As you will read about in the book, YouTube can be addictive. I swear I am on the YouTube wagon, but someone sent me a video I could not help but sharing.

One of my projects is a nascent website in which you can confess your sins (anonymously). I then post your sins here, and folks on the internet can then suggest penances or give you absolution.

The idea is that there are so few priests out there, there’s no one to confess to. So you seek Web-based confession and absolution here. I call it the Reconciliatron, after the masturbation device in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

In any event, someone in YouTube land is thinking the same thing. Check it out here. (Thanks, Thomas!)

In other, unfortunate news, the Vatican just announced the excommunication of my brave friends, the womenpriests. Fortunately, the excommunication did not take. The womenpriests simply refused to be excommunicated. You go, girl(priest)s!

Unholy Wine(s) of the Week. Memorial Day weekend permitted a trifecta of tastings of the wines we brought back with us from the Finger Lakes. The Standing Stone Riesling 2007 was light, crisp, acidic, refined, with restrained white stone fruit and some mineral qualities. Should be drunk alone; a little delicate for food. Great value! The Silver Spring Winery 2003 Cabernet Franc was a good, light-bodied, light-alcohol summer red with a darker nose than taste, sufficient acid to pair with food. We drank ever so slightly chilled and it changed nice as it warmed in the glass. Lamoureaux (French for “Love Waters”) Landing 2007 Gewurtztraminer had dry, citrus qualities like a sauvignon blanc, spiciness mid-to-late-palate, no discernable lychee flavor, medium bodied with high but perfectly balanced alcohol.

Tags: confession, excommunication, gay, lesbian, masturbation, orgasmatron, pope, vatican, womenpriests

            60,000 people showed up in Yankee Stadium to celebrate Mass with Pope Benedict XVI.  Tickets were in short supply.  Several sold on Ebay for more than $200.  According to newspaper reports, even those with strings to pull ended up empty-handed. 

I was one of the lucky ticketholders selected by lottery by the Archdiocese of Boston.  But I spent Sunday in the mountains close to God.

A phone call prompted my decision to stay home.  I blogged more about it here.  Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s Cabinet Secretary and Chairman of the Catholic Foundation Scot Landry refused to give me the ticket until I gave him assurances that I would be neither disruptive nor confrontational.  He had read a blog post of mine in which I solicited ideas on how a gay Catholic ought to approach Papal Mass attendance “consistent with not ruining others’ worship experience.”

Absent the assurances of good behavior, Landry said, he could not release the ticket.  Grudgingly, I supplied the assurances and Landry mailed the ticket to me.  But the experience soured my view of the Mass.  No longer was I a member of the flock with a right to celebrate Mass with the ostensible leader of my Church; instead, Mass was a privilege, withheld pending promises to behave properly.  This view of worship-as-privilege is also reflected in the recent acts of certain American bishops, who have called for withholding the sacraments from politicians favoring abortion and, last year in Wyoming, from a lesbian couple who advocated politically for same-sex marriage, and who in March excommunicated three women who had been ordained as womenpriests.

Landry’s call also reminded me of the insularity of the Pope’s visit.  Unlike John Paul II, who held open-air Masses to which all were welcome, Benedict scheduled only closed events, where voices of dissent were discouraged.  These themes of privilege and insularity made Benedict’s “Apostolic Journey to the United States” feel more like an invasion. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I was moved by the Pope’s meeting with five Boston-area abuse victims.  The meeting was properly scaled: a pastor and five of the wounded among his flock.  It did not end abuse or suffering, and it was no recompense, but for many it was a small consolation, even a bit of a miracle.  Stadium-sized miracles seem less likely absent such human-scale interaction.

Now that the Papal invasion is over, we gay people return to our churches and the womenpriests among us return to the pews.  No one grants us this privilege; none of our pastors put insulation between them and us.  We take our seats because they belong to us by virtue of baptism; they are not leased to us contingent upon good behavior. 

