Where's The Threat?

TNG is taking a much needed break from Dec 19-Jan 4. TNG will return with new content on Jan 5. Until then, please enjoy this post from the past year. Original publish date: 10/22/08

Does this man look threatening to you?

He sure scares the hell out of the Catholic Church, I can tell you that much. He scares them enough that they have cut him off from holding lay positions in the Church. But why?

The fellow in the picture is Scott Pomfret. I interviewed him for TNG prior to his coming to D.C. in August to read from and discuss his recent memoir, Since My Last Confession. In it, Scott writes about his struggles to reconcile his deep Catholic faith with both the Church’s stance on gays and lesbians and the views of friends and family members who can’t understand his allegiance.

Who is Scott Pomfret, as reflected in his memoir?

He’s a professional man, a lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He’s a dedicated member of the Church, serving in a lay position at St. Anthony’s Shrine in Boston as a lector (reading sections of scripture during the Catholic mass). He’s a dissenter, determined to change the public stance of the new Archbishop of Boston about gays and lesbians in the Church. He’s a writer, a “happy porn-writing Sodomite,” in fact. He’s a loving man in a long-term relationship with his partner, Scott Whittier. He’s a concerned member of his local community, working with St. Anthony’s as advisor to the Church’s social justice ministries and human services outreach. He’s dedicated to his family, but doesn’t hesitate to argue with them about religion and sexuality.

In other words, the Scott Pomfret in Since My Last Confession is the same hard-working, conflicted, loving, angry, sexual, faith-filled mess of a human being many of us are. To me, all that doesn’t add up to much of a threat.

But the Catholic Church obviously doesn’t see Scott Pomfret quite the same way. Their reaction to Since My Last Confession? They “fired” Scott as lector and ended the gay and lesbian spirituality group he had helped to lead.

Why? Where’s the threat?

It wasn’t like the Church didn’t know that Scott, with his partner, has written sex-filled gay romantic novels under the Romentics banner. He was profiled in The New York Times Magazine and The Boston Globe.

It wasn’t like the Church didn’t know that Scott disagreed with its public stance on gays and lesbians. As detailed in Since My Last Confession, Scott engages in a lengthy running correspondence with Archbishop Sean O’Malley’s personal secretary, Robert Kickham, attempting to convince O’Malley not to give homophobes any more ammunition through his anti-gay public statements.

It isn’t like the Church hasn’t experienced a long history of its members writing about their spiritual journeys, going back at least to St. Augustine’s Confessions. A number of these memoirs have even been written by gay men within the Church, including John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865) and well-known travel writer Charles Warren Stoddard’s A Troubled Heart and How It Was Comforted at Last (1885).

So what’s the threat contained in this particular memoir, this particular man, to cause the Church such consternation?

Two ideas come to mind:

First, Scott’s very normality and integration into the spiritual and charitable missions of the Church make him a frightening figure. If the Church is correct that gays and lesbians are a threat to the sanctity of marriage, a threat to children, a threat to the very communities of which they are a part, how is it possible for an openly gay man to do the good Christian works detailed in portions of the memoir?

Second, Since My Last Confession is not an agonized, tortured memoir. Scott is comfortable and unapologetic about his sexuality. He is also unapologetic about his faith. Although there are extremely serious moments, the book has been published and presented as a comedy. A great deal of the humor involves the Church’s hypocrisy (its ahistorical view of marriage, its simple refusal to acknowledge the obvious fact of the existence of gay priests) and the extremity of its views about homosexuality (equating it with “willful murder,” for example). While a good rail and rant against bigotry can have its place, the most effective way to destroy it is to shine a constant light on its absurdity and laugh it out of existence.

The Catholic Church hierarchy is so absurd and bigoted, perhaps it is correct to feel threatened by Scott Pomfret’s modest, piercing memoir.