05.07.19

Pick One: Roman Catholicism or LGBTQ+ Support

Until the age of sixteen, I spoke the same six verses every night: 

Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep / Bring me sweet dreams all

through the night / Until I see the morning light / God bless everyone I love / Amen. 

Now, at the age of twenty-two, I cannot bear to even utter this prayer aloud, as if it’s going to slice my tongue or knock a tooth on its way out. ‘Now I Lay Me,’ which began as a loving mother-daughter ritual, somehow morphed into an object of my extreme resentment. No particular traumatic event occurred to me within the blessed walls – so why do I feel such anxiety and hatred (and not even an ounce of nostalgia) for something that enveloped me for the majority of my life? 

The answer took me years to define but lies in the core tenet of Roman Catholicism: God is everywhere, not just inside the Church, and one is a soldier of Christ always. The issue was that to me, God and fear were synonymous, so I was always afraid.

I had horrible insomnia throughout childhood. I recall lying in bed for hours, not wanting to fall asleep out of terror that I’d die before I awoke. “Say your prayers, Beanie, and you’ll be fine!” my mother would assure me. So, say them I would – five, even ten times in order to fall asleep. If I had a sleepover at a friend’s house, I’d recite them in my head. I even found myself praying throughout the day, asking God for the monkey bars to be open at recess, for a good quiz grade, for my cut to heal, and on and on and on. It got to the point where I felt as though I needed to pray for everything, or else something would go horribly wrong. 

This continued until one day, I forgot to pray. I was in fifth grade math class, and I was distracted by a girl standing in the hallway, directly in my view through the door window. She was in the eighth grade and I didn’t even know her name, but for some reason I found her more interesting to watch than anyone I did know. She has really pretty hair, I thought might be the reason – but her face was also so, so nice. I wonder what her skin feels like. Does she wear makeup yet? Who is she friends with?

I wondered about her for the rest of the day, until it was time for my nightly prayers and I realized, with horror, that I had not prayed since that morning. I recited the Act of Contrition and Our Father multiple times. I whispered Now I Lay Me out loud in the dark over and over. How could I have been so careless? I’m so sorry for forgetting you, God, please don’t let anything happen to me. Hours later, I fell asleep.

What a relief it was, waking up the following morning (alive!) and realizing that absolutely nothing had gone wrong. Whew, I thought. Thank God! 

I then realized that if I did it once, surely, I could do it again. Slowly, I began to rely less on praying throughout the day and more on retroactive penance. Nonetheless, God continued to loom over my every decision. 

I never understood why the creator of the universe would make church so horribly boring. Going to mass was excruciating, and religious education felt like a painful waste of time. I would fight with my mom over it weekly and in the end, I’d always succumb out of guilt for upsetting her, since all she was trying to do was raise me as her parents had raised her. By the time I approached my Confirmation at age 16, I came to the conclusion that the true importance of religion lies in suffering and survival. No longer would I have to attend mass and class every Sunday to meet my Confirmation quota, but instead I’d be in control of my own faith. When the priest told us to “feel the Holy Spirit” as he confirmed my peers and me that May, I truly felt it. The warmth entered my body and reverberated throughout every bone. It was the most religious I have ever felt. 

A year later, I firmly no longer believed in God.

A year later, I also firmly realized that I was attracted to women. I was devastated and profoundly afraid. I’d grown up listening to my Catholic grandfather make snide remarks about “the homos” and to acquaintances saying that they “just wouldn’t feel comfortable being close friends with a girl who’s gay.” A close college friend of mine who was also raised Roman Catholic but in a different community experienced similar devastation and prayed incessantly for God to “please not make [her] a lesbian.” 

Praying in this case was to no avail. So, as people often do when something doesn’t work after they’ve tried long enough, we gave up. We gave in. “Fuck you, God,” I whispered to my ceiling one night after I’d spent the evening at a party wanting to kiss my female friend more than anything. “I can’t do it anymore.” 

For me, this meant backing away from the church. The less I attended mass and the less I prayed, the less afraid I became. Instead of letting God define my actions, I became responsible for myself and my decisions. I learned more about morality through conversations with peers my freshman year of college than I had in all 12 years of religious education. I also allowed myself to pursue my homosexuality and ultimately fell very happily in love. 