In this light, any single Mass at my humble home church Saint Anthony Shrine seemed worth a thousand Papal Masses in Yankee Stadium.  I’d rather hear a homily from a friar in his habit than a sermon from a prince in his finery.  

I still have that gilted ticket.  Sometimes it gives me a twinge of guilt that someone who did not share my view of the Papal mass could have had the ticket in my stead.  Perhaps as Penance I’ll auction it off on Ebay and donate the proceeds to the friars of Saint Anthony, who make the real day-to-day miracles happen.

Unholy Wine of the Week: Scott and I and the other founding members of our cooperative Winebuyers.Org traveled up to the Finger Lakes of New York and did some wine tasting.  We rented a fab house next to a waterfall and visited wineries along lakes Keuka, Seneca, and Cayuga.  Expect to see more N.Y. State wines in this space over the summer.  A repeat favorite: Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinefera Wine Cellars Rkatsiteli, reportedly one of the oldest cultivated grapes in the world, grown at Mount Ararat, according to our homolicious wine pourer.  Clean, crisp, dry, white with good minerals and acidity, decent fruit, perhaps between a pinot blanc and a dry Riesling.   

Tags: catholic, church, eucharist, gay, glbt, homosexual, lesbian, lgbt, mass, pope, queer

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was a cutter. Like a twentieth-century Amy Winehouse or one of those hunched-shoulder hollow-eyed Goth girls sporting black eyeliner and nail polish and satanic tats that you occasionally see congregating in parking lots on suburban high school campuses, Padre Pio practiced self-mutilation. According to a document in the Vatican archive, Pio ordered four grams of carbolic acid from a pharmacist from San Giovanni Rotundo and asked her to keep the order a secret. The BBC reports that at least one historian has concluded that Pio used the acid to create the stigmata on his hands and feet for which he became famous.

Notwithstanding this evidence that Pio was, in the words of the founder of Rome’s Catholic Hospital, “an ignorant and self-mutilating psychopath who exploited people’s credulity,” the Vatican under John Paul II canonized Padre Pio partly because of his lifelong stigmata (that’s a lot of carbolic acid!).

Pio is now particularly popular. In Italy, his picture adorns rearview mirrors, dry cleaners, and police station walls (presumably not next to the “Most Wanted” posters). Here in the U.S., he is a favorite of my nemesis Cardinal Sean O’Malley, a fellow Capuchin who wears a cross-shaped pendant containing a piece of Pio.

In fact, Pio’s popularity has reached such heights that – on the fortieth anniversary of his death -- the Church has decided to set Pio up with his own Vegas show. Like Celine Dion.

Well, not that much like Celine. And not in Vegas. Instead, the church dug Pio out of the ground and propped him up in a glass case at his friary in Puglia, Italy. 700,000 people have signed up to visit and millions more are expected.

You might ask, Why can’t these pilgrims put flowers on a grave like the rest of us? Why show the body itself? Well, exhuming saints is one of those kooky Catholic traditions, like stake-burning, book-banning, and bad homilies. Frequently, the Vatican digs up the bodies of the beatified and examines them for miraculous instances of preservation. The notion here is that the incorruptibility of their souls will be reflected in the incorruptibility of their flesh.

Thus, thirty years after his death, it was discovered that Saint Anthony’s tongue, for example, was as unblemished as if he had just been preaching with it the day before. (Saint Bonaventure promptly took the tongue in his hands and kissed it, initiating the first French kiss between saints.) The entire body of Saint John Vianney, tongue and all, was also discovered to be perfectly preserved. And, like Pio, Vianney was so popular that the Church hacked his heart out of his body and put the show on the road, spinning off the heart from the body like Frasier from Cheers. The Vatican has twice dispatched the heart (sans body) on a world tour, most recently in 2006, where the heart saw the sights in Boston and Long Island and got lots of favorable reviews. I’ve wondered ever since how John’s heart enjoyed the Duck tour. Quack, quack. (For more on Vianney’s Boston visit, read my book.)

