Mandatory reading. Whatever else you do this week, make time for Colm Tóibín's
magnificent essay on simultaneously knowing and not knowing something. His topic is ostensibly the Catholic Church, its endemic sexual abuse, its reactions, and its relationship with homosexuality, particularly its gay priests but also its gay faithful. If you ever doubted that the reprehensible could become so atrocious as to break through the space-time continuum and appear almost comic, read the catalog of very recent Church statements spitting blame for the sex abuse scandals on everyone else. Tóibín avoids easy fingerwagging at hypocrisy to consider much deeper issues of what we allow ourselves to know or not know at a particular time. His essay is literature but, published in the
London Review of Books, it will be ineligible for next year's Best American anthologies, so this is your chance. And yes, technically the 8,000-word piece is a book review of
The Pope Is Not Gay! by Angelo Quattrocchi.
A sample of Tóibín's essay:
"That you were gay was something you managed to know about yourself
and not know at the same time. I am almost certain, for example, that
when I was warned by a priest at school that a boy who had parted his
hair in the middle had by this act given a sign that he was homosexual
(the only time the term was mentioned in those years), the priest
himself had no clear and open idea that he himself liked teenage boys.
(He would spend time in jail more than 20 years later for abusing
teenage boys.) He would have had a way, learned for good reasons in
adolescence, of keeping some of his actions and desires secret from
himself. His sense of power and entitlement would also have meant that
such crimes as he committed would most likely not see the light of day.
The priesthood had, as far as he was concerned, solved his problems for
him.
"This is almost an aspect of the Catholic religion itself,
this business of knowing and not knowing something all at the same
time, keeping an illusion separate from the truth. We knew that the
bread and wine, for example, were literally and actually changed into
the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the priest at Mass, and,
at the same time, we must have known that this was not the case, that,
really, they remained just bread and wine.
"The shame an
adolescent felt about being gay in those years should not be
underestimated; the feeling that you were less than worthy, that if
people found out the truth about you they would despise you, went deep
into your soul. This was another reason to become a priest. You could
change your own powerlessness into power. As a priest, you would be
admired and looked up to, you would spend your life – as so many
Catholic priests have indeed spent their lives – doing good and being
good. And being seen to be good, being needed by the sick and the
dying, being wanted to officiate at weddings and baptisms and funerals,
saying the sacred words which would mean so much to the congregation,
all this would offer you a fulfilled and fulfilling life. Becoming a
priest solved not only the outward problem of forbidden and
unmentionable sexual urges, but, perhaps more important, offered a
solution to the problem of having a shameful identity that lurked in
the deepest recesses of the self.
"This idea of knowing two things
at the same time has been essential to gay people in other ways. Gay
people have known that our sexuality was actually, despite what we read
or were told, quite normal, quite natural; it was only the world that
thought otherwise. While the world’s view often ate into the self,
there was another part of the self which remained intact, confident,
sure. Introspection, the study of the self, for gay people became
necessary, fruitful. The struggle between our knowledge and their
prejudice often meant that a spiritual element in our being – something
private, wounded, solitary and self-aware – had reason to come to the
fore and seek nourishment in a close relationship to God. This is
another reason so many gay men have become priests."
There's this secular observation, too:
"Before the creation of a post-Stonewall gay identity and the presence
of gay role models on television and in the movies, most gay men worked
out a strategy, in early adolescence, to do a perfect, lifelong
imitation of a straight man, to move around in that gruff, rangy way
straight men had invented for themselves. For many homosexuals, the
stereotype of the mincing, high-pitched queen was the most frightening
idea that ever walked towards them. They hated it and feared it and
worked out ways not to look like that themselves, or to be invisible
when they did so."
Tóibín also considers the previous pope, the current pope, and the current pope's exquisite private secretary, "Georg Gänswein. Gänswein is remarkably handsome, a cross between George
Clooney and Hugh Grant, but, in a way, more beautiful than either." Of Ratzinger's infamous 1986 letter on homosexuality, which "must be seen as an objective disorder," Tóibín notes that the future pope:
"...is thus implying that legislation for gay rights has somehow led to an
increase in paedophilia. He is careful, however, not to spell this out.
This is an interesting moment, the beginning of a culture of denial, a
culture in which someone else, somewhere else, had to be blamed."
He follows that "interesting moment" from 1986 to 1992 to 2005 to this summer. Read it.
[
only $3.79].
or 
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).
was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and won a Costa award. (No update on the film, adapted by Nick Hornby, which was to have begun shooting this spring with Rooney Mara, and didn't.) Tóibín's Lammy winner 
[[
]] by Michael Cunningham, and their great, great forefather 
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