When I was 14 years old, I thought I’d heard the call.
I knew I was gay, and had been begging God to make me straight. I did it through daily 20-minute sessions of devoted prayer, each concluded with a test: I’d get the swimsuit section of the latest department store catalog and stare at the men’s and women’s pages side-by-side to see if this time I was miraculously drawn to the bikini-clad women instead of the men.
It never worked.
As I realized my situation’s hopelessness, I did what many gay Catholics do and wondered if homosexuality was God’s way of calling me to priesthood. Priests don’t need to get married (they can’t), and as one I could still be respected and influential. Randomly, one of my friends said she dreamed of me as a priest, white-robed with a green stole draped around my neck, welcoming parishioners to Mass.
It was a sign. I was chosen. My torturous secrets – my suffering – were, in consistency with Catholic philosophy, to teach me compassion, and would bring good to the world. God works in mysterious ways.
When I was young, I was a proud Catholic. We were the religion of the oppressed: Irish, Polish, Puerto Rican and Italian immigrants whose arrival by boat gave the Statue of Liberty its iconic symbolism. We came from poor railroad workers in the Rocky Mountains and Mexican crop pickers in Texas and California. I was told that Jesuits laid the intellectual foundation for the peace movement during the Vietnam War. My mother said she never met a Catholic Republican; she said the idea was absurd because Catholics care about poor people. My beliefs were as much an ethnic and cultural identity as a religious one.
And then it hit.
When 9/11 shook the country, my church’s youth pastor (a non-ordained, married man who worked for the parish under the authority of the priest and would be the ultimate foil to my faith) responded with a prayer that all the Muslims be converted to Christianity, leaving a sour taste in my mouth.
But that was nothing compared to the crisis beginning months later. From Boston, a trickle of stories that had been coming for years was suddenly a flood of front-page headlines: Catholic priests molesting children – almost all boys – for decades. Troubled survivors tearfully came forward with press conferences and lawsuits, decades late. One priest was accused of touching up to 130 pubescent boys. Another had ties to NAMBLA and privately advocated adult-child sex. There was an arrest in California, lawsuits in Florida and Oregon, and other stories. All these cases had been kept secret by bishops and cardinals in different archdioceses: Cardinal Law was under fire (he would eventually resign), the Vatican was caught in the headlights, and everyone in the Church was going fucking nuts trying to assign blame without blaming the Church.
So our youth pastor came up with another lecture for the teenagers that made my stomach churn. We all struggle to make sense of the scandals, he said. Since the Catholic Church is the “One True Church,” Satan wants to attack it more than any other institution, he explained. The Devil makes men lust for boys to turn Catholics’ proper revulsion against such sins into a hatred of their religion. If you are not in good standing with the church when you die, he told us, you go to Hell, which is what Satan wants. Satan wants to destroy our faith and it is spiritual suicide to let him win.
After that, the youth group became increasingly focused on sex, as if inspiring hyper-purity in us could somehow shame reprobate priests. I learned about “mortal sin” and that it includes masturbation and deep kissing in church doctrine. When I checked church websites or read official church statements to see if the ideas were bogus, I trembled to find them corroborated.
It turned out, all my life I had been what they call a “cafeteria Catholic” – a person who claims to be Catholic but accepts or rejects teachings like side dishes in a buffet. Probably 95 percent of Catholics in America are like this. It’s fine for a straight man to have nuanced views; he is spiritually safe if he only has sex with his wife and repents of any transgressions. But a gay person is automatically in a state of sin in any romantic relationship.
The problem wasn’t that I was offended by the traditionalist perspective; it was that I didn’t know what to believe. Was everything I valued in Catholicism wrong? If the angry and demanding God I just learned about was possible, who’s to say the real god wasn’t an extremist Protestant God who would condemn me for being Catholic or an extremist Islamic God who sends all non-Muslims to Hell? If “God is just and reasonable” is gone, anything is fair game.
I had never believed in the Devil, and didn’t think Hell was a literal place. Now people I trusted said not only was Hell real, but I was probably going there. I stayed awake at nights with that fear. I pored over books by religious people of all stripes looking for answers, and just found more toxic ideologies. In school, my eyes were glassy and gazed at empty space as math teachers scowled at me for not finding circumferences and cosines as compelling as the eternal flames erupting against my psyche. For a while, I prayed the rosary daily in hopes that I would find some sense in everything, but the God I used to feel connected with was gone. This new one was a masked executioner I didn’t know.
I saw a Catholic archbishop on TV explain that the Church acknowledges homosexuality is a permanent and persistent condition – women are advised to avoid men with “complicated” sexual histories – but that he also doesn’t think that homosexual men should be allowed to be priests for fear they would molest boys. Other archbishops issued similar statements, and finally the Vatican itself recommended gay men be barred from seminary until they have gone three years without a homosexual inclination.
