An Extremely Close Encounter with a Gay Catholic Celibate

Was he trying to rescue me from sex while I was trying to rescue him from the church?

The image of colored light shifting through stained glass remains one of Brenden O'Donnell’s few positive associations with the Catholic Church. Photo by Emma Richter on Unsplash

In his Grindr profile, Eddie quoted Avatar: The Last Airbender and identified as a proud member of my chosen Pokémon Go Team: Team Instinct. In the summer of 2016, which Pokémon Go Team you were on was nearly as important as whether you were voting for Hillary or Bernie in the Democratic Primary.

Curiously, Eddie also had a cross emoji next to his name.

Maybe he was one of those cool, weird, progressive Christians. I’d been attending Quaker meetings and was starting to see a pathway into spirituality more accepting than the one I’d experienced growing up in the Catholic church. I loved the simplicity of Quaker services. On Grindr, I pontificated on my spiritual journey to Eddie, who was so curious about it. He seemed like someone I could connect with in many dimensions: gay, nerdy, and maybe even spiritual. The fact that he looked great with his shirt off was neither here nor there.

We met at a cafe. He was covered in enigmatic tattoos and was shinily bald, with a slightly retro nu metal-looking goatee that somehow worked on his sharp jawline. Before long, we were discussing religion again, now in person.

“You don’t still go to church, do you?” I asked.

“Yes. Being a Catholic man is very important to my identity. Just as important as being a gay man.”

I paused.

“How do you reconcile it though? Being gay is a sin, according to the pope.”

“Lots of things are sins. Sinning has never disqualified anyone from Catholicism. Quite the contrary, in fact. I believe gay people’s sins actually help them adhere more closely to the Catholic faith. They know how to process sin in a way that most Catholics don’t. Us gays are in less denial about it.”

He spoke with a sly confidence that made me want to test him. I attacked his logic.

Brenden: The cycle of confessing and sinning and confessing again is abusive.

Eddie: Lots of religions have a system of amends. Catholicism’s system just happens to be transparent.

Brenden: The priests’ direct line to God creates a hierarchy.

Eddie: It’s not that they’re more directly tied to God; it’s that they have more knowledge about how to access him, like a clearinghouse.

Brenden: It’s sexist that only men are allowed to be priests

Eddie: Being a priest doesn’t make someone more holy. Sure, the gender rule is arbitrary, but it doesn’t on its own elevate men over women.

Our disagreements felt tense yet synchronized; we’d both heard both sides of the argument. We’d both argued both sides. Performing the debate both liberated and frustrated us. As if to relieve the metaphysical tension, we opted for the physical. We barely made it to my apartment after finishing our coffees. We spent the rest of the day in my bedroom. He spent the night.

The next morning, he told me he had to stop by his place to let his dog out, but that he’d be back with coffee. He was back in half an hour. We got dressed and went to the nearby Pokémon gym with our phones and portable chargers and stayed there until we got hungry.

At a nearby sandwich shop, he told me he’d been meaning to tell me about something called “Courage.”

“It’s this mutual help program for gay Catholics.” He took a big bite and gazed up at me while chewing, watching me process what he’d just said.

“That sounds creepy,” I said.

“No, no!” Eddie said, sitting up and putting down his sandwich. He shook his head and held his hands out to me, like I was speeding toward him and he was trying to get me to slow down. “It’s not conversion therapy or anything. It’s about helping gay Catholics live a holy life.”

“How?” I asked.

“By helping each other remain celibate.”

I tensed, holding my sandwich in front of my face like I was trying to block eye contact. Was this all a ruse to convert me back to being straight? I went on the offensive.

“Well. Seems like we wouldn’t belong,” I said, waving my finger between the two of us and raising an eyebrow.

He laughed nervously.

“Well, I still go to the meetings. It’s not about perfection. It’s about continuously trying.”

“Wait. So you’re trying to be celibate?”

“Yeah. I am. How do you feel about that?”

“Confused,” I said, looking down at my phone to check Pokémon Go so I could hide my facial expression. I was worried I’d looked as horrified as I felt.

Later, when I got home, I thought back over the past 24 hours—the emotional connection felt real and we’d had very good, fun, uninhibited sex. But perhaps his lack of sexual inhibition implied repression? I kept getting lost trying to sort it all out and texted my friends Noah and James for backup.

