Mirror of Justice

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.]