Notes From a Divorce
How Pope Francis personally destroyed my marriage and every marriage
“The idea is absurd. But then, all ideas are absurd.”
-Severian the Torturer
I still remember the final time that God tried to save my marriage. My wife and I had agreed to sit down for counseling with our parish priest, which already felt humiliating for me. But that was the point we had gotten to; after trying everything else, after every desperate move to try and make this marriage work, I was just ready to humiliate myself, ready to lay myself bare and just accept whatever came over me, just so we could finally have this miserable chapter be over. I was so scared of being alone, and so exhausted of having to struggle through this and be miserable every night, that I had to go to the last resort.
But that meant that I had to sit down in this man's office - this guy wearing black, this guy who I thought was just okay as a homilist, and he was younger than I was by the way - and just lay out all of our struggles in front of him. And at the end of it, he said “well, I've never been married before” - as if I didn't know that - “so I'm not really sure what to do with all of that. But I can give you two a blessing.”
I snorted. “What good is that going to do? We have real problems here, and that's all you have to offer?”
“Well,” he said hesitantly, “gay people can't have this blessing.”
When I was sitting in that room, I didn't have words at the time to describe what came over me in that moment. “Gay people can't have it?” I asked him.
“They can't have this blessing, no.”
What I was feeling, I would later learn, was a deluge of relief.
“As in, you won't give it to them?”
“I couldn't even if I wanted to,” the priest explained.
“But…but what if,” I stammered, “what if you do someday? How can I trust that this blessing will work? Will have any staying power?”
The priest took a deep breath and looked me directly in the eye. “I'm not certain about a lot of things in this world, Tony. I know I act like it, but I'm not. But I'm certain of this: I will never be able to bless gay people the same way that I bless you and your marriage.”
We were blessed that day, after a lengthy theological discussion of the specifics of the blessing and who was and wasn't allowed to receive it and whether my personal state of grace at that moment in time qualified me to receive a blessing, as is standard for all blessings in the Catholic church. And that blessing kept me and my wife going. The challenges didn't go away, of course, because they never go away in marriage. But we had this one anchor, this blessing so powerful that we knew that gay people could never get it.
But now even that has been taken from me.
When it comes to divorce, the number we usually have in our head is “fifty”. Our assumption, at least for as long as I've been alive, has been that fifty percent of all marriages eventually end in divorce. However, since the Vatican's publication of Fiducia Supplicans in late 2023, which officially authorized priests to confer blessings upon people in same-sex relationships, the national divorce rate has jumped up to one hundred percent. Every single couple in America has gotten divorced in the past four weeks, without exception. That's the finding from new research from the Henry Miles Center for the Study of Traditional Marriage at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.
“What we're seeing is another major shift in the actual function that marriage serves in society,” says professor Catherine Walston of the Miles Center. “You have to keep in mind that, for centuries, marriage existed primarily as an economic arrangement. In the pre-industrial world, and even in the early decades of the industrial age, marriage existed as a structure to allow families to pool resources. The idea of marriage as a path to personal fulfillment and happiness is still less than a century old, and it is still, structurally, a very new concept for all of us.
“And yet,” Walston continues, “what we're seeing now is an even larger shift underneath that shift. Before you think about marriage as an economic arrangement moving into a path to personal fulfillment, you have to remember back to the original purpose of marriage as an institution: marriage was a way for people to be not gay.” Walston suggests the image of a tidal wave moving the institution of marriage from “economics” to “emotions”, but with wave, in turn, riding on top of an undertow pushing the water near the seabed from “not gay” to “gay”.
“There's no question that, as the institution becomes gayer, we'll continue to see it degrade,” she adds. “Think about it: centuries ago, why would someone get married? Because they were not gay. Why would they stay married? Because they were still not gay. It's simple math. And that is a load-bearing pillar for the institution of marriage, and that is what is now at risk.”
“We didn't originally set out to destroy the institution of marriage. This was really just because we liked our dogs so much that we wanted to marry them, and we figured that passing gay marriage legislation would be a productive first step towards the eventual legalization of human-dog marriage.”
I'm having coffee with Sebastian Anal, the President of Gay. He's a soft-spoken man wearing owlish glasses and a fishnet tank top, and he's reminiscing about the mid-2000s, the first time that American gay people asked for rights.