Truth is, of course, you don’t even have to be a saint for the Church to want to dig you up; the Archdiocese of Boston has been trying to dig up the body of its former leader, rogue gay William Cardinal O’Connell, who himself exhumed a few bodies, for the past few years.

In any event, Pio’s case proved a little more complicated than that of Anthony and Vianney. (I blame the cutting.) It seems that there was a little unwelcome wear and tear from his forty years in the grave. Something less than perfection.

Trying to put a good spin on the discovery, Archbishop D’Ambrosio described the newly exhumed body as being in “surprisingly good condition”:

We could clearly make out the beard. The top part of the skull is partly skeletal …. The knees, hands and [finger]nails [are] all clearly visible.

Worst of all: there were no signs of stigmata. Apparently, it’s difficult to find a drug store in the hereafter that will sell you sufficient quantities of carbolic acid.

Putting aside the lack of stigmata, the underwhelming evidence of preservation simply would not do for a religious rock star of Pio’s standing. It’s one thing for Mick Jagger to look like he’s been poorly mummified in a dank cellar even as the blood flows though his veins, but another thing entirely for Pio not to look his best even forty years after meeting his God.

So, what’s the Church to do????? Well, as if you needed any further proof the clergy are generally gay, the Archbishop’s immediate response was to send Pio’s body to a mortician to clean him up and “make the face more recognizable.” Nothing a little pancake make-up and eyeliner can’t cure, Archbishop D’Ambrosio seemed to be saying. Canyon Ranch, next stop!

Doctoring the saints for the sake of the faithful might seem a little underhanded, but I sympathize. I know just what Padre Pio feels like: many’s the morning after a Saturday night over-indulging in the unholy wine that I could have used a mortician’s skills to revive myself into looking suitably presentable in time for Sunday brunch.

In any event, the showing of the new improved and prettier Pio is now open to the public. Perhaps I’ll stop by this summer on my way to Cinque Terre and see if I can get Pio to share with me some beauty tips. Carbolic acid facial scrub, anyone?

NOTE: after last week’s post about the Papal bus, some folks have pestered me as to what happened at the Pope’s Mass in Yankee Stadium. I’m afraid you are going to have to wait a bit longer, my pretties.

Unholy Wine of the Week: Owen Roe Sharecropper Oregon Pinot Noir 2006 is one of the mid-range wines produced by Owen Roe, a winery named after the Irish patriot. It is certainly a young wine, with predominant berry flavors, but somewhat one-dimensional with little of the earthiness of some of Owen Roe’s top-of-the-line productions like “The Kilmore.” Nevertheless, concentrated but not heavy. The high-alcohol is nicely balanced (even when it warms in the glass, it never comes to center stage. The acids seemed relatively low; I’d worry this one might get flabby over time, so I’d slurp it up now. We had pork loin chops and Portobello mushrooms, which worked well.

Tags: cardinal o'malley, catholic, cutters, gay, glbt, homosexual, lesbian, lgbt, miracles, mystics, padre pio, pope, religion, saints, self-mutilation, spirituality, stigmata
Current Location: Boston MA
Current Mood: groggy

Don’t get me wrong.  I am pleased and proud that members of the gay Catholic group Dignity staked out the roadside along the Popemobile’s route through Washington DC.  For years, Dignity has been the strongest gay Catholic voice in the nation.  But crowing about the Pope’s having waved to the silent Dignity contingent made me squirm.  Are we really satisfied with that – a Papal wave?  The news story makes the members sound like a pair of Okies vacationing in Hollywood who managed to get a glimpse of a Big Star and imagined the Big Star threw a smile their way:

The pope appeared to look directly at about a dozen members of the group as they stood behind a 10-foot long banner with the message, “Dignity Washington — Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics, Our Families and Friends — A community of Faith in Action.”
“I thought it was a good chance for us to be seen and he obviously saw us and waved at us, so I think we got our message across,” said Raymond Panas, president of Dignity Washington. …
“Whether he actually saw or read our sign, we’ll never know,” said Dignity member Bob Miailovich. “It was nice to see him, and it was all very prim and proper. He waved in our direction and that was very nice.”

