Seven Years of Priests
One of the things one is promised as a Catholic (and especially as a convert) is that the sacraments are powerful vehicles of divine grace. That is to say, the sacraments (for those who desire to receive them and are open to their effects) actually work to heal the soul and transform it it. They provide grace that helps make you a holier person, and strengthens the will to enable you to better resist sin.
It’s a dogma of the Catholic Church, defined at the Council of Trent, that no one in the state of grace is incapable of keeping the commandments. Which is to say that, while we all remain imperfect and marred by original sin in the present life, it is a non-negotiable teaching of the Church that with the help of the sacraments we are all capable of at least living a morally upright life on the main points, even if we slip up here and there.
When I entered the church, I had all of this in mind. I believed that, after being baptized and confirmed, I would really experience some sort of renaissance of character or personal sanctity, and this would enable me to better live up to my personal standards, which included such items as (1) not indulging in impure thoughts, looking at pornography, or masturbating, and (2) not being subject to gravely disordered (homosexual) sexual desires.
For about two weeks after the Easter Vigil when I was baptized, I managed to steer clear of impure thoughts and keep my hands clean. Two weeks. Then the inevitable happened, and I asked to see a priest for confession. Two weeks was a pretty good stretch for me. As a person with what I’ve since realized is an unusually active libido, I’d only gone that long once or twice since puberty. So, while I was disappointed in myself for failing to live up to my goal, I figured what the priest said about it was right: that I was growing and would make more progress over time as I became more and more “open” to grace and better capable of mastering my appetites.
The priest I saw for confession that first time was a nice guy and very friendly. He gave me a long chat and recommended I start watching Michael Voris’s “Vortex” videos. I felt edified by the encouragement and went away convinced that improvement would come in time, and it would become easier (as the priests I’d spoken to, and the catechetical materials I’d read indicated) to resist temptation over time as grace worked more deeply within me.
Five days later I was back again. And five days after that. And three days after that. And so began the pattern which characterized seven years of my experience as a Catholic, until I reduced the frequency of my confessions.
Seven years! In those seven years I went to confession once or twice a week on average. Every time I went I did so in a spirit of contrition, with a firm purpose never to sin again, hopeful that something was going to change, open to the advice I was given, devout and sorrowful. Sometimes the emotions would be strong, sometimes they would be dominated by a tender contrition, sometimes by fear of hell, perhaps most often by a sense of frustration with myself and shame at having failed again so soon.
Seven years! In those seven years I must have gone to confession about five hundred times. I had periods where I stuck with a single confessor, and periods where I would just show up and confess to whoever was on that day. I went to diocesan parishes, Dominicans, Franciscans, Opus Dei, liberals, conservatives, trads. I had a wide range of experiences with these priests. Some were stern, others said virtually nothing and let me out of the box almost immediately. I’d like to set down some memories of those seven years here, though, to give a sense of the sort of nonsense I was subjected to.
First off let me make it extremely clear: during those seven years, despite an earnest, profound desire to reform my life, become holier, and stop sinning, nothing in my moral life improved from what it had been like prior to my reception into the Catholic Church. I did not find that temptation was easier to overcome, or that the frequency of my yielding to it modified at all. I experienced a great deal more shame and distress around my own sexuality. My sorrow at regularly failing the God whom I centered my life and career on was wedded increasingly to the fear that, if I died without confessing, I would burn in hell forever.
Toward the end of my time as a Catholic I decided that this latter experience was probably psychologically unhealthy, and so I resolved to go to confession less frequently and be kinder to myself, to see if somehow that would help me overcome my “addiction” to sexuality, or enable me to somehow achieve the “affective maturity” that the Church claims men with homosexual desires are lacking. This was a happy accident, because, while this kindness and reduced use of the sacraments did not in any way make me less of a sexual being, it did enable me reduce the quantity of shame I experienced over my sexuality, shame which was reinforced every time I went to the confessional.
