CHURCH IS IN THE DARK ABOUT GAYS

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I am as Catholic as the moon is round. It's not visible, sometimes, the moon, my Catholicism, but it's there, pulling the tides, shaping the earth, pulling and shaping me. I knew who made me before I knew who I was. God made me.

"Why did God make you?" the catechism asked.

"God made me to show His goodness and to make me happy with Him in Heaven," the catechism taught me.

I was a child who loved being a Catholic. I loved bowing my head at the name of Jesus, kneeling, lighting candles, inhaling incense, listening to Latin prayers and Gregorian chant.

I loved Saturday afternoon confession and Sunday morning Communion, the ritual, the cleansing, the knowing that if I got hit by a car on my way home from church, I would ascend right to Heaven and behold God's face.

I loved words like "ascend" and "behold." They took the sting out of death.

I had a child's unflinching faith. So did my friend Beth. We both spent the seventh grade in different towns and different parishes praying for the same thing: signs of the stigmata. We longed to be martyrs and saints. We laugh at this now. But it's a wry laugh. What happened to us?

In fourth grade I accompanied my best friend, Rosemary, to her Baptist church one Sunday, and my priest said I'd sinned. Rosemary could come to my church any time, but I couldn't go to hers because hers was not the one true Catholic and apostolic church, he told me.

I was 9 years old and absolutely certain that this priest was God's right-hand man but I didn't believe he was right about this.

Forty years later a different priest called me a cafeteria Catholic, but not in a mean way. He said it with an understanding born of having said this many times before. But he said it with a warning, too. You cannot choose what to believe if you are a Catholic. You have to believe what the church teaches.

I didn't. And I don't. And I am not the only one.

The church was kind when I went back. The child who wanted to be a saint grew into a woman who left the church for 17 years. The moon rose and fell and tugged and shone, but I said no, I am not following you.

And then one day, the moon lit up a man I did follow, a good man and a good priest.

He said, "God loves us all," and he meant it. He said, "People are good," and he believed it. He said at the end of every Mass, "Go and serve the Lord and one another." And he did.

I forgave the church its trespasses because of him. I opened my eyes and saw that there were no longer just altar boys serving Mass. There were altar girls as well. I saw lay people reading. I saw Eucharistic ministers. I saw a community where there once had been a kingdom.

I turned a deaf ear to Rome's dictates about premarital sex, divorce, artificial insemination, and contraception. Yes, the church was against these things, but when I returned, it was to a parish where there was no finger-pointing. This church was holding out its arms.

"What would Jesus do?" I love this question, which was newly popular then. Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman at the well, a social breach, unheard of. But he did it anyway. Jesus was best friends with Mary Magdalene, another scandal. Jesus forgave Peter for denying him, and Judas for betraying him, and his Father in Heaven for sacrificing him.

What would Jesus do? He would not draw a line in the sand and say, "Cross it and I reject you."

The Roman Catholic Church, my church, deems homosexuality a sin. It says that two people of the same gender who love one another and are in a committed relationship are sinners. It says that same-gender couples aren't really couples and are not morally fit to raise children.

But the Roman Catholic Church, my church, also teaches that God loves his creation so much that he sacrificed his only son for all of us.

For all of us. Not just the heterosexuals in the group.

The moon pulls and illuminates. But my church is in the dark.

"Who made us?"

"God made us."

Straight and gay, God made us and loves us all.