This week, the former Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger of Marktl am Inn, Bavaria — now Benedictus PP. XVI; or Pope Benedict XVI — visits the United States, spending most of the work week here in Washington. He has visited with President Bush, paraded down Massachusetts Avenue NW (near where I live) and Pennsylvania Avenue NW (near the White House, not near where I live), and, as I type this, is saying mass at the newly-opened Nationals Stadium in southeast D.C.

There's been pageantry to fulfill even the most fervent Catholic's fantasies. Bush, Laura and (I think) Jenna parted from their presidential tradition and greeted the pontiff not at the White House but at Andrew's Air Force Base in Maryland. All along his route, from there to his papal residence at the Embassy of the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See (on Massachusetts Avenue, again near where I live), Benedict XVI has been greeted by cheering crowds carrying elaborately-printed banners of welcome and greetings for his 81^st birthday. His mass, a carefully-planned and heavily-secured event, is to about 47,000 people, not to mention however many will be listening or watching it on TV or streaming it online.
 

(It takes me a while to finish these blog postings, so perhaps by the time I finish, so will he.)
 

All the while, the press, as it did when Pope John Paul II visited New York in 1995, points out the Holy See's differences with American Catholics and, because Benedict will speak later today about Catholic higher education, with Catholic-run colleges and universities. Too much dissent, too much cherry-picking of ideas and moral attributes, not enough total acceptance of the canon of church doctrine. Too much … secularism.

Secularism: the separation of society and government from the influence and control of religion or the act thereof. Merriam-Webster defines it as "indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations."

The word makes some people flinch, others squirm, some squall, others retch. I mean we're talking The Vagina Monologues on American Catholic college campuses here. It's got to be something to fear.

In his speech alongside the pontiff yesterday, Bush brought up another word that makes Catholic hierarchy especially upset. He said that we — Americans, better still his constituency — need the pope's message of truth (or whatever) "to reject this dictatorship of relativism and embrace a culture of justice and truth." He went on: "In a world where some see freedom as simply the right to do as they wish, we need your message that true liberty requires us to live our freedom not just for ourselves, but in a spirit of mutual support."

Relativism: defined by Merriam-Webster as "a theory that knowledge is relative to the limited nature of the mind and the conditions of knowing" and a "view that ethical truths depend on the individuals and groups holding them." Not to be confused, of course, with Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, though I don't know much about that either.

Before I go on about Catholicism, let me make something clear. Spiritual or not, devoted or not, Bush I find to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for people with more powerful personalities and a more pressing message than he possible could have on his own. Like many a "conservative" Republican or "neo-con," Bush represents the use of conservative speech for the purpose of power alone, not for any utopian imagery associated with an America where people thrive solely on their own merits while, at the same time, following an ethos raised almost solely from the scripture of the Gospels. I'm sure he thinks of relativism as often as he thinks these days of how many "weapons of mass destruction" Saddam Hussein was stockpiling underground in Iraq prior to our 2003 invasion.
 

My father — an ardent, pre-Vatican II Catholic who still prefers masses said in Latin — has spoken disapprovingly of relativism and has even sent me in the mail articles about it, about what Pope John Paul II said about it, and about how Hollywood not only revels in it but seeks to proselytize on its behalf as exemplified in its most popular films, TV shows and such. Never mind Mel Gibson's Catholic and anti-Semitic rants and the Republican Party memberships of Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Relativism, my father has said, eliminates the strength of the bottom line. The shades of grey it illuminates ignore what he says are the black-and-white realities. As Harrison Ford once elaborated in a film, not even so much the black and white but the right and wrong.

Because liberals don't believe in such trivialities, right? That's why they argue for social justice causes like welfare that actually aids people in need and drug policies that address both the ills associated with addiction and the rights individuals have to their own private lives. Talk about cherry-picking. In politics, it doesn't matter how wholly consistent your philosophy is, John McCain, but rather how consistently it agrees with those whose money you need to run your campaign and whose votes (and vote-getting) you need to win.

If you're conservative and believe that the government has no place in your private life but then say you agreed with and wish we still had anti-same-sex-sodomy laws that have been overturned throughout the states in the past generation, how consistent can you be? If you say you don't want any central institution forcing your hand at anything you believe to be a matter of personal liberty, why are you tithing at church and taking in the sometimes beleaguering (and sometimes inaccurate) protestations and dramatics of a pastor you've been following since childhood (or, in some cases, young adulthood)? Only because you choose to?

