I had a different take on it. Historically, up until about the time of World War II, the priesthood was a good method for a young man from a lower class immigrant family, a fellow with just about zero chances of getting a decent education or any kind of non-blue collar job. As for the whole celibacy issue, well, the church had long experience with that sort of thing, and as long as everybody was discreet, nobody really cared. Following the war, there was a massive expansion of low cost and state funded higher education and the job market exploded. Suddenly, all those Italian and Irish and Polish kids could get college degrees and good jobs. Meanwhile, the church drifted to the right, and began really pushing the celibacy requirement.
The result was massively predictable! ‘Normal’, i.e. straight, men no longer had a need to go into the church to get ahead. That left the only candidates for the priesthood the ‘non-normal’, in other words the gays and pedophiles. Suddenly faced with a massive decline in recruitment, the church drastically lowered standards on who they would let into their ranks. By some accounts, by the Nineties, the majority of Catholic seminary students were non-heterosexual. It’s a mathematical certainty, an element of Set Theory, my specialization — If you exclude all members of a subset from the superset, the remaining members of the superset will all be members of other subsets. In other words, if you actively exclude heterosexuals who like grown up women, you are left with homosexuals and heterosexuals who like kids.
There was probably a different explanation, but I was going with my version.
I hadn’t thought much about John Paul II, who seemed like a nice enough guy, but was definitely old school, and he could never understand why those pesky Americans got so wrought up over priests diddling little boys. Benedict XVI didn’t have much more luck. During his reign the European churches found out their priests were diddling their little boys as well. On the one hand he was much more open about the problem than his predecessor, but on the other hand he was also old school and got caught covering up problems in his own jurisdiction. At least he wasn’t personally involved in anything.
Supposedly, his replacement, John Paul III, was going to be the key to fixing the problems. A dark horse candidate, he was a Swiss bishop (not even a cardinal), young and modern, and had an understanding to the problem. Scarcely had his papal coronation been completed, however, when the videotapes came out, videotapes that showed him when he was a monsignor, with another priest sodomizing a teenage boy who was crying and begging them to stop. The boy later committed suicide, and the tapes came out when the other priest was caught with a different boy.
The outrage was worldwide. There were immediate calls for his abdication and prosecution, but nobody could actually make him do anything. The Vatican is a separate country, and the Pope is the boss. He refused to resign, and then threw fuel on the fire. In a Papal Bull, he ruled that Papal Infallibility not only extended forward to the future actions of a Pope, but extended backwards, to actions in the past. In effect, he wrote himself a pardon.
Within weeks of this, the Catholic Church collapsed. Three-quarters of the world severed diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Even the Swiss Guards, his own security force, from his home country, resigned and went back to Switzerland. The Pope ended up hiring non-Christian Nepalese Gurkhas as his new security force. In the United States, several of the big city bishops and cardinals called an emergency meeting of the Conference of Bishops, and within weeks over ninety percent of American parishes created the Reformed Catholic Church, splitting the church in two. There were no differences in the liturgy, but there was no pope, priests could be married, women could be ordained, and birth control was allowed. By the time I left the scene, the church was actually undergoing a rebirth. Sarah’s husband, the Catholic chaplain at Nazareth College, although not an ordained priest, immediately quit his job and went to divinity school to get the remaining courses necessary to be ordained.
But that was for far in the future, and even thinking about it now would make enemies, including Marilyn. I just sat there in the pew and listened and kept my mouth shut. Nobody said anything until the time for communion came, and I stayed in my seat. Everybody eyed me curiously, and only asked me when we left the church. I simply told them I was Lutheran, not Catholic, and they gave me a very curious look and didn’t say anything more.
In the entire family, with all the spouses and relatives, I was the only non-Catholic. They didn’t make you feel like a pedophile, not precisely, anyway.
Saturday night supper was going to be burgers, which I normally like, except when they are burned to charcoal, which is the way Big Bob liked them. Sunday dinner was scheduled to be roast beef, roasted to a finely dried leathery substance and then smothered in brown gooey gravy. I reminded Marilyn that we would go out, and she nodded and wandered upstairs to change again. I nibbled on some cheese for the cheeseburgers while I waited, and drank a beer with Big Bob. It was Kraft white American cheese, the sort that will survive through nuclear firestorm and the Apocalypse. The beer was Heineken, though; Big Bob had good taste in beer.
Marilyn came back down a few minutes before seven, and my mouth got suddenly dry. She was wearing that short denim skirt she had worn that one night in Ocean City, along with the high heeled sandals. She did have on a very tight red checkered short sleeve blouse and a bra, though. She looked beyond sexy, and her perfume was driving me crazy. I thought for sure her parents were going to say something to her, but they didn’t.
Harriet and Big Bob had perfected the mechanism for not seeing what they didn’t want to see. They didn’t want to know that their eldest daughter was fucking a frat boy soldier, so they simply pulled their blinders on. My parents never learned this skill, and both this time and the last, had constantly quizzed me on whether girls were coming to the apartment or frat house. Neither Harriet nor Big Bob ever asked me once, even when their little girl was running around in a miniskirt and fuck me heels and visiting me for vacation weeks.
Her brothers all knew, just about from day one. They might have been young and virgins, but they weren’t blind. Matthew used to crudely joke, after we got engaged, about the foolishness of buying a cow when you can get the milk for free. Luke and Gabe once walked in on us fooling around under a blanket in front of the fireplace one winter when the library was chilly. I actually stood up to defend myself from their righteous anger, but I forgot that my pants were still down around my knees. They just laughed at us.
I was smiling as we left the house, and I let her walk in front of me so I could watch her legs and ass. God, was she hot! Once in the car, I turned the key and then said, “I think I’ve changed my mind. I want to go over to the Marriott and order up some room service for dinner!”
Marilyn laughed at that. She waggled a finger at me and said, “I don’t think so. Dinner and then we’re going out, remember?”
I groaned at that. “Please, tell me, are you wearing anything under that skirt?” I reached across and laid a hand on her bare thigh.
Marilyn whimpered, but then crossed her legs, which really made the skirt ride high, and said, “You’ll just have to find out later. Let’s go.”
I groaned as I put the Galaxie into gear. “You’re killing me. You know that, right? You’re killing me!” Marilyn simply grinned at that.
We drove into Utica and across the river into North Utica, where I remembered a restaurant on North Genesee that had a fairly young crowd. It was crowded enough we couldn’t get a table right away, so we had a drink in the bar until something opened up. Utica is not one of the great dining cities of the world, but you can always get a steak somewhere. There is, however, a local dish seen only in the Mohawk Valley known as ‘greens’, which I love and Marilyn hated. It basically looks like grass clippings (which I think is actually escarole, kale, or spinach — something like that) mixed with hot peppers and bread crumbs and baked in olive oil, and it’s delicious! Every restaurant has their own recipe, and everybody argues over whose is best. I made sure I had a large serving.