August 18, 2013 |
Priests. The original men in black. Men in dresses and poofy hats. Men in stiff, white, neck-pinching collars like the paper the barber wrapped around your neck – a Roman collar. Men without wives. Men of mystery. Men who speak a dead language. Men who got instant respect. Veneration. Men not of this world who perform magic rituals. A secret society. Blessed men who gave their blessing. Men who forgave. Men who made wine blood and bread flesh. Miracle men.
I remember Monsignor Barden. A monsignor is a VIP priest, white-collar equivalent. He was a pastor. White hair, pink face. Immaculate black habit with red piping. When I was in eighth grade he came in one day and asked the teacher, a nun, to leave and then he explained sex to us boys. It was going okay. Not too much new info. Pubescent boys compare notes, if not other things. But then he started talking about masturbation and, like a bolt from Zeus, he announced that it was… wrong. A sign. Mortal sin. Send you straight to hell.
I have never been more astonished and taken aback. What the fuck?! What the hell?! It was okay if there was a wife on the end of your penis, but not if you were all alone and lonely. It not only didn’t seem right, it seemed downright illogical. Adultery, yeah, I can see the problem with that. Fornication, well it’s not mentioned in the Ten Commandments, but yeah, we don’t want a lot of bastards running around without families. But what’s the harm in a good wank? I sensed that something was deeply wrong here. They had obviously made a mistake.
Then there was Father Cherness. Father Cherness did not usually wear a neat black suit or dress. Often he was without his Roman collar. He tended to wear a bright, multicoloured, silk baseball warm-up jacket. Also, unusual for any man at that time, he usually had a few days’ growth of beard. Not a beard, but noteworthy stubble. Father Cherness was a priest, but he was also an artist. He was controversial. He had painted an extraordinary mural in the stuccoed apse of St Luke’s Church, a crucifixion scene. It showed Jesus on the cross between the two thieves under a dramatic sky, with Roman soldier, Christ’s mother Mary, grieving apostles, various onlookers.
Many members of the congregation absolutely hated this mural. They thought it was disturbing, depressing, too much. I loved it. I didn’t watch Mass in the church as much as stare at Father Cherness’s mural. If I had any religious experience in that church it was from contemplating that mural. Boring sermons didn’t bother me. This painting was eloquence enough. And it was very well done. It had Velazquez lighting and the hallucinatory palette and exaggerated composition of El Greco. I could, and did, stare at it for hours. But I was equally fascinated by the priest himself. He’d had troubles, it was whispered. Something about trouble with some nuns and drinking. And there was that profane jacket and the stubble and the cigarette hanging off his lip. Before long he was gone. Where, I don’t know. Years later I came back to look at the painting that had made such an impression on me and it was gone, too. Painted over.
Catholic kids were always being propagandised about vocations. I remember my mother saying, probably after a couple bourbons, “I hope one of my boys turns out to be a priest.” In school we were all told about the greatness of being called to be a priest or a nun. It was the highest state you could achieve, even more than being married. The vocation is a call. I thought I had it once or twice but it was a wrong number. And once puberty set in, forget about it. But my brother was obsessed with the priesthood. He set up an altar in his bedroom with all the paraphernalia used in Mass, and he had a full set of vestments. I don’t remember how he got all this stuff. It was rare stuff in toy and costume form compared to the accoutrements of more conventional fantasies, such as cowboy, policeman, Indian chief. He had a Roman collar and the whole works. He would say Mass and try to get people to come, even giving out communion in the form of Necco wafer candies, which looked quite a lot like the Eucharist. My brother became an altar boy and became quite close to several of the priests in the parishes we attended, although in many other ways he was a bit wild and troublemaking. Whatever fantasy he had, I suppose he went pretty far. At one point he fancied himself as Curly of the Three Stooges and refused to answer to any other name. At another point he was way into TV’s The Fugitive and we had to call him Kimble. He dyed his hair darker and, one day, on the way to school, he got off the bus two stops early. Later, I asked him why and he said, “Somebody recognised me.” It was unusual, but I understood the priest thing. He believed everything the nuns told him about being a priest. Many years later, after tries at other careers, he actually did enter a seminary for a while, but he was asked to leave, apparently after a Christmas party where he may have gotten too familiar with another seminarian.
I always wondered about that because when he was a kid he had priest friends. Just like you read about in the sordid stories today. Nobody thought anything about a priest taking your kid to the movies, or even on a trip. I never asked him about it later because I think I didn’t want to know the answer.
I never had a priest pal. But I did get to know a lot of priests pretty well going to a Jesuit high school and then a Jesuit university. I liked the Jesuits. There were some great men among them. They were highly educated and they were good teachers. They seemed a cut or two above the diocesan priests one encountered in the parishes. Many were true scholars and intellectuals, and they just had that Jesuit aura, that dark elitist glamour that Himmler noticed when he modelled the SS after the order. Hitler had actually called Himmler “my Ignatius Loyola”, the latter being the founder of the Society of Jesus. My high school was the oldest building in Ohio built on the metric system. Although the Jesuits had taken a vow of poverty, they tended to live well, and every week the truck of a European-beer importer unloaded at their residence.
