A week ago, Electra asked in a comment here if I had shared details of my story on this blog. The story I mean is the one to which I just alluded when I noted that the leaders of the Catholic church have given my husband and me (and many LGBT Catholics) a loud, clear, decisive message that we count for nothing at all in their scheme of things, in their merciful church, at their table stacked with bread for the world.
In response to her question, I told Electra that I had told my story a number of times here, but that I had done so for the most part in the past, when I began this blog — as a kind of catharsis at that time, since I was totally unable to find any Catholic or secular publication who wanted to listen to it and help me tell it. (To repeat a point I have made over and over on this blog: many "liberal" Catholics who remain firmly ensconced in the institution and defend its leaders have never intended to go out of their way to include us who are LGBT, to give our stories and our voices a hearing.)
Since the period in which I began this blog and talked about my story a number of times, I've tended to stop talking much about it, after I got it out of my system in the telling of it back then. But in case there are readers of this blog who haven't read my previous accounts of my story, and who may be mystfied by comments about not counting at all in the eyes of the men running the church in my previous posting today, here are some of those previous postings documenting my story:
Bearing Witness: Healing the Tear in the Soul of American Catholicism--A Call for National Dialogue (1)
Bearing Witness: Healing the Tear in the Soul of American Catholicism--A Call for National Dialogue (2)
The Refusal of Bishops to Be Good Shepherds: More Roots of the Abuse Crisis
Shepherds, Sheep, Listening, Caring: More on the Santa Clara Conference on Catholic Abuse
Charlotte Catholic High School Controversy: "May God Send You Many Outspoken Truth-Tellers and Holy Trouble-Makers"
Agni Asks If I Go to Church: Another Excerpt from My Letters to the Bishop of Charlotte — Eucharistic Bread and Daily Bread Connected
In some ways and at some level, maybe I began this blog (it now occurs to me) primarily to find a way to tell my story, given the way in which the Catholic media — the "liberal" Catholic media — has demonstrated its total unwillingess to provide me any chance to tell the story. And so now I've done so, and the story is out there for anyone to hear, who wishes to deal with it — and perhaps I've fulfilled the purpose of this blog by telling it.
(It surely has made little difference, nor have any other stories like it — and not a few LGBT Catholics could tell similar stories — when it comes to the men running things in the Catholic church, hasn't it? Or to the people in the "liberal" Catholic media and academy who can always find one more reason to listen respectfully to those men as they talk about mercy, healing the world, and bread for all . . . .)
