Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (8 page)

Three Hale Marys

Between visits to Saint Anthony Shrine and bloody Marys at the gay sports bar, I prosecute people who commit securities fraud. Much like the priesthood, the ranks of the Securities and Exchange Commission are overwhelmed with zealous, righteous, parochial-school-trained Irish guys who believe in big words like Personal Responsibility and Justice and Honor and Fairness and Beer. Like monks in a scriptorium, my colleagues and I spent days, weeks, months, and years poring over documents, reading bank statements, and interviewing witnesses.

Then came a day — a Friday, inevitably — when the work ended. The suspected fraudster’s defense lawyer had used every excuse and played every card, confronting me with the decision as to whether to charge the fraudster with a crime. Whether to destroy his life, consign his children to scholarships and his wife to social opprobrium, dim his prospects for early retirement, and perhaps even put him behind bars.

I prayed that I never be tested the way my target was tested.
Thank You, God, for giving me the grace to work for the government so I can't whet my appetite for the good life on an expense account, since I have to pay for every last throat lozenge from my own pochek to avoid coming into conflict with governmental ethics rules
.

God, am I doing the right thing in accusing this poor bastard of fraud? This man whose hand I once shook? This man who is not necessarily rich, perhaps just trying to get ahead, trying to do the best for his family, who nevertheless made a stupid decision, who coaches his kid’s Little League team, who is perhaps a lector in his own parish, a religious education teacher, the dude in the next pew, You only know
.

Then I remembered that could have been Gram’s retirement fund he stole, or it could have been my godchild’s college fund. Yet I ached for that confirming voice from the Almighty, saying,
Go ahead, Scott, fry the son of a bitch anyhow. It’s OK with me
.

Regrettably, God never once weighed in on these deliberations. He just laughed and said,
That's why you're making the big bucks, Scott. Now, if you put a little higher percentage of that government salary in the collection basket, then maybe we can talk
.

Collection basket!
I smacked myself on the forehead.
Shit, I’m late for Mass again!

My black Oxfords clopped on the marble floor like high heels. The SEC identification cards around my neck flapped wildly on their tether. I bobbed at the tabernacle, cut left into the sacristy, skidded around the corner, and nearly knocked down Francis the Franciscan Friar.

“Slow down,” Father Francis murmured. His scolding was soft as a cluster of butterflies. The mixture of loving kindness and my own breathlessness made me dizzy. I swore Father Francis sent a special plea on my behalf to the Almighty:
Have mercy on this new lector He knows not what he does
. Because lateness wasn’t the worst of it: Fathers Abraham and Francis had enumerated a whole host of lay-ministering sins.

Lay Ministry Rules, Loosely Translated

“Mea culpa
, Father Francis,” I said, dropping my man-purse and swapping my SEC identification badge for a metal cross printed with the word
lector
. I vaulted into place in the pew reserved for lay ministers.

Give or take a few broken hips, some mental disease, and a handful of people who go spiritually adrift, Saint Anthony Shrine has a roster of approximately one hundred fifty lay ministers at any one time. Three are typically assigned to each mass — two to distribute the hosts, one to read, and maybe a spare to change the lightbulb over the tabernacle. Recognizing my rookie status, Father Francis had kindly assigned me to a group of experienced ministers, every one named Mary.

Mary Flanagan’s hair was white, but her face was young; tall and thin, she looked much younger than her eighty-seven years. The passage of time had given her a question-mark silhouette. Each week, she dressed in crisp blouses and sensible shoes, and she liberally administered hugs to anyone with a pulse.

Mary Fleming was more reserved. She was shorter, rounder, and thirty years younger. Her eyes sparkled with shy playfulness in the sacristy, but on the altar she always wore her game face.

Mary Flaherty hailed from the Pleistocene age. She had whiskers and walked with a cramped, bent, wide-legged stance, as if she were perennially headed into a stiff wind. In the fall, she wore a Red Sox jacket and tennis shoes. At first it seemed like a victory just to avoid her condemnation, let alone win a word of kindness. Then she’d smile, and the dour puss she wore from a combination of habit and pessimism disappeared. The world surprised Mary Flaherty from time to time.

Ding!
The brass bell sounded, and the three Hale Marys stood as one. Francis the Franciscan Friar stepped out onto the altar. He was wearing a simple white cassock pulled over his brown robes, a green surplice, and a stole on his shoulders depicting the five wounds of Christ. (That’s hands, feet, and the centurion’s spear in the side, for those of you who are counting.)

“In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” said Father Francis, launching into the introductory rite. My mind instantly shot to the moon. While Father Francis droned, “blah … blah … God … blah … Jesus … blah,” my inner litany sounded more like this:
Geez! What’s with the statue of the Virgin? Somebody ought to rethink the gaudy paint. It makes her look like a harlot
. …
Did Scott rent a car so we could go fetch that pew from Albany?
…
Maybe the fraudster didn't do it. Maybe he really was visiting his elderly mother in the hospital at the time? Maybe the five eyewitnesses were lying
.

I realized Father Francis was staring me down. Uh-oh! The nearest Mary nudged me into the aisle. I dashed up to the ambo, remembering the evil microphone would transform the slightest breathlessness into the sounds of a dirty phone prankster. Fifty parishioners looked up expectantly. Three or four of the loony ones swayed and rocked. The guilty in the back row examined their feet, which in turn made me feel as guilty as any fraudster that had walked through my office door.