I never experienced anything overtly sexual from the Jesuits, but at one point, members of my class travelled from Ohio to New York City on a field trip led by a Jesuit scholastic (that is a priest in training). This particular Jesuit was the leader of a sort of charitable club called Sodality, and as a spiritual adviser he sometimes spanked some of the boys. One of my football team-mates who had accepted such a chastening said that the Jesuit had tried to spank his bare bottom but he hadn’t allowed it. One night he took us to a club in Greenwich Village and, before we went, he changed into civilian clothes, telling us that in Greenwich Village homosexuals often dressed like priests. We also found out, years later, that one of our football coaches was gay, which led to speculation as to why some players made “first string”.
Actually, the Jesuits turned out to be a pretty lusty hetero lot, judging from my high-school faculty. In the late 1960s, when all sorts of revolutions were taking place, quite a few of the Jesuits I had known got married. To women. I thought it was a terrible thing that these men, who had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and for the most part behaved with great nobility, were expelled from their chosen life for choosing to marry. We knew, as educated men, that for roughly the first 1,500 years of the Church, priests married. The vow of celibacy existed among orders of monks, but it was an option. Until the 14th century at least half of the priesthood was married. It wasn’t until the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century that the Church declared celibacy superior to marriage. Among the popes, at least 39 were married men, some were the sons of fathers who had been pope. Pope John Paul II stated that celibacy was not essential to the priesthood. When it eventually became the rule, it was adopted for economic reasons. The first inkling came from Benedict VIII, who was concerned about priests’ children inheriting property that could have gone to the Church. The Church didn’t want its wealth diminished by inheritance or by the support of widows and children when the breadwinner, or bread consecrator, was gone.
I remember being creeped out by some of the recruiters who visited my high school, particularly the Passionists. They are an order of contemplative monks and they wear rough wool tunics and sandals rather than shoes. They always seemed a bit creepy and alien and they always had really long toenails. Priests and monks in orders always seemed peculiar to me. I liked the idea that a lot of them make beer or some strange herbal liquor, and that they actually work. On the other hand, the idea of living with a lot men and no women didn’t appeal to me and, thinking about it, one wondered exactly who it did appeal to. Same with the nuns who were my teachers and lived in a house with a lot of other nuns.
I wondered why a lot of nuns had men’s names, such as Sister Bernard, a favourite of mine. Or Sister Joseph. And why did some of the nuns have moustaches. And then there was a hint of kink. Why did Sister Imelda, the principal, call me into her office in the fourth grade and hit the palms of my hand with a metal ruler until I cried. I hadn’t done anything. But as I grew older my suspicions grew. And I thought a lot about Father Cherness.
Donald Cozzens’s book The Changing Face of the Priesthood, published in 2000, estimated that homosexually orientated priests may account for more than half of the priesthood. A 2001 Catholic University study reported that 19% of priests stated there was a homosexual subculture among priests and 36% said there “probably was”. In the same year, a whistle-blower priest from Virginia, Father James Haley, charged that there was a conspiracy of homosexual priests in high places controlling seminary admissions, parish assignments and the appointment of bishops. The priest estimated that 60% of the priests in his diocese were homosexual. This priest wound up being charged with sexual misconduct (a woman who had suffered from cancer placing his hand on the site of her surgery). In 2002, the priest was permanently suspended for testifying in a deposition, violating the bishop’s “no-talk rule”.
It’s easy to see why the Catholic Church, with its policy of celibacy, could become a homosexual enclave at a time when gays suffered discrimination in mainstream careers, except in the arts and applied arts. The Church has also moved, though not as a body, toward thinking gay and not acting gay, just as thinking straight not acting straight is tolerated. Apparently they aren’t denying everyone an orientation! But sooner or later – maybe depending on the new pope – the Church is going to have to go back to the way things were in the earliest days of the true believers – before it got big enough for big time management, when men and women, married and single, conducted the affairs of the Church. Hey, Jesus walked around with 12 guys, and seemed to love one of them, John, in particular. Of course, this was 2,000 and some years ago, when women did not enjoy equal opportunity.
Among the 50-odd texts known as Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1896, was a fifth-century papyrus, the Gospel of Mary, that is Mary Magdalene. It is obviously non-canonical scripture. (The bible as we know it today, considered to be definitive by most followers, was not finalised until the fifth century and books used before then were edited out. In 367, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, listed as canonical the exact same books that today constitute the New Testament canon. Which may be how the Nag Hammadi library came to be buried.) In the text Mary Magdalene reveals to the apostles things that Jesus told her that he did not tell the rest. In this scripture Andrew doesn’t believe, then Peter said, “Did he really speak with a woman without our knowledge, not openly. Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?” Levi (aka Matthew) answered Peter, “Peter, you have always been hot tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us… ”
Curiously the bible often mentions St John, the beardless apostle who Jesus loved, and Magdalene in the same breath, and some theorists claim they are one and the same person, the result of a biblical edit that put women in their place. If Jesus’s innermost confidant was a woman, and her testimony was excluded by the paternalism exemplified by Peter, said to be the first pope, maybe society has changed enough by now to cut Jesus some slack and let the ladies take a crack at the priest racket. Surely they could do no worse than the guys. Let’s let the nuns wear the pants. I think it’s time for a real Pope Joan.
by Glenn O’Brien
