Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (42 page)

Father Judge then slid a box across the table, saying, “This is for you.” The box contained a commemorative gold coin from the Second Vatican Conference.

“Wear this medal,” Father Judge said. “It’s a symbol of the priesthood that you are going to lead. Whenever you look at this medal, I want you to think of me and what your priesthood means.”

Choked up, Father Bear-Daddy solemnly agreed he would.

Then Father Judge grinned. “But if you ever get in trouble, Bear-Daddy, hock the damn thing. It’s worth a fortune.”

Why Catholic? (Part 3)

“I am sixty-two years old, and I’m only in it for the paycheck,” a priest confessed.

Said his confessor: “Good, you’re finally doing something for yourself. No shame in that.”

Last Chance for Love

The final Mass at Boston’s “gay church” brought back hundreds of those who had fallen or moved away — the old homosexual Jesuits, the musical directors, the unchurched, and the otherly churched. They fondly recalled the old days. Out flowed tears, laughter, and fond reminisces about the
Boston
magazine article that identified the JUC as the hottest spot to pick up men. At the doughnut social, everyone joked that the closing hymn ought to have been “Last Dance, Last Chance for Love,” the famous anthem that marks closing time at gay clubs everywhere.

The humor masked a real sense of loss. For almost thirty years, the JUC served as a haven. One longtime member of the community told me,

Several guys have major life-threatening diseases, a number are active in AA, other people feel more comfortable than being in bars. The sermons gave them something to feed on during the week. They would find something to challenge or support or encourage them. There are a number of parents of gay children, especially those who have lost kids, and [the JUC] has helped them to reconnect with a Church that was hurting their kids. A lot of people really do love the traditions and values of the Church and feel chopped off from Church life. They can come here and be who they are and not be chopped at.

For many, the JUC was a last stop on the Catholic line, including for those who had left the seminaries and orders and had not again

found such a deep community of men. The members bitterly complained that the Jesuits had pulled the plug on the JUC so abruptly. They were angry that the Jesuits made no effort to continue the ministry in a cheaper location. They were upset that
The Pilot
, the Diocesan newspaper, made no mention of gays and lesbians in its article covering the closing.

The absence of Jesuit leadership on the future of the community forced the members to take action. Mama Bear and a handful of other men formed a steering committee to hunt for a new home. Seventeen sites, about half of them Catholic churches, opened their doors.

Even the chancery got into the act. The archdiocese’s new COO, Vicar General Father Richard Erickson, pledged to help find the JUC a home in a church in the archdiocese.

Mama Bear and the boys greeted the offer with skepticism. “Can we trust you?” they asked. “You know we are all gay?”

The vicar general assured them that the chancery valued the JUC community. He found an underutilized diocesan church nearby where the JUC could move intact, keep its own liturgy, music, and — above all — its doughnut social. Some members of the JUC preferred Saint Cecilia’s, a welcoming parish in the South End with a friendly pastor, mostly straight congregation, and huge student population. Either place, Erickson assured them, was fine with the archdiocese.

I asked Erickson, “Does O’Malley know about what you’re doing to help the JUC? Won’t he accuse you of wrongfully leasing a car or something if he finds out?”

“Everything I do, I’m doing on behalf of the cardinal,” Erickson assured me. Father Kick-Me also confirmed that the cardinal knew all that was being done in the name of the archdiocese.

Love Thy Neighbor

The Vatican apparently failed to make Father. Erickson aware of the Satanic conspiracy that homosexuals had launched to seduce priests. News of the conspiracy first surfaced in October 2007, when Vatican high-honcho Monsignor Tommaso Stenico lured a hot young man to his office, where they had X-rated discussions, and the good monsignor opined that the sin that cries out to heaven for’ vengeance was A-OK in his book, the sooner the better. After video of this colloquy broadcast nationally, Stenico explained that he was conducting research into the above-mentioned conspiracy. Even the Vatican laughed. But me, 1 understood perfectly. Like my trying to score a kiss from Cardinal Seán, Stenico was just trying to get to know the enemy better. No shame in that.

Other signs of post-marriage-debate redemption surfaced:

• Reverend Erickson started making pilgrimages to the gay-lesbian outreach ministries of some of Boston’s Jesuit and Paulist churches to start a dialogue.
  

• O’Malley gave a much closer advisory role to the Rev. Brian Hehir, a man widely viewed as insufficiently conservative by the snitches.
  

• O’Malley appointed a woman as Hehir’s replacement at Catholic Charities; she was the first woman ever to head the organization.
  

• Reverend Kick-Me assured me that Cardinal Sean now stood firmly against using the Eucharist as a battleground, and wouldn’t ban anyone from receiving it.
  

• On the Brown Bag blog, Sean graciously included a photograph from a talk he gave at an Irish pub that shows a six-inch sliver of my bald pate sticking out among the heads of the more pious.
  

I no longer needed His Eminence’s approbation, but I tried to keep my heart open to his conversion. To paraphrase Father Bear-Daddy’s instructions to the recalcitrant lay ministers, Sean is not dead yet; he can still learn new tricks. Perhaps these signs, small as they were, signaled a first step. If so, it was still worth meeting with Sean, to worship with him, and to witness to him. I imagined our colloquy might go like this:

We kneel next to one another in the pew. We are exhausted, pock-marked, worn, our dark nights of the soul kept at bay with alcohol, Xanax, and masturbation, YouTubing and CardinalCasting. Our fingers ply rosary beads; I’ve stolen Sherwin’s for the occasion. We have a deck of prayer cards, but we’re each playing a losing hand. We are silent, intent, listening. Mentally squirting calicos with plastic water pistols.

