Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (9 page)

Ignoring the scandal was not an option. (Except for Pope John Paul II, whose postscandal 2002 trip to North America notoriously excluded the United States.) The front page was relentless, and everyone and his sister wanted a swing at the target. In my liberal circle, there weren’t enough practicing Catholics to go around, so I bore the brunt of people’s rage. They demanded:

“How can you support a church that did this?!”

“Why don’t you hold them accountable?!”

“Where is your pope now?!” (Not in America, that’s for sure.)

I hemmed and hawed, made halfhearted excuses, and shamelessly pulled the Mother Teresa card. But my defense of the Church, however poor, never resulted in substantive argument. Instead, my interlocutors jumped straight for what they viewed as the polemical jugular: “But you’re
gay
, dude. You write
porn.”

They had, of course, hit the nail on the head. Although not necessarily for the right reasons. Sure, it was easy to believe that, because the Hale Marys and I tut-tutted together about the scandal and shook our heads and pitied the friars and felt sorry for ourselves and muttered “Je-RU-salem,” they and I were in the same boat.

But we were on different oceans. For a gay Catholic, the scandal had a whole extra dimension about which straight Catholics never worried. Within weeks of the scandal’s breaking, it became clear that the Church’s primary defense was going to be a good offense — against gays.

The Vatican and high-ranking cardinals issued statements linking the scandal to the “problem” of homosexuals in the priesthood. Word quickly leaked that the Vatican was preparing to bar men identifying as gay from the seminary entirely (which it ultimately did in 2005). That arrogant cardinals were turning an administrative nightmare of their own making into the isolated handiwork of a group of horny, marginalized homosexuals in clerical collars left me speechless.

There’s nothing gay about shuffling guilty priests from parish to parish so they can diddle more kids. That sin — I came to agree with my inquisitors — was quintessentially Catholic, not gay.

At home, of course, the scandal flung gasoline on the fire of Scott Whittier’s belligerent atheism. Everything he had always believed was now proved true. And it was all on the front page of the
Boston Globe
. You couldn’t buy publicity like that for the atheist cause.

A lesser man might have afforded himself at least a grin of satisfaction. Not Scott. “It’s what I expected,” he said, shrugging. “No surprises here.”

The lack of triumph in his tone had a single source. Scott Whittier has one opinion about pedophiles: he thinks they should die. Slowly. In great agony. Preferably twisting from a rope tied to their genitals. He couldn’t take satisfaction in the Church’s downfall, because in his view that downfall wasn’t worth the expense to the victims.

After the revelations continued unabated for months, Scott finally sat me down on the pew. His eyes were bloodshot, his expression murderous. The word
Catholic
came from his lips like he was choking on an olive pit. I’d like to say the pit struck my cheek, fell to the good soil at my feet, and germinated into a large, peaceful olive tree that provided us shade and comfort for years.

No such luck.

He complained about the money I dropped in the collection basket at St. Anthony’s. He contrasted my political and legal activity in support of gay marriage with my participation in a church that was that issue’s primary opponent in Massachusetts. In the weeks that followed, he e-mailed dozens of old news stories, such as the Vatican’s condemnation of the 2000 World Pride parade in Rome that ended with the city withdrawing its official sponsorship of the event.

Diddling children, yes. Parades, no. A hell of a slogan for a decaying church to carry into the New Millennium. Je-RU-salem!

Scott asked point-blank, “Why do you keep going to a church that hates you?”

Ouch.

Vatican to the Rescue

I looked to the leadership of the Vatican for guidance. And the Vatican didn’t disappoint. On the issue of Harry Potter, for example, Rome took a strong and unequivocal stand. In 2002, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, spoke on Vatican Radio and labeled J. K. Rowling’s series satanic.

I didn’t even know the Vatican had a chief exorcist. Who else was on the payroll? Did Amorth have a staff of junior exorcists toiling away in windowless Vatican cubicles? Was there a grand inquisitor in the office down the hall? A hooded executioner in a small office by the water cooler?

