Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (41 page)

In one parish, the pastor gave a series of Advent homilies that addressed the Church’s role with respect to people on the margin. The series culminated in a Christmas homily, at which the priest declared, “As long as I am pastor, GLBT people will be welcome in my parish.” He won a standing ovation.

These are small steps, discrete acts, a quiet refusal to occupy the back pew. Learned helplessness fades; we are not all shocked dogs anymore.

Re-Membering

Angela, a thin, sporty lesbian wearing a Guatemalan wool hat, ski coat, and fleece pullover, was telling the G-L Spirituality Group about her parish in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. Most Holy Redeemer had an 80 percent GLBT congregation, who mostly attended the 10:00 A.M. mass and had been doing so since the AIDS epidemic began.

“It was the first place I could ever go into and worship with all my parts. I didn’t have to check anything at the door. I brought my whole mind, my whole body to worship the Lord,” Angela said. “I didn’t recognize the sacraments in my life until I came to church with all my parts.”

Our ignorance of the fullness of being gay Catholics struck Angela. She, too, saw broken people. She, too, detected a sense of woundedness. Job, Alphaba, Mama Bear, me — so many of us were “dis-membered.” We had left the Church emotionally, if not physically.

I nodded like a bobble doll on the dash of a Ford 150. When I first came to the Shrine, I left behind a litter of parts. Holy foreskin and severed hearts? That’s nothing. I shed Scott, porn writing, Romentics, untempered fury. The Shrine could have used another lay ministry entirely, the Holy Coat-Check Girl to supply numbered tags in exchange for a few crimped bills in a jar so I could pick up all my parts when I headed out the door.

Angela suggested a solution. She had participated in a program back west called Re-Membering. “The Church is like a person with a missing limb. It needs its homosexual members. Rejoin. It needs to re-member itself.”
The eye cannot say to the feet, I do not need you
, I thought.
All members of the body of Christ are important)

We began to plan a weekend Re-Membering retreat. “There must be lots of unstructured space to talk about the Church.” Angela said. “What it really says and how to interpret that in gay life. It provides a portal, which is like a birth canal, for gay Catholics to come back.”

“Just from a marketing perspective,” I suggested, “I think we need to limit the birth canal analogy, if we hope to get any gay men to show up.”

It would also be necessary to have someone in authority present. As Angela put it, “We need a collar in the room.”

“Maybe a collar in body armor.”

“People tend not to believe laypeople. They’re caught up in that old-school mentality that the only source of authority in church is a priest,” Angela said.

Just as I was about to riff smugly on Ye Olde Piety Show, God Himself rang a big brass gong in my head and pointed out the obvious: the Piety Show performers included me. I, too, was living with that old-school mentality. The desire to plant one on Cardinal Sean, to get him to acknowledge me, bought wholesale into the snitch model of the Church in which old men in Rome hoarded the truth and doled it out piece by piece to a thoughtless and shrinking flock, who petitioned and gave thanks for every scrap of approval thrown down.

Humiliation flooded me — for needing acknowledgement, for seeking yet again after unrequited love.
Have you ever loved an archbishop? Because to love someone who is an archbishop is never to see the world the same way
.

All of us gay Catholics ought to stop waiting for others to confer power on us. However worthless you feel, and however worthless you are made to feel, others cannot take away God’s love for you or the godliness within.

“My Church,” Angela said, “is right at this table.”

Why Catholic? (Part 2)

On seeing the announcement for the G-L Spirituality Group in the Shrine’s weekly bulletin, a righteous blue-haired, middle-aged woman came up to Father Bear-Daddy before Mass while he was preparing the altar.

“Hey,” she said, waving around the bulletin. “What’s next? You going to have a support group for prostitutes?”

Father Bear-Daddy turned, looked at her, bit his lip, and simply could not keep his tongue in check. “Why? Did you want to join?”

False Starts and Fake Boobs: A Draper

Catholic is the language I speak when I speak about experiences that are at once full of awe, joy, mystery, gratitude, and yearning. Confession, forgiveness, genuflection, inflection, mercies, parables, psalms, redemption, saints, signs of the cross, sins — this is my vocabulary. I never feel so authentic when I am speaking a different moral language; I never find
le mot juste
.

I come from a family of halfsies, botched starts, and conflicting impulses. My paternal aunt became a nun, left the convent, married, and now ministers to alcoholics. My uncle started life as a man but is now a woman. (We call her “Aúncle.”) My French Canadian side tempers my Irish half. My father was born a Protestant, but educated Catholic and served as altar boy. We take two steps forward and one back. We don’t always get it right.

Gram would kill me for saying it, but we Catholics need to jettison this black-and-white Protestant notion of being saved — that onetime experience that marks a conversion. Catholic conversion is always happening now, when the ordinary speaks and we listen. Come out often, take Eucharist every day, start again. Endure transitions, translations, transubstantiation. Adopt a local view — bury a few babies, train a few lectors, pray for an archbishop you don’t love enough, shake hands with a snitch, trust that He is working through others elsewhere at the same time as He is working through you, others you’d like to meet someday if only you had time.

Open the door. Sit in the pews. Bring all your parts and gifts, however homely, and hold nothing in reserve. Lay it all before God. Participate in the Church’s dying in hopes of participating in its new life. It’s a privilege to be alive in a time like this, a privilege to take part in history like the preservation of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, a privilege to be part of the Church at a time when so many are hearing a call to make it better, richer, more just.

We will benefit, as will those already inside, opening them to a more complete realization of God’s love. The Church, after all, is incomplete without us. It is broken. We can enter its imperfection.

