SEX, COMMUNISM, AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
By Kenneth J Uva
The sky was silver gray, typical of a late fall day in New England, as I drove from Boston to an old farmhouse in New Hampshire that was designated a monastery. The place was on a country road. The air smelled of a combination of burning wood from fireplaces and of burning leaves at a time when burning leaves was an aroma of autumn before that was banned in many places as a pollutant of the air. If New England has a signature day, it would be that day.
The house was of white clapboard that needed a paint job. There were a few outbuildings, a garage, a tool shed, and possibly a guest house although I didn’t get to explore the grounds. There were no flowers. Some plants, tied to stakes, indicated that vegetables had been grown but the dry, dead leaves and branches said that whatever grew had been harvested and that winter was approaching.
There were a few young men around, possibly monks. It was hard to tell if they were ordained anything since they wore civilian, country clothes, jeans, flannel shirts, or turtle neck sweaters. They were polite and welcoming. They expected my visit and led me into the house to see Father Richard.
Father Richard had answered my author’s query in a Catholic magazine. I was writing a book about Catholic anticommunism and he claimed to be one of the first to sound the alarm. In his response, he said he was the leading anticommunist during the Cold War. I was familiar with his name and even quoted him in my chapter about Senator Joseph McCarthy. He had argued that the Ivy League establishment opposed the senator because his name was so Irish that it “smelled of peat.” An interesting reference, I thought, so I figured it would be worth the trip from New York to visit this man to learn what he had to say.
“I wrote a weekly column for Our Sunday Messenger ‘Wrong or Right.’ I covered many subjects but began to focus on communism in 1945 when I was outraged by the Yalta conference when Churchill and FDR gave Poland, a Catholic country, to the Soviets. This was a sellout, pure and simple. After I was ordained in 1940, I heard reports about how the republican side in the Spanish civil war, which was supported by Russia, and reds all over the world, had killed priests and raped nuns. In this country, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was treated as heroes by the leftists. I suppose some of those guys were idealists but most were just communists claiming to be fighting for democracy.”
“You wrote about McCarthy. I remember your comment that his name smelled of peat.” Father had much to say on the subject. “Eleanor Roosevelt had a column that ran in a bunch of newspapers. I guess the owners printed her because they were afraid the liberals would be after them if they didn’t. Of course many of those papers were owned by Jew liberals anyway so I suppose they were happy to have her on their pages. She said McCarthy created a ‘chill of fear’ in the country. I asked many people if they felt a chill. They said they didn’t. Maybe the chill was from those who were afraid to be exposed as communists.”
That led me to another question. “Father, I see more than one aspect of anticommunism. We can see what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin but what about anticommunism in the US? The big part of that was fear of domestic subversion, loyalty oaths, blacklists, naming names, etc. Did you think that the government, the schools, and show business were infiltrated with communists that needed to be exposed?” “People in this country helped out Russia,” he said. “Look at all the aid that was sent during World War II. In 1933, Russians considered a wheelbarrow a complicated machine. Less than twenty years later, they had an atomic bomb. They didn’t do that without help from spies and subversives here in the US.”
He had something else he was anxious to talk about.
“I was living in Boston writing my columns. I had inherited money and could afford to live in my own place. Well, I got involved with the son of a prominent lawyer who was connected to the Church. The lawyer complained to the bishop. The church always kept these things quiet so they paid hush money so he wouldn’t go to the police. I then got transferred to Buffalo. Word was out that I was gay. The bishop was on the board of the Association for Foreign Policy and didn’t want me to make waves. He was afraid I would be blackmailed so he told me I should keep a low profile and resign from publishing. He just wanted me silenced because I was anticommunist.”
“Since the Church was so strongly anticommunist, why would the bishop want to silence your political writing?” Father said that it didn’t matter what he wrote, that the bishop wanted no attention paid to him because there would be a scandal reflecting badly on the Church if his history became known.
“It was at that time, I became an expert on spirits. I started to drink.”
Father said that the bishop wanted to test him for mental illness but he refused to be tested or obey the bishop’s order to go into a mental hospital.
“I got an apartment that became a boys club. The cops heard about my place and the drug squad showed up believing I was growing pot. I wasn’t but had it around but not at the time the cops showed up.”
“Meanwhile, the bishop was now a cardinal and transferred to Rome. The new bishop wanted to protect his predecessor so he kept an eye on me. The cops raided again and found some Polaroid’s. Now the cops would not raid a priest’s house without the bishop’s permission. I hired an unscrupulous Italian attorney who was more interested in protecting the church than defending me. I signed a plea bargain that the whole thing would be buried if I pled no contest to immorality. The boys involved had fathers who paid off the police chief and there were no charges against them.”
“The whole thing was directed by the bishop. I was transferred to New Mexico which is Siberia for priests. The place there was full of Irishmen who would rather drink than screw.”
“I had a book that was coming out about sex and the Catholic Church. The bishop told me to kill the book and live in peace. If I published, I would go to jail. I was basically dealing with the Inquisition of New Mexico. They didn’t want me to publish what they said was a ‘liberating book.’ “
“I read your book.” “Where did you find it, in the basement of some second hand bookstore?” He was pleased to learn that I bought it in the Gotham Book Store, the famous literary gathering place in Manhattan.
The book was scholarly treatise with an extensive bibliography and footnotes filled with research regarding what Catholics, from saints to bishops to priests and teachers had to say about sex. His premise was that the Church was obsessed with sex beyond all else. He remembered a priest who was his religion instructor in high school who equated sex with murder because they were both mortal sins. He decried how Irish police would try to entrap gays by keeping surveillance over certain gathering places.
Father also said he had a book of memoirs that was still in manuscript form. The bishop ordered him not to publish it because of what it would reveal about the Catholic Church. “The publisher sold too many books to Catholic schools so they buried the memoir.”
“They didn’t want a book that revealed how many priests were gay. The Church didn’t make priests gay but the whole environment—the seminary, the Holy Name Society, the Knights of Columbus, the choruses, were all male. What better place for a gay man? He was in an environment with only men yet didn’t have to fake an identity. No one had to claim they were a confirmed bachelor.”
The day was getting late and I wanted to get back to Boston before dark so our talk ended. I mentioned that there was a new biography of Bishop Fulton Sheen, the popular TV priest of the 1950s and that I would send it to him. We said our goodbyes and agreed to keep our correspondence active. For the next year and a half or so, he sent me copies of his articles, clippings of other Catholic authors on the subject of communism, such as William F. Buckley, Brent Bozell, and Phyllis Schlafly, dispersed with his commentary, both personal and political.
“The Church’s bosses were afraid of anyone they could not control. They weren’t honest about how many priests were gay and did not want me to be prominent in bringing that to the attention of the public. Their first duty was to protect the institution at all costs.”
From the frequency of his mailings in an era before electronic communications, I knew he was a lonely man. I wrote frequently and did what I could to be a connection to the outside world. He was not a man with whom I shared political opinions. Yet, I had sympathy for his moral conflict. He never withdrew his beliefs that the Church was wrong in its positions on sex, but he remained a loyal Catholic.
One day during the Christmas season two years after our meeting, I received the following letter:
“…I am Father Richard’s sister-in-law. I am sorry to have to inform you that Father passed away after he drove his car into a lake…”