More important, what exactly did the Department of Exorcism do besides taking positions on Harry Potter? Had they, for example, attempted to exorcise the devil in Cardinal Law that made him put the welfare of the institutional Church above the welfare of children? Did they run a school for exorcists, where they started with minor demons, worked their way up to mid-size devils, and then set to work on Satan himself?

I doubted the veracity of the report, but it turned out that Father Amorth was perfectly real. And perfectly serious. And — I am not making this up — his favorite movie is
The Exorcist
. According to news reports. Father Amorth has performed over 30,000 exorcisms. That’s a lot of split-pea soup.

In his Vatican Radio interview on the Potter matter, Fr. Amorth said, “Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil.” Keep in mind, this was five years before J. K. Rowling outed Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, as a gay man.

Amorth put Harry in good company. Father Amorth said in the same interview that Stalin and Hitler “almost certainly” were also possessed by the devil. Interesting. Adolf Hitler. Joseph Stalin. Harry Potter. Makes perfect sense. According to Father Amorth, Pope Pius XII once tried to perform a long-distance exorcism on Hitler — without success, obviously. Amorth explained, “It’s very rare that praying and attempting to carry out an exorcism from a distance works. One of the key requirements for an exorcism is to be present in front of the possessed person, and that person also has to be consenting and willing.”

Amorth’s concession gave me a very personal sense of relief. Even if he had detected my unsuitability for lector service at Saint Anthony Shrine, he would not have been able to compel the devils within me to get hence without traveling all the way to Boston. But that relief evaporated when further research showed that Father Amorth was not just a crazy old man straying from the reservation. Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger (hereinafter “B16” or “the Rat”), was also preoccupied with the bespectacled adolescent wizard. The Rat wrote that Harry Potter contains “subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly” in children. Nice to know the Vatican was holding high-level consultations about protecting children from fictional characters while subjecting the same children to predatory priests.

To be fair, Saint Anthony Shrine has its own brand of lopsided, endearing kookiness. Father Justin, for example, is our jazz friar. He constantly riffs on the standard liturgy in ways that catch the flatfooted congregation off guard, somewhere between an amen and a thanks be to God, and not sure whether to sit, stand, kneel, or just shoot the good father and be done with it.

The Shrine attracts more than its fair share of mystics, crazy people, and the devout-against-all-odds — and not just misguided homosexuals like me. A typical Friday mass included:

• The Hero, whose multiple sclerosis had twisted his limbs and stolen his voice. Every Friday, without fail, he propelled his wheelchair up the center aisle by stomping the marble floor with one twisted foot like an angry bull. He bellowed and grunted the prayers and responses out of time in speech as garbled as Chewbacca’s. This wheelchair-bound wookie had a reason to hold a grudge against God, and yet he came week after week and made his own pre-Mass ministry, handing church bulletins to all who came through the door.

• The Haunted Man, who communicated regularly with demanding dead people in purgatory. For the sake of their immortal souls, he attended no fewer than six masses a day.

• The Witchy Widow, who wore secondhand shoes and a Victorian black lace shawl fastened over her stark white hair. Before Mass, she flung herself before the tabernacle and prayed madly, lips moving but making no sound. During Mass, she stayed out of step with the coordinated responses and prayers of the other parishioners, like a sour note in a marching band. After communion, she kissed the feet of the brass Jesus and never once acknowledged another living soul.

Who is the Holiest of Them Ail?

The Haunted Man and Witchy Widow are contestants in a penitential variety show, the goal of which is to outdo one’s neighbors in acts of piety and abasement. Other contestants include Deep Bowers, Exaggerated Genuflectors, Floor Flingers, Prayer Bellowers, Demonstrative Bead Counters, Forehead-on-Pew Slumpers, Large-Cross Wearers, Early Arrivers, Late Stayers, and, I imagine, a few with thorns in their underwear and a dungeon at home where they whip themselves at night.!