“Our thinking was,” he continues, “when it came time to really push for human-dog marriages – we were originally targeting the year 2020 - everyone would respond with ‘well, we already let them marry people of the same sex, how is this any different?’ That's how you change hearts and minds. That's how you bend the arc of the universe,” he finishes.
When I point out that this exact scenario was used - hyperbolically and speciously, I had thought - by politicians in the 2000s to oppose marriage equality, he jumps in.
“Oh, we were terrified. When Rick Santorum started saying that kind of stuff? We thought he was onto us. We thought he had been bugging our meetings. Thank Athena, nobody actually believed him.
“After Obergefell, though,” he continues, referencing the 2015 Supreme Court case, in which he filed an amicus brief, “well, we weren't expecting such a sweeping victory. We started to wonder, maybe we hadn't been setting our sights high enough. Maybe, with some focus, we had the power to destroy the entire institution of marriage, and also the Catholic church, within the next fifteen years.”
I ask him if that is now the main objective of the LGBTQ community, and he says “not trans people, right now they're really focused on winning high school sports competitions, but everyone else? Yeah. We didn't expect the Vatican to actually step in and help us in our mission to destroy marriage and the church, but with Fiducia Supplicans, we're now years ahead of schedule. Blessings, for gay people? We all know that blessings were created only for straight people. We've been trying to chip a hole in a brick wall, and Pope Francis just installed a screen door.”
When I ask Sebastian Anal why he and the rest of the gay community would possibly want to “destroy the entire institution of marriage, and also the Catholic church, within the next fifteen years,” he immediately responds “mostly to annoy people”.
In a real statement that they put out last month, the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy in the USA said words to the effect of “it's very important for us to be able to still judge and condemn gay people, especially to their faces.” To cite their own words, they also emphasized in their criticism of Fiducia Supplicans that “Even the appearance of endorsement of any moral evil must be avoided at all cost”.
I think this is why Fiducia Supplicans is so bruising for some people, especially in my generation. We came of age during the 2000s, the decade when the Catholic church's moral authority was unimpeachable. The institutional church took great pains during the 2000s, and into the 2010s, to avoid being tarred at all with any moral evil, always going out of their way to avoid being associated with war, torture, capital punishment, racism, violent white nationalism, climate degredation, police violence, militarism, unfettered capitalism, loosening gun restrictions, contempt for the poor, deportation, child prisons, religion-based immigration bans, child sexual abuse, and Mel Gibson.
So you have to understand that a blessing for two gay people is really hard for a lot of Catholics to process.
The Chicago City Council has just voted to dual-zone every church within the city limits and force it to serve as a gay nightclub after 6pm. Alderman Casimir Srkypzynowicz explained that “now that Pope Francis has provided his clear endorsement of all gay activity, it's only natural that we begin to repurpose these spaces. Personally, as a member of the Socialist Democrat Party, I'm excited to hurt organized religion and support gayness, and will be exploring future opportunities to divert funds to this project from the Chicago Police Department budget, which will also, hopefully, lead to an increase in violent crime. I would also like to thank the President of Gay, Sebastian Anal, for his full-throated support of this program.” At the time of this writing, the restrooms at Holy Name Cathedral were being remodeled to include a specific room for doing poppers, and a vertical neon sign reading “CLUB THROB” was being installed on the steeple.
Chicago Archbishop Blase Cardinal Cupich is fully on board with the change, and has mandated additional aesthetic changes across the arch. While parish priests would often wear rose-colored vestments on the third Sunday of Advent and invariably open Mass with some sort of joke like “I know these robes are pink but don't get the wrong idea ha ha,” all Chicago diocesan priests are now wearing rose-colored vestments every week, regardless of liturgical season. According to the new memo from Cupich, “to show our full support for Fiducia Supplicans, effective immediately, all clerical vestments used in all public celebrations of the sacraments must be The Gay Ones”.
My parish has suspended all pre-Cana marriage prep classes indefinitely; there are conflicting reports about what happened at the Tavarellis’ house last week, but it looks like one of the young men underwent a serious mental break and just jumped in the middle of the circle of dining room chairs, pulled down his pants, and defecated right in the middle of the floor. The whole time, he was feral, borderline rabid, screaming at the top of his lungs “WHAT IS THIS. IS THIS MARRIAGE. IS THIS WHAT MARRIAGE IS. I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE.”
