I want to preface this story with a caveat for people who know me IRL that I am not cross-posting it to any of my social media accounts and ask that this story not be shared on Facebook.
My identity on Twitter is less known, so I may tweet a link to this via my “nameless” Twitter feed, but for reasons that I won’t get into here, I’d rather keep this diary semi-anon for now. Maybe that makes me a coward, but I simply don’t have the emotional bandwidth to put my full self behind the boofdah guise “out there” right now.
I’m watching my sister’s 11- and 14-year-old sons for the weekend while she and her husband are out of state for an adults-only family gathering. Per my observant Catholic sister’s wishes, yet feeling dread about the church’s message given what happened on Friday, I took my nephews to Mass at their local Catholic church this morning. I regret having gone, and don’t think I’ll set foot in a Catholic church again unless forced to.
I’ve undergone a decades-long deconstruction process and am now rather content as an agnostic. Out of respect for my sister’s beliefs and how she and her husband parent their children, I don’t talk about religion or politics with her and her family; my husband, our own children (now young adults), and I are also deferential to her wishes around her family’s religious observances, even though we don’t share these beliefs.
It frustrates me to no end that my sister believes her Christianity is the “default setting” for family events, but as I’ve gotten into heated arguments with her in the past about our differences in views, I normally keep my mouth shut when I’m around her. Contrary to what she has sometimes suspected, I have no intention of “grooming” my nephews to accommodate my own point of view.
This morning, the homily was the part of the Mass I’d dreaded. For those who aren’t familiar with Catholic church services, a homily is where the Mass takes an interlude from the memorized prayers, hymns, and rituals for the priest to give a pseudo-”real world” interpretation of the liturgical readings covered during the first half of the service. In my churchgoing experiences as a now-former Catholic, the homily usually tied Biblical teachings into current events or facets of everyday life.
On the heels of Friday’s terrible SCOTUS decision overturning Roe V. Wade, the Vatican appeared to give the American Evangelical Right a mild side-eye with a formal statement that “those who oppose abortion could not pick and choose pro-life issues,” pointing to other circumstances that can “threaten life, such as easy access to guns, poverty and rising maternity mortality rates.” The Vatican spokesperson wrote that being “for life” means “defending it against the threat of firearms, which unfortunately have become a leading cause of death of children and adolescents in the U.S."
I’d hoped that, at the very least, the priest who was leading this morning’s service would echo the Vatican and redirect his parishioners’ attention to these traumas that impact living, breathing human life after being born. It would be about damn time that any conservative church would broaden its focus past fetuses, but, as I was to find out, I was being too idealistic.
At first, the young priest—whom I’m guessing was about 30 or 35; my younger nephew said he was new to the parish—seemed to start off on a politically neutral foot. He launched into a retelling of the morning’s liturgy, which centered around Jesus rallying his disciples, calling upon them to leave behind everything they knew to join him in becoming “fishers of men.” The priest mentioned that one of the disciples had asked Jesus if he could take a few moments to tell his family goodbye before journeying away, but that Jesus had told the disciple (and I’m paraphrasing in layman’s terms), “If you’re all-in on this mission, you’ll put me first, and all else will follow, and will never come before me.”
Putting aside the fact this is unbelievably cruel—dude, you won’t even let the poor guy give his family one last hug before leaving them forever??—the priest used this parable to underscore how we all needed to put Jesus first in all aspects of life, that, yes, family is very important and, oh no, the priest didn’t want us to get the wrong idea that we should forget about them, even our parents, siblings, children, and other loved ones needed to take a back seat to Jesus.
Yes, it might be “uncomfortable” to put the people and things we loved and enjoyed in the back seat, the priest said, but gee, think about how “uncomfortable” Jesus was when he was marching to Golgotha Gethsemane [[H/T Soonerdoc for the correction! :) ]] not even getting assistance as he dragged his method of execution up this steep hill while getting ridiculed and spit on. The priest went on, using the word “uncomfortable” multiple times to describe Jesus getting nails pounded into his wrists and feet as he was put to death “for YOU—for all of humanity.”
There it was—the Big Lie of a supernatural being “saving the world from sin” by coming to Earth in human form and allowing himself to be brutally murdered. I felt my blood pressure rising at the memory of these abusive, rather lunatic teachings I’d been raised with—warped “sacrifice-porn” teachings that had been branded into my brain when I was a child and young teen. There was a reason I rarely set foot into a Catholic church unless for a wedding, funeral, or some other family occasion.
