What We Don’t Talk About: Sex and the Mess of Life by JoAnn Wypijewski

Author:JoAnn Wypijewski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

8

Sin, a Story of Life

Fall 2002 . As a child I tried to imagine what a day, a year, a lifetime of hearing confessions must be like for the common parish priest. It was said that the sainted voluptuary of suffering Padre Pio would spend seven hours a day in the confessional. Did pilgrims seeking absolution burden him too, I wondered, this stigmatic bleeding from hands and feet and side, with the same paltry crimes that I and my little confederates heaped upon the patience of our mostly unremarkable priests, Saturday after Saturday? Bless me father for I have sinned … disobedience, lies, a broken fast in Lent, a taking of the Lord’s name in vain, impure thoughts, impure deeds … Events in search of a narrative; acts with no history or complicating context, no personality caught between good and evil; generic sins from tykes who could not but be generic sinners. It was only later, with age, that I understood sin as a story of life, and confession as neither moral audit nor ransom from hellfire but, in truest form, something altogether more human, a talking cure, the poor man’s psychotherapy. If such homely characterizations now seem profane it is doubtless not in the usual sense of the word. For once again in human affairs, the confessional looms as a symbol of dank mystery and corruption.

In the sex scandal enveloping the Catholic church it stands as emblem of clerical secrecy, site of criminal accusations, source of indignation among old-timers who said a lifetime of mea culpas believing that divine grace depended on the purity of priests. Its representative virtue, forgiveness, has been supplanted among churchly concerns by zero tolerance. To its suspect privacy has been counterposed a different kind of talking cure, the public recollections of people who say they were abused by priests. Those recollections have been conveyed in countless press reports and public forums. However valuable the airing of old secrets is for the speakers, as shaped and deployed in the press their stories have somehow left them behind.

It has become meaningless whether those speaking up were four or thirty-four, whether they saw a priest naked or were raped, whether they always remembered or have unearthed fantastical recovered memories, whether they felt pain or, harder to divulge, guilt because of an uninvited pleasure. They are generic victims now, of generic abuse committed by generic “pedophile priests.” Their stories have merged into “the story,” one that everyone and no one knows. Its favorite themes are sin and betrayal, but the words have become like Catholic kitsch, colorful and empty, the spirit of camp snuffed and, in its place, the whiff of the invert. Sex as a social fact, part of the jangled, needy, contradictory culture of humans, not gods or monsters, has disappeared in the wash of words about sex. The society of grown-ups has picked up childish things, and it doesn’t look as if it’s going to put them away soon.

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