They Don't Call It the Seminary for Nothing

Catholic priests love them some serious schoolboy bootie. (There. I've said it.) It would appear obvious that the greater part of the Catholic establishment got into the biz because it was advertised--strictly word of mouth, mind you--as a veritable smorgasbord of prepubescent ass. The confessional booth, that painfully literal Catholic vessel of reconciliation, affords the priest a dark, intimate, and--dare I say--romantic encounter with impressionable fondlees, who are only too eager to avoid the eternal, tendril-like fires of hell through whatever oral or anal means possible. (It's exceedingly strange the things a benevolent God asks children to put in their mouths, but God's will, too, is impenetrably mysterious and shouldn't be prodded at, as if with a stick.)

It's almost like a double-team operation. The nuns, in their function as administrators of some vague genre of religious education, create unique and terrifying visions of hell and damnation, like budding modern-day Dantes in pilgrim shoes. There is--if one backs away from the crime scene and analyzes the situation methodically--an almost sensual attachment to the morbid and the punitive on the part of these storytelling sisters.

When I was but a young lump of clay, malleable to the manipulations of these habited she-wolves, Fatima was a favorite theme of apocalyptic-grade fervor. Fatima, for those unfortunates who aren't in the know, is a small town in Portugal where, allegedly, the Virgin Mary appeared to three peasant children circa the First World War. In addition to just popping in for a visit, Mary reportedly supplied a lot of pyrotechnics and bombast to Catholic folklore, the likes of which Hollywood itself might have thought too over-the-top. At one point, according to the nuns of my youth, Mary opens up a doorway to hell in the earth to show the little kiddies what's in store for all the folks who aren't on board with Catholicism.

(Back then, I always pictured a sort of whooshing, perfectly square pocket door opening onto a scene of about, say, thirty or forty aspiring actor-types--you know, the kind of bland people you find mugging and emoting in the backgrounds of music videos. These actors, stripped to rags and grease-painted with faux burns and gashes, clamber when the door is opened; they try to extract themselves from this sweaty mosh pit, but to no avail. Today, when I imagine the scene, I am tempted to round out the image with Mary stomping on one of their imploring hands and chiding, "You had your chance, bitches!" I know this isn't in keeping with Mary's character, but I can't fight the screenwriter in me. If you get too preachy and earnest with a religious scenario, especially if you don't have Julia Roberts playing Mary, then you're going to have a hard time luring a wide audience. You need to throw in a little ironic anachronism, like Robin Williams' genie in Aladdin, pointing out hell's uncanny resemblance to a giant trash compactor or, better yet, Scandal's "The Warrior" video.)

Nowadays Fatima has been supplanted as a first-tier apparition site by Medugorje, Bosnia, where (allegedly) Mary began appearing in 1981 to six teenagers and continues appearing to this day. (It's kind of like when a really, really popular rock band books a venue for seven consecutive SRO nights of head bangin' artistry.) At my Catholic high school, there was a religion teacher who was obsessed with the apparitions at Medugorje--so much so that he neglected to teach anything at all. He simply told us stories about his "pilgrimages" to Medugorje, where he had seen the sun spin in the sky and then seem to careen toward the earth. He told each and every story with the intense nostalgic enthusiasm of one who'd witnessed the apocalypse (or a facsimile thereof) but lived to talk about it. Meanwhile, I was doodling pictures of Fat Man swallowing Little Man in my Mead three-subject notebook. Even the hardcore militant Catholics in the class half-suspected that Mr. Medugorje had suffered some incidental blunt trauma to the head somewhere along the way.

My point--and I insist that I have one--is that with all of this special effects-laden doomsaying about secrets, damnation, and unimaginable suffering, it is, ergo, pretty easy for a random wolf-eyed priest to convince your average clip-on tied schoolboy to join him under his tented robe--or else God might send him down into that New York apartment-sized hell with all of those bad actors shrieking, "Help me!" and twisting their faces into unspeakable shapes. Truth be told, the Catholic Church has done an awful lot for the child molestation industry. It has not only supplied a mechanism of persuasion (i.e., supernatural retaliation), but also a complex and secretive bureaucracy to shuffle priests around when the heat gets wind of the game. One hears tell that there are ultra-private California [e]rectories where black-thong-wearing priests, bishops, and tap dance instructors lounge around a pool whilst being served tropical drinks out of chalices by altar boys. Priests are moved to these locations when they've tapped out their parish's stock of youthful tail.