Where did She go Wrong?

At Notre Dame I majored in theology and held an office in the campus prolife group. As a student there I had my world expanded exponentially, albeit still within the Catholic bubble. At Notre Dame I came across more permutations of Catholicity than I had ever imagined existed. On or near or passing through campus was a dizzying array of personalities and schools of thought and service groups and periodicals. Focolare, Opus Dei, Lawrence Cunningham, Jean Porter, Richard McBrien, Michael Buckley, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Waldstein, CILA, the Thomas More Society, Crisis, NCR, the National Catholic Register, Commonweal, Lefebvrists, Marianists, millenialists, Lonerganians, Thomists, Balthasarians, the Theology of the Body, Feminists for Life, Comunione e Liberazione, Community of Sant’Egidio, Holy Cross Associates, High Mass in the Basilica, Wednesday night Masses in the chapel of Farley Hall...like I said, dizzying. One Thursday night I would be out to a fondue dinner with a friend and her father and a conference-attending Joseph Fessio, SJ (who fixed his traditionalist gaze on me and said, “So, just how bad is the Theology Department these days?”). The next morning might find me crashing a professional conference on medical ethics—sitting in the back row, taking it all in—before heading off to hear a speaker on liberation theology over at the Center for Social Concerns. During my time at Notre Dame a professor I asked to be my confessor steadily tried to bring me along from a stunted spirituality centered on self-discipline (I was very, very good at that) to a more expansive and far more challenging spirituality centered on the daunting gospel command to love—really love—God and neighbor. I left campus with my diploma and a handful of awards, one of them for being the top theology student. I hated leaving, and told everyone I felt like I had just started getting to the good stuff.

After a couple of weeks I drove my fondue friend to an order of female hermits in New York whom she was considering joining, and headed to the L’Arche community in Toronto, Canada, to live and work among the developmentally disabled. Daily Mass was again part of the mix, this time with Henri Nouwen as celebrant. When Henri was gone a few of us tried our hand at lay preaching. I’d like to think I did a passable job. After two years at L’Arche, not able to shake that “but I was just getting to the good stuff” feeling, I requested a deferral of admission to law school in order to continue theology studies. Fellowship in hand, I relocated to Boston and found my intellectual home in the work of Karl Rahner. Two years of studying theology and nothing but theology—and getting paid for it!—well, that was as sweet a deal as I had ever come across.

During my years in Boston I dated a couple of guys, one of them a former seminarian and fellow theology student. He and I attended a talk by Andrew Sullivan, then the editor of the New Republic and an out gay Catholic. I sat and listened, and knew for the first time with a semblance of peace what I had come to know in recent years in more conflicted fashion: that I was, and would always be, a gay Catholic.

I met my future partner some years later at a party thrown by a priest. The months that followed were excruciatingly difficult. It is one thing to be a gay Catholic, another to take the step of dating. I realized I would never have an answer for those who say, “God will give you the strength to bear whatever burden you have. He will give you the grace to be a faithful, celibate, gay woman. You need only pray and fast.” If I protest and say that I have prayed, I did fast (every Wednesday, for years!), my continued existence as an unrepentant gay Catholic simply provides them with their own ready answer: “You need only pray and fast more.” And who can disagree with that? I am reminded of the words of Rahner as he pondered embarking on the writing of his massive tome Foundations of Christian Faith:

Link to Commonweal...