I confess that this tendency to let ourselves get excited by the crumbs thrown our way is one I share.  I suppose it comes from making our way through the desert of spiritual experience that dealing with the Roman Catholic hierarchy has been. 

For example, when I first heard that the Pope made a clear distinction between homosexuality and pedophilia in comments made en route to the U.S., and promised to root those subject to the latter out of the priesthood, I was initially pleasantly surprised:

[T]he pontiff said: “I would not speak at this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia, which is another thing. And we would absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry.”

“Who is guilty of pedophilia cannot be a priest,” he added.

For a professor trained in subtle theological nuance, Ratzinger has never made as clear that he recognizes a difference between the two concepts.  His comments delighted me: all those right wing conservative Catholics will be disappointed because B16 so undermined their argument that priestly homosexuality was the cause of the abuse scandal. 

But on further review, what does B16’s distinction mean?  What value does it have?  For example, if pedophile priests are the issue, why bar homosexual candidates from the seminary?  This initiative was one of the first major acts of the B16 Papacy back in 2005.

More important, what really shook the faithful was NOT the acts of pedophile priests, however horrific those acts were.  The faithful could have attributed these terrible acts merely to a (large) handful of sick individuals without losing faith in the Church. 

What scandalized the faithful was the conduct of the bishops – bishops who not only protected priests from exposure, but set them up in new parishes to prey (pun intended) on a whole new crop of young people.  In other words, bishops who were panderers and pimps for their pedophile priests.  In this sense, pedophiles were not the whole problem, and certainly not gay priests.  The problem was pimping bishops.  A truly revolutionary statement by B16 would have been this: “Who is guilty of being a bishop cannot be a priest.”

Tags: benedict, catholic, gay, homosexual, lesbian, pedophilia, pope, scandal, seminary

As if to emphasize the fact that the laity are really beside the point in the view of the Pope Benedict XVI hierarchy, it appears that there will be no lay ministers serving at the Masses he is celebrating in Yankee Stadium and in Washington DC. 

And just as an aside, who celebrates Mass in Yankee Stadium, of all places?  That’s an unholy place, if there ever was one, especially for a born-and-raised boy from Boston who still remembers Bucky Dent hitting a home run that foiled the chances of the Red Sox back in the days when we could not fathom an actual World Series victory.  Sigh.  [UPDATE: on further review, it turns out that Dent homerun took place in Fenway Park.  Perhaps Yankee Stadium ain’t so bad.]

Anyhow …

No lay ministers?????  The thought is appalling.  At Saint Anthony Shrine in Boston, we live on lay ministers.  Friars get old, but lay ministers are ever refreshed.  They go through boot Camp before they’re deigned fit to serve, and it’s hard to imagine a Mass without them – and why would you want to, unless you were one of those people pining for a pre-VatII restoration when we can all work beads and mumble a lot and believe we had no place in God’s sanctuary?  Talk about the good old days.

Anyhow, as a timely recompense for B16’s nonsense, James Alison has written a chunk of wisdom some of which I set forth below for your digestion.  The test is called “Letter to a Young Catholic.”  The whole thing won’t take much time, but what really caught my eye was the humility of the piece.  Alison says, essentially, I may not be right in all I preach, but as long as I know it as truth, I will continue to preach it:

