It's Shrove Tuesday --do you know where your pastor is?
By Diogenes (articles ) | February 24, 2004 6:28 AM
Twelve years ago the NCR ran a disjointed "open letter to the Holy Father" written by an anonymous and clearly agitated gay priest who, by way of rebuking the Pope, wished to show the harm inflicted on closeted priests of his acquaintance by Catholic doctrine. Perhaps because of the unusually high media attention paid to Mardi Gras this year, the following portrait came to mind:
And then there is the alcoholic priest, well into his middle years, whose sickness no one in community acknowledges. Shortly after I arrived, when he was three sheets to the wind, he shared with me his fondest wish: "Oh to be 21 and black and living in Rio during Carnival time." And he is moderator of the school's water polo team.
And this comes, remember, from a guy writing in favor of gay clergy. I've thought about that nameless priest and his macabre "fondest wish" several times over the years, especially when, in the course of listening to a sermon, it becomes clear that the homilist inhabits a universe alien to Christian personhood. It's not just a question of moral depravity, or shocking taste, or immaturity that borders on derangement
Of course it's the papier-maché facade that's ordained and promoted to pastor or bishop or vicar general. Yet even so the interior dispositions leak out sometimes, and one is brought up short. This preacher maintains the mass is a chance for God to say Thank You to us; that bishop insists predator priests have a right to their "good name"; a third friar gives a vocation retreat in a clown outfit. No Catholic can connect this with the logic of his faith or with his wholesome experience; he can only murmur sarcastically, "Oh to be 21 and black and living in Rio during Carnival time..."
Not long ago the webpage of the California Jesuits splashed photos of novices in Mardi Gras drag, along with camp, jokey captions. My first thought was that it must have been an indiscretion. But it's more likely to encode a message they really wanted to send: we have seceded, interiorly, from the Church; we wear a mask, but the mask itself is a tease; what you see is almost what you get.
I supect that, for the most part, gay priests will continue to display a more popularly acceptable facade than the Jesuit model, will continue to live parallel lives in a world of degraded fantasy, and will continue their piecemeal subversion
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Posted by: il Dottore -
Feb. 24, 2004 10:53 PM ET USA
The Dallas Charter ignores the big problem. Homosexuality in the seminaries and among the clergy, dissent and heterodoxy, and liturgical abuse and iconoclasm; these three areas of bad morality, bad theology and bad liturgy nourish each other like malignant tumors attacking the Mystical Body of Christ. The pedophile scandal was the tip of the iceberg, just below the surface is the ephebophile and then the homosexual followed by the irreverent and the disobedient. The whole house needs cleaning
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Posted by: Fatimabeliever -
Feb. 24, 2004 3:21 PM ET USA
To this I utter a lenten prayer, "Almighty God, the Father, please deliver us from all evil religious men and women who believe they are much more important than Your beloved Son, Jesus who suffered so much pain for our sins.
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Posted by: -
Feb. 24, 2004 9:49 AM ET USA
This psychologically disturbed homosexual should have been turned away at the very first interview for his "vocation," which is a sham. His all too common story is why I never seriously considered the priesthood, nor would I ever encourage my son to consider a vocation. Straights wouldn't want to spend five minutes in a gay bar; why in the world would one want to spend a lifetime among closeted, active homosexuals? This order of "priests" ought to have been dissolved years ago.
