Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (28 page)

• Mother Theodore Guérin: a nun who lived in Indiana in the mid-1800s and whom B16 canonized in 2006. Her own bishop expelled her from her convent, demanded that she resign as mother superior, banished her from Indiana, and forbade communication with her fellow nuns.
  

• Joan of Arc: burned at the Church’s request in 1431, canonizedbyB15inl92Q.
  

• Thomas Aquinas: the Church questioned his writings when they first appeared, but canonized him. fifty years after his death.
  

• Mother Mary MacKillop: a nun excommunicated by her bishop in 1871, reinstated by Pope Pius IX the next year, and beatified by J2P2.
  

Even B16 used to believe in the primacy of conscience over rules: “‘Above the pope as an expression of the binding claim of Church authority stands one s own conscience, which has to be obeyed first of all, if need be, against the demands of Church authority.”

Sometimes the snitches escape the blogosphere and make undercover forays into real life. Throughout the history of the Jesuit Urban Center, self-appointed spies took to its pews, seeking liturgical improprieties and sermons on gay topics. Reverend Kick-Me told me that certain gay-marriage foes canvassed every parish and reported back to the chancery those that refused to make petitions available or preach in sufficiently fire-and-brimstone terms about the evils of gay people in love.

The Protestant Catholic Church

Rules-based snitchery has become a peculiarly American phenomenon. As one priest put it:

We are an American Protestant church calling ourselves Catholic. When something comes from Rome we follow it. In Italy, they thank the leader for the dead letter and the guidance and they do nothing. They work it out pastorally…. That goes on at every level I remember on Vatican radio after some pronouncement condemning homosexuality, the question was, “How are you going to deal with [a] gay couple?” The answer was, “You’ve got to work it out, because better for them to be together than to be going to bars.”

Several people who had done missionary work in Latin America told me that priests routinely took concubines and had children. My parents, who spent four years as medical missionaries in Africa, in the late 1990s, reported that married priests were the norm, not the exception. As another American priest told me, “It’s only here that we take celibacy seriously.

The anonymous meanness of the snitches’ blogs reveals an unChristian bearing that does more damage than a little offhand, new-age religion in a homily. But sympathy and compassion for another’s errors don’t make for interesting blogs; the snitches want nastiness, not virtue. Every time I read one of these blog entries, I wonder how the authors call themselves human. I shake my head and think,
How great the God that made an asshole like you, how vast His creativity
.

Unintended Consequences

Archbishop Sean’s spiritual package adjustments had an effect he never intended. His words encouraged snitchery that threatened my physical safety. On Ash Wednesday, 2004, a group of zealots staked positions at the Shrine’s front door. They accosted those arriving for ashes and pressed flyers on them, promoting a book called
Defending a Higher Law: Why We Must Resist Same-Sex Marriage and the Homosexual Agenda
.

Excerpts from
Defending a Higher Lam

• Criminal law should be used to punish private homosexual acts, because homosexual acts are “intrinsically evil.” whether public or private.
  

• Any association that “promotes” homosexuality should be outlawed because the purpose of such an association is “evil,” “illegitimate.” and “proscribed under natural law.” {Anybody see any First Amendment issues?)
  

• “We will show how the [homosexual] movement has a worldview based on a false morality and a neo-pagan mystical eroticism that is completely opposed to a Christian world-view and natural law,”
  

Father Bear-Daddy several times demanded that the zealots leave. After each request the pamphleteers moved away, but then sneaked back to their original positions. Father Bear-Daddy then stood next to the zealots, telling people to whom they offered a flyer that it was anti-Catholic and anti-Franciscan. Father Bear-Daddy also put a garbage can in the lobby with one of the flyers pasted to its side and a sign that said, “Deposit here.” Finally, Father Bear-Daddy called the cops.

“If we put ‘All are welcome’ on the door, then all are welcome. At the same time, we have zero tolerance for those who harangue, scream, and shout, or disrespect what this place is. Jesus entered into relationships with people — and through those relationships lives changed. He didn’t insist that this and that must change first,” Father Bear-Daddy explained.

Despite Father Bear-Daddy’s fierce defense, the Snitches grew emboldened. They regularly trashed announcements concerning the G-L Spirituality Group. They scribbled hell and damnation on them and shoved them into Saint Anthony’s “bread box,” a receptacle for donations for the hungry.

On Valentine’s Day, 2005, the director of evangelization at the Shrine received a bitter voice mail. The caller requested that she tell Father Bear-Daddy that “they” would be coming for him, that Father Bear-Daddy would know who “they” were, that he was a disgrace of a priest, that he had no balls, and that
she
had no balls. (A few seconds later the caller conceded parenthetically, “Of course you have no balls.”) The caller urged Father Bear-Daddy to “go back to Rhode Island where all that vermin and filth come from.” The caller appointed a specific Sunday mass three weeks later as the day on which “they” would show up.