I don’t want to pretend that being an openly gay Catholic is something easy or obvious. It isn’t. For a start, merely the fact of your wanting to read a letter like this at all is a sign of how many obstacles you must have overcome already. You may have faced hatred and discrimination in your own country, from family members, at school, at the hands of legislators eager for cheap votes, through shrieking newspaper headlines that sear your soul, and in the glare of which you are speechless in your own defence. And you’ve probably noticed that at the very best, the Church which calls itself, and is, your Holy Mother has kept silent about the hatred and the fear. While all too often its spokesmen will have lowered themselves to the level of second-rate politicians, lending voice to hate while claiming that they are standing up for love. The very fact that, through and in the midst of, and despite, all these hateful voices, you should have heard the voice of the Shepherd calling you into being of his flock is already a miracle far greater than you know, preparing you for a work more subtle and delicate than those voices could conceive.

You will share in all the contempt which the modern world has for the Catholic Church by virtue of holding firm to the faith you have been given – you will be considered as having little of worth to offer. And by virtue of being a Catholic you will always be on the brink of being considered something of a traitor to whatever project your contemporaries seek to build. …. [Y]ou will be considered something of a traitor within the Church as well. “Not quite one of us”. And certainly not someone who can publicly represent the Church, be a visible part of the sign which leads to salvation. … [Y]ou will be considered a bad Catholic, if a Catholic at all. For, long after the evangelical groups which gave birth to “reparative therapy” and the “ex-gay” movement have moved on, and their leaders apologised for leading people astray, such ideas will find Catholic backers and supporters, since they flatter current Church teaching. But don’t be afraid of those ideas, and don’t hate their propagators. They are our brothers. The very fact that these brothers understand that if the Church’s teaching is true it must have some basis in the discoverable realm of nature means that ultimately it is the evidence of what is true in that realm which will set us free.

But what of the long “meanwhile”? For you, called by your name, … being Catholic implies a vocation to some sort of ministry, some sort of creative acting out, some sort of public imitation of the life and death of Our Lord. So I don’t want to pretend: you will find yourself developing a ministry, as I find myself developing one, without any public backing from Church authority. It will be as if you did not exist. You will have to learn to live in the silence of being neither approved of, nor even disapproved of. You will fall out of the gaze of men, and if you are anything like me, desperate for an approving glance, you will experience this as a form of dying. …

Let me give you an analogy. I don’t know whether you are old enough to remember the Cold War? …  One of the spin-offs of the Cold War was a literary and cinematic genre of spy stories, tales of intrigue and underground life waged (in the worst cases) by goodies against baddies and in somewhat rarer, better, cases by morally ambiguous people on both sides of the NATO/Eastern Bloc divide.

Try to imagine yourself an agent for one or the other side … . Now imagine that long ago you received your instructions from the head of the agency which is to “run” you, and were given appointed “handlers” for your mission. So, confident that you were being backed up by them, you plunged into your work, starting to build up community, small signs of the kingdom you serve, deep in enemy territory. Then imagine that something weird happens, there is something of a coup within the agency that sent you out, a policy shift, and all the people who had “handled” you, knew you, and prepared you, are quietly retired. So you find yourself with no direct line to anyone back at the agency. You are deep underground, and you are suddenly without cover, without back up, without resources, without even recognition. So much so that the new agents sent out by the agency don’t even know of your existence, and would probably heartily disapprove since if you are who you say you are, then you are part of an older and currently discredited approach to the “enemy territory” in which you have long gone underground.

…  What are you to do? …. [D]o you allow your anger and resentment at your treatment by the agency to cause you to give up working on the project for which you were originally called and trained? Or do you so love the project that you are prepared to love the agency which now hates you, confident that eventually, things will work out? Loving the agency when it loves you is easy enough, but loving it even through the time when it disowns you? Now there is the finger of God!

This is where I would urge you, as I urge myself, often with a fainting spirit, to see the privilege of what we have. Yes, … they either don’t know of our existence, or need plausible deniability for their own sakes, but meanwhile here, deep in enemy territory we can carry on building not just a wee little corner of something defensive, but the Catholic Church itself – the full thing, the whole whack. And curiously, with less interference from busybodies than would be the case if the lines of communication were up. So, do we dare to have our love stretched by building without approval, as we wait longingly for the day when some Berlin Wall comes down, and communication is restored? Can you take responsibility for that? Can you persevere?

