Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

a village, called my brother a fag, and taken the name of Gloria Gaynor in vain. Amen.
    Anything more devout then purely ordinary Sunday churchgoing, however, attracted family-wide consternation. When my older brother suddenly took to attending Mass on a daily basis, our parents worried that it would go on his permanent record and keep him out of Harvard Law. The prospect of a hyper-pious blood relative nosing into my affairs for the rest of my life worried me.
    Fortunately, my brother soon discovered liquor and girls. His churchgoing gave way to breaking into neighbors’ houses to make long-distance phone calls to his girlfriend and piloting our parents’ tank-sized 1972 Fleetwood limousine across the grassy median of local roundabouts. He showed no further signs of sanctity. Indeed, quite the contrary. He became a lawyer.
    Despite our lukewarm piety, we had a real, genetic connection to the sterner pre-Vatican II Church — the Church of the Tridentine Mass in Latin, public condemnations of self-abuse, and knuckle-whacking nuns who forced my left-handed father to convert to right-handedness. My mother was Irish, born and raised. And in the 1970s, her native land had not yet embraced the world of folk masses, macramé guitar straps, and music directors with a passing physical resemblance to Jesus Christ.
    On one early trip to the motherland, my grandfather dragged us to a nine-hundred-year-old stone chapel that was pure postcard Ireland. Celtic crosses lay uprooted on the front lawn, and gravestones had worn smooth with rain. It was a long drive from Dublin, so when the car finally stopped, my siblings and I shot across the churchyard, chasing each other, laughing and screaming.
    My grandfather — a brilliant, beloved, erudite figure of endless dignity — sternly herded us together. We were breathless and giddy and trying to make each other laugh. We didn’t yet know it was wrong to be happy on holy ground.
    “There’s a legend about this church,” my grandfather said.
    “A legend?” my brother asked, taking the bait.
    “If you run three times counterclockwise around this church, they say the devil himself will appear and take your soul.”
    My brothers and I stared in awe at the dark, hoary structure. As my grandfather no doubt anticipated, we behaved for the rest of the afternoon. But as the hours wore on, a naughty excitement infected my awe. The devil was so close, and the soul so easily lost! One small slip, and damnation was mine. Maybe I could run around just two and a half times and then stop , I thought. Maybe I could go close enough to see just a glimpse of his hooves, his tail. No more, I swear .
    The lesson I took back to the States was this: church is a place of confrontation. It’s where good and evil meet. Choices are stark and immediate; the boundary is thin. Every moment ticked with spiritual tinder. One small spark might cause an inferno of consequences. At any moment, I imagined, I might be annihilated.
    Heady stuff for a six-year-old. Personal responsibility weighed on my shoulders. I understood that I had a direct hand in the outcome: my acts and my prayers could make all the difference in terms of salvation. And not just my own failings, but the failings of others that I failed to prevent, faults I failed to detect, correct, or scold. Forget to mention my beloved grandfather in my bedtime prayers? Next thing I knew, he had highly metastatic colon cancer.
    My hometown parish had no hoary legends. Saint John the Evangelist, a thoroughly modern church, airy and bright, smelled of incense and candle wax. The lectionary, a book of daily readings, was heavy as a stone tablet. The pews were full. The music was, in retrospect, awful. Familiar brass bells marked the start of Mass and the various blessings. The parishioners’ signs of the cross were like the wings of a thousand butterflies. I was baptized at Saint John’s. I was confirmed at Saint John’s. I attended weekly mass at Saint John’s