Fr. Williams and the Grind of Celibacy

May 19, 2012 By Max Lindenman 7 Comments

They say you know you’re getting old when cops start looking like kids. I say you catch your first whiff of your own grave-dirt when priests start looking like kids.

This first occurred to me two years ago, when I attended an ordination ceremony for three new priests of the Diocese of Phoenix. One, whom I’ll call Fr. D, I knew slightly though Communion and Liberation. (Since CL doesn’t ask its members to whistle, or screech, or boil over, or whatever adorable term Opus Dei uses for a formal declaration of commitment, I suppose I’m still a member, even if my last meeting was over a year ago.) Fr. D was about ten years younger than me, and it showed. He smiled constantly, and bounced through his duties with shining eyes, like a sacerdotal Tigger. He revered our bishop — whose head was then being sought by a large section of the public, including many Catholics — as a son reveres his father, and not the father in Sling Blade, either.

One night, I thought I saw Fr. D.’s laddish high spirits assert themselves in an unexpected way. He and I were having drinks with another CL member, a young Italian woman I’ll call Bettina. Bettina was a memora domini, and I rate her decision to consecrate her virginity a sadistic prank on my entire gender. In her person, she combined the fawnlike grace of Audrey Hepburn with the dark smolder of Irene Pappas, and — oh, never mind. You get the idea. Anyway, emboldened by the beer, Father and I started practicing our Italian. Both of us, it quickly emerged, would have had to spend a year under the Tuscan sun before we could speak the language like Tonto spoke English. I myself have exactly 50 phrases to my name, every one of them incorporating some dysphemism for “penis” or “testicles.” Given the nature of the company, that left me all but mute.

But on at least one point of usage, I was ahead of Father. He addressed Bettina as Doña. “That’s Spanish,” I told him, taking no pain to sound like anything but a big, pedantic jerk. Just then, for the briefest of moments, Fr. D shot me a look of profound irritation and profound contempt. “What a weenie you are,” it said. As it disappeared, it took with it one of my childish illusions. Just because a man has formally sworn off sex, doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy basking in the good opinion of women. Even if Father barred the vestibule of his mind to the slightest thought of jumping Bettina’s lovely bones, being corrected in front of her could still bruise his masculine amour-propre.

This week, the world got a much more compelling reminder of just how unnatural it is for a fully-equipped man to make himself into a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven. Scholar, TV commentator and Legionary of Christ Fr. Thomas Williams confessed to fathering a love-child, and announced he is leaving public ministry for a year. Though Williams says the child’s mother was neither a student of his nor under his spiritual direction, a report made to the Vatican by a former Legion priest alleges Williams did carry on affairs with students at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum University, where Williams served as an instructor.

Though Williams has comported himself as a model of contrition — no histrionics, no conspiracy theorizing or cries of “Help, help! I’m being repressed!” — it’s still stomach-turning news. Many among the faithful are embittered. After reading some of the posts in Deacon Greg Kandra’s combox, a priest felt moved to plead for understanding on Williams’ behalf. He writes: “[Williams] is human – weak – vulnerable – and I bet lonely; and to that, I can personally relate.” Without trivializing Williams’ offenses, or the pain and embarassment they’ve inflicted on countless people, this man can guess all too easily at some of the reasons he committed them.

“To the average person,” writes sociologist and former Benedictine priest A.W. Richard Sipe, the “perfect and perpetual continence” required of priests by Canon 277 “poses a seemingly impossible task.” He adds: “No researcher so far has assessed that more than 50 percent of Roman Catholic clergy at any one time are in fact practicing celibacy.” If these studies are accurate, and unless anyone wants do away with mandatory clerical celibacy, then the time seems ripe to accept a paradox. For many priests, the “daily dying to himself…for the love of Christ and His Kingdom” prescribed in Sacerdotalis Caelibatus is an on-again, off-again thing in practice. At some point since his ordination, the guy presiding over Mass in your parish may have slept with someone. He may even have fallen in love.