“¡Esto va para largo…!” “This is going to be a long haul!” – that was the sage advice to me of one of my formators, one of my handlers, who in addition to being a gay man is an historian. He was telling me, as I am telling you, that the process of adjustment to truth in this sphere is going to take a long, long time. …

Who knows, my friend, whether this opportunity for communication will be repeated? …  One way or another, let me tell you what I have discovered in my years underground in enemy territory: you are not alone, and His promises are true.

This is what we need to do to build the Church.  We need to accept responsibility.  It is not a responsibility conferred from the hierarchy on us, but one conferred by the Almighty directly on all of us, including the gay and lesbian among us.

Here in Boston, we are taking that admonition seriously.  We continue to build the Church of the Gospel, the Church we love.   As I write, we are gathering representatives from all the faith communities, whether parishes or otherwise, who welcome the gifts and charisms of gay people.  We are sharing ideas.  We will soon have a website to help those who have not yet found us, to find us.  We have events planned through June, and we expect in particular to have a gay pride event.  This effort represents a resurgence in Boston.  We gay Catholics are re-taking our churches here.

Interestingly, there is a phenomenon in Boston (and other cities) called Boston Guerilla Queer Bar.  The idea is simple: once a month, the group agrees to descend on a very straight bar on a particular night at a particular time.  Result: a formerly straight venue is charmed with the benefits of gay appeal.  For one night, it is the gay boys who are out on the dance floor.  The music is the same, the drinks are the same, but the effect is magical.  An instant queer bar where once a straight bar had been.

What would happen if we selected a particular parish church, one per month?  All the gay Catholics would descend on it at, say, the 10AM Mass.  We would sing, we would worship, we would be indistinguishable from our straight friends in the pews, except perhaps for the ferocity of our love, our kiss of peace, and the fact that we would leave petitions in the collection basket in lieu of dollars to avoid contributing to a corrupt hierarchy.  We could invite members of Dignity to join us.  We could invite womenpriests.  We could bring our families, however constituted.

The genius of it is that this would not be an act of mere civil disobedience or profanation like ACT-UP’s spilling the Holy Eucharist at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. This would be a celebration, an exercise in ordinary worship with all its glorious earnestness, awkwardness, false starts, distractions, simplicity, ritual, incense, adoration, amazement, and radical transformation. 

Alison invited us to build the Church.  But we should also feel free to take back what is ours.

Unholy wine of the Week: Rhys Vineyards “Alesia” Green Valley Pinot Noir 2006. (Note that, according to Rhys, I shouldn’t have drunk the bottle at all!  Mea culpa!   Only so many bottles I can “hold’ in a 950 square foot apartment!)  A brilliant new release for which I waited interminably on the waiting list.  An unusually rich pinot, with the viscosity and color of a syrah, a powerfully compact delivery of flavor, dark fruits strongest (cherries, plum), balanced acidity and alcohol.  Like meeting a big stud who also happens to have an amazing vocabulary.  (Did you guys see the NY Times piece on the Gladiator?  Nothing like a Scrabble-playing street fighter to get my panties in a bunch.)  I would never pick it as typical of pinot, but it has its own brawny merits.

Tags: catholic, gay, homosexual, james alison, lay ministry, lesbian, mass, pope, queer, religion, spirituality

I won the lottery.  Not Powerball, not Megamillions, not any kind of lottery where you retire to your own private island and hire serving minions to cool you with palm fronds and scoff at those who tormented you in your youth and so are ineligible to get a taste of your prodigious bounty.  No, I won the right to rise at 3:45AM and board a bus for New York City (“New York City!  Just like I pictured it!  Skyscrapers . . . and everything!” – Stevie Wonder), where I will cram myself into Yankee Stadium with 60,000 of my best Catholic friends to listen to a man who has done more to hobble the civil law/civil rights advancements of my people than anyone on the planet.  Yep, you guessed it – I’ve drawn a seat to the 2008 Papal Mass courtesy of the Archdioceses of Boston and New York.  In other words, a lottery more akin to the famous Shirley Jackson short story.

