Harry Was a Rich Young Man

I was going to put something up about a new witch hunt in the Catholic Church that someone brought to my attention. I find myself caught in a struggle about why I still care, after all these years of dismissal and distance. It does boggle the mind that the Church still parades along in all its dogma and conservatism so long after the Enlightenment. But I did give up being bothered by it years ago, or thought so anyway.

On the issue in question, getting gay priests out of the clergy, I present a few assertions which are probably contestable, but I put stock in them. The first is that there are quite a few gay priests. Some of this was quietly reported in Jesuit circles years ago as a point of study, some of it you know because you know. You just do. Maybe, like me, you've had it confirmed in carefully couched discussions with one or two, as well as highly connected members of the laiety over the years. The priesthood attracts, or, perhaps more accurately, is a last refuge for people at terrible odds with themselves, people who carry what they consider dark secrets, cyclical misery, desires for power and indescribable shame. The vestments, the relative remove from the rest of society for long periods of time, become a self-imposed life of containment. I'm not equating this horrid self-loathing to all gay people, certainly not. Gay Catholics are another breed entirely, though.

The gay priests I've known usually start with this fundamental struggle - they are gay and they are Catholic - they believe in the mysteries, the sacraments, the faith, and accordingly must believe that they are grave sinners. They may be able to quash their behavior, but they cannot stop their inner desires. God knows their desires - their deepest secrets. They are consigned to flames of hell for eternity. They look to (ahem) his strength to keep them from "sinning", but they know they cannot hide their fundamental unworthiness from his eyes. If they are heartily sorry for the offense of their very existence, then at the tolling of the final bell they might be forgiven.

What a terrible way to live! What a terrible set of strictures and controls the Church wields against its people. You can apply the strictness and complete inhumanity of Church teachings to so many issues and watch me sprout horns and a tail. If that's faith and religion, then I will dance the rites of spring. I'll break my bread and drink my wine with Locke and Hume and the French Revolution, with Christiane di Pisan, Larry Flynt and Che. And just for kicks, with the Marx Brothers (including Karl). I've always wanted to meet them.

Gay priests were often my favorites, because, at some point, if they are to remain in the priesthood, if they are to function without feeling like they should kill themselves, they start to radicalize. They question. They decide they are not horrible sick people, but missionaries of a vision of acceptance and love for all, starting within themselves. In the eyes of God, at the foot of a cross of a man that died, they come to love themselves. They bring this to their sermons, their counsel, their smiles and their messages of encouragement.

They begin to assert and hold up the ample doctrinal and biblical support (because in conservative religion it is all about trusting the infallibility of ancient and modern mistranslations of shoddily transcribed texts) for Christ's teachings of tolerance, caring, love and the removal of artificial barriers between people. They take a lot of flak for this, but I think they constitute a thread of hope, perhaps a little regarded cult, that extends back centuries. I think they and their predecessors have been working in an attempt, perhaps a vain one but an attempt nonetheless, to change the Church, bring it back to its roots among the people, bring it back to the humanity of Christ. Of course the Church wants to be rid of them.

If you are going to put your faith in The Word, well, there are a fuck of a lot of words, some of them originally in dead languages for which there may be no direct translation. You might as well use discernment - the talent, gift and burden bestowed upon the human race - to determine which of these words are ones to live by. You can use the example of humility, caring and foregiveness we attribute to a poor carpenter's son, or you can be Herod.

Organized Christianity has very little to do with Christ. Here I refer the reader to Lenny Bruce's old routine about "Religions Inc." where the leaders of all the great faiths come together for a board meeting - bishops, rabbis, imams in all their finery, and God, the Chairman, calls them all to order -

"The gate receipts are down, man. Way down."

You could add -

"We have a huge HR problem! I've asked Saint Bartholomew from Personnel to come up and give you a Powerpoint on recruitment strategies that work. Have all your people take urine tests, whatever, personality profiles."

I have thought about my Catholicism quite a bit in recent years, realizing that it must serve and speak to some deep spiritual needs. I also realize that every thought I have about it puts me outside the accepted flock, denies Church teaching, laughs at the infallibility of the Pope. Because I believe the things I do - that women, gay men, married people and Sinead O'Connor should be priests if they want to, that the Pope is a political head of state presiding over a vast art collection and more property than anyone should, that evolution is a fact and creation is a story, that I don't need to confess to any sins - or even agree that I have sinned - to some old pervert guy who knows my parents, through a perforated grille, in a little closet - I am not a good Catholic, that I am in dire danger of going to hell unless I ask forgiveness. No? Well the atheists are taking new members.

But yet some deep tidal current in the Church puts me in touch with small groups of people that began meeting in secret nearly two thousand years ago, quietly and relentlessly spreading a word that offered a powerful humanistic alternative to the materialism and militarism of the Roman world.

And I will meet you under the sign of the fish, as long as it has feet. ;-)