Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (18 page)

“This brings me to a more general point,” Father Bear-Daddy announced. “We need to bump up the liturgy a notch. I want the
best
lectors for the high holy days. I want to increase our membership. I want to make the music really zing.”

It was unclear whether Father Bear-Daddy was envisioning putting on a mass or marketing a Broadway musical.

“It’s important,” he continued, “that the faithful get a seamless worship experience.”

The other committee members and I exchanged looks.

One of them, whom I had always suspected of being an Opus Dei infiltrator, said, “We might want to start by making sure the lectors are actually Catholic. 1 noticed the sign-up form requests you to list your occupation, but not your religion.”

The suggestion had the whiff of a purge, which I instinctively resisted. “Have we really had a problem with people passing themselves off as Catholics solely to get access to the pulpit?”

“Well,” she said, “I think it’s important. It’s not like it was in the old days.”

Father Bear-Daddy growled and let loose with one of his trademark pastoral f-bombs. He was impatient with the “old” Saint Anthony Shrine, which the faithful invoked regularly to oppose his grand plans for a total ecclesiastical makeover.

At Saint Anthony Shrine, the old and new coexisted in uneasy tension. Minor theological adjustments like blessing gay unions and womenpriests certainly seemed in order. But some innovations went too far. For example, Father Bear-Daddy took inordinate pride in the newly installed Franciscan Giving Center — an ATM-like donation station in the lobby on which some friar had posted the sign “Credit/ Debit for Jesus.” At the time, the Shrine was the only Catholic church in the country to have one. Several major newspapers printed a photo of Father Bear-Daddy with his arm around it.

It was mortifying. The Orgasmatron in Woody Allen’s
Sleeper
came to mind.

The Reconciliatron

The Giving Center presaged an entire line of automated faith machines. Once the old friars retired and the shortage of priests became acute, the Franciscan provincial would install another automated station in the confessional called, the Reconciliatron.™ Simply type in your sins, and the Reconciliatron™ gives you computerized absolution. Just be sure to get a receipt. You’ll want to have your records in order when Saint Peter undertakes an audit of your life at the Pearly Gates.

I explained to Father Bear-Daddy that, I, too, harbored a nostalgia for the harder, older times that had existed long before my first appearance at the Shrine. Bitterness, backwardness, and repression seemed more honest.

“You’ve confused all that old-fashioned baloney for honesty,” Father Bear-Daddy replied. Only he didn’t use the word
baloney
, or anything else you could print in a family newspaper.

Lector Boot Camp

If you hang around long enough, someone will inevitably put you in charge of something. This was how Father Abraham’s lector-training legacy passed to me — including his hardcore philosophy. When you’re going to the proverbial mattresses, you don’t want Magic Fingers and a waterbed. You want a thin, inflatable camping pad that deflates beneath you in the night. You want your pith helmet for a pillow. You want a moth-eaten wool blanket. Life in the trenches should not be feel-good consolation.

Ten of the faithful showed up to the first session. They sat in folding chairs around a wooden table in the dingy second-floor classroom where the GLBT Spirituality Group met. Highlights included a bearded, disabled man with two amazingly dexterous foreshortened arms like a
Tyrannosaurus rex
, yet another Mary, and two college-age women whose perfect skin suggested they hadn’t committed a sin in their lives.

We kicked off with an hour-long lecture on the practical theology of lectoring: “Read the selected text. Understand the selected text. Know the selected text. Proclaim the selected text.” Then we drilled a copy of the current lay ministry rules, which had bulked up since the days of my training to four single-spaced typed pages. After a turkey club sandwich break, the lector candidates marched over to the sanctuary. For half an hour, they drilled the opening processional until they could walk the liturgical pace in their sleep.

For combat training, they took to the pulpit with the lectionary in hand and that nasty microphone at their lips. They sucked.

“Urn, great liturgical pace approaching the pulpit, Mary,” I said, emphasizing the positive. Experience taught that lector candidates generally reacted poorly to being told they made Chewbacca sound as if he had been taking elocution lessons. “I loved the way you held yourself stiff as a pencil and were not able to let loose anything more articulate than the yip of a lapdog. Now, let’s work on every thing
else
about your performance.”

I strode to the far reaches of the church, cupping my hand to my ear, playing the “I-can’t-HEAR-you” game. “Slow down,” I shouted. “EM-pha-SIS.” The subtle attractions of words like “Heil” and “Achtung” and “totalitarian state” were becoming clear to me.

“For God’s sake, man,” I called out. “You’re not informing us there’s a spill in aisle five. You’re proclaiming the
Word!
Let your voice ring out. I want Sean O’Malley himself to hear you, all the way up there in the chancery.

“Look up!” I shouted. “Look up at the end of the sentence. Hold my gaze. You a criminal? Are you
lying
to me when you read His word? Why can’t you look up for more than a split second and hold my gaze ?”