For some people the implications of such a thought are as stark as they are obvious: Father is nothing but a hypocrite and a son of a bitch. In some cases, this judgment could be fair enough. Even if Canon 277 didn’t exist, using priestly clout to talk someone into the sack would be as unethical as a doctor’s seduction of a patient. It might also signal a predatory turn of mind. But status within the Church doesn’t always translate to power within a relationship. When Milwaukee archbishop Rembert Weakland began an affair with theology student Paul Marcoux, he found his hierarch’s prestige no match for Marcoux’s ruthlessness. Very quickly, Marcoux began squeezing him for money; in writing to refuse, and to end the relationship, Weakland was reduced to pleading.

Weakland’s subsequent use of archdiocesan funds to pay off Marcoux when Marcoux threatened a a lawsuit was shameful. I am not among those who would dignify him as a tragic hero, especially not if he allowed his experience with Marcoux to prejudice him against minors who alleged sexual abuse on the part of Milwaukee priests. But in his sign-off letter to Marcoux, Weakland spoke of his celibate vocation as one who’d gained a deeper understanding of it:

During the last months I have come to know how strained I was … I just did not seem to be honest with God. I felt I was fleeing from Him, from facing Him. I know what the trouble was: I was letting your conscience take over for me and I couldn’t live with it. I felt like the world’s worst hypocrite. So gradually I came back to the importance of celibacy in my life … I knew I would have to face up to it and take seriously that commitment I first made thirty-four years ago.

It’s tempting to read this cynically — as the desperate words of a man trying to wiggle out of an uncomfortable situation. But in his renewed appreciation for the exclusivity God demands, Weakland sounds very much like the nun quoted by Sally Cline in Women, Passion and Celibacy. Referring to her “romantic” involvement with another nun, the woman said: that the worst thing “(though at times it seemed the best) [was] the intense focus on each other.” She sounds like she knows what it means to farm out the work of her conscience.

I found that quote from Cline’s book in another book, Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk. Norris interviews Benedictine sisters extensively on celibacy, and most agree that falling in love represents an irreplacable part of their formation as celibates. “The worst sin against celibacy,” one prioress said, “is to pretend not to have any affections at all, To fall in love is celibacy at work.” She concludes, “Celibacy is a vow to put up all our feelings, acceptable or not, up to our hearts and put them into consciousness through prayer.”

She’s talking about love in general, not about sex specifically. It’s unclear just how many priests in that 50-plus percent actually love the people they’re breaking their vows with. Nevertheless, just as many nuns Norris interviewed learned the true meaning of celibacy only after they’d fallen in love (usually at a distance, and with a priest), it seems to have taken a sexual relationship to teach Weakland the same lesson. Or, to put it in more negative, AA-type terms, some may need to hit rock bottom before they can begin the climb up.

For Weakland, that lesson came at a very steep price to many people. If Williams decides to remain in the priesthood, the same will be said for him. Forgiving them may be possible only through gritted teeth. But while we’re gritting, let’s spare some sympathetic and admiring thoughts for all those priests whose falls have been less expensive (and, if it needs saying, with persons over the age of consent). According to the bulk of the evidence, answering the call to lifelong contienence is exhausting and enormously difficult — as difficult as Fr. D must have found resisting the call to deck me.

The Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington bears the inscription: “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” Given the Church’s general preference for secrecy, I’d like to build a monument to the unknown, imperfect celibate. It would, of course, be an obelisk, and it would stand next to the entrance of some popular basilica. Incised in the base would be these words:

“AT SPOTS LIKE THESE HAVE STOOD IN TARNISHED GLORY MANY SINNERS, KNOWN BUT TO GOD, TO WHOMEVER THEY WERE CANOODLING, AND IN SOME CASES, TO WHOEVER HAS ACCESS TO THE FILES IN THE CHANCERY. THEY DID THEIR BEST.”

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Fair Play for the Girl Scouts!