The question is, what’s a gay Catholic to do with this sort of opportunity?  I planned to bring my digital recorder and camera, of course, and to wear my “I’m Loved By a Second-Class Gay Citizen” rainbow pin that I wore during the rallies for same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.  But what else ought I to do, consistent with being reasonably respectful of others beliefs and spiritual experience (or at least consistent with not getting arrested by Homeland Security operatives – apparently, all our names have been submitted to the agency for pre-screening)?  Any suggestions for civil disobedience?  Do I engage the masses (so to speak)?  Seek dialog?  Hand out business cards about Since My Last Confession?  Show off wallet photos of my boyfriend and our Scotty dog?  Give your regards to B16?

I am open to any and all suggestions.  Email me at scott.pomfret [at] gmail [dot] com.

P.S.  We don’t really have a Scotty dog, I promise.

Unholy Wine of the Week (What You Wish They Would Consecrate): 2006 Saxon Brown Pinot Noir Parmelee Hill.  An unusually dark pinot with the punch to back it up.  Perhaps lacks nuance or layering, but densely packed flavors barely give the palate a rest.  Acid is high and alcohol may be slightly out of balance at 14.5%, suggesting another year of cellaring might help it out.  Look for dried and dark fruits, barnyard, and saddle flavors.

Tags: catholic, gay, homosexual, lesbian, mass, pope, yankees

There will be no ceremonial flinging of the corned beef at Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley of Boston this year. The Cardinal has learned on the job. He may pick fights with gay folks, womenpriests, and the relatives of his poodle-owning predecessor William Cardinal O’Connell (more on O’Connell in my forthcoming book Since My Last Confession), but God forbid he should get between an Irishman and his beer. This year, Saint Patrick’s Day falls during Holy Week. By Vatican decree, no celebrations of saints are permitted during Holy Week. The Vatican therefore moved Saint Patrick’s Day back to Friday, March 14.

Cardinal O’Malley wasn’t about to fall for that trap. Back in 2000, when he was Bishop of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, March 17 fell on a Friday in Lent. In honor of the holiday, other bishops gave the flock dispensation from the prohibition against meat eating during Fridays in Lent, so that the Irish Americans could enjoy their traditional corned beef and cabbage. Not O’Malley. O’Malley stood firm. He was sheriff and their would be no consumption of the other pink meat on his turf. A national sh*tstorm ensued in the press. Irishmen like nothing more than playing the oppressed rebel, a fact one would have thought a guy named O’Malley would know. In any event, O’Malley choked on his corned beef. He caved to the pressure and ultimately permitted corned beef on the Lenten table.

This year, O’Malley rejected any notion of another Friday Saint Patrick’s Day. He refused to condemn South Boston holding its Saint Patrick’s Day parade on Palm Sunday, March 16. (I imagine the O’Malley and the parade organizers thinking, “Isn’t Palm Sunday the day Jesus paraded into Jerusalem on a donkey? Good enough for me to parade my Guinness-sodden hindquarters through the streets of Southie with a shamrock-shaped beer helmet on and corned beef in my belly. It’s all about asses.”)

Instead, O’Malley diplomatically promised to preach a homily at March 17, Holy Tuesday Mass addressing the life of the patron saint of the Olde Sod. Very Solomonic, indeed. Or timid. Whatever.