“This guy is trying to be celibate.”

“CELIBATE. DIDN’T HE JUST FUCK YOU,” asked James.

“Bye girl,” Noah added.

“Well, he says that celibacy is kind of a theoretical concept. Like, it’s not about never having sex. It’s about trying not to. It’s a goal you live with.”

“It sounds like a goal homophobes would want us to have,” wrote James.

“Yeah…like, I assume straight people don’t have to shoot for celibacy?” Noah asked.

“Eddie says that celibacy is seen as a gift for gay people because it helps them identify the sin that they need to confront. Sex isn’t a sin for straights in the same way, but avoiding sin is just as hard for them. Straight people have to live in a sinful world where everything is temptation. For gay people, things are a little simpler because the focus is sex.”

Neither of them responded. I panicked when I realized I’d just written out a monologue that Eddie had delivered to me. Did they think I was brainwashed?

“Isn’t that fucking crazy?” I added, hoping to convince them I was still the friend they knew.

They didn’t respond.

My friends’ silence made me doubt my attraction to Eddie, but I kept seeing him. Being with him felt like a mystery that I needed to solve: What kept him returning to the church? What kept me returning to him? What would it take for me to rescue him from the church? Could I use logic to debate him away from its grasp?

I began seeing Noah and James less and Eddie more. I was with him nearly every day and night. I’d nearly forgotten about the Catholic stuff. One night, after finishing a movie, we retreated to his bedroom. I tumbled onto his bed. He stayed standing.

“Oh. Ummm,” he stuttered, looking down at me.

“What?”

“Well, my roommates and I have a rule where we don’t have overnight guests.”

I sat up immediately. It had never occurred to me that whenever we’d spent the night together, it was always at my place.

“I’m sorry, I should’ve mentioned it,” he said quickly.

“No, it’s totally fine. I shouldn’t have assumed. Are your roommates Catholic as well then?” I asked, realizing I hadn’t ever met them.

“No. Actually…it’s my rule.”

“What? But you always stay at my place.”

“I know. I think, for me, it’s a rule I need to stick by. I know my decisions aren’t always consistent. But I’m working toward consistency. Maybe one day I’ll propose that we end the rule, or maybe someday I’ll stop staying over at your place. I’ve been feeling confused. So my main priority is just to stand by my promises to others.”

My head was spinning. Someday he might decide to stop staying at my place? So he was still on his path toward celibacy? I realized I’d been wrong to assume that his Catholicism was an insanity he was in the process of overcoming. How could our relationship progress like this? I’d been his temptation, and he’d been fighting me without my knowing. Perhaps he’d been sharing his feelings for me with his priest during confession. While, for me, our experiences together evoked images of a loving future, for him, they inspired a quest for absolution.

A few days later, he sent me a video message that blew it all up again. The camera framed his nervous, mild smile:

“I talked to my priest about you. I told him you are a very special person to me, and that I don’t know where this would lead. Celibacy remains an important value to me, but I’m discovering new values. You’ve shown me new ways to think about the world compassionately. I see in you a way to love more people and see more perspectives. I told my priest all of this and he brought up a possibility: What if I asked you to be my boyfriend? A relationship is about making each other better people, and you’re doing that for me. What do you say?”

The sky opened. I was wrong about him seeing me as a temptation. I was wrong to think he felt ashamed of me. His priest gave us his blessing.

I said yes.

He arrived at my door fifteen minutes later, sweating from a vigorous bike ride, and swept me into his arms.

A few days later, he arrived at my place again. When I opened the door, I reached up to kiss him and he turned away.

“This isn’t right. I know that I’m going in circles. But I can’t be your boyfriend. I think I’ve been fooling myself because my feelings for you are so strong.”

“I think you need to go,” I said, turning away from him.

We decided to carry on without a label for two weeks, with one stipulation: no talking about “us.” We’d rarely gotten through a day without having an existential conversation about our relationship. We decided simply spending time together would help clarify what we wanted.

We went to the beach often during those weeks, swimming and making out in the waves. Maybe if I kissed him enough I could right his mind. My touch would slowly and progressively push the Catholicism out. He lifted me in the water and grabbed my legs to wrap them around his waist.

