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MY LIFE
How Pope Francis Helped Me Realize I Couldn't Be gαy and Catholic
And what I learned about love (and loss) along the way.
Phillip PicardiOCT 6, 2015 6:02PM EDT
Before she passed away after a battle with cancer, my grandmother asked me if I was dating anybody. I had recently broken up with someone she really liked, and I told her, “Not yet, Grandma. Doing the single thing.”
“I hope you find someone,” she responded, looking down at the tray where she kept her medicine, Kleenex, and rosary beads — a gift from my uncle’s recent trip to the Vatican. They were, he told her, special because the Pope blessed them. I refrained from rolling my eyes every time she grasped those beads. She had a childlike fascination with her faith and believed up until her death that lighting candles would cure the ill and her nightly prayers would eradicate her cancer. They didn’t, but she never stopped trying, and she treated that rosary as if it were a witch’s amulet of great sorcery.
“I just want you to be happy,” she continued, on the state of my dating life. Grandmothers, and mothers, often say things of this sort to their offspring, so I really didn’t think much of it. I reassured her that I would be just fine.
When I said goodbye to my grandmother just a couple of days later, she was in a morphine-induced sleep. I remember kissing her cheek and feeling the familiar baby softness, glancing at the wrinkles caused by her deep emphatic dimples. We tried to wake her, but she looked so peaceful. The cancer had spread to her bones, so I didn’t want her to move, but I knew she could feel me there.
On my train ride back to New York, I wiped away tears and tried to focus instead on the stack of magazines in my backpack. But then, my phone vibrated: I had matched with someone on an app I barely used called Hinge. About to go on a dating app cleanse, I still obliged the buzz.
I never really made a checklist for potential suitors, but if I had, this guy would have ticked every last box. He was a doctor, graduating from an MBA program in the spring. He liked to dance, so I challenged him to a duel, knowing full well that I would lose. He said he’d like to meet and, knowing the deadline for my cleanse was looming, I arranged for an introduction once I got off the train. He agreed.
I was planning on a quick, hour-long date, but I realized after meeting him that this wouldn’t be the case. We spent five hours together that night, talking to each other endlessly about family, politics, and surprisingly, faith. His eyes widened when I explained that I was raised Catholic. “That’s a lot of guilt,” he said, joking.
Truthfully, it was: Catholicism had become an impervious steel rod lodged between me and my father ever since I came out of the closet. I mocked his Pope and his God, taking great pains to insult his blind faith in a Church that actively sought to quell my civil rights. I had gone through years of Catholic school and angrily remembered one teacher recounting the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, finishing her lecture with the simple, “The Catholic Church’s teaching is that ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity is not a sin, but acting on it is.” I remember wanting to scream in her face, wanting to throw that thousands-of-years-old Bible in her face and then spit on it. I wanted to shake her, to ask her if she knew what she was saying. But Catholicism had taught me so long ago that this was my cross to bear, so I didn’t. In true Catholic schoolboy fashion, I bowed my head and said nothing. And then, my teacher turned her back to erase my condemnation. In one fell swoop, the words that judged my future, the family I so wanted, the husband I was still dreaming of, were gone.
After Darien and I met, our next two days were filled with nothing but each other. I was going to work late and leaving early just to spend time with him. Every second we spent together was spent in true, unadulterated bliss — laughing, kissing, and holding each other, with a familiarity that was so uncanny I didn’t even bother to fight it.
On New Year’s Eve, we went our separate ways, since we didn’t want to appear too crazy to the friends who had begun to ask questions about our whereabouts. After midnight struck, I realized that my friends had more or less abandoned me on the dance floor, so I just started spinning around and making my own party. Before I knew it, there he was, smiling.
Earlier that night, my grandmother finally succuмbed to her cancer. This is our first year without her.
In Catholic school, I gave up on God. I turned my back on Catholicism and, in turn, the only God I ever knew. I stopped praying, when I used to pray every night in bed. I scoffed at my father, at every religion class I had to attend. I refused to get Confirmed, and my father was disappointed. I was happy he felt that way — I wanted him to feel the same pain I felt. I wanted him to feel rejected by me the same way I was made to feel rejected by God.