Sean is thinking, perhaps, of the pastoral days at the Centro Católico in Washington, D.C., before he acquired the cocked red hat that made a mockery of his simple brown robe. He is remembering perhaps the first Mass he said at the monastery of the Poor Sisters of Saint Clare in Cleveland. He may be thinking, Lord have mercy. We’re not in Cleveland anymore.

I, perhaps, am recalling the moment of Mikaela’s baptism, the lie I told my pastor at age fifteen when I said I was ready for my confirmation, the Hispanic guy with the broken accent at the Shrine’s legal center who was the only client I could say for sure I had truly helped, or a hug from Father Bear-Daddy that lifted me off my feet.

Cardinal Sean might break the silence to say something I once heard Father Myron say: “The problem with beautiful Catholic imagery is that we can easily convince ourselves we see God when we do not see God. No one has seen God, so we have to content ourselves with seeing Him in others. And the most contented people I know are those who have success in this.”

I might respond, “Here I am, Sean,” because I can think of no more powerful or destabilizing argument.

“How can a porn-writing sodomite consider himself a real Catholic?” Sean might ask.

“How can a cat-squirting goldfish-murderer consider himself a true Franciscan?” I might reply.

Sure, I might concede that maybe writing porn is not the highest use of what few gifts God gave me. But then, neither is using the pulpit of the archdiocese to achieve strictly political ends the highest use of that grace, particularly when you are dishonest about your arguments.

I therefore add, “I'l make you a deal, Your Eminence. I'll give up writing porn if you give up the political campaign against gay marriage and the uncharitable broadsides against gay parents and goldfish. How about that?”

Maybe Cardinal Sean nods solemnly and takes the offer under advisement. Dialogue, after all, is not the cardinal’s strength.

That’s when I throw in the kicker: “Tell you what, Sean. As an added incentive, I'll even throw in the towel on the YouTube habit. Gratis.”

“Done!”
Sean might say, and shake my hand.

Or maybe he’ll just Donald Trump me without a second thought: “You’re excommunicated!”

Why Catholic? (Part 4)

Asked why he is still Catholic, Father Butterballino said:

I recognize that I have made a compromise. People ask, ‘Do you believe in all that stuff?’ And I say, I believe in all the stuff in the Gospel, and I believe what we do in this parish. That’s important enough for me to stay with this…. Sometimes I picture a straight couple, and their kids are all grown up and married, and what had held them together is now gone, and the guy looks across the breakfast table at his wife and asks, ‘What keeps me here now?’ And he realizes he spent most of his life with her. Well, I spent a chunk of my life with the Church, and I did a good job. So I’m trying to find new ways to be in love with her. To love her in a different way. To continue that image, I am not going to divorce her, because I spent most of my life with her, and it was good.

And So What

If O’Malley — through his graciously pleasant secretary Reverend Kick-Me — told Father Bear-Daddy that he was no longer to permit me to lector, take communion, volunteer at the legal clinic, or advise the human services providers or the liturgy committee, I would certainly miss offering my gifts — mean as they are, gay as they may be. Let’s face it: those ministries are the only good work I do all week. I am, after all, a lawyer. My vocation offers few moral satisfactions. I can’t fix cars, or build bridges, or heal wounds.

But if they took my ministries from me, there would be nothing tragic or shameful about sitting behind the remaining Hale Marys rather than beside them. In fact, I think I would feel an embarrassing sort of undeserved richness: for continuing health, a boyfriend who loves me, a family and godchildren who nurture me, a G-L Spirituality Group full of wounded heroes and heroines, forebears like Dignity, ministries like Always Our Children, priests like Lewandowski and Cuenin, wise scholars like Keenan, and friars and lay ministers who bury babies, welcome lonely seniors, visit Mary with her broken hip, fill kids’ backpacks with school supplies, push Chewbacca back to his place at his bulletin delivery ministry, and create a Broadway liturgy that really pulls you out of the drama of which you are the center, first through words that pry free your moorings, then through music that tosses you about, and finally through shared, familiar prayer.

I would find some other saving, secular ministries. I would support my lectors. If they let me, I’d continue to teach them on the sly. If a lector asked, I’d be glad to give private advice.

I don’t think I would feel lost or betrayed. I’d be able to forgive them for taking from me. After all, Sean and I are each rich if you have eyes to see us that way — if, for example, you see God in us. His Eminence often speaks of the schizophrenic, deinstitutionalized stranger who thinks he is Jesus Christ, and, in a disturbing, challenging manifestation, that stranger is indeed Jesus.

For now, I treat each lector training like the last. I am extra careful and extra solicitous, and I always try to make sure that a G-L Spirituality Group member sits among the volunteers. Lector ninjas must carry on after Sean throws me out so that, on any given day at any given mass, someone wonderful will proclaim the Word,

The ministry, after all, is not about me.

“Close personal friend” is not a euphemism for “gay lover.” That would be a “particular friend,” as many priests know.

epilogue

AY PEOPLE CONTINUE TO MOVE
out of the South End, and they put their spare housewares out for sale on the brick sidewalks: a 1950s vintage ice bucket shaped like a green apple complete with stem, leopard-skin pillows, a snakeskin belt, and alligator shoes. But my eye fell again and again on the authentic kneeler covered with light blue cloth, a cross carved into the wood frame. I kneeled.

“Let’s buy it!” I said to Scott. “It’ll look great in the living room next to the pew.” The kneeler would assuage the intellectual guilt of watching
Desperate Housewives
,

“A kneeler?” Standing in front of me, his crotch at face level, he deadpanned, “I think it would be better in the bedroom, don’t you?”

Amen
, Makeup sex is always best. We all have rubrics we religiously follow that bring normalcy to our day and maybe supply the illusion of control and a measure of timelessness. We all have our own private rituals of reconciliation.