
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. (read the full article)






>






