Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (23 page)

Walking the Excommunication Walk

I tried to contact some of those who have recently been excommunicated to talk about the experience. Here are two stories with very different ends.

Father Ed Cachia and the Will of God
. Father Cachia, the pastor of St. Michael’s Parish in Cobourg, Ontario, wrote a newspaper article calling for the Church to establish a dialogue with women who felt called to ordination, and, reportedly, for admitting to celebrating masses with female priests in the United States. In a follow-up interview, Father Cachia said the ordination of women could be

the beginning of a new and awesome change in the life of the Church. [It] would bring dialogue to help people sit down and as human beings work out our differences. These women would like to talk about this, and Rome is not giving them a chance. Rome believes these women are only after power. My experience is very different. I am edified by their spirituality, compassion, and love. They wash the feet of others and are very humble in service. They are rooted in faith, willing to suffer consequences. For them, this is no cheap stunt or meaningless event. By closing the doors of debate and dialogue on women who feel the call of being ordained priests and deacons, the Church is perpetuating violence against these women by saying: “You have only to pray, pay and obey; we have no time to dialogue with you.”

Refuting the claim that Jesus chose only men as his disciples, Cachia pointed out, “Jesus only chose Jews, too.”

In November 2005, Cachia lost his job for these and similar statements. The bishop of Peterborough, Ontario, announced Cachia’s excommunication on the following Palm Sunday. Responding to the announcement, Father Cachia said:

My statements that the Church should speak respectfully and should re-establish dialogue with women who are called to ordination are what I believe to be true. For me, this is the truth regardless of whether the Church agrees with me. To force me to retract my statements would be to force me to lie. The choice I was given was to lie to the people or lose my position in the Church. If we sacrifice our principles and integrity to save ourselves we have sacrificed everything. I lost everything: my home, my job, my benefits, my pension, and my security.

However, Jesus calls us to stand by our convictions even to the point of suffering. Father Cachia then started his own church called Christ the Servant at a local United Church in Cobourg. He reportedly told the press, “I never in my whole lifetime ever dreamt it would come to this…. I really believe that, if I am following the will of God in all this, the Lord will not abandon me. He will not let me down.”

Apparently, however, the Lord
did
abandon him. Cachia has since quit Christ the Servant and met frequently with his bishop in an effort to rejoin the fold.

Father Marek Bozek and the Parish Rooster
. In 2003, the parish of St. Stanislaus Kostka refused to cede control of its assets and property to the Archdiocese of St. Louis. Archbishop Burke removed the parish’s priests, thereby depriving the congregation of communion, baptism, marriage, and funerals — an attempt to induce “spiritual and sacramental starvation,” according to Bozek. Rather than knuckle under, the parish hired Bozek to replace the fired pastor. After a year-long process of spiritual discernment, Bozek accepted the position on December 2, 2005.”

Burke accused Bozek of the “ecclesiastical crime of schism” for encouraging the parish to accept his priestly ministry. Within three weeks and without any process whatsoever, Burke excommunicated Bozek while the latter was vacationing in Peru. Burke accused those parishioners who accepted sacraments from him of committing mortal sin. The archdiocese also reported Bozek, a native of Poland, to immigration authorities.

Neither Bozek nor his parish backed down. The
Chicago Tribune
reported that one parishioner, a lapsed Catholic, described her reaction to Bozek’s ministry this way: “I feel like I’ve got more spirit, more hope. It makes me feel closer to Christ. This church has brought me back to my roots. In a roundabout way, Burke has helped this parish.”

Bozek himself said: “I could imagine Jesus saying to me: ‘Kids could not be baptized. Parents died, and you did not come to me.’ I didn’t want to be told to move aside because I was not courageous enough…. [Burke] sees the church in terms of regulations, not human lives and human suffering. Doing this, he really breaks people’s hearts and people’s souls.”

In 2005 and 2006, Bozek attracted more people to his Christmas Mass than the archbishop who excommunicated him. In an e-mail, Bozek wrote that before the schism, “the Parish rooster [sic] listed about 250 households. Today there are more than 600 registered households in Saint Stanislaus. [The v]ast majority of them are so-called ‘outcast’ Catholics, or people who for various reasons felt alienated from or marginalized in other Roman Catholic parishes. They all have found a spiritual home, free of judgment and politics.” Bozek acknowledged that the parish “has been blessed with many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender parishioners, and they provide us all with a beautiful witness to God’s grace present in all our lives.”

Hearing this story gave me the same sense of renewal as the parishioner at St. Stanislaus Kostka. Hell, I felt jealous. Not just because Father Bear-Daddy had not purchased a parish rooster for Saint Anthony Shrine, but also because excommunication seemed like a backhanded blessing. If you could get yourself excommunicated by Bio’s unloving hierarchy, you could wear it as a moral stamp of approval. And besides, after getting a
latae sententiae
(with soy milk) from a Capuchin like Sean, Starbucks would never look the same again.

