Bishop Mario Grech attracted headlines recently when he told an audience of Gozitan priests that the confessional should not be a torture chamber. The bishop got that image directly from the recent ‘apostolic exhortation’ by Pope Francis, of course, but did the Pope get it from anyone else?
I suspect he did. The statement “God is not a torturer” famously comes from that great psychological thriller by Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (1936). Bernanos isn’t mentioned much these days but his book, rated one of the best 20th century French novels, had a huge impact on young literate men entering the priesthood in the middle of the last century, in part because the film based on it (by Robert Bresson, 1951) is considered monumental in its own right.
Martin Scorsese credits it as a guiding influence on his own great thriller about alienation, Taxi Driver, while the statement about God is his favourite line from the film.
The connection is not just a matter of wording. One of the climactic scenes in Diary is the confession that the young, naïve priest hears from a dying countess. He helps her die in a state of grace but the rumour spreads that she died because his words had tormented her.
The novel itself has been described as an act of prayer. Not one of those fake prayers, said aloud, where someone pretends to be addressing God while really trying to be inspirational to anyone who’s listening. It’s not prayer as propaganda or advertorial.
If it’s prayer at all, then it’s prayer as struggle, where one argues with God and feels oneself being painfully changed in the process.
The entire plot takes place in a stormy demitasse of a French village, where the pettiness of evil has ravaging consequences for reputations and personality. The priest, dying of cancer and struggling against the faithlessness around him, comes to doubt his own convictions.
He comes to see that it is in the wreckage of his life that his faith grows. Not despite his agony but because of it
However, he comes to see that it is in the wreckage of his life that his faith grows. Not despite his agony but because of it. At one point he says that every Christian encounters Christ and finds his vocation in the Gospel scene with which he most identifies. Our priest identifies with Christ’s agony in the garden. His personal agony brings him to understand everything in a new light – ‘all is grace’.
Why go into all this? Because it helps us avoid a glib interpretation of the consequences of Francis’s grave exhortation to experience the joy of love in families.
One way of characterising that glib interpretation is this: all that’s needed, in facing up to the challenges of contemporary family life is for the Church is to ‘show mercy’, to show ‘patient realism’ (meaning waiting for the moment when the ‘wounded person’ before you asks for a hug), and know that you – the priest, the Christian friend – must be prepared to ‘accompany’ them on ‘their journey’. It’s all about union, you see, and coming together, massaging the pain.
What Bernanos shows should make us doubt such sweet complacency.
A real encounter of the kind that Francis is urging will shake certainties. It’s not about taking the good news to others but rehearing it with them. It may be the priest who needs to ask for mercy, the parent whose ‘realism’ is turned upside down, our own wounds that are revealed.
A good idea of what that’s like in Malta is given by the Drachma Parents’ Group (the association of Christian parents whose children are ‘gay’, in the widest sense of LGBTIQ), in their May publication, Uliedna Rigal (Our Children are a Gift).
Ostensibly, it’s a manual based on 50 FAQs for parents who have just discovered that they have a child who is gay. It takes them through the process of the child’s coming out, to disclosing the news to family and friends, to settling what science says about sexuality, to how to find coherence between what you know about your child and what the Catholic catechism says.
Beneath the calm surface of unflappable question and answer, however, we also get a glimpse of rougher undercurrents.
The book is dedicated to ‘all parents who lost one of their LGBTIQ children through suicide’. Meanwhile, the luckier parents give some of their experiences, none of which quite lives up to expectations.
It’s not just learning that your child is gay. It’s also about how. Is it from someone else or in a long letter in which your son describes what he has been through over the last four years (without you noticing)?
What about the son who, in the face of your nervousness about his future, tries to cheer you up by saying, not to worry, he’s stronger from all the bullying he’s had on the school bus since he was 13 (including from the teacher)?
And what do you do if you find out that not one but two of your children are gay? Do you decide that you must have therefore had nothing to do with it? Or that mishandling the first case led to the second? Could it have had to do with the marital separation?
Every intelligent parent is gnawed by doubt and guilt. It’s not just what they thought they knew about their children that’s called into question. It’s what they thought they knew about themselves, about what kind of parent they thought they were managing to be.
What’s shaken is not just family memory and one’s sense of the past. It’s also the future. What lies in wait for the children? The line between parental firmness and indulgence is already tricky enough to draw with ‘straight’ children. What’s the right kind of love and understanding to show your gay children?
How prudent is it to tell others? It’s not just gay children who are judged. It’s their parents, too. I am struck by the number of couples whose marriage needed counselling after the bombshell, although sometimes the result is a stronger family, even a livelier one than before, as though the truth had set it free.
It may be tempting to blame ‘traditional prejudice’ and religion but even here the booklet shows that goodness and evil are where you least expect them.
There is the TV psychologist who recommended an exorcism by a pastor.
There is the grandmother who, being told by her daughter that her grandson was gay, declares with conviction: “This is the boy we have always loved.” It turned out to be her spiritual legacy, as she died two weeks later.
On the catechism itself, the booklet is officially agnostic while recommending books that show that the scriptural verses against homosexuality need to be understood afresh.
But, in a way, the biblical verses ostensibly about homosexuality are here seen to be beside the point. The parents come from different kinds of Catholic backgrounds, not just in terms of commitment but also in terms of religious style. What comes across strongly, however, is how their children helped them reread the Gospel with new eyes and ears.
Bernanos’s priest identified with Christ’s agony in the garden. These parents explicitly identify with Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan, when Luke (3: 21-22) recounts a voice speaking from the heavens: “You are my son, in whom I am well pleased.”
It is a hard-won recognition. It is not a liberal updating of traditional religion because it’s a discovery that what they were taught was truthful all along but not quite what they thought it was. Without loving their children they were as good as dead but to love them they had to find new life.
It’s a lesson for the whole Church in Malta. It’s a difficult journey ahead. Nothing is as alienating as love. Its journeys are without maps, on roads with strange lighting, to a place where we have to check in our egos at the door.