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As the throngs o f concelebrating priests process past the media
corner, l look directly at each one and sense that many are gay
(you know how that goes)
B Y
R E X
W O C K N E R
he assignment to cover ACT UP
New York’s now-infamous “Stop the
Church” demo at St. Patrick’s Cathedral
December 10 left me uneasy for several
weeks in advance.
I had not been inside a Catholic church
since 1984 when I left the seminary after
deciding, one-by-one:
— that gay sex is good,
— that the Pope is not infallible,
— that the Catholic dogmas on Jesus’s
divinity are internally contradictory,
— and, finally, that a casual look at the
world I live in suggested that the omnipotent,
omniscient and omnipresent god of
Christianity does not exist.
By now, my seminary days seem like
another life on another planet. But one
emotion has stuck with me throughout the
years — a periodic sick feeling in my gut that
I knew would surge up during the St. Pat’s
mass.
Both of my seminaries — S t Meinrad
College in St. Meinrad, Indiana and the
University of St. Mary of the Lake in
Mundelein, Illinois — were 60 to 70 percent
gay. About half of the men — 30 to 35 per
cent of the students — were out-of-the-closet.
At St. Meinrad, we were called “the Family.”
We had regular tables at the campus bar, the
Unstable.
Later, the year I was at S t Mary of the
Lake, tensions between gay students and the
few heterosexuals exploded and we had a
major campus symposium at which the
straights were told by seminary officials to be
more tolerant of the gays. Among much else.
T
the straights were angry about the seminary
double standard. Gay students, they pointed
out, were permitted discrete romantic affairs
while straights got in trouble for having
women in their dorm rooms.
This is also how things stand today in the
Archdiocese of New York, of course. Father
Andrew Greeley, a heterosexual, wrote an
article this fall for the National Catholic
Reporter complaining that Catholic rectories
are becoming “lavender houses.”
He complained about a “national network”
of actively homosexual clergy.
Father is a little slow to catch on to trends.
The network has had a newsletter for years.
So, knowing all this, and more, there I am
at mass in St. Pat’s. As the throngs of
concelebrating priests process past the media
comer, I look directly at each one and sense
that many are gay (you know how that goes).
In a way, of course, this is neither a big deal
nor hot news. Who cares what Father does
with his weenie anyway.
But with my personal history and my
double insider’s perspective, all I saw was my
gay friends sitting out in the congregation
fighting for their lives and then the gay priests
(whose justifications and excuses I know
intimately) standing up at the altar lending
support to the church’s anti-condom death
campaign.
I felt sick. But even more, I felt terribly
embarrassed and terribly sorry to have ever
been connected with such an unconscionably
hypocritical institution. I flashed back to the
week at St. Mary of the Lake when two of the
deacons who were going to take their vow of
celibacy a few days later were caught at the
glory holes at the adult bookstore on the
interstate just over the Wisconsin line.
I know: who cares what Father does with
his weenie. Humans are by nature
contradictory. Many of us probably have
things in our past or present similar to being a
sexually active celibate who preaches against
condoms but uses them.
I suppose if it weren’t for the feeling in my
gut, I ’d just let the matter drop and leave the
gay priests to bask in their hard-won
integration of contradictions. I ’d justify my
silence with the logic that gay priests are no
more screwed up than many other people.
But according to the Myers-Briggs
Personality Indicator — a psychological test
the seminary gave me — I ’m a feeler, not a
thinker. And my emotions side with ACT UP
and its chant, “You say don’t fuck, we say
fuck you.”
W e’ve grown used to hearing ACT UP
shout: “We die, they do nothing.” But in the
case of these priests, I sense something much
worse. We die, and our gay brothers reload
the automatic assault rifles. Once I absorbed
this fact, I began to feel that smashing up a
piece of Jesus-bread, as one ACT UPper did,
was a surprisingly restrained protest.
As you read this, politicians and gay
leaders continue tripping over each other to
attack ACT UP for having dared to take its
anger inside the cathedral. But I have to say
that my shock lies in quite the opposite
direction. I ’m surprised somebody didn’t
dynamite the whole tabernacle where the
whole bowl o f Jesus-bread is kept.
That might have begun to address my
emotions about just how evil it is for this
quintessential^ hypocritical church to try to
insert its bizarre and completely discredited
theology into sound public health policy.
“O ’Connor, you’re a murderer,” one ACP
UPper shouted at the Cardinal as he
“transubstantiated” the bread into Jesus’s
body.
A murderer who rules over a den of
hypocritical disciples worshipping their own
convoluted logic of self-justification.