “I can’t condone homo-genital sex.”

Well, hello to you, too, Bishop
.

Franczyk took a deep breath and said, “You can make a big difference in the lives of gay people. Bishop, especially gay kids.”

The bishop pushed back his chair and took his own deep breath. It stunned him to learn that kids killed themselves because they were gay.

“Have you ever loved a gay person?” Franczyk asked. “Because to love someone who is gay is never to see the world the same way.”

The bishop agreed to let Franczyk start her group. Over the year, at the height of the same-sex marriage debate, Franczyk and other parents met with over twenty-five pastors, with a goal of speaking to every priest in the diocese.

All listened intently to the parents’ stories. Many of the priests suggested that they had never engaged in an intellectual discussion about gay people before. Some resisted the pitch and said they viewed active homosexuals as sinners. Some said they had been reaching out quietly to gay people for a long time. Some expressed anger at Franczyk and her fellow parents for trying to start a dialogue inside a Church that had been historically so discriminatory against gay people. They seemed to be saying:
Unlike me, you can choose to leave!

Slowly the group’s efforts produced results. Priests hung Always Our Children posters in their schools and churches. They put notices of Always Our Children meetings in their bulletins. Franczyk asked one priest to recite a prayer of the faithful for GLBT people.

“You write it, Ann, and I’ll read it,” he responded. Here’s what he read at Mass:

Let us pray for our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender children and their families, reaching out to them with love and compassion as Jesus and His Mother would in a world which is so often afraid of what it doesn’t understand. Let us pray to the Lord
.