For others, giving up and giving in means throwing oneself wholeheartedly into Roman Catholicism. As recent studies have found, 30-40% of the American Catholic clergy are likely gay and some have even gone so far as to claim higher, such as that 80% of the Catholic clergy at the Vatican are gay. Exact numbers are impossible to figure, as the majority of gay priests hide and shame their own sexual orientation. At first, these large percentages may strike hope for a more accepting Roman Catholic future. Interviews with gay priests, however, tell us that the future of Roman Catholicism is not gay because it has been all along.

 Some have even expressed that the priests most accepting of LGBT individuals are likely to be straight, while many priests who adamantly chastise homosexuality are gay themselves. In seminary, most priests have been taught that anything, including being paralyzed, is better than being gay. Resultingly, Father Greiten, interviewed by Elizabeth Dias, almost committed suicide when he realized he was gay, until he confided in a fellow classmate and learned that this man (also studying to be a priest) was gay as well. When he sought advice from a former seminary professor and found that he, too, was gay, Father Greiten finally understood the irony of the “Catholic closet” – gayness is no secret. There is a large community of gay priests who know one another, and they also know who to fear. 

Despite the community, even if a priest does not shame himself, he still lives in the constant terror of life outside the closet, which, as Father Greiten and other priests who came out or were outed, includes a slew of death threats and defamation across the Roman Catholic community. Unfortunately, a large component of this demonizing behavior is that the coming out of priests coincides with the rising of known sex abuse cases. To many right-wing believers, all gay priests are “homosexual predators,” that one cannot be gay and simultaneously a member of the clergy, that one cannot be gay and a true Roman Catholic.

Can one be gay and a true Roman Catholic? I’d like to take this question a step further and inquire: can one truly be a supporter of the LGBT community while simultaneously supporting Roman Catholicism? I argue no. Belief in God and religion alone aren’t problematic, for spirituality benefits many communities and people, but the system of Roman Catholicism specifically is undoubtedly and irreparably damaging. In addition to the known persistency of sexism and thousands of sex abuse cases (alongside the concealment of them by the church), there are millions of individuals who have been shamed and persecuted for their sexuality, resulting in years or lifetimes of pain, terror, ostracization, self-hatred, and even suicide. The additional oppression towards trans individuals and other LGBTQ+ members is unimaginably inhumane. If religion is meant to teach morality and the abolition of sin, the Roman Catholic church is hypocritical and dishonest to its core, and supporting it disregards LGBTQ+ members and the irrevocable pain many have experienced as a result of Roman Catholicism ideals and implementation. 

Sometimes I forget that I was ever Catholic. Even my mother stopped going to weekly mass after sex abuse scandals rose in number, so when I visit home church is thankfully never on the agenda unless it’s a holiday. I am always reminded, though, when my grandparents visit and ask whether I have a boyfriend. Each time, I laugh and say, “Oh no, no boys for me!” My Nana always nods approvingly and responds, “You’re a smart girl to focus on your studies!”

It is a terrible feeling to hope that your grandparents will die before you marry, but the other option, “them finding out about you and dropping dead,” as so eloquently stated by my mother, is probably worse. I’m lucky to have supportive parents, especially since my mother was educated by nuns, so I’m able to mentally distance myself from my grandparents’ homophobia. I know that in their case, Roman Catholic ideals have been so deeply rooted into their ideologies that at ages 84 and 86, reversing them is close to impossible. 

What matters more is prevention. At the rate in which policies and attitudes change within the Roman Catholic church, it would take centuries for gayness to be fully accepted by the community, let alone the acceptance of all LGBTQ+ members. Plainly put, we don’t have time to wait around for the pope to merely acknowledge our existences – we deserve better. We deserve communities, religious or not, that don’t require us to fight in order to prove our humanity, ones that don’t loom over our every action and strike trepidation into our every decision. Roman Catholicism does not deserve us. 

For those religious and supportive of the LGBTQ+ community, a different church or religious community should be chosen. Loyalty to both is insincere and underhanded.

I may no longer believe in God, but I do believe in what’s good. I believe in freedom of religion, in the ability to love whomever and, most simply, I believe in the liberty to fall asleep without fear. Now when I lay down to sleep, the tranquility of silence, intermittent with soft exhales escaping the mouth of the beautiful woman lying beside me, is my nightly prayer.