May 17, 2012 By Max Lindenman 7 Comments

A friend of mine, actually one of my old parish’s most accomplished busybodies, once talked her way into the hotel room of a 1950′s rock guitarist when he was performing in the Phoenix area. Her goal — her sole goal — was to get the legend’s autograph for a friend of hers.

After sizing my friend up, the man smiled. Cocking his head toward another man, who was holding a camera, he asked her, “Do you object to pictures?” When my friend looked puzzled, he asked again, “Do you object to pictures?” Finally, it dawned on her that he was really asking, “Is it okay with you if my friend here photographs us while we’re having sex?”

My friend bridled, took umbrage, flew into a state of the highest dudgeon imaginable. With finger wagging, she addressed the aging satyr: “Mister _____, I’ll have you know I was a Girl Scout. I’m no groupie! All I want is for you to put your signature on this piece of paper, for my friend, who idolizes you, though I can’t imagine why. He saw you play at _______.” She named a ballroom in Connecticut.

By this point in his career, this performer had made the transition to nostalgia act without downsizing his headliner’s ego. Even Keith Richards, who considered himself deep in the man’s artistic debt (and who had managed to get along, more or less, with Mick Jagger for over two decades) found him hard to take. He had also been convicted of a sex crime. But something about my friend’s straight-backed rebuke brought out the rake’s gallant side. Picking up her reference, he asked, “That place is closed now, right?” My friend nodded, and the two fell into a pleasant conversation. After about half an hour, he signed her paper, and she left triumphant.

Extracting the Girl Scout training from this friend of mine would have been impossible. Easier to deprogram a Moonie. In tandem with the Catholic Church, the GSUSA had poured the concrete that held her value structure together. “Always leave a place looking better than when you found it,” she’d lecture me, and had no sympathy for my argument that cigarette butts add reverse chic to picnic spots. Once, while catering a retreat — one of her chief charismata — she discovered she’d overestimated the amount of milk required by half. Me? I’d have yelled, “MILK FIGHT!” and it would have been on. This goody-goody-friend of mine insisted on hauling the overage down to Maggie’s Place, a local house of hospitality for expectant mothers.

Not only did this woman follow a neurotic compulsion to do the right thing, she insisted on doing it for the right reasons. If I rouse myself to throw someone’s discarded Coke bottle into the recycle bin, I expect to be inducted into the Orde Pour le Mérite. My friend, on the other hand, would warn, “Don’t do anything for the badges,” meaning merit badges. In her book, virtue rewarded hardly counted as virtue at all.

As grating as I often found this just-canonize-me-now attitude, I hope the bishops find generous traces of it as their Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth investigates GSUSA materials it fears are “problematic.” Exactly what sort of heterodoxy the committee expects to find is unclear; in his announcement, committee chairman Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Ft. Wayne, Indiana doesn’t say. But among culture warriors nationwide, the buzz against Girl Scouts has been building to a roar for some time.

The Huffington Post reports that a Colorado troop became a target for critics by accepting a biological boy who considered himself transgendered. Just this past February, GSUSA spokeswoman Michelle Tompkins issued a letter refuting what she says were false allegations broadcast via EWTN, in a program titled Women of Grace. According to Tompkins, GSUSA has no relationship with Planned Parenthood, and no plans for creating one. Neither did it have any hand in distributing a Planned Parenthood brochure that turned up at a United Nations event. The HuffPo identifies the brochure as “Happy, Healthy and Hot,” and says its purpose is advising HIV-positive young people “how to safely lead active sex lives.”

But for the Girl Scouts’ ciritcs, it may not be necessary that, in Girl Scout usage, the “head” in “head/shoulders/knees and toes/(knees and toes)” refer to the head of Baphomet, once venerated by Templars. The real problem may lie in a general orientation. Mary Rice Hasson, a visiting fellow in Catholic studies at the think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center, calls the GSUSA leadership “reflexively liberal.” Dismissing the generally positive review given the Girl Scouts by National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry executive director Bob McCarty as “whitewashing,” she predicts that the Girl Scouts and the Church are on a “collision course.”

