To be honest, we never expected a welcome. We certainly never
expected an invitation. But there we were, five years ago, two women in
our pastor’s office, letting him know that we were a couple (in case he
hadn’t picked up on that) and that we would in a few weeks be showing up
at church not to sit in our separate spots (she in the choir, I in the
middle-back) but to sit as a family with our two newly adopted sons in
tow.
We didn’t want that reality just sprung on him, a thoughtful and
decent man who, we expected, might get an earful from a few parishioners
in the ensuing days and weeks. We asked if our coming to church like
that was OK with him. Our priest said he appreciated the heads-up. “Just
come, just come,” he insisted, expressing considerable relief that we
had nothing else to discuss (“When I saw your names in my appointment
book, I was afraid you might be asking me to bless your union”). He then
inquired as to the boys’ names and ages and, hearing that the eldest
would be almost six, asked, “Will you send him here, then, for school?”
My partner and I shot a glance at each other. We said we hadn’t figured
that was a possibility. We’d been struggling with the school question a
bit. Sending the kids to the village public school in the very rural
district where we lived was out of the question. We wanted a more
demanding education for them. Sending them to our parish school in the
small city in which we worked was, we had thought, equally out of the
question. The priest raised both eyebrows. “No, not out of the question.
Not at all. Send them here. In fact, I don’t even think you’d be the
first same-sex couple to do so.” We’d had no idea. He thought a bit,
came up with the family’s name, and said he thought all three of the
girls were still enrolled and doing fine. We were stunned. Of course
we’d want to send our kids there, then. Of course.
Things recently went quite a bit differently in Boulder, Colorado, it
seems. A same-sex couple who went to re-register their daughters for
the 2010–11 academic year at Sacred Heart of Jesus parish school were
instead asked to contemplate that the school was not a good fit for
their daughters, given the nature of their own relationship. The couple,
who had cleared their eldest child’s original registration with school
officials and had been regular churchgoers all along, asked the next day
for clarification: Were they, or were they not, allowed to register
their children? The principal consulted the parish priest and the
archdiocese, and the decision came down: the children could stay for one
more year, but then would not be allowed to continue. Dismayed teaching
staff alerted the press, and in March Archbishop Charles Chaput of
Denver issued a statement explaining the general policy of the
archdiocese. “If parents don’t respect the beliefs of the church, or
live in a manner that openly rejects those beliefs, then partnering with
those parents becomes very difficult, if not impossible.”
The dotCommonweal blog lit up rather quickly (commonwealmagazine.org/blog).
The three-hundred-and-fifty-plus comments over two
separate threads are, from anyone’s perspective, a
fascinating read. There is the argumentation-by-capitalization
contributor who points out the Truth of the Magisterium on Marriage and
Parents and Children. There are the eye-rolling know-it-alls who cannot
believe time is being taken to argue the finer points of church and
state, law and morality, the mission of Catholic education, etc., when
it is perfectly obvious to them, as it should be to everyone, that the
Boulder women are gay activists trolling for a lawsuit. But mostly,
there are the thoughtful readers and their nuanced comments, many
speculating as to why these gay women in Boulder would want to send
their kids to Catholic school in the first place.
I cannot speak for them. But I can speak for myself and my family.
The fact of the matter is, I am you. More than many of you
seem to realize. I went to Catholic grade school with you, was perhaps
even more pious than you, unless you also rode your bike to daily Mass
in the summertime and got a ride with the neighbor lady to Friday
evening Stations of the Cross during Lent. Unlike you, who never had
uncles who worked for Jesse Helms, I had the opportunity to kiss Senator
Helms on the cheek when I was eight. (People intent on finding an
explanation for my orientation may wish to ponder that fact.) Each week I
brought the Baltimore Catechism to my mother to demonstrate my
mastery of another chapter.
In Catholic high school I aced all my classes, as had my brothers and
sisters before me. At home, I scanned the reading material at hand—the National
Review, the Moral Majority newsletter, and the Hillsdale College
newsletter—and watched Firing Line with my father. I attended a
Reagan campaign rally on the picturesque green of my New England
hometown. In our home, Reagan, Buckley, and Falwell enjoyed a kind of
trinitarian status. Wanting to attend a Catholic college or university,
as had three of my four older siblings, I set my sights on the
University of Notre Dame, applying there and only there.