What if I don't make the same choice? Does that mean somehow that I am not entitled to my own right of privately-held spiritual or ethical expression? Because you and I don't go to the same church? Because you and I have a (normally only slightly) different origin of moral opinion on which we base our decisions and judgments?

And by the way, isn't spiritual strength enhanced by tests of faith, by the struggle (the true meaning of the word jihad in Islamic tradition) that one should have reconciling spiritual and theological belief with the trappings of modern society? If you can come back around the circle to where you started, isn't that what bolsters you as a member of a church, mosque, synagogue or temple? How strong can your faith truly be if nothing has ever forced you or even just encouraged you to ask questions?

What is God? Why do we believe in God? What does it mean to say God always existed? How can we be sure of the meanings of eternity, heaven, damnation, purgatory, indulgence? Does it really matter if there are seven or 700 virgins awaiting a holy warrior in the paradise? Is it worth waiting for eternal bliss if the earthen existence is so trying?

Why would any God who is referred to by any religious leader as "loving" allow for such terrible tragedies to occur in the world, even to people who don't believe in God or in one god? If God, as Christian tradition emphasizes, is fatherly and forgiving, why are so many people of so many different faiths forced to suffer indignities and injustices for no better reason than that they happened to live under the wrong dictator or along the wrong coastline?

Why do we default to God as "He" and not "She" or something gender-neutral? Where does sex fall in line with being spiritual? If we are sexual beings, how natural can it be for a man or woman to deny the act and release of sex in favor of undistracted service to God? If we are to believe that humanity is at heart imperfect — some would say inherently sinful, others inherently evil — how can any devotion to God matter or service to God make a difference if it in and of itself is not perfect?

Why is "blind faith" so good for anyone? What is the difference, in a church's context, between a good education and a proper education? When can one's bad experiences with a church or a religious community be attributed to the particular members of the community who contributed to those experiences, and when can they be (or can they be at all) attributed to the church and its teachings, to its foundation? How can one not look with avarice at a clerical hierarchy that seeks to protect people who commit foul crimes against the most vulnerable of their parishioners?

And how are they going to place more than 400 children taken (some would say rescued) from that religious community in Texas?

I won't answer those questions. I can't. I ask, but really I don't care enough.

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I was baptized and raised in the church. That photo shows me in Istanbul in September 1973. I was 3 months old. In the years to follow, no matter what else I did, said or thought, my father ensured that the church and its teachings weren't pushed far into the background. My fondest memories of growing up are not, or mostly not, church-related. But it's hard to detach pretty much any milieu I was in from the influence of the church since it was always there. I did go to kindergartens and daycare places that weren't run by the church. But once I was in the grade system, from then 'til high school graduation, it was Catholic all the way.

It took some time, but by mid-high school, I was about as involved as one could be with the church short of spending every morning praying in chapel before first period. I did do that sometimes, just not always. I won't disavow those days, when I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, wrote "friendship letters" to people I knew who were "making" their Search retreats (Search was short-hand for Search for Christian Maturity, a church-sponsored program of monthly retreats for teenagers), and served as a Eucharistic minister. I won't say I regret or have forgotten those days. If I have, it's only because I have forgotten a lot of things in the 20 years since I was in high school.

Here I am, at age 17, in a photo from a special mass that was said in honor of my graduating class at Father Ryan High School in Nashville. I am administering the Eucharistic wine — from the presiding priest's own regal chalice, no less — to Julie Pasquinelli. This mass was said on the evening of May 18, 1991, as a precursor to graduation. Service awards were given to the most humanistic, involved students, and I was one of them. That senior year, I went on a vocational retreat to St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana and actually felt a serenity in the silence. More than anything else, I enjoyed praying. Enjoy's a weird verb for it, perhaps, but that's what I did. I'm not even sure, then or now, if my prayer was a communion with God or something more intellectual and confessional but less spiritual. Even a priest, or at least one with enough experience dealing with the pluralistic society that is any suburban or urban parish, would say that as much as you need to be able to confess your feelings (not necessarily your sins alone) to God, you need to be able to confess them to yourself. If the idea of an omniscient god is to be believed, then it's fair to say that God already knows your shit. It's you who has to come to terms with it.

Not that I can tell you about St. Augustine or any of the post-Gospel theologians. I studied comparative monotheistic religion in college mainly as a way to get in touch with Islam, the dominant religion of the land where my father's maternal forebears were born. If I can claim a pride, at least historically, in being a Catholic, I can also claim a pride in being raised with a large, extended Lebanese family. At the time, I wanted to get in deeper touch with that and studied Arabic and Islam in depth. I probably know more about its tenants than about my own church's, though learning about Islam did help me appreciate my own faith more, at least for a while.