I find myself hoping that this collision will not end too bloodily. It’s true, when it comes to ideology, the Girl Scouts are not the Boy Scouts. The GSUSA may not order its members to become atheists or homosexuals, but unlike the Boy Scouts, they leave room in the ranks for both types. If GSUSA has no formal relationship with Planned Parenthood, it does belong to the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, whose spokespeople have called for “an environment where [girls] can freely and openly discuss issues of sex and sexuality.” It would be very hard for a Catholic Girl Scout to avoid concluding that people who contest Church teachings are worthy objects of fellowship.

That conclusion seems like nothing more than common sense. It’s the opposite conclusion — that one rejected doctrine anathematizes an organization the way one drop of African blood was once thought to make a person black — that looks persnickety. If the Bishops’ Conference wants to cut its own ties to organizations like the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights, which supports same-sex marriage and abortion, that’s one thing. If it wants to prohibit Catholic universities from honoring public figures who buck the Church’s line, it’s at least operating within its jurisdiction. But to reach outside of its own organizational limits to make demands of institutions that include Catholics, but which never claimed to be Catholic, is to reach into strong-arm territory. If this is evangelization, it’s not a style of evangelization I see winning many converts.

Indeed, that may not even be the bishops’ goal. Implicit in their latest move seems to be a fear that no young person could remain an orthodox Catholic if exposed to any opposing point of view — roughly, “How are you’re going to keem ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree”? If I were a young Catholic, I’m sure I’d find that inference unflattering, to say the least. Lately it’s become fashionable among Catholics to claim persecution, Cardinal George’s prediction that his successor would die in jail being only the most melodramatic example. But I cannot find an instance where the GSUSA, acting in odium fidei, shunned, harrassed, or even denied preferment to a Catholic. If the barbarians won’t come to the gates, then, it seems, we’ll drag the gates out to the barbarians.

Among their merit badges, the Girl Scouts offer one called “My Promise, My Faith.” According to the GSUSA home page, “A girl earns the My Promise, My Faith pin by carefully examining the Girl Scout Law and directly tying it to tenets of her faith.” It represents a lesson on living in a pluralistic society; only though a complementary badge with a name like “You Heretic Knuckleheads Are My Cross” could that lesson be more thorough.

Cervantes — whom I’m quoting via Florence King — once defined a lady as someone so determined to be respected that she could make herself so even in an army of soldiers. Change “army of soldiers” to “horny rock has-been,” and you’ll have a fair picture of my Girl Scout friend. Throw in stewardship and (occcasionally) a sanctimoniousness that made me want to garrotte her with her own kerchief, and you’ll have your case that Catholicism and the Girl Scout Promise can go together like milk and Peanut Butter Tagalongs.

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Mark Shea and the Gay Saint

May 4, 2012 By Max Lindenman 34 Comments

Mark Shea’s May 1 column, the one in which he informally canonizes the late Perry Lorenzo, might not qualify as a revolutionary act. But it will, I think, represent something — a subtle but important tonal shift in the intra-Church conversation on homosexuality. If Mark himself doubted his column represented something new, he probably wouldn’t have bothered writing it in the first place.

Lorenzo, who died at the age of 51 in December, 2009, had served as education director for the Seattle Opera. A lifelong Catholic, graduate of Gonzaga University and onetime seminarian, he became an expert in liturgy and sacred music. His Blogspot blog is still up; his posts (even less frequent than mine!) showcase his profound love for the Church and the arts, and his appreciation for the symbiosis of the two.

Lorenzo was also openly gay. (His obituary reports he persuaded his partner, Paul Hearn, to convert to Catholicism.) Mark Shea’s reaction to all this amounts to a shrug. Without bucking the Church’s line on homosexuality, Mark declares Lorenzo’s sex life — if he had one — off limits. “I also agree with the Church that my own acts of gluttony are sinful and even gravely so,” he writes. “But I don’t believe God has abandoned or rejected me and I trust his grace to help me slowly become conformed to Christ, so why should I believe for a second that somebody like Perry, who manifested such abundant and beautiful fruits of the Spirit was not pleasing to God and was not doing his best to strive for God?”