My parish is working on throwing out their copies of A Marriage in the Lord and trying to re-write the pre-Cana curriculum from scratch, but there's no starting point here. There's nothing to cling to. Nobody at my church has any idea what marriage is. They keep asking each other and getting nowhere.
In response to Fiducia Supplicans, the superior general of the SSPX actually wrote that:
“When we bless a couple, we do not bless isolated individuals: we necessarily bless the relationship that unites them…This idea, which no longer believes in the power of grace and rejects the cross, does not help anyone avoid sin. It replaces true forgiveness and true mercy with a sadly impotent amnesty. And only accelerates the loss of souls and the destruction of Catholic morality. All the convoluted language and sophistical dressing up of the document of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith cannot hide the elementary and obvious reality of these blessings: they will do nothing more than reinforce these unions in their intrinsically sinful situation, and encourage others to follow them. This will merely be a substitute for Catholic marriage.”
It's already happening. My pastor met with that young man who shit the floor at pre-Cana; apparently he had been asking the facilitators, while holding his fiancee's hand, if he “was supposed to be doing the gay version of this now, I'm so confused.” One thing led to another, and now the Tavarellis, who were nice enough to volunteer to teach pre-Cana in their living room, are stuck with a $900 bill from Stanley Steemer.
“There's no question that 2023 was the greatest year in the centuries-long history of our organization,” says Father Horatio Mouth, speaking to me over Zoom. Father Mouth is the head of the Gay Clergy for a Gay Church organization.
“Not only did we have the Synod meeting, which was of course our biggest 2023 priority to make the church gay,” Mouth continues, “but the Holy Father did agree to open each general session of the Synod with a different full-length - ha, length - gay pornographic film, allowing us to really ground the rest of the global church in our agenda. And then, with Fiducia Supplicans coming out - ha, coming out - before the end of the year…it's just incredible. This is where the church is going to be in the future. With the gayest people it can find. You see, God is a sort of Mr. Magoo-type figure, blindly fumbling around and showering blessings and grace upon whoever is right in front of Him, without ever really understanding what's going on. Gay Clergy for a Gay Church see our job as putting as many gay people in front of God as possible so that we can steal blessings and grace from straight people, out of spite.”
This statement struck me as inconsistent with what I had heard from other clergymen in their responses to Fiducia Supplicans. For example, Father Jeffrey Kirby had recently written this real piece in the National Catholic Register:
“…the recent Vatican declaration appears destined to cause spiritual stress and uncertainty to parish priests and the people of God in the trenches of life…It will anger and frustrate many of those in irregular marriages who are trying to reform their lives and follow the Gospel and who now feel unsupported by the higher shepherds of the Church...Imagine the sense of betrayal in the parents who have fought to keep their adult child out of a gay lifestyle and who now have to explain what the Vatican has just done…imagine the pastor who now has to emphasize the need for a divorced-and-remarried couple to continue the annulment process even if they now think it’s unnecessary. Imagine the pastor who must stress again and again in his preaching that homosexual activity is grave sin, though we are now blessing those engaged in it. Lastly, imagine the people hurt by the gay lifestyle who no longer see the Catholic Church as the field hospital and path to a renewed life since we’re blessing gay couples and appear to have compromised on this point.”
I ask Father Mouth how he can reconcile his position with the clear and coherent argument that Kirby makes. Jesus Christ's mandate, after all, was to go out and serve these very real and very relatable people: the parents who tell their adult children what kind of sex to have and are also solely responsible for explaining every move of the Vatican to those adult children, the remarried couples who need everyone around them to follow the exact same sets of rules to feel secure in their marriage, the parish priests who know they have to make public homophobic statements once a week to do their jobs properly. How can we turn a blind eye to these pillars of the people of God? Can the church really be the “field hospital” that Kirby wants if they're not actively and repeatedly condemning gay sex, as all field hospitals have famously done throughout history?
“I'm, honestly, very glad that all of those people are upset,” Father Mouth replies. “A lot of folks will underplay the importance of spite to the queer liberation movement, but that's really what we're about, moreso than rights or equal treatment or not being crushed by the violent power of the state. We mainly want straight people to see us receiving blessings and feel jealous, because when they feel that way, we - gay people, collectively - think it's funny and also sexually arousing. The global Catholic church has always been our most effective tool to reach these goals.”
