Guerilla Queer Church

As if to emphasize the fact that the laity are really beside the point in the view of the Pope Benedict XVI hierarchy, it appears that there will be no lay ministers serving at the Masses he is celebrating in Yankee Stadium and in Washington DC. 

And just as an aside, who celebrates Mass in Yankee Stadium, of all places?  That's an unholy place, if there ever was one, especially for a born-and-raised boy from Boston who still remembers Bucky Dent hitting a home run that foiled the chances of the Red Sox back in the days when we could not fathom an actual World Series victory.  Sigh.  [UPDATE: on further review, it turns out that Dent homerun took place in Fenway Park.  Perhaps Yankee Stadium ain't so bad.]

Anyhow …

No lay ministers?????  The thought is appalling.  At Saint Anthony Shrine in Boston, we live on lay ministers.  Friars get old, but lay ministers are ever refreshed.  They go through boot Camp before they're deigned fit to serve, and it's hard to imagine a Mass without them – and why would you want to, unless you were one of those people pining for a pre-VatII restoration when we can all work beads and mumble a lot and believe we had no place in God's sanctuary?  Talk about the good old days.

Anyhow, as a timely recompense for B16's nonsense, James Alison has written a chunk of wisdom some of which I set forth below for your digestion.  The test is called "Letter to a Young Catholic."  The whole thing won't take much time, but what really caught my eye was the humility of the piece.  Alison says, essentially, I may not be right in all I preach, but as long as I know it as truth, I will continue to preach it:

I don't want to pretend that being an openly gay Catholic is something easy or obvious. It isn't. For a start, merely the fact of your wanting to read a letter like this at all is a sign of how many obstacles you must have overcome already. You may have faced hatred and discrimination in your own country, from family members, at school, at the hands of legislators eager for cheap votes, through shrieking newspaper headlines that sear your soul, and in the glare of which you are speechless in your own defence. And you've probably noticed that at the very best, the Church which calls itself, and is, your Holy Mother has kept silent about the hatred and the fear. While all too often its spokesmen will have lowered themselves to the level of second-rate politicians, lending voice to hate while claiming that they are standing up for love. The very fact that, through and in the midst of, and despite, all these hateful voices, you should have heard the voice of the Shepherd calling you into being of his flock is already a miracle far greater than you know, preparing you for a work more subtle and delicate than those voices could conceive.

You will share in all the contempt which the modern world has for the Catholic Church by virtue of holding firm to the faith you have been given – you will be considered as having little of worth to offer. And by virtue of being a Catholic you will always be on the brink of being considered something of a traitor to whatever project your contemporaries seek to build. …. [Y]ou will be considered something of a traitor within the Church as well. "Not quite one of us". And certainly not someone who can publicly represent the Church, be a visible part of the sign which leads to salvation. … [Y]ou will be considered a bad Catholic, if a Catholic at all. For, long after the evangelical groups which gave birth to "reparative therapy" and the "ex-gay" movement have moved on, and their leaders apologised for leading people astray, such ideas will find Catholic backers and supporters, since they flatter current Church teaching. But don't be afraid of those ideas, and don't hate their propagators. They are our brothers. The very fact that these brothers understand that if the Church's teaching is true it must have some basis in the discoverable realm of nature means that ultimately it is the evidence of what is true in that realm which will set us free.

But what of the long "meanwhile"? For you, called by your name, … being Catholic implies a vocation to some sort of ministry, some sort of creative acting out, some sort of public imitation of the life and death of Our Lord. So I don't want to pretend: you will find yourself developing a ministry, as I find myself developing one, without any public backing from Church authority. It will be as if you did not exist. You will have to learn to live in the silence of being neither approved of, nor even disapproved of. You will fall out of the gaze of men, and if you are anything like me, desperate for an approving glance, you will experience this as a form of dying. …

Let me give you an analogy. I don't know whether you are old enough to remember the Cold War? …  One of the spin-offs of the Cold War was a literary and cinematic genre of spy stories, tales of intrigue and underground life waged (in the worst cases) by goodies against baddies and in somewhat rarer, better, cases by morally ambiguous people on both sides of the NATO/Eastern Bloc divide.

