Читать книгу The Monk and the Skeptic - Frank Browning - Страница 7
ОглавлениеIn which the inquisitor cruises his first Holy Father and finds him quick of flesh.
Our story begins when the two of us are in the Jeu de Paume gallery on the Place de la Concorde looking at a new show by Pierre et Gilles, the French photographic artist whose work wavers between the kitsch and the surreal. We are standing side by side before an image of Saint Peter, rendered as a gymnast porn star crucified upside down. I hadn’t known the details of Saint Peter’s crucifixion, having had no childhood religious instruction. I draw in my breath in polite shock. “That’s rough,” I say to the tallish man standing next to me.
“It’s just how they crucified Saint Peter,” the man answers. He is dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. I nod, then turn my attention back to the painting. I haven’t yet noticed the rosary beads hanging from the watch pocket of the gentleman’s Levi’s.
A moment passes.
“Do you always cruise priests in art galleries?” he asks.
“Only attractive ones,” I answer, startled, but eager for a reasonable response.
So our friendship opens on a cold, sunny December afternoon. We stop for a coffee at a nearby café where he—we’ll call him Brother Peter—explains that contrary to my expectation he doesn’t find the Pierre et Gilles images at all sacrilegious. Moreover, he knows the artists to be practicing Catholics, which leaves me more startled. Before he departs for his daily swim we agree to meet again. Brother Peter’s daily swim was as inviolate as his daily hour of silent prayer before he joins his fellow monks. He always dwelt, even in his travels, within a Dominican community.
A few days later we meet for another coffee in my apartment. He lingers for an hour afterward. Our meetings continue over the following several months in one city or another. He is quick to explain that he is not at all available for what is called “a relationship,” as he is married in the most profound sense to his spiritual community. Nor I, I answer, since I am completely comfortable in my own decidedly more secular relationship. Our conversations advance, sometimes with physical interludes, surveying, debating, exploring the nature of secular and spiritual friendship; the relation of the body to God, or gods; the mission of charity enacted by the notorious high-drag Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, several of whom he has known rather well; the value and the danger of transvestism, which, while he has never tried drag, he appreciates immensely; the biblical interdictions about improper pleasures of the body and how he manages his confessions knowing that he is unlikely to quit having sex with other men; the matter of sinful use of another’s body; his unyielding opposition to gay marriage; and his conviction that the human body, and in particular his own body, will persist in its finest perfection for all eternity—so long as he maintains his faith and follows the duties and obligations prescribed by Christ.
We both liked sex. More to the point, we shared a similar sexual sensibility: aside from short-term excitement, we both experienced sex as a route to another kind of knowledge. For me sex has always been a means toward a human connection greater than the thing itself. Even in the anonymous variety in the parks, forests, and undergrounds around Paris, San Francisco, and New York, orgasm, jouissance as the French would have it, has seldom been the point. (Or as an old friend once put it, if it’s just about orgasm, he’d rather have a Cuban sandwich.) The acts may be brief and possess no intention or capacity for enduring companionship. What is usually called romance may be utterly out of the question, but what has always been essential is the disarming intimacy of naked touch—knees, nipples, tongues, buttocks, though (almost) never undressed penises. Odd as it may sound, the caress of skin to skin lets loose a calisthenics of rich and complex intimacies, animal and atavistic, unrelated to the mindfulness of romance. Sex for Brother Peter is, he says, never about romance. Certainly it is not about confessions of devotion. It would take several months before I began to comprehend what it was he could bring to sexual acts and what he derived from them.
So far as I know, I had never before lain with a true priest, nor have I since. But it wasn’t long after Brother Peter left my apartment that wintry afternoon that I was propelled back more than two decades to an encounter with a magnificently beautiful and tortured young man who had fled from his seminary on the eve of his ordination. I met that man in Elysian Park in downtown Los Angeles. It was late on an autumn afternoon. The sun falling to the west turned the dry grass gold. The man had just dismounted a BMW muscle bike, which I soon learned was his only possession. He was dressed in Levi’s and a denim shirt, half buttoned. He hadn’t shaved for several days, though the bristle was thin. His eyes were set wide apart, deep and worrisome. I was tending my dog, an Australian shepherd lost in all the fragrances of canine paradise.
The man—Rafe—simply stared at me. Motionless. I pretended to read. He leaned himself against the saddle of his bike and began to stroke his bare and hairless chest. It became obvious that I was not reading. He walked over to me, sat on the same large rock where I was perched, put his arm around my shoulders, and kissed me.
“Can I come home with you?” he asked.
He had not showered in some days, but I agreed. The next morning he asked if he could stay with me.
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“I’ve been in the park for two weeks. I’m a priest. No, not really. I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be ordained this month. I can’t do it.” He began to sob. “I don’t have anywhere [to go],” he whimpered. “They’ll come and get me. Please.”
