Being Catholic is like being a closeted gay man

In some ways it is. A rather prominent public figure I used to know was a closeted gay man. I met him through my parents and then one day in university I went to a gay club in Montreal with some friends and there he was. It was a rather out-there joint called Narcissus. I'll spare you the details but suffice to say the entertainment was quite different from what you might expect at most clubs.

And I saw this guy. And he saw me. He nodded at me so as to make it clear that he had recognized me but I got the sense that I was being discouraged from going over to talk to him and his friends. And what would I say in any case? That I was just slumming and that this was not the sort of thing I normally did? That I am not gay? Somehow that seemed pointless.

I asked my friends about it later, the man in question (now deceased) was prominent enough that it was inevitable that some would recognize him from time to time. They said that this sort of thing happened all the time and one of my friends told a rather funny story about having a very casual encounter in a public park and then showing up for a job interview the next day to find he was being interviewed by the very man he had had the encounter with the day before.

An unspoken rule applied that you just didn't let on what you knew about each other. My friend said he and his one-time lover had never acknowledged what had happened between them even though he got the job—perhaps precisely because he got the job. The temptation is to call this sort of relationship a community but it isn't really. It's like a  community in some ways and you can see why the outing of public figures in the 1980s and 1990s was such a touchy issue. But it was a secret community and therefore more like an underground movement than a city on a hill.

Many Catholics behave like closeted gay men. Meet someone from church at a party or through work and you chatter away but leave it out where it is that you know one another from any time some one else might hear.

There are, odd as this may seem, important cultural reasons or this. Anglicans sing loud and clear, Catholics try to disappear into the mix. Go to communion at an Anglican or Episcopalian church, and everyone gets up in an orderly fashion, row by row. Go at a Catholic Church and everyone gets up en masse and shuffles to the front.

The last is actually significant and good which makes it unfortunate that some Catholic churches are adopting the more orderly row by row approach. For Catholics are not supposed to regard receiving communion as routine. If we have any doubts about whether we have sinned, we are to refrain. If everyone goes row by row, the individual who does not stands out and everyone wonders why they aren't going.

Our whole understanding of what goes on in church is like that. Watch Catholics go into church and you will see what I mean. We show up at the last second and dart in as if there was some sort of secret. Not unlike the way people walk casually down a sidewalk and then dart into Wicked Wanda dirty book store and tattoo parlour. And some Catholics stand at the door and talk afterward but most of us take advantage of the delta they form to slip back into public like unnoticed. That may seem like a bad thing but I'm not sure it is.