The first story that comes to mind is actually from prior to my conversion. My junior year of college I was enrolled in RCIA and had a lot of trouble despairing over my own future and my inability to belong. I had a lot of suicidal thoughts, and when I confided them to a friend he recommended that I talk to a priest at the local parish. We can call him Fr. Patrick (not his real name). Fr. Patrick was a sensitive and intelligent guy, who ran the young adult group at the parish. I presented him with my difficulties in the vaguest of terms. He seemed confused by why I was there but decided that I was struggling with “despair”, and he gave me a copy of a little spiritual tract, Taming the Restless Heart by Gerald Vann. The book is extremely hokey but in precisely that sort of way that enables those of us looking for religious consolation to believe that we’ve read something life-changing. Fr. Patrick was a nice guy, well intentioned but horrendously unqualified to be offering any sort of counseling. In retrospect it’s a wonder that I didn’t die during that period.
Earlier I mentioned my first confessor, Fr. Enzo (not his real name). Fr. Enzo was an old diocesan priest who had served as a military chaplain in Vietnam. He was recommended to me by one of the priests at the parish where I was baptized, and was happy to be a regular confessor to me and the friend I converted with. Over time, I started to get odd vibes from Enzo. On a couple of occasions he launched into detailed descriptions of what he’d seen while serving in the military, including vivid descriptions soldiers’ penises. (This was shared in the context of the sacrament of confession.) At the time this struck me as odd and a little creepy, but I was a new convert and believed 100% in the sanctity of the priesthood and was therefore ready to bury any sense of discomfort and carry on.
Things only got weirder with Fr. Enzo, though. The next fall he said he wanted to take me and my friend out for lunch, and we were both honored and agreed. When we met him for lunch he introduced us to his “friend”, an extremely flamboyant man who had inexplicably volunteered to give the three of us a ride to our destination (but did not join for lunch). From what I gathered they were on close terms with one another. It was another odd thing, which I told myself did not mean what it obviously did mean. At the lunch Fr. Enzo made a joke about how many times I’d jerked off over the summer, which was both creepy in its own right, and an overt violation of the seal of confession. I was really uncomfortable and confirmed with my friend afterwards that what he’d said was indeed inappropriate.
After that I stopped confessing to Fr. Enzo as much and started going to the normal confessional line at my parish. The experience varied enormously depending on who was on the other side of the screen. Usually I would get the same short speech about God’s mercy and the importance of never despairing, and was out of the box in a minute or two. But sometimes things would be very different. On one memorable occasion I was yelled at because I had looked at pornography and the priest felt that I wasn’t adequately contrite. He said he needed to impress upon me that “this sin will destroy your faith.” I was horrified and left with a new fear to grapple with: not only was sinning bad, not only did it put me in danger of hellfire, it was also somehow going to make me lose my faith in the long run.
My last year of college the friendship with the fellow I’d converted with went up in flames, and he totally cut off contact with me. In the midst of this I tried talking about it with Fr. Enzo, and he attempted to mediate. He told me that my friend had cut ties because he thought I was gay and romantically attracted to him. I was devastated. It’s difficult to overstate how psychologically damaging that experience was. I became depressed and started having frequent anxiety attacks where I was convinced my heart had stopped beating, or that I was going to die if I didn’t intentionally will myself to breathe from one moment to the next.
The horror of losing my closest friend precisely because I (still totally closeted) was too gay for him sent me into a full blown existential crisis. I was 22, I was approaching the end of college, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. I hated myself, I felt increasingly like a failure. Remember, in the midst of this there was the continual pattern of failure, shame, and repentance reconfirming weekly that I was attracted to men and could not escape it.
Somehow the thing that ended up presenting itself to me as a viable way out was to give myself completely to religion, so there would be nothing left in me but the desire to serve God. I resolved to join the Dominican Order and got in touch with their vocations director, who met with me the next time he was in the area.