When I got home from work that afternoon, anguished over what to do and how to say it, Rafe was gone without a trace. There are hundreds of stories like Rafe’s, maybe thousands. Until I crossed paths with Brother Peter, Rafe had all but disappeared from my memory, but Brother Peter’s warm, tactile presence brought Rafe back as though it were with him that I had passed the afternoon. By now he would be the same age as Brother Peter. Calm and at peace as Brother Peter seemed, I would soon learn that his torment in his twenties was every bit as painful as Rafe’s had been. His suffering led him to the cusp of self-destruction.
I never heard again from Rafe, and I frequently felt guilty after his disappearance for not having offered him more. That guilt vanished in time, only to resurface in the hours after Brother Peter left. What sort of institution was this church that for all its promise of deliverance from suffering propelled many of its sons to the ledge of oblivion? Was I drawn to this cultured monk only by the titillation of the exotic? Did the one man’s success at negotiating the contradictions between his mission and his desire erase the other’s desperation at the hands of the same hierarchy? Must I judge? Must I suppress recollection of Rafe’s pain (and his very possible self-destruction) in order to continue these sublime afternoons enjoying both the dialogue and the lust that Brother Peter brought?
In an earlier era, when scarcely the only images of homosexuality were to be found on the cracked vases of classical Greece (and most of those hidden away behind brick walls), Rafe would likely have suffered in silent sublimation. Brother Peter would have restricted his engagements to long retreats in distant lands—not that homosexuality was unknown in the cloth. Prior to the twentieth century the priesthood was frequently the natural home for men who simply lacked the means or the libido to claim women for their dowries and the physical relief they offered. Boccaccio’s Decameron notwithstanding, those who entered the monastic orders were strictly surveilled. Exposure led not merely to defrocking, but also to destitution or death. As recently as half a century ago, there were no models of the happy homo rewarded with public posts as a standard check mark on the diversity chart, and there was scant counseling to reassure homosexual men and women that cocksucking, butt fucking, and cunnilingus were normal, natural sexual activities. In those times I would not have crossed trails with either Rafe or Brother Peter. And even now I wouldn’t entertain lifting the cloth of an obvious cleric. Somehow both the abstract notion as well as the image bears too much the incense of kitsch. Robes and dresses, beads and sequins, collars and bondage, sandals and pumps. To seek it out seems too much like a Sacha Baron Cohen version of Our Lady of the Flowers. Not to mention the bad odor of rampant priestly child abuse that hangs like an acid cloud from Dublin to Culver City, the images from Buñuel’s Viridiana with its swinging lamp in the form of a bishop’s head, or Torquemada (a Dominican) and the burning of the Jews.
Still, both of these believing Catholics tugged at my curiosity. Raised utterly secular (heathen, one friend said), I was fascinated that they seemed equally anchored in modernity and in the Middle Ages. If for Rafe that duality had proved to be an impossible division, Brother Peter seemed to suffer no anxiety at all. Despite my own lack of religious education, I have never harbored any personal hostility to those who do pursue religion. My father fended off itinerant Kentucky preachers by pulling out a newspaper clipping that he stored inside the Seth Thomas windup clock he kept on his desk. The clipping listed the schedule of Unitarian services in far away Lexington, Kentucky. Unitarians were an unknown species in the countryside and were neither more nor less suspicious than sodomites. The preachers usually skedaddled off in confusion. In fact I doubt that my father had ever attended a Unitarian meeting.
Priests on the other hand were fascinating and mysterious sorts for a boy who went to a two-room school and then scampered up the lane from the school bus into a house filled with thousands of books in multiple languages. Priests spoke Latin. They didn’t spit tobacco, or say hain’t for hasn’t, or pronounce the capital of Argentina “Boo-ee-nis Airs,” as my grade school teacher did. Father Hubert, from Saint Charles in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, was as likely to come out to the farm to buy apples on a Sunday afternoon as was anyone else, while the fire-and-brimstone evangelical sorts condemned business on the Sabbath. He seemed lean and fit beneath his black cassock, his face ruddy-cheeked behind wire-rimmed glasses. If memory serves me correctly, he once engaged my father, who had won himself the college Latin prize, in some sort of banter about Augustine and Utopian dreams. And finally, he lived in what I always regarded as the prettiest house in town, a plain, one-story, white building with a tile roof and leaded glass windows bent in French curves. It was said that he drank wine at dinner.
