The room was like that of any small hotel conference room: dropped ceiling, fluorescent lighting, bland carpeting, and white-clothed tables encircled by chairs. Men in suits, men that had been charged with a mission, filled the room and passed time waiting for the guests of honor to arrive: bitching about the early morning hour, telling inside jokes, and discussing the week’s politics.
“Who’s coming?” “What’s he looking for?” “He’s a definite closet case: into Opus Dei and Mother Angelica, so you stay away from him.” “Thank goodness mine’s a liberal.” “Liberal with the altar boys!” “Funny. Not!” “What was yours named again?” “Is my rabat [rab-ee] straight?” “The president of the conference is coming! Oh my god, I should have polished my shoes.” “Does anyone see a cufflink? A gold crucifix cufflink?”
We were men in black (clerics) and this was our mission: hobnob with the bishops of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, who were in Washington, D.C. for their yearly conference, with one goal only: get them to send more meat to the seminary.
Now, we were all celibates, mind you, and so were the bishops. The year was 2001, two months before the clergy sexual abuse crisis burst wide open in Boston and spread with manifest destiny across the nation and then became a global pandemic. Things were more relaxed, naïve, and bishops were still open to using the more “liberal-minded” seminaries like the Pink Palace.
Loyal bishops are the lifeblood of a graduate-level seminary. It is they who entrust their vulnerable, amniotic seminarians to the formational gestation of the seminaries’ rigor. And, eight years ago, the number of vocationally fertilized was dwindling, thanks to the priest shortage, and rectors were desperate for dioceses and their fresh mutton.
My rector was no different. Every year on the Thursday morning of the USCCB’s annual meeting, he booked a conference room and treated the bishops to a catered breakfast. There’s one thing that every cleric loves (even more than free porn): free food. The way to the bishop’s heart was food and, of course, strapping, young seminarians, flitting about, waxing eloquently about their vocations and drunk on the Church’s salvific mission.
Those of us present were gleaned from the student body by the rector according to certain parameters.
1. First chosen were the sole seminarians from a diocese. They were the last best hope for continuing the diocese’s dying ontological line at the seminary. These diocesan orphans were charged with one task only: sell your bishop on the seminary at all costs. Recruit a diocesan brother.
2. Next chosen were the handsomest seminarians. Nothing impresses an old, repressed, and celibate bishop more than hot boys, desperate for holy father’s attention. These seminarians were charged with the task of winning new bishops to the fold. Conservative guys went for the conservative bishops; liberals for the liberals. Theological inbreeding was the rule; crossbreeding, forbidden.
3. As for the ugly ducklings from dioceses with multiple diocesan brothers, they were left behind at the seminary, full of grace and truth rejection and resentment.
I was chosen to go every year (that’s the Vanity Smurf coming out in me). And every year, after the (breakfast) ball was over, after the homoerotic energy of the clerical courting diminished, and after our rector pimp congratulated us on a job well done, we “good men” of the seminary left the hotel and boarded our chartered bus for the rush-hour ride back up to Baltimore.
Every year without fail, gay Catholic men stood silently outside the bishops’ hotel, holding candles and keeping a twenty-four-hour vigil in protest of the church’s hypocritical, psychologically outdated, and pastorally damning teachings concerning the LGBT community.
Passing the protesters, I wasn’t the only seminarian averting my eyes, afraid that if I looked a gay in the eye that he would know, that the truth of his glare would strip away my clerical shield, and that I would be proclaimed a “known” homosexual.
Each of the four years that I attended, the damn bus took forever to pull away, and I sat there, from behind the safety of the reflecting bus windows, looking at the courageously grieved gay protestors.
No one on the bus spoke of them. We just stared, silently accepting their judgment, our hearts heavy with shame. Then we were whisked back to the safety of the seminary, the homoerotic dormitory, and the corresponding compartments of our collective clerical closet.
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