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The Gifts We Offer (a review of "The Only Good Priest")

© Dennis Cox

In his mystery novel, The Only Good Priest, Mark Richard Zubro comes close to completing the rude cliché with “is a dead priest.” Tom Mason, a gay schoolteacher in suburban Chicago, is clearly not exercised by the mysterious death of the good Father Sebastian. Gay friends approach Tom to play amateur sleuth (again!) because the police and the Church seem to have no appetite for investigation into the cleric’s closet life and associations. Tom is more motivated when his favorite nephew is kidnapped as an apparent result of ecclesiastical intrigues versus radical gay politics. As Tom and his macho professional baseball player lover, Scott, try to unravel the mystery surrounding Father Sebastion’s death, they engage in venomous diatribes against gay priests and the hypocritical Catholic church. Their outrage seems to me to be misdirected; perhaps a better target would be a stringent theocratic system, which requires celibacy from its ministers. (One priest’s narrative describes his life as a “closet” heterosexual who concocts an elaborate ruse to hide his relationship with his wife and children.)

One solution for the secrecy and consequent corruption might be to throw the door open on the closet which is fairly bursting with gay priests. Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbletown, known as a “liberal maverick” in the Catholic hierarchy, suggested just that, in 1997, when he addressed a symposium at the New Ways Ministry. New Ways is an organization, which promotes care and understanding of gays and lesbians in the Roman Catholic Church. Gumbleton posits that if all gay priests were to “stand up” and come out and admit their gayness, their numbers would confound the Catholic laity and hierarchy, and they would be forced to acknowledge the “gifts” provided by these devoted stewards.

This same proposition has been offered to gay teachers, politicians and yes, even entertainers. The validity of the sanguine results of widespread acceptance of the challenge, alas, will remain cloudy until more multitudes acknowledge their sexual identity.

RECOMMENDED READING:
The Only Good Priest
by Mark Richard Zubro
St Martin’s Press, 1991
ISBN 0-312-05486-6.