I was shocked to learn decades later about another priest down on the river—the Ohio—who had been sent to the penitentiary for disrobing choirboys and engaging them in cocksucking instruction (however much I might have profited from such expert direction). Cocksucker was then merely a dirty word schoolyard boys hurled at each other as a prelude to a fistfight. It was not an imaginable activity. As well, the reality of being a priest was nearly unimaginable. My young classmates were taught in their Sunday schools that priests were the agents of an alien power run from a secret and largely diabolical temple far across the waters and that Catholics were not Christians. In our home such talk was quickly dismissed as rural ignorance about which we should feel charity but say nothing. Yet such liberal enlightenment only intensified the exotic aura surrounding such an impossible creature: a man who talked about the Bible, who knew the Psalms and the Song of Solomon, and who wasn’t a stupid hillbilly.
Come puberty and the thrice-daily exercise of right-handed self-relief, the exoticism intensified. Catholic boys, I learned in high school, were admonished by their religious teachers not to touch themselves in that way lest they (a) go blind, (b) become deaf, (c) sprout pubic hair in their palms, or (d) descend into insanity. (Being neither Catholic nor any other sort of Christian, I rejected the first three as nonsense, but seriously wondered about the insanity option until well into my twenties. One heterosexual friend, subjected to Jesuit instruction, told me he had never dared to touch his sexual tools until after he had plunged into his first vagina, so terrified was he of the dark consequences. It must have been then that I began to understand personally the diabolical heritage of the Inquisition (whose chief agents were the Dominican order). How did these athletic young men who took up the cloth manage their impulses? And how could they square their rich education, fully accepting of science, evolution, the Big Bang, with the ludicrous teachings about hairy palms? I longed to ask our county public health director, the community’s highest-profile Irish Catholic, such questions. I even imagined a scenario in which his daughter, my coeditor at the high school paper, would invite me to their house where, as she was helping her mom with dinner, I would pose the question. But of course I never dared. Such questions eventually proved merely academic once a real, live penis belonging to another male made its way toward me. The teachings about sex emitted by Holy Mother Church or Her evangelical cousins seemed simply silly by the 1970s.
Once the AIDS plague arrived full throttle by the ‘80s, church doctrine moved from the anachronistically ludicrous to the morally reprehensible. Masturbation, as Bill Clinton’s first surgeon general urged, was the ultimate safe sex—a technique she recommended to all the young or unattached (or even to the attached who sought out more); for that counsel she was fired. Worse yet was to come from a series of scandals that nearly bankrupted the church in Massachusetts and all but destroyed what had been a near ecclesiastical regime for sixty-five years in Ireland. The Irish Catholic priesthood was revealed as possibly the single largest organized brigade of pedophiles in the Western world. No modern republic had been so thoroughly dominated by the Vatican and its emissaries as Ireland. Not only were all the putatively public schools run by the church, but also the 1937 constitution recognized the “special position” of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church in preserving and protecting the faith of Irish citizens. The acid glare from the priests and nuns at any who challenged church dogma burned like volcanic coals—as I learned while traveling in the ‘70s with an Irish friend who was a single mother.
Then as the scandals of brutal and buggering priests at last leaked into the national newspapers and eventually state radio, the whole structure imploded. Daily phone-in programs on RTÉ Radio were inundated with calls from men in their forties who broke down sobbing as they recounted having been held after classes and repeatedly raped by pale, pudgy men in their shoe-length black soutanes. Tough working-class grandmas whom I met while reporting on Irish schools lost control of themselves as they recounted the fear they still felt even entering a school building. Mothers in their sixties called the radio to talk about their disappeared sons. And too often some of those sons’ skeletons were exhumed from unmarked graves, the beating marks yet visible on their once-young skulls. My old image of my father and Father Hubert discussing Saint Augustine over sherry was all but obliterated by these ghastly accounts, replaced by a vicious tableau of bitter, mean, violent men beating and raping little boys in the church cloakroom. I could only ask myself, what sort of persons could these men be?
One insight came when I spoke to Marie Keenan, a social worker and psychotherapist at University College Dublin, who had spent more than a decade interviewing priests about their sexual and emotional experience. “These men who are in the seminary can’t express themselves, are not encouraged to express themselves, are not helped to know and understand the mechanisms of their body,” she told me. “They’re out there without support, without supervision, and it is only a matter of time. When you put these men . . . [when] you give them access to children and put them in positions of power, over time their sexual needs will emerge. It’s just like the system blows.” Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk, who has spent his post clerical life exploring the effects of enforced celibacy, was even more outspoken: “As the [U.S. Conference of Catholic] bishops’ own study published in 1972 said, two-thirds of priests are either mal-developed or undeveloped psychosexually. Only 20 percent are developing and 10 percent are developed . . . What we are producing [are] emotional thirteen-year-olds.”