Many, of course, are already there. At the Shrine, for example, my predecessor on the Lay Ministry Committee was an out gay man. He and his husband (another Scott!) were civilly unionized in Vermont on their twenty-fifth anniversary and subsequently civilly married in Massachusetts. (One of their friends quipped, “You guys have been married more times than Elizabeth Taylor!”)

The cantor was gay. A half-dozen eucharistic ministers were gay. The friars … well, not exactly breaking news. But there was indeed a whole shadow world I had managed to overlook in my time there.

“Why are you still Catholic?” I asked a gay father of three.

“Entirely aside from my spiritual life and my promise to the good priests and nuns that were here when my children were christened, I also feel a political responsibility not to leave but instead to sit my gay ass in the pew and not to be budged by people who don’t want me there,” he said. “It’s the Rosa Parks thing. I’m just not moving. It’s my Church, too, as much as theirs. If I want to leave, I will, but I won’t leave because somebody else wants me to leave or because it makes somebody else uncomfortable. I just won’t do it. I won’t do it for myself and I won’t do it for people who are not yet born, who will have the same struggle. That’s … my very quiet of saying, ‘We’re here, we’re queer, and I’m proud of it.’ I’m there, and [my husband] is there, and I’m proud we’re there. If it were appropriate to raise my middle finger, that’s what I am doing — in a polite, kiss-of-peace kind of way.”

Pucker those lips and raise that finger high. Blessed, of course, are the meek and the poor in spirit. Blessed are the Hale Marys and the Myrons and the Mama Bears. But also give me Catholics like the gay father of three, Bear-Daddy, Ann Franczyk, Thelma and Louise — Catholics who are ribald and frothing and furious, irrepressible, lusty, pigheaded men and women who like to get dirty and yell and drink grog and eat without worrying about their cholesterol, men and women who howl at the moon, for whom a few conversational bruises is par for the course, who weren’t beaten up in the schoolyard but maybe a few times since then, who kick down doors and run their heads into walls, who laugh and cheer, break bones and skin, who carry their brothers and sisters, who savor the vast silences, jubilate with the noise, and who listen well.

Give me a God unafraid of a few bruises, jostling elbows, hickies, a God with a sense of humor and a sense of mission.

Give me fellow Catholics who understand that this book is an act of love.

We have too many advantages, too many graces, to act solely from resentment. Act instead from joy. As Cardinal O’Malley once said, “I often use humor in my talks…. It helps to focus people. Our religion should bring us joy, and it also keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously.” Impiety and irreverence have always been my puny defense against this all-consuming faith and love that make me feel naked and vulnerable as the day I was born. As I wrote in the beginning, I never intended this book to be an attack on the Church.

I’m no saint. No one is going to cut out my heart when I die — at least not as an act of veneration, anyway. Since my last confession, I've sucked cock, written porn, cheated on my Church by flirting with gay-friendly Protestant alternatives, insulted Mama Bear, failed to walk old ladies across the street, fantasized about murdering my brother, YouTubed for Schadenfreuden sake, littered my parts in the streets, felt superior to Ye Olde Piety Show, failed fully to forgive the snitches, and stalked Cardinal Sean.

And I’m not as sorry as I could be.

1 Corinthians 12:21—22.

XVIII

Last Chance for Love

You are no longer to pray for vocations. Stop right now. We have so many vocations, it’s unbelievable. We have married men, we have farmer priests, we have women who have been trained theologically who are ready to go. Your prayer shouldn’t be for more vocations, but that the Church have the courage to recognize the vocations among us
.

—- Father Walter Cuenin

Meanwhile, Back at the Shrine

O MARK THE ANNIVERSARY
of September 11, Father Bear-Daddy set up a five-thousand-pound Bell of Remembrance in the street outside the Shrine. The names of the victims appeared on a sixty-five-foot-long banner strung from one end of the Shrine to the other. He rang the bell at 8:46 A.M., when the first plane struck the Twin Towers, and again and again for each successive crash and the collapse of the towers.

The massive bell tolled throughout downtown Boston, and I thought immediately:
There is something real in this ritual, something substantial. You can feel it in your gut
.

It turned out that Father Bear-Daddy had a personal stake in the September 11 memorial. Father Mychal Judge — the openly gay Franciscan chaplain of the Fire Department of New York City who died at the foot of the Twin Towers — was a close personal friend.*

“[Father Judge] had the ability to heal and bring people closer together. Along with his sense of humor, that is what I will miss most about him, and what I was reflecting on today as I heard the bells and looked back,” Father Bear-Daddy said. “He could always help people, and everyone loved him.”

Prior to his 9/11 heroics, Father Judge had founded Saint Francis AIDS Ministry, one of the first Catholic AIDS organizations in New York. According to a former Marist brother who worked with him in this ministry, Father Judge had been a member of Dignity. He also had a keen appreciation for gorgeous men, exclaiming, “Isn’t God wonderful!” when he came upon a group of them one night.

“Was he a gay saint?” I asked Father Bear-Daddy.

“Not a gay saint, no,” Father Bear-Daddy said. “In fact, if he had died of natural causes, no one would be talking about him being a saint. And knowing Mychal, you are getting half of it — not even — if you take just the gay part. But he was a phenomenal man, the epitome of the word
charism”

According to Father Bear-Daddy, Judge was a this-worldly priest — practical, pastoral, and with a great sense of humor. “I don’t know exactly how Mychal died. You hear all kinds of pious stuff— he was giving last rites, he was helping someone out from the rubble. But I do know what kind of guy he was, and what would be typical of Mychal.”

After Father Bear-Daddy’s ordination, Father Judge took him out to dinner and solemnly said, “You, Bear-Daddy, were ordained in one Church, and I was ordained in another.” Father Judge had been ordained before Vatican II, and Father Bear-Daddy after. “It’s a whole different Church,” Father Judge said. “Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”