Local Catholics are only good for pissing people off

I'm sure there are stories of kindness, compassion and decency which emanate from The Catholic Church but I don't have any experience with them.

Recently, the story of St. Agnes Catholic Church failing to renew the contract of its music director simply because he's gay and also serves as the choir director for Kansas City's Heartland Men's Chorus is yet another example of a wave of "conservatism" crashing over local Catholic Churches and washing away longtime devoted members.

But last Sunday, Joseph Nadeau ended his last Mass at St. Agnes Catholic Church with a wrenching solo on "God Help the Outcasts." It was his other life, as the artistic director of one of the nation's largest gay male choirs, that ultimately cost him his job.

In January, the St. Agnes Catholic Church hierarchy summoned Nadeau into a closed-door meeting, he said. Monsignor Gary Applegate told Nadeau that to continue as music director, he needed to resign from Kansas City's Heartland Men's Chorus, take a vow of celibacy and acknowledge that homosexuality was a disorder, Nadeau said.

Actually, this isn't anything that new. This is the parish I grew up in and it's strangely comforting to know that some things (their intolerance) will never change. When I went to school there, the only thing they hated more than Mexicans was gay people or maybe Black people . . . I don't know for sure, I didn't pay much attention in school. Later on, in that same parish, a high school teacher would tell my football team in a private moment that there wasn't anything wrong with "fag bashing" other than running the risk of getting their blood spattered on you. This is why baseball bats were (supposedly) preferred . . . Which (ironically) seemed kind of ghey to me. People find this stuff hard to believe . . . But I'm not making it up and maybe there is some kind of logical explanation for it . . . Who knows? Maybe all of the Mexicans who went to that school were, in fact, retarded and really did belong in the slow classes.

In the end, I've found that whenever anyone really questions representatives of the Church . . . There is only one answer: If you don't like it, you can leave. Strangely, you'd think this kind of attitude would quickly evaporate the membership but you'd be wrong. Very much like the ratings of Lou Dobbs the Church earns even MORE attendees (in this country at least) when it takes a reactionary or intolerant stance on a divisive issue. Also, I've always found that reformers of the Church and their views are even more ghey than the almost any homosexual parishioner. If you think the people in the Church are obnoxious, the people trying to change it are downright silly and don't realize that women priests would prove once and for all that God is dead.

And while it doesn't seem very Christian to shun somebody because of what they do with their genitals in the privacy of their own public restroom stall, I can't say the reaction of St. Agnes parishioners is that surprising. I've always known that if the Church didn't speak up during the Holocaust, the institution will always be more concerned with mindless devotion to their own rules and their standing rather than simple human compassion. And while I'm a bad Catholic who rarely attendees mass, I have to admit that I'm still drawn to the Church because of the ancient rules, old buildings, outdated philosophies and ongoing traditions which serve to remind me that more than two thousand years of worship serve only as a meager, flawed offering to the hope that these rituals aren't in vain. Also, it's cheaper than a movie and they give away snacks sometimes.