In contemplating lectorhood, I hadn’t given a moment’s consideration to the possibility that regularly uttering the word
God
with a straight face would prove a challenge. It was one thing to mentally run His Name through my head in a moment of extremis (God,
please don’t let Whole Foods be out of arugula)
, to punctuate someone’s sneeze (“God bless!”), or to express the Hibernian morbidity Mary Flaherty loved (“See you tomorrow, God willing”).

All that was fine. On occasion, certain members of the Holy Family were useful for moments of surprise and shock: “Mother of God!” “Jesus H. Christ,” or “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” My mother, a far better person than I, had a novel fix for this sin. She simply converted blasphemy to geography. Instead of “Jesus Christ!” she spouted “Je-RU-salem!” Or, for truly dire occasions, “Pu-DAY-ga.” I still don’t know where this latter city is, but her tone told me it was nowhere I wanted to be.

In contrast to these easy invocations of God’s name, uttering holy words without irony while in the act of worship —
that
made me feel icky. It was like reading porn aloud or accidentally hearing your sister’s love-sounds through a bedroom wall.

Needless to say, every eighth word of the Bible contained the name, of the Almighty. It might be Yah weh, it might be Elohim, it might be the Most High, but God under any of these names had the same effect. I took to inoculating myself ahead of time against the giddy urge to put ironic quote marks around such words wherever they appeared. “God-God-God-God,” I intoned in the privacy of my SEC office as sternly as my gay voice allowed. “Lord-Lord-Lord-Lord-Lord. Jesus-Jesus-Jesus.” This exercise only made me feel like one of those saccharine southerners with poofed-up hair and fake boobs who insert “God” into every third sentence and made my teeth itch.

For courage, I looked to the three Hale Marys. Mary Flanagan winked, like she was in with me on this great big cosmic joke. I could almost see the crucifix at her neck dance and her bony shoulders shake with laughter.

Instantly, all doubt vanished. My lips formed the first word of the reading, and I vanished. My mouth opened, and light streamed out. Peace reigned. White flowers cascaded over pots. The smell of cedar incense seemed particularly acute. I swore I detected the scent daubed behind Mary Flanagan’s ear, and this suddenly seemed like the personification of faith: that somebody eighty-seven years old would still make the effort to make herself beautiful for Church. I did just fine.

Thanks be to The Pedophiles

In January 2002, a decades-long game of Clue came to a horrible, inevitable finale. We Catholics took a peek at the cards in the middle of the board, and the perp was revealed: it was Father So-and-So, in the rectory, with a handful of girlie magazines and a six-pack of beer. Although no friar was implicated in the scandal, the news hit Saint Anthony Shrine like a bomb. What had been a bustling and cheerful sanctuary took on the atmosphere of a morgue.

It wasn’t the sexual acts themselves that raised everyone’s ire. Show me a Catholic, and I’ll show you someone who can name a priest from childhood that everyone knew you should never be alone with. Typically no one complained, most kids steered clear, and we nonvictims carried on with our lives. In a way, Catholics had collectively determined to accept a certain number of diddling priests as the cost of doing God’s work.

What really galled us about the scandal was that the Archdiocese of Boston didn’t merely shelter pedophiles from prosecution — it actually provided the abusers with fresh meat by assigning the sick priests to new parishes and new victims without disclosing their past sins. Some monster in the grand residence of then-cardinal Law had clearly weighed the personal damage to young boys against reputational damage to the Church and concluded that the boys were expendable.

School for Scandal

In many dioceses around the world, the term
scandal
has won a capital S and has become shorthand for diddling priests and the bishops who enabled them. But
scandal
is also a term of art in the Catholic Church — “To ‘give scandal’ is to intentionally tempt a brother to sin or to give him occasion to commit it.”

When I first read about the scandal, I experienced the standard Catholic response: guilt. It’s in my genes. I feel personally responsible for everyone’s tears, others’ happiness, spilled milk, underfunded schools, untidy bedrooms, unmade beds, and unfolded laundry. It’s important to me to make sure that carbon emissions are reduced or eliminated, coaches and teachers made proud, and all sexual activity ends in orgasm.

As for the scandal, I
knew
my participation in the Mass, my support of Saint Anthony Shrine, and my willful blindness in childhood had somehow contributed to and perpetuated the mess. Doctrinal bombs might explode outside the Shrine, but I focused on my God-given task: reading from the Bible. If the microphone squawked, I took a deep breath and ignored it. If the pope squawked, I ignored him. Solitary prayer consisted of covering my ears and singing
“LA-LA-LA-LA-LA”
to drown out unwanted noise.

I thought I could get away with it. I thought I could divide the world into two discrete spheres: one that was gay, messy, and morally cloudy, and one that was antiseptic, Catholic, and enduring. Two fundamentally different worlds populated by fundamentally different people. In retrospect, considering the Church’s reaction to the scandal, my religious experience at St. Anthony’s had about as much substance and connection to reality as a jolly, tonsured Franciscan on the label of a bottle of Frangelico.

The molesting priests must have told themselves similar stories. Each probably eked out a separate “good priest” world with which he could console himself. In the good priest world, he performed corporal works of mercy and revered God, balancing out in his mind what he did behind the scenes to the altar boys. Unfortunately, each “bad priest” act rippled down through time and affected total strangers at a twenty-year remove with the immediacy of a two-by-four.