As a prospective applicant to the Dominican Order I was given a checklist of activities that I should be undertaking on a regular basis, including criteria for admission. I was expected to read about the history of the order and its founder, St. Dominic. I was to maintain an active prayer life, ideally including daily mass and some portion of the Liturgy of the Hours. When I spoke to the vocations director he added to this some general expectations around chastity—it was understood that men making religious vows needed to be chaste, and this meant a demonstrated habit of chastity over a period of months or years. He also talked about “affective maturity” and “spiritual fatherhood” and painted a picture of the sort of men they were looking to get as novices—guys who would play a game of pick-up basketball, guys who “would have made great fathers” if they’d been family men instead of priests. Without putting it in as many words, the message was that “faggots need not apply.”
Having been Catholic for only about a year at that point, I was still clinging to the belief that somehow grace would “heal” me and make me at least straight enough that I would be able to join. Maybe, I thought, I don’t have the “deep-seated” kind of homosexual inclinations. Maybe mine would go away in time.
Since I wasn’t allowed to apply straight away (new converts aren’t allowed for at least three years), I decided to get a head start on my seminary education and enroll as a lay student. Because I was a prospective novice, I was told to find a spiritual director to meet with regularly, and I did. The priest I chose was one of the professors I was studying with, and he seemed kind. He had a very specific way of doing spiritual direction. Every time we met I was required to come with a question or a problem that I had to pose to him. He would then have us reflect on some scripture, and talk about my question, and he would give me an assignment to do on my own time before our next meeting.
I knew that if I was going to do spiritual direction I had to be honest with this priest—let’s call him Fr. Peter—about my deepest struggles. I had never told anyone outside of the confessional that I was gay or “struggling with same sex attraction”. But somehow in that first meeting with him I managed to tell him that I was. I remember we were sitting in his office in the faculty wing of my graduate school, and as I told him I started sobbing uncontrollably. This was something I had been keeping hidden from everyone in my life since the beginning of puberty. It was horrible, and it hurt so much, and saying it out loud was an acknowledgment of its reality that magnified the pain unbearably. His response was to shush me and tell me that I was crying too loudly, that he was worried someone might hear me in the hallway.
After I managed to calm down he told me that I should read Augustine’s commentary on the First Letter of St. John, and focus specifically on the opening passage about “what we have seen” and so on. In subsequent meetings when his advice proved unhelpful, he told me that I should find an alternative outlet for my energy, and encouraged me to start painting icons, under the theory that this would reduce my sexual impulses and potentially make my homosexuality go away.
Another thing Fr. Peter recommended (along with many other priests) was that I install blocker software on my laptop. I ended up using a program called CovenantEyes, which flags any adult sites you visit and sends your traffic history to an accountability partner. For my accountability partner I reached out to Fr. Enzo, who was happy to help. When I violated the CovenantEyes protocol, he would write me emails chiding me about how bad the stuff I had looked at was. The shame was too much for me to bear, and after a bit of this I wiped the software from my computer and stopped responding to Fr. Enzo.
Another thing I was encouraged to do was join the Angelic Warfare Confraternity, which is a sort of prayer group run by the Dominicans that involves wearing a knotted nylon cord around one’s waist at all times for protection from temptation. At the initiation we were told that if we wore the cord and performed the obligatory daily prayers, St. Thomas Aquinas (and many angels!) would protect us from lust just as he had chased away a prostitute with a flaming log when his brothers tried to tempt him into having sex. I stuck to this program for three or four years before giving up on it. Alas there was no indication that it made any difference at all.
After some months of meeting with Fr. Peter for spiritual direction, he informed me that due to a change in his title he could no longer meet with me and all upcoming meetings were cancelled. By that point I felt like even more of a failure. None of his advice had worked out for me. Having our relationship terminated so abruptly, after everything I’d shared with him about my personal history, felt like a slap in the face.
The next year I found a different spiritual director, but never ended up meeting with him. He was my academic thesis director, and he never really met with me to discuss that either. I did go to confession with him once, and he told me that my primary vice was probably pride, which was befuddling to me given how much I hated myself. I decided not to apply to join the Dominicans, under the assumption that I was morally unqualified to be a priest. The prospect of going through the application process and being rejected because I was too gay was too much for me to bear. I decided against it.