So I can't take back what was my past. I can't say that it was a bad thing that I was raised in a church community, educated by nuns like these, confessing to priests, praying repeated "Our Father"s and "Hail Mary"s while holding a rosary, praying novenas for friends, putting money in the basket every week as it was passed around, feeling that tinge of excitement and guilt when the host that was said to be the true body of Christ touched my tongue. I was sheltered, for sure, and I certainly wasn't given the space to explore my sexuality the way I probably should have. Being gay, it's not as if I could not have found opportunities or even a sympathetic ear to bend. I just didn't think to look. That community and my commitment to it made me purposefully turned away. To this day, I can't so much as fantasize about any of the boys I grew up with, even if any of them had been conventionally or specifically attractive. I didn't then, and I can't now.

And being gay isn't necessarily what drove me away from my faith. I had opportunities even after coming out to explore a definitively alternative expression of Christianity, even of Catholicism. I just didn't like what I saw. I went to a Dignity mass once in 1995, covering it for a project as a student journalist while at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I couldn't stand it. It was so… not me. In those years between high school and now, especially when I was still in school, the only joy I got out of expressing my Catholicism was when I went to a big, Gothic or Victorian church and sat alone, amidst the gargantuan statues, frescoes, mosaics and stained-glass windows, thinking. Not necessarily praying. Not sure at all.

If anything's pulled me away, it's the secularism of my life as it is today. Some would say that's sad, that it seems as if I had a good, deep understanding of where I was and should've been back then. But I was awkward and young, like most people. There was barely a time, even in the middle of mass, when I was sure of what I was doing or how I looked doing it. In fact, the only time I was sure of how I felt and what I thought was right was when I grimaced while at a mass in 1997 when a man stood up in the congregation wearing a felt-scrap-lettered green shirt reading "Homosexuality is a sin." And this was in an urban church with a gay choir conductor and, I'm sure, a gay priest or two. All I could think as I looked at him was fuck you and your self-righteous bullshit. Perhaps today, a little older, I'd have more gumption to go up to the man and ask him what he thought he was accomplishing, at least on an outward level, by wearing such blasphemy.

I was going to write a tirade here about how being Catholic skewed me for too long away from the fulfillment of adulthood, how it sheltered me from the realities of secular life around me. When I did go to college, beginning in 1991, the awkwardness was instant, and the fear palpable. I hated New York City because it was so big and frightening. It wasn't nurturing. It wasn't scalable. In the years I spent there, I had to learn as if I'd never learned anything before. I learned how not to scare people with talk of spiritual devotion. I learned how an alternative view of something I thought I already had an expertise in could illuminate it rather than insult it.

I remember a classmate telling me that he'd read a study that compared Catholicism on a multi-point scale that was used to denote a cult, saying the church community's characteristics fitted with the majority of the points. I dispelled the idea at the time, a little hurt that it would be brought up to me at all. But over time, as I looked back through that prism, I saw the similarities in my own experiences. I mean those Search retreats did force us to stay up late and eat a lot of sugar.

Instead of a tirade, I write a reflection and not necessarily a well-organized one. I'm happy as I am today. In a way, my spirituality is revealed in the way I live and love with my partner, John. There's a love here that feels somewhat like the kind of love I learned about in high school classes about scripture, church history, morality and the sacraments. There's a sensation beyond sexual, a comfort and perhaps even a developing "blind faith" that permeates into everything else in my life. Perhaps, in fact, a struggle is needed to shore up what we have, but we struggle as it is. Nothing's perfect, and it never will be. I don't care.

In the meantime, I will not discount any good that comes with a relativistic outlook. In a way, government is relativistic. As much as we talk about constitutional ethics and adherence to the law, we also apply standards individually and tend as a people to ask for individual consideration. There's always someone with the view of being, or being affected by, an exception. Even conservatives take relativistic outlooks on matters. Again, perfection: it isn't there, not among us humans.

Also, I will continue in my walk away from a decisively Catholic way of life. If I am to believe that the foundation of a good life can be laid in the way mine was — in places like St. Leo the Great Catholic Elementary School and Father Ryan High School, in Search and vocational retreats, in masses and at memorial services, in the doctrines I studied — then I don't find it difficult to discern that the life I am living is worthwhile, whether in the church or not. I can add one more point of pride: Catholic, Lebanese, gay … and secular.