Participants in Ye Olde Piety Show never accept communion from a eucharistic minister, however extraordinary he or she might be. Apparently, someone told them that communion only works if you take it directly from an ordained priest. They change lines, cross-check their compatriots, duck, and backtrack to the other side of the sanctuary solely to avoid receiving communion from the unordained. To them, lay ministry is as newfangled as power door locks, cell phones, or the Internet. Where’s the magic in the sacraments if any post-Vatican II homosexual can administer them?

When participants in Ye Olde Piety Show do approach the priest, the religious fireworks really begin. They leave plenty of room between themselves and the communicant in front of them, so when the path is clear, they get a two- to three-step running start to fling themselves at the priest’s feet with tongue outstretched.

Even the artwork at Saint Anthony Shrine was a little off-kilter. A row of panels in the second-floor chapel pictures twelve apostles — but not the right ones. A Simon is missing, replaced by Saint Paul, who was not an apostle. In a rendering of the Last Supper, Judas makes no appearance, and no women whatsoever have shown up, although the Gospels put both at the scene.

All this kookiness reminded me of the Native American craftsmen who deliberately engineer errors into pottery. The flaw is the point where the spirit enters the work and gives it life. So, too, for Saint Anthony’s: the Shrine was a veritable Swiss cheese through which the Spirit flowed at a steady clip.

Of course, kookiness is all fine and good until someone burns at the stake. Local Saint Anthony’s kookiness was endearing, but high-level Vatican kookiness was too much to bear. Like the Hale Marys and Ye Olde Piety Show, like Fathers Abraham, Justin, and Francis, like so many Catholics, I just wanted a church of which I could be proud. This yearning was another form of learned helplessness: I was passively looking for a savior to restore my pride, as if the Savior we had wasn’t enough.

IV

Love, J2P2

Join us in a diplomatically intricate, ethically ambiguous, and sometimes publicly humiliating tightrope walk toward Jesus
.

— Jim Naughton, Anglican Diocese of Washington, D.C., referring to the controversy over the ordination of gay bishop Gene Robinson

Happy Birthday

HRISTOPHER HITCHENS BE DAMNED
. If you want proof of the existence of God, you have a couple alternatives. First — and I think this evidence is irrefutable— Dick Cheney and Alan Keyes each have a lesbian daughter, and Lynn Cheney in turn has a child. These facts bear witness: Not only is there a God, but He’s a funny son of a bitch.

If you need additional proof, you can pray to the Lord and see if He answers. I, for example, had prayed for a new savior to restore my pride in the Church. On my thirty-fifth birthday, God delivered. The pope appointed Sean Patrick O’Malley to be the new archbishop of Boston.”

Given the timing, I concluded that O’Malley was a gift-wrapped, sealed-with-a-kiss love offering from the Almighty Himself.

The friars at the Shrine shared my optimism, in part because Archbishop Sean, as he preferred to be known, was one of them — a brown robe! He was a Capuchin, a kissing-cousin branch of the Franciscans from whom cappuccino takes its name. One friar announced, “We are called to be peacemakers, to heal wounds, unite what has fallen apart, and bring home those who have lost their way, … That’s what the [Vatican] had in mind when they appointed [O’Malley].”

Personally, I couldn’t help but ascribe tremendous virtue to a man who was said to speak six languages, and who, like me, loathes cats and had been caught red-handed in the decidedly un-Pranciscan act of shooting them with a squirt gun. At first glance, O’Malley came across as a likable wizard.

Not everyone in the archdiocese shared my enthusiasm. Archbishop Sean’s habit of wearing his habit inflamed the sartorial jealousy of diocesan priests, who suffered in basic black and a dog collar. Never permitted to wear a sash and dress, they cattily referred to O’Malley as the Brown Bag.