But then, I met Darien. And all of a sudden, I was overcome by emotions I had literally never felt before. He said things like, “Thank God for this beautiful day,” and I didn’t disagree. He told me he was “blessed” to be with me, and I didn’t taunt him. Instead, I felt a connection I didn’t know could even exist. “He’s an angel,” my cousin had suggested. “I know you don’t believe in these things, but I do. That’s not a coincidence.” I shook my head in annoyance, but for the first time in a decade, I felt something unfamiliar, something warm deep in my chest: I believed.
When the Pope came to visit New York, I assumed my typical role of disinterested, aggravated ex-Catholic. I made sure to steer clear of his whereabouts, even though our offices are at the World Trade Center site he visited. I tried not to nod my head in approval at his dinners with the homeless, or his condemnation of the GOP’s attitudes toward immigration. I wanted to be annoyed that my lovely President and his even lovelier First Lady met with the Pope, but I wasn’t. I was interested. And I was happy to see Fox News and other conservative outlets spinning out of control over a religious leader they had deemed “socialist.” I couldn’t help myself.
So when the news broke recently that the Pope — this beloved, holy man who is meant to serve as a symbol of progress for Catholicism — met with the infamous Kentucky clerk Kim Davis who refused marriage licenses to gαy couples, I felt a familiar pang of outrage. I saw the photos of her two rosary beads and I instantly thought of my grandmother. From my office high above the ground in the Freedom Tower, I felt my knees shake and my head bow in confusion. I was in that awful classroom all over again.
Since then it has been revealed that the Pope did not meet with Kim alone, and he did not meet with her to condone her actions. The media, including much of the gαy press, gave him the “get out of jail free” card that he had been waiting for.
I felt as if the world was praising this man for being progressive, but missing the point. We freely criticize politicians for their stances on a host of social issues, including gαy marriage, but seem to give Pope Francis a pass because he’s the Pope, and has come off as slightly more moderate than his predecessors. We shouldn’t do that. He’s not God, he’s just a man. We should hold him to the same accountability as we do other public figures. He should be asked hard questions, and he should have to answer them.
And just over the weekend, the Pope held the Synod, where the Catholic Church discussed their stances on matters of the modern family. All of this comes right after the Kim Davis scandal, and, in a double-whammy not kindly received by the Vatican, follows a Polish priest’s coming out to the press. The priest called for change in the teachings and, naturally, was fired from his position at the Vatican as a result (though for now he remains a priest).
In Pope Francis’s homily (which, if you’re not Catholic, is basically when the priest offers a lengthy reflection and analysis of the teachings…or if you’re me, the part where my father hilariously starts snoring), Reuters quotes him as saying the following: “This is God’s dream for his beloved creation: to see it fulfilled in the loving union between a man and a woman, rejoicing in their shared journey, fruitful in their mutual gift of self.” He reiterated that the “true meaning of the couple and of human sɛҳuąƖity” is of that between a man and a woman.
He later — and in my opinion, quite ironically — put an emphasis on the love and mercy of the Church, saying those who “fall or err must be understood and loved.”
And to be honest, I find myself completely shocked at the pangs in my heart. I find myself, somehow, disappointed. After some time in reflection — not through prayer to God, but more so through reading a lot of Nora Ephron and listening to a lot of Beyoncé — I’ve realized something so simple: I’ve always wanted a God and a Church that loves and accepts me. And I am not ashamed that I want that, nor am I afraid to ask for it.
But here’s the catch: I won’t wait for another Pope or a miracle to usher Catholicism into modernity. I won’t accept conditional love for something I’ve not chosen nor am able to control through prayer. I won’t accept that the Pope says he loves me, yet tells me to remain chaste and deny myself the love I actually deserve. I want my Pope to accept me now. I want to marry a man, ideally the one I’m currently dating, and not have it be a problem. I want to find support in God for the way He (or maybe She!) made me, not condemnation. I don’t want to wait for them to “come around,” and I sure as hell won’t sit here and praise the baby steps. I refuse Pope Francis’s love, and likely that of his successor, too. And the best part is? I no longer need it.
For the very first time in my life, I know what it means to be truly, wholly loved. And I know I deserve it — both from the people in my life, and the God that I pray to.
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Topic: Brainwashing of Teens (Read 1567 times)