Little, apparently, has changed since then, either in the United States or Ireland. In France, priests are simply a disappearing species, while in Italy, where the Vatican continues to weigh heavily on domestic politics, the priests are said to have long maintained a “special position” for their housekeepers. Yet officially the teachings of the church regarding sexuality remain locked in a nether zone that drifts further and further from science, psychology, common sense, or real practice. That couldn’t be clearer than in the theological treatment of masturbation or, more correctly, antimasturbation. One of the most extreme arguments comes from a former Saint Mary’s College theologian, E. Michael Jones, who characterizes masturbation as “the root sexual evil first of all from a developmental point of view—it is the child’s introduction to sexual sinning—but also because all other sexual sinning is at its root masturbatory.” Jones left Saint Mary’s (in Indiana) because he didn’t present a sufficiently stern Catholic education; afterward he drifted in and out of Holocaust denial journals. Yet Pope Paul VI, among the most sober of recent popes, was only slightly softer in his denunciation of the solitary sin, issued in 1975 via the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: “Masturbation is an intrinsically and seriously disordered act . . . the deliberate use of the sexual faculty outside normal conjugal relations essentially contradicts the finality of the faculty.” The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was then directed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI. It is on the same theological basis that the church continues to denounce homosexuality and indeed any sexual activity not directed toward “the finality”: the only and necessary goal of our reproductive capacities. Certain liberal prelates have argued for limited exceptions for masturbatory and other non-procreative sexual activity so long as it leads to the procreative act. Foreplay is OK if it leads to coitus, but only if it leads to penile penetration of an appropriate female.
The last millennium has produced thousands of theological tracts concerning the preconditions and requirements for moral copulation, most of which can be reduced to the argument that moral sex can take place only within the confines of a devotional commitment to creating life. Anything outside such a sacred commitment constitutes a fundamental character disorder that leaves the fornicator further alienated from divine fulfillment. There may be an internal, quasi-Aristotelian logic to the syllogisms, but they are largely bereft of any current psychological insight, and at the end of the night, they leave the church’s agents, its priests, with a theological and moral code no more advanced than the hillbilly fundamentalist preachers spew out every Sunday, proclaiming that the world is six thousand years old.
Fortunately, tens of thousands, and possibly as many as half of the world’s 405,000 Catholic priests, have given up on strict celibacy (which forbids masturbation) and have regular sex with willing adults. In 1994, Cardinal Jose Sanchez, of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, generally agreed to the accuracy of several studies suggesting that at most 50 percent of priests practice celibacy. Anecdotal evidence suggests as much. A decade or so ago, Carl, a journalistic colleague who was openly gay and who had earlier studied for the priesthood, weighed a return to the cloth and undertook on-site interviews with a number of monastic communities. A Dominican brotherhood in the South was particularly keen on Carl. At a critical moment in their discussions, Carl told them of his homosexual life and made it clear he had no intention of abandoning sex with men. The brothers smiled at him, he told me, and asked simply, “So what’s the problem?”
Brother Peter has never been so candid with the members of his order. He supposes they do not know of the friendships and adventures he has shared with me and others. He does not know whether other Dominicans with whom he shares prayers and silent meals also have their own adventures with men, or with women. It would not bother him if they do, but if so, he doesn’t want to know—not because he doesn’t care about their affective lives, but because he believes sharing such intimate knowledge would threaten the security of the monastic family. That “family” is the rock of his emotional and spiritual stability. Ordinary parish priests cast into the crosscurrents of faith and displacement find other solutions. Some have discovered in the hierarchical order of the church a salvation from the disorder of desire. Others, like the Irish child abusers, clearly failed to find adequate solace in the Doctrine of the Faith, and the hierarchy provided them neither charity nor counsel. As Marie Keenan put it, they blew up and took their victims with them. A doubtless larger proportion of those dwindling numbers of Euro-Americans who continue to prostrate themselves for the rites of ordination have successfully negotiated a working balance between their biological compulsions and the real communities of faith to which they have given themselves. In France and Italy, there seems to be a ready wink of the eye when the matter of priestly celibacy comes up in conversation. An old friend from Rome once told me, with only limited irony, that priests, like prostitutes, perform a vital role for adolescent males who want to test out their erotic yearnings so they can decide which gender they prefer. But that was Italy.
Those who have taken up monastic orders are surely of a special nature. No longer do incipient gay men need to seek out the cloisters for refuge from a hostile secular world. Indeed the monastic life today seems to most ordinary people far stranger and more exotic than marching publicly through the streets waving a rainbow flag. To take on the robes and the cowls and the vows of poverty, and often silence, of the monastic life speaks of a genuine spiritual sensibility. In a world of unprecedented sexual openness and opportunity, that spiritual journey is no longer free of the challenges and temptations of the flesh. Certainly that is the case with “Brother Peter,” who continues to wrestle with the dual dictates of devotion and desire.