Implicit everywhere in Mark’s post is the sense that Lorenzo was not merely gay. He was, first and foremost, a human being with remarkable gifts and talents that he applied, generously, toward evangelization. Lorenzo’s sexual orientation may have complicated his relationship with God, but at least there was a relationship to complicate. Declaring him a “saint,” as Mark does, is probably a little premature; devil’s advocacy for the opposing view is hardly unreasonable. The real, solid takeaway is that Lorenzo is a fellow sinner and fellow pilgrim, just like Mark or me or any of our readers.

This may sound like nothing more or less than common sense — would any Catholic deny there’s more to Mel Gibson than bigotry and anger-management problems? But in these frazzled times, it represents a very neat splitting of differences. Many Catholics reject Church teachings on homosexuality out of hand. Pew data shows that support for gay marriage runs higher among Catholics than among Americans in general. On the other side, the subject of homosexuality drives some prominent, self-consciously orthodox Catholics to astounding depths of nastiness. Last month, the Catholic League tweeted sneeringly of “Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen” who “had to” adopt kids, rather than conceiving the old-fashioned way. By way of attacking Cardinal Wuerl, who had placed a priest on administrative leave after he’d denied communion to an open lesbian, George Neumayr wrote that anonymous “church insiders” had nicknamed the cardinal “Wuerl the girl,” in tribute to his “precious personality.” This was as close as Neumayr could come to saying, “Check it out, dudes, His Eminence is a pillow-biting faggot” without risking a lawsuit. To at least a few Catholics, “gay,” or any synonym, is still an argument-ending epithet.

But, from reading the responses to Mark’s piece, I didn’t get the sense that too many of these people hang around Patheos. Far less than outright contempt for gays and lesbians, Mark’s critics seem driven by a kind of moral fussiness. By speaking so highly of Lorenzo’s gifts, and so neutrally of his sexuality, Mark was condoning, if not encouraging, sin. (If I were George Neumayr, I might compare Mark’s critics to so many princesses, with peccatus as their pea.) To quote from someone commenting under the handle “Sophie”:

Christ wants us to do fraternal correction when our brothers/sisters err in their lives and not say what he does is between him and his God…The sins of the members of the body affects the whole body of the Church. No soul is an island. If the gay man was a deliberately practicing a homosexual lifestyle, then he was in a state of mortal sin no matter how many acts of charity or good works he does in his life…Sainthood is serious business and it means HEROIC fight for virtue. This “gay” man’s eloquent words are nothing if his deliberate actions are not congruent to what he professes. Love for Christ and the Church is proven with our lives not merely with our words…This article cheapens the demand of Jesus to be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. Never forget that when Jesus forgave Mary Magdalen, he stated “Go and sin no more”. He never condones sin.

Sophie — whose remarks seem pretty typical of Mark’s more negative responses — places the issue firmly in a theological context. In doing so, she creates space for ongoing dialogue. What form should fraternal correction take? Where gays and lesbians are concerned, what form of spiritual direction is most effective? If the cultivation of virtue requires a heroic fight, does it follow that priests and other counselors should comport themselves like so many Pattons and Pullers? If the goal here is really to minister to actual human beings, rather than protect the party line from worldly encroachment, I don’t know that there can be a single, definitive answer. There may, in fact, be as many answers as there are gays and lesbians looking to lead the Christian life.

LGBT issues have a special place in my heart for a very personal reason: to this day, I’m amazed I’m not gay. My being straight seems like a terrible oversight on somebody’s part. Unathletic, expressive, creative, quick to tears and worshipful of my mother, I’m a total nance whether you want to quote Jung or Bensonhurt folk wisdom. (Yeah, I know — plenty of actual gay people bear no resemblance to the stereotype, but try telling that to my inner 13-year-old.) I tend to form close friendships with macho, stud-type guys; if I’m not literally playing bottom to their top, I’m certainly playing Lewis to their Martin or Dom to their Burt.