Try to imagine yourself an agent for one or the other side … . Now imagine that long ago you received your instructions from the head of the agency which is to "run" you, and were given appointed "handlers" for your mission. So, confident that you were being backed up by them, you plunged into your work, starting to build up community, small signs of the kingdom you serve, deep in enemy territory. Then imagine that something weird happens, there is something of a coup within the agency that sent you out, a policy shift, and all the people who had "handled" you, knew you, and prepared you, are quietly retired. So you find yourself with no direct line to anyone back at the agency. You are deep underground, and you are suddenly without cover, without back up, without resources, without even recognition. So much so that the new agents sent out by the agency don't even know of your existence, and would probably heartily disapprove since if you are who you say you are, then you are part of an older and currently discredited approach to the "enemy territory" in which you have long gone underground.

…  What are you to do? …. [D]o you allow your anger and resentment at your treatment by the agency to cause you to give up working on the project for which you were originally called and trained? Or do you so love the project that you are prepared to love the agency which now hates you, confident that eventually, things will work out? Loving the agency when it loves you is easy enough, but loving it even through the time when it disowns you? Now there is the finger of God!

This is where I would urge you, as I urge myself, often with a fainting spirit, to see the privilege of what we have. Yes, … they either don't know of our existence, or need plausible deniability for their own sakes, but meanwhile here, deep in enemy territory we can carry on building not just a wee little corner of something defensive, but the Catholic Church itself – the full thing, the whole whack. And curiously, with less interference from busybodies than would be the case if the lines of communication were up. So, do we dare to have our love stretched by building without approval, as we wait longingly for the day when some Berlin Wall comes down, and communication is restored? Can you take responsibility for that? Can you persevere?

"¡Esto va para largo…!" "This is going to be a long haul!" – that was the sage advice to me of one of my formators, one of my handlers, who in addition to being a gay man is an historian. He was telling me, as I am telling you, that the process of adjustment to truth in this sphere is going to take a long, long time. …

Who knows, my friend, whether this opportunity for communication will be repeated? …  One way or another, let me tell you what I have discovered in my years underground in enemy territory: you are not alone, and His promises are true.

This is what we need to do to build the Church.  We need to accept responsibility.  It is not a responsibility conferred from the hierarchy on us, but one conferred by the Almighty directly on all of us, including the gay and lesbian among us.

Here in Boston, we are taking that admonition seriously.  We continue to build the Church of the Gospel, the Church we love.   As I write, we are gathering representatives from all the faith communities, whether parishes or otherwise, who welcome the gifts and charisms of gay people.  We are sharing ideas.  We will soon have a website to help those who have not yet found us, to find us.  We have events planned through June, and we expect in particular to have a gay pride event.  This effort represents a resurgence in Boston.  We gay Catholics are re-taking our churches here.

Interestingly, there is a phenomenon in Boston (and other cities) called Boston Guerilla Queer Bar.  The idea is simple: once a month, the group agrees to descend on a very straight bar on a particular night at a particular time.  Result: a formerly straight venue is charmed with the benefits of gay appeal.  For one night, it is the gay boys who are out on the dance floor.  The music is the same, the drinks are the same, but the effect is magical.  An instant queer bar where once a straight bar had been.

What would happen if we selected a particular parish church, one per month?  All the gay Catholics would descend on it at, say, the 10AM Mass.  We would sing, we would worship, we would be indistinguishable from our straight friends in the pews, except perhaps for the ferocity of our love, our kiss of peace, and the fact that we would leave petitions in the collection basket in lieu of dollars to avoid contributing to a corrupt hierarchy.  We could invite members of Dignity to join us.  We could invite womenpriests.  We could bring our families, however constituted.

The genius of it is that this would not be an act of mere civil disobedience or profanation like ACT-UP's spilling the Holy Eucharist at Saint Patrick's Cathedral. This would be a celebration, an exercise in ordinary worship with all its glorious earnestness, awkwardness, false starts, distractions, simplicity, ritual, incense, adoration, amazement, and radical transformation. 

Alison invited us to build the Church.  But we should also feel free to take back what is ours.

Unholy wine of the Week: Rhys Vineyards "Alesia" Green Valley Pinot Noir 2006. (Note that, according to Rhys, I shouldn't have drunk the bottle at all!  Mea culpa!   Only so many bottles I can "hold' in a 950 square foot apartment!)  A brilliant new release for which I waited interminably on the waiting list.  An unusually rich pinot, with the viscosity and color of a syrah, a powerfully compact delivery of flavor, dark fruits strongest (cherries, plum), balanced acidity and alcohol.  Like meeting a big stud who also happens to have an amazing vocabulary.  (Did you guys see the NY Times piece on the Gladiator?  Nothing like a Scrabble-playing street fighter to get my panties in a bunch.)  I would never pick it as typical of pinot, but it has its own brawny merits.