If you’ve never been to a Catholic Mass, there’s an important ritual that comes right at the end of Mass, which until recently you could see in person. After Communion, and after a short prayer and some parish announcements, the priest will ask everyone to bow down for the final blessing. At this point, the priest will ask “are there any gays in the congregation?”, and if anyone says yes, they are asked to exit the church. The priest will then ask the ushers to lock the exterior doors of the church to make sure the gay people don’t dive in at the last second to try and get some blessing on them, and then the priest will proceed with the final blessing for the now-blessing-eligible congregation. The doors will be unlocked and gays will be allowed back in after the blessing concludes, in case they want to sing “Lead Me Guide Me” with everyone else. Again, this doesn’t exist anymore. The Vatican has taken this away from us.
Father Robert Lynch of Chicago's Beverly neighborhood didn't want to bless Stephen and Adam, but Stephen and Adam were good parishoners, and Father Lynch wanted to remain faithful to the magisterium of the church. So, one evening after Saturday 4pm Mass, Father Lynch agreed to give Stephen and Adam a quiet blessing in his rectory office.
“Thank you, Father,” said Stephen. “And now, we're going to stand on the altar and blow each other.”
Father Lynch sputtered. “What- what are you talking about? That's absurd!”
“Oh, it's not absurd at all, Father,” said Adam slowly. “This is what the church wants to happen now. We agree with the hysterical, sputtering, and real op-ed about Fiducia Supplicans that Kennedy Hall actually published in Crisis and actually thought would be a good idea to write:
“Cardinal Fernandez has signed off on James Martin’s dream—our nightmare…the Spirit of Vatican II has reincarnated itself into an ecclesial Stonewall Riot…Now, I know what you are thinking: the pope’s declaration says nothing about blessing gay unions. Well, you are right, it says nothing about blessing gay unions. But it is quite clear in paragraph 31 that priests can now bless same-sex “couples.” So, it seems to me that instead of asking whether the document is a precursor to the abomination of desolation or the work of an anti-pope, we should ask the most important question of all: What is a couple? Perhaps you might think that the omission of the word “union” saves the document from giving any impression that Pope Francis and his conduit, Cardinal Fernandez, are A-OK with blessings that are gay. Well, perhaps you believe that communism will finally work if we just communism harder, or that vaccines can be guaranteed safe and effective after 10-minutes of production time. It is, after all—or it used to be—a free country, and you are free to believe any fairy tale you want. As Pope Francis famously said about homosexuals, “Who am I to judge?” Alas, the word union being absent from the declaration is utterly meaningless if you have a dictionary or can access the internet. You see, if we take a little trip through the history of the English language, we find that the word “couple” shares the same etymological patrimony as the word “copulate.” (If any kids are watching, please have them leave the room.)”
“And while we're confused about what Hall meant by kids ‘watching’ an article in a right-wing rag, we're on board with this vision, and the Vatican is too. If you show any mercy or acceptance to us, that means that you accept every facet of our sex lives, and you have to let us do sex stuff to each other - all kinds of sex stuff - on the altar. And also you have to watch.” Father Lynch shuddered; he had no desire to see this happen in his church. But what choice did he have? The Pope had ordered him to do this. He took a deep breath and got up to watch Stephen and Adam desecrate his altar.
As I write this, I'm sitting alone at my dining room table. My wife and children are gone. I don't know what's going to happen to my home, or when I'm going to see my daughters next. All I have is this flickering lightbulb above me, a Trader Joe's frozen tamale for dinner, and a slow dripping sound from a cold pipe somewhere in the walls.
I wish, I sincerely wish, that I could have just seen the news about Fiducia Supplicans, said “huh, that's interesting”, and then just gone about my day like a white male adult Catholic in America who enjoyed a tremendous amount of comfort and privilege, and who was also well aware of the injustice dealt to LGBTQ people by his church and thus found the promise of heavily caveated non-liturgical blessings a little underwhelming as a step towards respect and dignity for this community, and thought that best-case this was kind of a theologically interesting perspective on the concept of “blessings” that still didn't mean much in terms of real material stakes, especially in my part of the world where, say, bishops can just fire people for being gay or deny them the sacraments whenever they want. I really wish that this wouldn't have led to my divorce, to my life falling apart, to my church destroying itself, to the opening of Club Throb as the hottest new dance spot in Gold Coast. I really wish that I could have had a normal response to this instead of going completely insane.
But our gay-ass Pope has made that impossible.