Not being a woman presented a bit of a problem. Without enduring a great deal of body sculpting and pancake makeup, I couldn’t just go and get myself ordained. How do you go about getting excommunicated in the comfort of your own living room?

Three Case Steps to Excommunication

Step 1: Cross Archbishop Sean

For fifteen years, Shirley Gomes served as a eucharistic minister at a church where she had married and raised her family. When she ran for state representative, someone tipped the church’s pastor that Gomes might be prochoice. He fired her from the lay ministry and told her she should not be receiving communion until she renounced her views. Noting that her male opponent in the race had stronger prochoice views but had attracted no interest from her pastor, Gomes appealed to then-bishop Sean to be reinstated. Following a private meeting with Gomes, Sean supported the pastor’s decision to fire her and his belief that she ought not be snacking on communion wafers. Denying the Eucharist isn’t the equivalent of excommunication, but it’s heading in the right direction.

Step 2: Don’t Sin in Silence

In affirming priests’ obligation to deny communion to divorced Catholics who remarried, J2P2 required both that the divorcee “obstinately persist” in sin
and
that she or he make “the situation of grave sin” manifest.

In other words, the Church only held the Eucharist hostage for public disagreements. Polls consistently showed that the majority of American Catholics holds views on birth control, ordination of women, and priestly marriage similar to those for which the Church excommunicated Fathers Callan and Cachia, Call to Action, and others. Catholics have always been notoriously more liberal than Protestants on gay marriage. Yet the excommunication of this majority doesn’t appear imminent.

So what do we make of the requirement of manifestness? It’s the ecclesiastical equivalent of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Take the example of Leah Vader and Lynne Huskinson, the Wyoming lesbian couple. (Let’s pray they have a son and name him Darth.) After years of taking communion at their church and appearing in its parish directory, Leah and Lynne committed the sins of (A) announcing their engagement and marriage in the local paper; (B) sending a letter protesting a bill that would outlaw same-sex marriages to their legislator, which was read on the House floor; and (C) being interviewed and photographed by the local paper with ashes on their forehead in observance of Ash Wednesday.

As soon as the story ran, Leah and Lynne received a letter from their pastor, sent at the direction of Bishop David Ricken, that barred the couple from receiving communion. The Associated Press reported the couple’s priest as saying, “If all this stuff hadn’t hit the newspaper, it wouldn’t have been any different than before…. The sin is one thing. It’s a very different thing to go public with that sin.”

Catholic life as it is truly lived is much messier than the rules acknowledge, so pastoral responses tend to occur on the sly. When my brother and his wife — who lived in sin for three years before getting engaged — were preparing for marriage, they participated in a pre-Cana program at their local church. The program spiritually prepares them for married life. They listened to lectures, discussed Bible passages, and met individually with the priest.

The priest asked my sister-in-law about herself, her beliefs, her willingness to raise Catholic children, and other pleasantries. As he was closing, he posed the following question: “Do you have any reason to believe Bruce will not be able to perform the husbandly duties necessary to allow you both to accept children from God, if He so wills it?”

“Oh, God, no!” my sister-in-law said. The priest thanked her and asked her to send in my brother. The priest posed all the same questions to my brother, ending again with the one concerning my sister-in-law’s ability to get the job done sexually. My brother’s affirmative endorsement was equally enthusiastic.

The priest then called them both in and announced that they had successfully passed the pre-Cana test, and their marriage would go forward as planned in the Church. They thanked the priest and prepared to leave.

“Oh,” said the priest, “one last thing.”

“Yes?”

“That last question, about whether you know about any sexual dysfunction? The correct answer is
not
‘no.’ It’s 1 don’t know!’“

Step 3: Dare to Trust Your Co-Catholics’ Maturity and Reasoning Capacity

Nearly every excommunicant trusted his or her fellow Catholics’ moral reasoning abilities and gave them credit for having a clear conscience and a robust faith. The Church, on the other hand, has little faith in the faithful. It treats Catholics as if their faith is timid, and they are children easily led astray. It presumes that the faith of the people is so weak that it requires protection from scandal and unorthodoxy.

B16 and I know the same people — Catholics discern silhouettes of the Virgin Mary in the icing on their breakfast pastries and parade garish plaster saints through the streets while passersby hurl rosary beads. (Or is that Mardi Gras? I always get confused.) At Saint Anthony Shrine, when Father Myron accidentally spilled a half-dozen communion wafers, he and Her Highness cracked heads trying to retrieve them and then fought over who would have the honor of consuming the soiled Host. These are people whose faith needs protecting? Their faith looks pretty robust to me.