After graduate school I ended up living in Chicago, where I attended two different magnet parishes, one run by Opus Dei, the other run by a small but prominent group of traditionalist priests. Opus Dei is famous for its aggressive recruiting strategy and one day after mass a priest approached me (a recent Yale grad, with a theology degree, and a teaching job at a prominent local prep school!) and suggested that I teach a small CCD class for kids who had aged out of the normal catechetical process but had not yet made their first communion. Along with this job (which I accepted gladly) the priest offered to meet with me monthly for spiritual direction. And so I did.
Spiritual direction with the Opus Dei priest (let’s call him Fr. Thad) was more pleasant than it had been with my Dominican spiritual director. Fr. Thad was a pragmatic person who swore freely and was friendly and relatable. This time I opted not to tell him I was gay, but let him assume that my sexual struggles were heterosexual in orientation. To advise me, he gave me several little books with maxims and reflections by Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei. I enjoyed these, as they mostly consisted of boy-scout-ish pep talks and little exhortations to work harder and try better. Fr. Thad told me that taking cold showers and getting out of bed immediately upon waking were the keys to developing the sort of moral discipline that would help me make progress spiritually.
Progress did not happen. After two years of meeting, Fr. Thad made gave me an open invitation to consider the possibility of “whether God was calling me” to join Opus Dei, which I took as a sort of ultimatum. I had no interest in joining Opus Dei, and I stopped scheduling further meetings with him. By the end of that year I’d made plans to move to New York.
Once I was in New York I stopped going to confession more than a couple of times a year for reasons I described above. I think I had had enough of trying to pretend that anything good was coming out of it. I’d been yelled at enough times by priests who didn’t know me to feel like every time I walked into the box I was playing roulette, unsure of how I should best express my confession so as not to trigger an onslaught of peevishness or a long moral discourse. I got into the habit of blankly affirming whatever worthless advice I was given, which came in many forms. Sometimes I would be told that I needed to exercise more. Sometimes to fast more. Sometimes to wake up early. Sometimes to spend more time socializing. I was told to read more scripture, to spend more time in adoration, to pray more, to just keep trying. I did all of it. Nothing made the slightest difference.
Before I close, I want to remember some of the positive encounters I had. Catholic priests are, after all, just people, and everyone has their good attributes. The group of seminarians and priests I studied with were, by and large, jolly and affable and I loved them. When I returned years later to visit the graduate school, I ran into a few of my old classmates, and I was overwhelmed with grief that my hopes of joining had come to naught.
The last time I received communion in the Catholic Church was at a private mass said by one of these friars. He reached out and invited me to serve the mass in the old rite at a side chapel in a local parish. It was a treasured experience, and it remains such.
The best confessors I had, which is to say the most humane, were the traditionalist priests at St. John Cantius parish in Chicago. One or two were assholes, but if you knew which booths to seek out you could be assured that the person on the other side would be compassionate and thoughtful, even if the net sacramental effect of it all was still nothing.
The best confession I ever had was in the basement of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC. It was with an OMI priest, and I confessed that I was having serious doubts about the intellectual coherence of Christianity. He told me that I needed to follow my doubts wherever they led, and never to be afraid of them. It was some of the best advice I ever received.
I wrote this post because I’ve been thinking about priests and spiritual abuse lately. I had a long discussion with one of my old seminary acquaintances on Twitter last week, and it resurfaced a lot of pain and anger. I was startled by the intensity of it, and I realized that I still haven’t come to terms with how wronged I feel by all of these men.
All of them, whether they were kindly or not, empathetic or assholes, confidently offered me damaging psychological and spiritual advice, and reaffirmed my habit of psychological self-abuse week after week, year after year, hundreds of times. And worst of all none of their promises were true; the snake oil they were peddling had no effect. Seven years of going to men acting under the authority of God in a spirit of vulnerability, just to be affirmed again and again that I was bad, that I had failed, that there was something wrong with me, and that it was indeed my fault the cure hadn’t worked yet, my fault I was still a sexual being, my fault I was still gay.
There’s plenty of reason for me to be angry.