That, of course, is impossible. Every door was officially closed: I couldn’t enter a “social” marriage with a woman, I couldn’t marry a man or adopt children, and I couldn’t be ordained, which is the only wholesome alternative to marriage in Catholicism. For a religion that holds love, family and community service as ultimate ideals, the range of prohibitions were like saying that my life’s calling is to be excluded from everything good — a hermit in some dark apartment, terrified of the sinful world and of myself.
I did not stay there. A lot of gay Catholics gradually slide into agnosticism, or keep loose commitments to the Church while maintaining their differences. Braver ones march directly towards the church with goals of reform, teaming up with activist nuns and priests who view Christian morality quite differently from their colleagues. That was now impossible for me after having such a poignant experience of rejection, and reading official statements that most Catholics don’t know about unless they’ve been to theology school.
I left the church before John Paul II died and Cardinal Ratzinger, former Prefect of the group once called “the Inquisition,” became Pope Benedict XVI. Now he has come under fire for doing the same things Cardinal Law did – hiding cases of sexual abuse to prevent political fallout, and putting more children in danger.
I am watching with mixed feelings as the Church writhes in turmoil over a scandal that seems only to expand. I feel no schadenfreude, but there is maybe some hope – being humbled can be educational. Will the Church continue to throw gay people under the bus, or will it open up to a more honest look at human sexuality and realize that repression leads to distortions in perspective? Will it seek openness and honesty, or mistrust of the public and dogma?
I will likely never be Catholic again. I don’t believe in the theology anymore, regardless of the Vatican’s views toward gay people. But for its own sake, I hope it changes.
© 2010, Matt P.. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com
Thank you Matt for sharing part of your life. I don’t know if your spirital-walk, as some call it, has stop or just changed direction, but however you endure from this point on. I hope the best for you. After excepting my sexuality as a bi-sexualy man my spirit-walk has stopped and I hate it. Articles like this help people know their not alone.
Be well.
One more speed-bump on your road to salvation, bro. God hates those who can’t spell!
Once and for all, everyone:
they’re
their
&
there
are all different words, and mean different things. If you speak English it is your responsibility to learn this. Your salvation may depend on it!
wow , I understand your position matt. As also catholic, I too feel their teachings are ambivalent. I would probably describe myself as a loose catholic. you know, not really believing 100% in their teachings. But being catholic is part of me despite me handpicking what teachings to accept. I go to church to get away from life/reality, not for their teachings but also provide get away from the loneliness sometimes. As much as I hate the church and catholicism sometimes, I feel it is a small part of me and compassion might be the only teaching I have not excised from my life . Just out of curiosity, do you feel your sense of identity is lost or erase when decided on excommunication. HOw did you deal with that so easily?
I too was once a Catholic and quite involved in the Church. I was a lector who had responsibility for all the lectors for the Saturday vigil mass. I was also responsible for training all new lectors. I think I was pretty good at it, but something was troubling me. One Saturday, I was doing the reading from the Old Testament, I don’t remember the passage, when I had a moment like Saul on the road to Damascus except in reverse. I quite suddenly became clearly aware that I believed not a word of it. I never returned after that day. I was fed up with pretending I actually believed in the supernatural or translated text that produced nonsensical sentence fragments. I was sick of priests and bishops blaming problems they created with paedophilia and cover-ups on gay people. I was sick and tired of all the bullshit of people inventing religions and cults to justify murdering nonbelievers or allowing men to live out their sexual fantasies with young girls and the wives of male followers or pretending that sex was somehow evil unless officially sanctioned by a bunch of men in dresses who were never supposed to experience such intimacy.
Just because we cannot currently explain something in the universe does not automatically mean it was caused by the supernatural.
Matt–
Thanks for sharing that, man. I know where you’re coming from, if from a slightly different perspective. Narrowly avoided the seminary out of high school (my parents adamantly refused to let me go in until I’d at least finished college–thank God!) and all the pathologies that would have caught me up in. Though despite the grotesque institutional problems and all the pain that has been caused to far, far too many in the name of the Good News, I find that I can’t NOT believe. I mean, the important stuff, the Creed, the Eucharist–not the sex stuff which owes far more to Stoicism and 19th century middle-class morality than anything in the Gospel. It’s just there. I’ve wondered if it isn’t all crap, but it’s just rooted in me as much as the knowledge that I’m into dudes.
Just in case you (should you be curious) or any of your readers might be interested, there are actually lots of Catholic theologians who work on these matters and critique official Church teachings on sex, gender, power and stuff, but do it precisely by pointing out how the official teachings are distortions of much of the wider Christian tradition, rather than simply appealing to more secular discourse. “Alien Sex” by Gerard Loughlin (and his edited anthology, “Queer Theology”), anything by James Alison, Elizabeth Stuart, Mark D. Jordan, Eugene Rogers’ “Sexuality and the Christian Body,” Gareth Moore’s “The Body in Context” and “A Question of Truth” all come immediately to mind. They aren’t apologetic in the usual sense, and certainly aren’t meant to simply defend an institution, but might be helpful for those who–like myself–find themselves incapable of not being gay but also incapable of not believing.