At Notre Dame I majored in theology and held an office in the campus
prolife group. As a student there I had my world expanded exponentially,
albeit still within the Catholic bubble. At Notre Dame I came across
more permutations of Catholicity than I had ever imagined existed. On or
near or passing through campus was a dizzying array of personalities
and schools of thought and service groups and periodicals. Focolare,
Opus Dei, Lawrence Cunningham, Jean Porter, Richard McBrien, Michael
Buckley, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Waldstein, CILA, the Thomas More
Society, Crisis, NCR, the National Catholic
Register, Commonweal, Lefeb-vrists, Marianists,
millenialists, Lonerganians, Thomists, Balthasarians, the Theology of
the Body, Feminists for Life, Comunione e Liberazione, Community of
Sant’Egidio, Holy Cross Associates, High Mass in the Basilica, Wednesday
night Masses in the chapel of Farley Hall...like I said, dizzying. One
Thursday night I would be out to a fondue dinner with a friend and her
father and a conference-attending Joseph Fessio, SJ (who fixed his
traditionalist gaze on me and said, “So, just how bad is the Theology
Department these days?”). The next morning might find me crashing a
professional conference on medical ethics—sitting in the back row,
taking it all in—before heading off to hear a speaker on liberation
theology over at the Center for Social Concerns. During my time at Notre
Dame a professor I asked to be my confessor steadily tried to bring me
along from a stunted spirituality centered on self-discipline (I was
very, very good at that) to a more expansive and far more challenging
spirituality centered on the daunting gospel command to love—really
love—God and neighbor. I left campus with my diploma and a handful of
awards, one of them for being the top theology student. I hated leaving,
and told everyone I felt like I had just started getting to the good
stuff.
After a couple of weeks I drove my fondue friend to an order of
female hermits in New York whom she was considering joining, and headed
to the L’Arche community in Toronto, Canada, to live and work among the
developmentally disabled. Daily Mass was again part of the mix, this
time with Henri Nouwen as celebrant. When Henri was gone a few of us
tried our hand at lay preaching. I’d like to think I did a passable job.
After two years at L’Arche, not able to shake that “but I was just
getting to the good stuff” feeling, I requested a deferral of admission
to law school in order to continue theology studies. Fellowship in hand,
I relocated to Boston and found my intellectual home in the work of
Karl Rahner. Two years of studying theology and nothing but theology—and
getting paid for it!—well, that was as sweet a deal as I had ever come
across.
During my years in Boston I dated a couple of guys, one of them a
former seminarian and fellow theology student. He and I attended a talk
by Andrew Sullivan, then the editor of the New Republic and an
out gay Catholic. I sat and listened, and knew for the first time with a
semblance of peace what I had come to know in recent years in more
conflicted fashion: that I was, and would always be, a gay Catholic.
I met my future partner some years later at a party thrown by a
priest. The months that followed were excruciatingly difficult. It is
one thing to be a gay Catholic, another to take the step of dating. I
realized I would never have an answer for those who say, “God will give
you the strength to bear whatever burden you have. He will give you the
grace to be a faithful, celibate, gay woman. You need only pray and
fast.” If I protest and say that I have prayed, I did fast (every
Wednesday, for years!), my continued existence as an unrepentant gay
Catholic simply provides them with their own ready answer: “You need
only pray and fast more.” And who can disagree with that? I am
reminded of the words of Rahner as he pondered embarking on the writing
of his massive tome Foundations of Christian Faith:
For a Christian, his Christian existence
is ultimately the totality of his existence. This totality opens out in
the dark abyss of the wilderness which we call God. When one undertakes
something like this, he stands before the great thinkers, the saints,
and finally Jesus Christ. The abyss of existence opens up in front of
him. He knows that he has not thought enough, has not loved enough, has
not suffered enough.
I don’t disagree that I have not thought enough or prayed enough or
suffered enough. Neither, for that matter, has anyone.
[Read the rest of this remarkable essay, in Commonweal, here.]