It was working, I thought. Look at him holding me in front of all these families. Look at them gawk. Look at him not caring.

Though we’d agreed to not talk about “us,” I was also trying to plant seeds. I’d mention the Quaker meetings I’d been attending. I talked more about them than I needed to: about the logistics, about which meetings I liked and why. I thought if we could start going to Quaker meetings together, we could meet on a spiritual plane that made sense to both of us.

A few days before our deadline, before we started talking about “us” again, we lay on the shore at Walden Pond. I was reflecting on the value of silence; how refreshing it was for no one to tell me what to do or think; to sit in wonder together.

“That’s how I feel in adoration,” Eddie said. “My church offers adoration hours on Thursdays and Saturdays. It’s a little like a Quaker meeting. Everyone sits in silence with the Eucharist. I love feeling awe with other Catholics.”

Eucharistic adoration is the somewhat niche Catholic practice of sitting in devotional silence before the consecrated host of Jesus Christ. In other words, priests bless the little wafers that become Jesus’s body during mass; then, during adoration, Catholics sit in awe of the blessed little wafers. If, during Quaker service, Quakers sit waiting for wisdom from the Holy Spirit, during adoration, Catholics sit in awe of the body of Christ.

I disagreed with Eddie’s comparison between adoration and Quaker service. The awe of adoration was different from the unspectacular humility of silence. In Quaker meetings, we simply practiced patience, whereas adoration was charged and dramatic.

But it wasn’t the time for debate now. As he raved about adoration, his jaw jutted and his eyes closed slowly. He might’ve cared for me, but it was becoming clear that the church was his true love. Or, perhaps, he thought it was, which amounted to the same thing. How could I hold any hope for this relationship if I saw his faith as Stockholm Syndrome? And how could I trust him if anytime I felt moved by his religiosity, I feared for my own sanity?

What’s unique about Catholicism’s threat to gay people is the way in which it forgives: absolutely, producing whiplash, positioning gay people—usually sinners just for existing—as suddenly even more holy than straight people. If gays work hard and with full honesty, Catholicism promises, then they can actually win the day. The sins gays commit are, of course, more severe. The church will never deny that. But our rise, when we confess, is steeper, too. Our holiness is just as triumphant as any Catholic. For gay Catholics caught in Catholicism’s net who aspire to celibacy, this system is addictive.

I had been thinking that Eddie was looking to escape the church, but here he was, reveling with me about adoration. He wasn’t looking for a way out. So I had to. I interrupted him, jumping up from my towel and running away at full speed toward the water, diving in and letting the coldness erase all the talk.

When I returned to our camp, Eddie didn’t need to ask why I ran away. I laid down next to him and he gently knocked his knee against mine. I knocked mine back. We agreed in silence that things were finished between us.

After Eddie and I split, the friends whom I’d scared away never fully returned. I now consider those damaged relationships a scar that can remind me to uphold my zero-tolerance policy regarding the Catholic Church, in case I ever feel any doubts. There is no talisman that can protect me, no way to conceptually reframe the church. I simply would stay away. And I have.

It made sense that I’d tried to position the Quakers’ unspectacular bareness as an analogue to Catholicism’s theatricality. But the Quakers couldn’t save me; all they could offer was solid, dependable wooden furniture and good, common sense. Meanwhile, the Catholics had cathedrals and choirs; they had incense burning in swinging golden thuribles. They had stained glass. As a kid, I loved to sit at the end of the pew so I could stare at the windows, watching the Sunday morning sun slowly shift its way through the stained glass kaleidoscopically. Scenes of unimaginable suffering illuminated like a Lite Brite: red, purple, green. Sometimes, even now, I can’t deny the beauty.

Watch our Substack Live Q&A with Brenden O’Donnell about his essay and how this relationship further impacted his life.

Brenden O'Donnell is the author of Geek Out: a memoir, pedagogy, and cultural criticism newsletter. He’s been published in The Audacity, The Queer Love Project, Sitting Queerly, and more. His manuscript-in-progress is a queer millennial coming out memoir. He lives with his husband, Peter, and dog, Willow, in the Boston area.