Truth is, some part of me shares the Cardinal’s frustration – Lent should include sacrifice. And one would think a beer-drinking celebration based on an actual saint would be the first to give way. Is that so little to ask of people? After all, the Friday prohibition against meat is one of the few shared communal sacrifices Catholics have left. Ultimately, however, it’s not my place to judge a person choosing between a little green beer and corned beef and the Friday Fast. I trust each of these people has made some other suitable arrangement with God.

***

In other news of Catholic kookery, The Right Rev Joseph Devine, Catholic Bishop of Motherwell, Scotland, accused gay people of attending Holocaust Memorial events each year in order to align themselves with Jews and other persecuted minorities. According to Bishop Devine, “The homosexual lobby . . . is ever-present at the service each year for the Holocaust memorial - as if to create for themselves the image of a group of people under persecution.” Bishop Devine seems to need a history lesson: Jews were not the only victims of Nazi persecution. Gays were sent to the camps as well. Hence the symbolism of the pink triangle.

This type of unreasoned rant is why people conclude that the antipathy of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church to gay people is born not from theology but from bigotry. Sigh. As if to confirm the comparison, Bishop Devine even went on to compare himself to famed anti-Semite (at least while he is intoxicated) Mel Gibson.

Unholy Wine of the Week (the stuff you wished they would consecrate instead of the Manischevitz-type plonk we routinely get): 2006 Casata Monfort Gewurztraminer Traminer Aromatico. Although Gewurztraminer is normally considered a German, Austrian, or Alsatian product, Tramin, the town from which the grape took its name, is in the Italian Alps. This version, retailing for $15, is dry, very light, medium acid, some minerals, some stone fruits, not complex, missing some of the lychee and richness and spice I expect from a Gewurz. Nevertheless, it made a nice aperitif. I would not pair it with food of any substance, but it probably would make a nice match for communion wafers.

Tags: catholic, gay, homosexual, lent, pope, saints, wine

It’s not enough for the Church to resurrect the Latin Mass from 1962.  It’s not enough for priests who weren’t even born ten years after Vatican II to nostalgically don priestly vestments that haven’t been worn for forty years like the amice and cincture.  Reaching even further back in time, the Church is also seeing a resurgence of interest in Exorcism.  Watch out for Linda Blair and a veritable tide of pea soup.

            According to the Washington Post, ground zero for the exorcism explosion is Poland.  Rev. Andrzej Trojanowski (a name that for me conjures up a hot, dumb, blond-haired, blue-eyed offensive lineman who practices safe sex) is building a spiritual center to "aid the growing number of Poles possessed by evil forces or the Devil Himself."

            This was the first I had heard of this particular Polish epidemic.  But it turns out there is an annual International Congress of Exorcists, 300 ongoing live exorcisms in Italy on any given day.  The Vatican’s chief exorcist – a staunch opponent of, among other things, Harry Potter – apparently battles demons on a daily basis.  And Pope B16 is said to be accelerating training for priests who want to do battle with Satan.

Who are good candidates for exorcism?  "People who … embrace New Age therapies … Internet addicts and yoga devotees."  Also cited is a wife who developed a passionate hatred for her husband.  (If that latter one is a criterion for possession, B16 better train the entire priesthood in the exorcism rite, because there will be no shortage of work to do.)

            My condom-safe friend Trojanowski plans the Betty Ford Clinic of evil.  "People could check in for a few days and receive ministrations."  Apparently, he has the Archbishop’s blessing.

            God bless the kookery!  (And bring me a soup spoon.)

UnHoly Wine of the Week (The Stuff You Wished Your Parish Priest Would Consecrate):  2002 Porter Creek Syrah Timbervine Ranch: dark understated fruit without typical CA jamminess or chocolate notes. High alcohol but well-balanced. Long, complex finish with a powerful peppery mid-palette. Elegant for a syrah.  Some spice, some olive, with a hearty dollop of Viognier added.  For more UnHoly Wines, go here.

Tags: catholic, devil, gay, harry potter, homosexual, kookery, lesbian, pope, religion, satan