A reader writes

I recently went to an awful, anti-Catholic play in my city. It was titled “Hail Mary”. The flier I received from the theatre announcing this season’s shows said that the play was written by Tom Dudzick, and then had in quotes after his name, the “Catholic Neil Simon”. The blurb describing the play reads as follows: “Tom Dudzick created this new comedy about a clash of wills between a young parochial school novice and her Mother Superior. The unexpected appearance of a childhood sweetheart and an eccentric priest add hilarious complications to he mix.”

I really thought I would be attending a comedic play which happened to have a Catholic backdrop. I love laughing at myself, and there are some pretty easy places to find humor within the culture of Catholicsm. Ever watch the old British sitcom “Father Ted”? Hilarious without being insulting. But instead, the play was nothing more than a diatribe against the Catholic Church and Her beliefs, with a
smattering of comedy thrown in to perhaps prevent playgoers from feeling too uncomfortable about all the anti-Catholicism being thrown at them.

To my question, though. In one scene, the young novice has a speech about the hypocrisy of the Church. The usual (false) subjects were thrown out, such as how the Church ‘looked the other way’ while the Nazis committed their atrocities, for example. Stuff I heard before, but knew to be junk – many thanks to you, on that score.

But a new claim was made that I had never heard before. The novice stated that in the Middle Ages the Church condoned same-sex ‘marriage’, and that the Church even had a special ceremony for such unions! Have you ever heard this before? I don’t know whether it is a complete fabrication, just thrown in to capitalize on the Hot Topic of the day; or if it is based on half-truths or misrepresentations.

I’m asking you about this because you know so much about this type of thing – and you have a bigger, and smarter group of Catholic contacts to mine for information than I do!

Thanks for any light you may be able to shed on this subject! Incidentally, I’m thinking of writing the theatre to demand my ticket money back as I feel the blurb describing the play was ridiculously misleading, maybe even deliberately so.

He’s referring to Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, a piece gay advocacy agitprop masquerading as scholarship by John Boswell. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus has fun with it here.

There’s also a review of it in the November 1994 issue of First Things, if you can track one down (or subscribe to their site).