It should’ve gone without saying that I hated that freaking homily this morning—and the priest wasn’t even through with us yet. Despite this, I’d begun to think we’d dodged a bullet and would thankfully be spared from any soliloquizing of Friday’s events. But, no. Oh, no. Oh, hell, no.
The priest took a weird, sudden pivot from Jesus suffering greater than any of our “discomforts” of putting him first to the weekend’s “joyous” news that Roe had been overturned, and nearly 50 years of being told it “was okay to murder 63 million children” were finally over. He used the words “joy,” “joyful,” and “joyous” several times to describe the new reality of forced childbirth—and never once did he give a nod to the Vatican’s aforestated concern for women in poverty, maternal morality, or our inadequate social safety nets that leave so many behind. Never once did he mention the 63 million women, each of their lives and histories and reasons for having an abortion unique, except in a condescending tone that became evident in what he said next.
In a sick way—and perhaps I’m reading his words incorrectly—he seemed to acknowledge the Vatican’s concerns in the wake of this ruling, but that was okay, because Jesus died for our sins, or something. Probably as a nod to the “fence-sitters” in the audience, the priest then added that “the Court’s decision would no doubt leave a lot of people uncomfortable.” Maybe, he explained, “some of you are not comfortable with this decision, because in some way, you’ve assisted with an abortion, or perhaps you’ve even had an abortion.” But the answer to this “discomfort,” he sermonized, was to “return to Jesus and put him first,” and only then could people find the healing and meaning in Jesus and life itself.
And...scene. We were in the overflow section of the crowded, huge congregation, so I couldn’t see if anyone had walked out in disgust. I was bracing myself for someone to challenge this priest’s words, right on the altar, but no one dared to, not even me. I’m not as much of an activist “bad-ass” as I used to think I was, and I’m a wuss when it comes to confrontation.
The Alleluias, Holy Holy Holies, Our Fathers, Peace Be With Yous, and shuffling down the aisle to get the Communion wafer proceeded after the priest wrapped up his homily. In a lame act of quiet protest, I abstained from getting Communion and sat silently as I watched my nephews line up in single file to take their wafer. My nephews didn’t ask me why I hadn’t gone to communion, and I wish they had as it would’ve have given me an opportunity to tell them why.
We didn’t talk much at all as I drove us out of the parking lot. I saw a big pickup truck with stickers displaying 2nd Amendment Since 1789 and a cartoon of Trump pissing on a Biden/Harris logo and wondered wordlessly if the driver of that truck fancied himself a good Christian. My nephews turned on their devices, and I turned up their favorite pop radio station as we drove away.
I wish I’d said something. My nephews are each heading into middle and high school in the fall, and I wish I could have set a good example for them by speaking out against the madness in their church’s homily, the dismantling of reproductive rights, and the falling apart of the country they’ll someday inherit.
Cue the copout cannon, but the following aspects weigh upon my mind around the prospect of speaking with my nephews candidly about my anger over this homily. I’m not emotionally close to my sister, and although I love my nephews and see them as bright young men, I don’t have a tight enough bond with them to disclose the weightiness of what’s in my heart around the issue of abortion and how their parents’ church demonizes it to the degree it does. I was there as their babysitter, not their “cool aunt friend.”
In addition, I don’t feel it’s my place to parent their children—and I’d catch hell from my sister if I said anything that conflicted with what she wanted her sons to hear. This is not a worry without a mega-f*ck-ton of abusive family history, so my fears are not unfounded. Plus, I have shit oral communication skills due to my Asperger’s, even and especially when talking with my own sister and parents.
Still, I feel like a goddamned coward for not saying anything.
For what it’s worth, I do plan on talking about this privately with my sister at some point when she and her husband return. I worry about my nephews being indoctrinated into this mindset, and I worry about their future romantic lives ahead of them if either of them were faced with a partner needing an abortion or any kind of reproductive care that their church didn’t approve of.
I don’t know if I’ll ever change her mind about showing her sons some kind of nuance to these weighty issues in an age-appropriate way, but I feel like it’s my duty to try. After all, refraining from confronting our ideologically more rigid brethren is how we got into this mess in the first place.
Thanks for reading—b