Even after I discovered my attraction to women, I lived with the quiet but persistent fear that one day I’d revert to my true form and wind up in bed with another guy. One evening, after a breakup had convinced me I was hopelessly out of my depth in the Kingdom of Woman, I decided, “Hell with it. The mountain might as well come to Muhammad.” (The fact that gay men had always been so generous in their shows of appreciation made me wonder whether playing for their team might not, in fact, turn out to be an easier gig.) I went to the gay bar two doors down from me, and within an hour was necking with a former Colomban priest named Mike, or in my improvised Gaelic endearment, “Mickleen.”

No disrespect to the poor guy, but I did not enjoy myself one little bit. Indeed, I was so distracted that I found myself looking over Mike’s shoulder toward the bar. Then, suddenly, I realized what I was looking at: there was a very pretty girl giggling over her beer and popcorn. Whether she was a fag hag, a lesbian or just someone who wanted not to get hit on I have no idea, but I was doing my damndest to make eye contact with her. Very shortly afterward, I aborted the experiment, having settled for myself the question my own sexuality, and of nature versus nurture, and resolving never to torment a woman by growing a beard. (I later reneged on the beard thing.)

This little anecdote is relevant because it illustrates how cultural baggage can burden people, no matter how hard they may try to unbudren themselves. Growing up, just by breathing the air I breathed, I absorbed the idea that homosexuality, being the natural extension of effeminacy, was plain contemptible — a flaw that polluted the character as surely as a spot of mold pollutes a kaiser roll. Looking back, my having tried to pick up a guy seems less remarkable than my having waited so long to do it. Being gay was so unthinkable that anything else — even the hetero mating game, which often involved the psychological equivalent of my slamming my dick in an oaken door — was to be preferred.

Here’s the kicker: I came by these prejudices during a childhood spent in cosmopolitan Manhattan, the son of ultra-liberal parents. My high school was about ten minutes’ walk from the West Village, birthplace of the Village People. In the landscape of my youth, openly gay people were so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable. And still, the idea I might be one of them condemned me to me years of paranoia. When I think of how growing up in a more traditional environment might have committed the delicta of fornicatio with my head, I cannot repress a shudder.

This long, painful history of self-suspicion has made me want to try to cultivate imaginative sympathy for people who actually are gay. (Rick Santorum says he’d love a gay kid as much as a straight one? Okay, that’s mighty white of him, but I’m not sure I’d want to be that kid.) Whatever stupid things Dan Savage has said and done, I’ll always respect him for the “It Gets Better” campaign. My earnest hope is that my adopted Church, even if she cannot bend her rules regarding gay relationships, will enforce them in ways that offer gay people not merely compassion, but respect. Nobody should shout “mollites!” or “μαλακός!” at the opposing team when it’s fourth and goal.

Of course, gay rights activists aren’t shooting rubber bullets, either. Last fall, for example, the Rainbow Sash Movement challenged Cardinal Dolan to a debate on gay marriage. The challenge came in the form of a rude and fatuous letter that no self-respecting person would have felt obliged to answer. Given this context, it makes perfect sense that Mark’s praise for Lorenzo triggered a defensive response; why not circle the wagons when the Injuns really are charging? For that reason, I’m glad Mark was brave enough to take the hit. He did it for a worthwhile cause. Catholics of good will deserve a gentle reminder that gays and lesbians — particularly those crazy enough to want to share pew space with us — are individuals, not simply bearers of an alien agenda, and much more, in all cases, then the sums of their indvidual sins.

Update: My brand-new friend Calah, of the Barefoot and Pregnant blog, has written a very moving personal essay in response to Mark’s piece — especially remarkable considering she normally rates Mark right up there with cancer.

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