“Did they?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “but we hired a police detail just in case.”

Over the next few months, someone regularly marked up the Shrine’s weekly bulletins with words like “Repent!” and slipped them under the door of the director’s office. The penmanship pointed to parochial school. Neat and clear, the writing in places had torn through the page from the force of the writer’s rage.

“Go join the Unitarians and their female bishops!” one defaced bulletin read. In the margin next to the notice of another G-L Spirituality Group meeting, another said, “Tell them the truth!”

“I’m afraid someday someone will show up and be …
well, disruptive”
Mama Bear confessed. Sure enough, a few weeks later, a scary, silver-haired gentleman showed up at the G-L Spirituality Group meeting with a small Dunkin Donuts coffee in his hand and a lot on his mind. He pulled out a breviary. His lips moved frantically as he read.

Each member of the G-L Spirituality Group introduced him or herself and said a little bit about why he or she was there. When it came to him, the gentlemen and his breviary remained silent.

“And your name is?” I prompted.

“Bill,” he barked, then looked down into his breviary.

“OK. Welcome, Bill”

Then we tore off our clothes and engaged in a raucous orgy right there on the second floor of the Shrine.

Actually, we read and discussed Archbishop Sean’s address concerning the importance of the Eucharist.

Bill’s face expressed his overwhelming disappointment.
What, no lust, no recruitment of children, no roasting of human fetuses?

He stormed out.

For God’s safe
, I thought,
don’t you have more important things to do, like protesting
The Da Vinci Code
or
Harry Potter?
Get a drink
—
or a hooker or something
.

What We Look Like

The upcoming wedding of Scott’s brother Rory and his fiancee Jezebel filled me with dread. Father Pamplemousse, the backwoods cracker priest they imported from a small town near the Canadian border where Jezebel grew up, would froth about homosexuals and the evils of gay marriage while Rory and Jezebel nodded with smug satisfaction that Truth had been proclaimed and that people like themselves still existed who believed in God and family values, which confirmed for them all the happy choices they had ever made in their whole lives.

Father Pamplemousse proved to be a breathtakingly queeny, roly-poly cleric who had obviously sublimated his sexual desires into gustatory desires. Rory and Scott were standing in the sacristy, tweaking their tuxedos and nipping at the unconsecrated wine, when Scott compared the half-naked Christ on the crucifix to his own performance in a production of Terrence McNally’s
Corpus Christi
.

“I have much better abs,” Scott boasted. “People should worship
me”

At just that moment, Father Pamplemousse appeared at the door. Hearing Scott’s comment, he threw back his head and laughed — a jolly cleric untroubled by blasphemy.

Gram and I sat together and watched the Catholic kookery unfold.
So that’s what we look like Automatons pressed into ill-fitting rental tuxes and twice-worn suits mailing empty, thoughtless gestures, jerked from knees to feet to ass and back again like puppets
. At the alleluia, Father Pamplemousse’s voice cracked. The entire congregation dutifully repeated the error. We shuffled forward in the communion line as if we were headed to work in a gulag. Rory bowed too low. The old woman should have removed her doily and let her hair hang free. Father Pamplemousse should have preached with a less gay voice. The service should have been deeper, less obvious, more meaningful.
Don't pay the least attention to these Catholics, Gram. Or to me. We can be better than we seem, honest
.

Gram, of course, saw what she wanted to see: idolaters, pedophiles, priests off to the nunnery, and too many books in the Bible.

See that? See that? Thafs not bread anymore, that’s the Lord! Did you see it change? Hand quicker than the eye and all that, huh?
I wanted her to acknowledge the Living Presence, to worship it — to become Catholic.

What’s that you say, Gram? Can you have a taste? Oh, no, sorry. Only we can eat the Eucharist
—
B16s strict orders
.

A few nights later, after a family dinner, Scott and Rory argued all night about religion. Bitterness and booze fueled the conversation. Scott could see only the Church’s bad works, its condemnations.

Embracing oppression, Jezebel chimed in, “Everywhere people shit on the Church — especially you!”

“Oh, boo-hoo,” I said. “You want oppression and persecution? Try being gay. No one’s feeding Christians to the lions anymore, but people are still killing homosexuals for being who they are.”

The dispute raged on into the night through paper-thin walls. Scott’s mother butted into the argument to forestall fisticuffs. She insisted her son would be happier and less angry if he found God.