Why are so many great writers, musicians, poets and thinkers ex-Catholics?
Catholics make up something like 20% of America and similarly about 20% of the world. Yet it seems like a huge majority of the people I respect and admire are ex-Catholics.
Maybe it’s because Catholicism is the dominant religion in cities like New York and Chicago (and in all blue states, really), where a lot of America’s art and culture happens, and maybe because when Catholics reach a certain level of intellectual development they inevitably leave the church. Who knows. Maybe it’s a sampling bias on my part since I’m an ex-Catholic myself and there’s something in the Catholic upbringing that gives you a certain moral and cultural aesthetic, and that’s what I go for. I’m not into bitter ex-Catholics, per se (and I don’t think that any of them are as bitter as practicing Catholics like to make them out to be), but more of a tortured, conflicted kind.
Either way, most of my idols are ex-Catholic too, and I’m glad to see ex-Catholicism has worked its way on to one of my favorite websites too!
@Anonymous
You’re right on. The Warhol Superstar Viva noted that many of the young members of Warhol’s Factory were young Catholics rejecting the tyrant Father and choosing an Arch Queer as their new daddy.
man, u r fucking true….i am a quite religious man, i would say, and i am muslim…yeah i know…being gay is prohibited in Islam, and what i am doing now, i mean, browsing for gay sites is definitely PROHIBITED. As a muslim (hey, i’m not promoting my religion ok) i also felt the same towards my religion,(previously) where guys musn’t be gays and the Hell where gays should stay. but i’d still believe in Islam, because it says that God will test those who have faith in him with a test that is bearable by the believer. it means, God will test you according to your strength, and those who are still believe in him after the test is then considered true muslim.
i believe that my sexuality is a test from him, and i must not involved in any gay relationship. i believe that if i pass this HEAVY test, he would reward me with a greater prize, in this life and the next. so it doesn’t really matter to me whether i am gay or not, as long as i have faith in him, that my sexuality is not a thing i would use to go against him. that is how i cope with the dilemma of being gay and being pious at the same time. i must tell you, i’m 21 this year and i still had never involved in gay relationship. then again, i like browsing gay sites…hahaha…though i know i shouldn’t….sorry if this comment might lead you to discomfort, but believe me, i’m just sharing.
Religion is the ultimate mind-screw.
I tried to be more involved, friends were very involved, taught cathecism, fathers were deacons, priests in their family. But religion in my family was always a hypocritical thing. The more I read from the bible the more horrified I was by the ideas and moralities expressed within it. The god of the old testament is a cruel, petty, viscous, barbaric bastard. How anyone could be convinced that new and old testaments come from the same god is a fundamental lie of the religion. The more I read of the bible the more I found, I shared little with the foul and vile moral foundation of these religions. As a kid I never believed in ANY OF IT. But that doesn’t matter. As children we are forced and indoctrinated and made to believe in the lies as easily as we are lied to and tricked into believing in Santa Claus.
But throw all the particulars away and religions, historically were about control and mandating behavior. Some were to teach how to survive (old testament/Judaism/Islam have a lot of dogma based upon health concerns of a medieval world.) The Roman Empire Church was a new branch of the Emperor’s Roman Empire. The first pope’s were powerful politicals with no religious aspects. The Pope is the Emperor of the Roman church-complete with a hierarchy modeled after Rome. Govenrments rule your life, religions rule your afterlife!! That’s the angle.
If you can see that–that it is just another avenue of a government controlling you, you may find some freedom from it all.
I still struggle with how horrific the strangle hold of religion upon the world and the people around me.
Here’s an interesting way to look at it. What if tomorrow someone said that we all have Chi–energy signatures, unique and flexible. But no machines can see them, only Chi-Masters can. And there are all sorts of rules how to keep your Chi alive and healthy. Your Chi survives beyond you. It makes you feel strong somedays, down others. But you must follow the Chi-Masters rules or your Chi may die and your Chi will not survive beyond your body. You must follow their rules or your Chi will suffer. Do you believe them? Why? Do you submit to the rules of the Chi-Masters now that they have let you in on the secret that you have a Chi?
That’s what Religions have done. They made up the concept of a soul, then told everybody that they are the masters of the realm of the soul. Do what they say or your soul gets it.
It’s an absurd lie that has lasted thousands of years.
Be content with life. Be content with your actions in life. Don’t set yourself up to regret your actions. Accept the limits of your life–no you can’t do everything you ever wanted to do before you die–but did you do the things you really wanted–did you try–do you make the things you do count? Be content with how you live this life and you may find you don’t need to have some fake carrot of another chance .