The candidates’ voices strengthened. Their diction sharpened. Their eye contact tightened like a vise. One of the sinless college girls stopped swaying in the pulpit like a gospel singer in a purple muumuu, and the other removed from each phrase the question mark and rising inflection that made the commands of Scripture sound like dubious propositions. By the time the commissioning Mass rolled around, a veritable army of lectors had formed, a crack verbal fighting force, lector ninjas. After Mass, we exchanged bear hugs and high fives.

“My lector trainees,” I crowed, burgeoning with pride like a father whose son has just hit a Little League home run or burst the prom queen’s cherry. “Broadway showstoppers, each and every one. Amen.”

VIII

A Habit Course Than Porn

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy that sustained him through temporary periods of joy
.

— William Butler Yeats

Give Us This Day Our Daily YouTube

Y WILY NEMESIS
, Archbishop Sean, went hog-wild in cyberspace. He didn’t open a ManHunt account — I imagined him posting a profile of himself raising the hem of his brown dress to show off his shapely gams, and promptly wished I had not — but he did join the blogosphere. He launched
The Brown Bag Blog
(not its real name), to which I occasionally posted helpful theological commentary, such as “Get a life” and “Go back to Cleveland!”

The Boston archdiocese didn’t land me in digital hot water. For that, blame Justin Cardinal Kigali of Philadelphia. Cardinal Justin — a known womanpriest hater — started posting weekly commentary on scripture and other issues to YouTube. I had been a YouTube virgin, but after spending a few moments with Cardinal Kigali’s clips, my cherry officially popped. YouTube orgies followed.

I typed “alligator attacks” and watched four grisly videos involving severed limbs.

“Birth defects” — “celebrity sex” — “third-degree burns” — “gynecological plastic surgery” — “plane crash.”

The most shocking footage featured William Shatner singing Elton John’s “Rocket Man.”

The addiction started innocently with just a cardinal, some scorch marks, and a few severed limbs. Nothing that threatened health or welfare, only on weekends and after work hours.

But put aside your crystal meth, your cigarettes, and your chronic masturbation. Nothing hooks a gay man like YouTube. Soon loved ones also fell into the sordid habit. Scott and 1 came to spend more time on YouTube than we did engaging in the sin that cries out to heaven. Our romance-writing enterprise ground to a halt. My anemic prayer life hit the skids. Stalking the archbishop fell by the wayside.

I lay on my back on the Protestant pew and stared at the ceiling. Scott sat at the laptop.

“Try ‘starving African children,’“ I said.

Clickety-clickety-click
.

Pause.

“What’d you get?”

Click
.

“AWWWWW!” Scott cried out. (To me, not to heaven.)

The monitor showed a miasma of bloated bellies, stretched skin, and flies in eyes.

“Enough,” I said, feeling queasy and responsible for world hunger. “Try ‘Britney on the beach,’“ I said.

Clickety-clickety-click
.

“Nude,” I added.

Clickety-clickety-click
.

Scott surveyed Britney with the dispassion of a clinician. “D cups,” he said. Guessing boob size was Scott’s favorite party trick. He had a 99 percent accuracy rate.

“Type in, ‘Hot twinks.’*

“No way,” Scott said, keeping me honest. “How about ‘Married men on the down-low’ instead?” (“Straight” men appear often in Scott’s porn stories.)

“No chance.”

Instead, we viewed Saddam Hussein’s hanging, Mitt Romney getting into a bitchfest with PETA after Mitt strapped his dog to the roof of his car, and Idaho senator Larry Craig’s “wide stance.” Even the Womenpriests were on YouTube!

Picasso Paints Provincetown

Starlets with pill problems check into the Betty Ford Clinic. YouTube addicts take off to Internet-free lodgings in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a gay beach resort and artist haven that also happens to be a vacation mecca for gay priests, celibate and otherwise.

An art gallery there was showing a series of strikingly bold paintings of the male figure: strong, masculine, and subtly erotic. The series was called
Man Emerging
. The artist? None other than my friend Picasso from the GLBT Spirituality Group at Saint Anthony Shrine.

Books I Took, with Me on My Big Fat Gay Summer Vacation

• The Catholic poet Anne Porter’s
  Collected Works
  

• The poet Don McKay’s meditations on rock,
  Stride/Slip
  

• Wayne Hoffman’s novel
  Hard
  , about a year in the life of a group of gay men
  

• Cardinal Bernadin’s
  Gift of Peace
  

• Faith Beyond Resentment
  , by gay Catholic theologian James Alison
  

• Dan Savage’s
  The Kid: What Happened after My Boyfriend and 1 Decided to Go Get Pregnant
  

• Andrew Sullivan’s
  Virtually Normal
  

• Kathleen Morris’s
  The Cloister Walk
  

• Note the absence of porn. Who says 1 can’t be redeemed?