Dividing the Body

When I was 15 I did something stupid.
Well, that’s a little like saying Stalin had an empathy problem. But I did one particular stupid thing that had the good fortune to be saved for posterity, should I ever wish to run for office. I was photographed giving the finger.
I still remember it. It was the homecoming parade my sophomore year and I was on the football player’s float when the photographer, a good friend, said something obnoxious and I responded. He was a photographer for the yearbook, and when the they came out at the beginning of the next school year, there I was, extending both my perfectly formed teeth and my perfectly formed bird to the viewer, looking dead into the camera.
I cannot imagine that word could have spread quicker. Say what you want about Twitter and Facebook, nothing spreads information as efficiently as a Catholic high school grapevine. If memory serves the annuals were handed out at lunch, the picture was pointed out to me by the end of the day and I was standing in the assistant principal’s office the next morning.
I haven’t thought about the incident in years. By the time we graduated, it had stopped being mentioned. I’m not sure my wife knows about it and I know my children don’t. I’m not particularly ashamed. I wish I hadn’t done it, but my kids will hear about it one day and I’ll try to teach them the lesson I learned from it. But the GOP race for president and the general direction Christianity has taken in this country have me thinking about it more often these days.
There is a harshness and divisiveness in the language that’s deeply unsettling. The New York Times reported yesterday that Bishops were attacking a group set up to support victims of clergy sex abuse.
William Donahue, president of Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights sums up the bishops’ position by saying “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”
He went on the say the victims should be fought. Note the emphasis on the Catholic Church as the victim, as the one that needs defending. It’s worth nothing here that what the suits are about is boys were raped by priests with the knowledge of church officials reaching all the way to the current Pope. Those priests were not turned over to the authorities, but shuffled off to other parishes where they were free to rape again.
A mandate that insurance companies pay for contraception was met by the Bishops with the same type of rhetoric as Pearl Harbor. The idea, which would not require a single person to violate the church’s archaic and misogynistic ban on contraception, is framed as an attack on the church. What the church really wants is a ban on contraception, a ban that will take away the free will that is the basis of Christian theology.
We’ve seen politicians refused communion for not voting to ban abortion (though we’ve never seen the Bishops attack politicians who support torture, unjust wars, the death penalty or universal healthcare). A lesbian was denied communion at her mother’s funeral. The Church, which is supposed to be a unifying force, the body of Christ, is instead moving away from the tenants of Vatican II and becoming more and more of a divisive force. Somewhere along the line attacking the sinner has become the norm, or in the case of the church’s complicity in child rape, transferring the onus of the sin from the sinner to the sin’s victim has become church policy. One wonders what happened to the idea that we should love the sinners, even the abortionists, the Pill takers and violated alter boys. Somewhere along the line the hierarchy has decided Catholicism is more important that Catholics. It is what Andrew Sullivan calls Christianism.
Which is why I’ve been thinking about that picture lately. It’s not my only sin and it’s nowhere near my worst. I certainly didn’t put the thing in the yearbook. But nonetheless I found myself in Mr. Conway’s office, almost a year after it happened, listening to him explain how he’s not punishing me for the picture, but for the action itself; that he’d be handing out the same punishment if he saw me doing it across the room.
He told me how he had to take show the picture to our principal, Mrs. Gagne, a tiny, soft-spoken woman, whose utter lack of wrath made you fear her disappointment more than anything. He actually had to point to my finger because she didn’t catch the gesture at first glance. Then she had to do the same for the Bishop.
My punishment was to write a letter to the Bishop apologizing and explaining what I learned. I can’t remember a single thing I wrote and it doesn’t matter because the lesson wasn’t taught until after I finished the letter. I had to hand it to Mrs. Gagne. She took the letter and without reading it, she hugged me.
“We love you Michael.”
That was all she said. It brought me to tears and quite frankly I cry much easier now than I did then.
“We love you Michael.”
It remains the purest expression of Christianity I’ve ever witnessed. I had embarrassed the school (which had a great sense of it’s standing in the community), my family, my church and myself. The response?
“We love you Michael.”
I had spent a lot of time in Mr. Conway’s office up to that point, all of it involuntary. I cannot remember being called to his office again, though I made it point to stick my head in every once in a while to say hello. The forgiveness that was offered and which I so greedily absorbed had a profound effect on this sinner. Mrs. Gagne reminded me that no matter what I did, I was part of that school, part of that church, part of that body of Christ and that there is no sin that is so great that it can’t be redeemed by love.
And with that gesture I was no longer angry at the photographer who shot the picture, nor with the editor who put it in nor the yearbook sponsor who allowed it to go to press. I was no longer even angry with myself for being so stupid.
I suspect that Bishop Dolan and Bill Donahue would demand my head if they were to become aware of my transgressions. For them it’s about ideological purity. These are the men who want to purge the church of its sinners. When they are done, and they look around, who will be left? A Jewish Carpenter and his mother. And I wonder if that Mary will put her arms around Donahue and tell him, despite it all, that she loves him. I suspect she will. And then maybe they will learn what I learned. And they will be filled with relief, love and forgiveness.