Let the gossip-mongering stop now

Having bandied about the name of Jim Corcoran in this column, I will do so again to congratulate and thank him for dropping his human rights complaint against 12 of his fellow parishioners in Cobourg, Ont., and Peterborough Bishop Nicola De Angelis.

The danger that 12 people are going to be fined $20,000 each for writing a letter to their bishop has passed. We can all go back to sending Sunday afternoon hissy fits about our parishes to diocesan offices with impunity. Even better, we are spared the humiliation of seeing the state rob a Roman Catholic bishop of $25,000 for doing his job and force him to preach, as Mr. Corcoran had on his wish list, a homily against gossip. Heaven knows, we’ve heard that stupid story about the pillow often enough.

Oh, come on. You know the stupid story about the pillow. A woman (it’s always a woman) passes on some gossip about a neighbour, feels bad and goes to confession to Fr. Irish Surname. Fr. Irish Surname tells the woman to take a pillow, climb up a roof,  slice open the pillow and report back. The woman slices open the pillow and, unlike most pillows these days, it’s full of feathers, and the feathers blow to the four corners of the Earth. Considering that we’re not allowed to throw rice outside churches after weddings any more, such clerical admonitions to litter the neighbourhood seem a bit hypocritical. But, anyway, the woman goes back to the priest to report, and he says that’s what gossip is like, yadda yadda, and the woman says, “Couldn’t you have just given me two Hail Marys and an Our Father? I’m so going to Fr. Mario next time.”

Okay, I made that last bit up. But, seriously, we can’t have the pillow story any more. Its day is done. It features in the film Doubt; when the child-seducing priest wants to shut up the nuns who are beginning to suspect he is seducing a child, he tells the pillow story, fake Irish accent and all. And this should remind us that sometimes gossip is not nasty tittle-tattle but, as some feminist theorists have pointed out, a safe way for relatively powerless people to exchange information about powerful wrong-doers. How we wish certain bishops had not dismissed certain other complaints about certain other men as “gossip.”

That said, it is not nice for people to libel their neighbours, which I say here freely and without a court order. It is particularly not nice for Catholics to tittle-tattle about the sexual or ideological purity of other Catholics. Okay, Mr. Corcoran did refer to his housemate as his “partner,” so his fellow parishioners can be excused for thinking that he meant “partner” in the way other people mean “partner” these days, which is to say, “person with whom I’m in a committed sexual relationship.” But many Catholic men, for whatever reasons, have male housemates, and many Catholic women, for whatever reasons, have female housemates, and it is much more charitable to assume that they are friends than that they are sexual rebels of some sort.

Single people living chaste lives have enough suffering without people pointing and wondering if their long bachelorhood is evidence that they are gay. And some of them no doubt are gay. Which is nobody’s business but their own. To divide up the world primarily by sexual orientation is to be seduced into one of the ideological aspects of gay culture, and surely, that is not something of which an orthodox finger-pointer would like to be accused.

Accusations of other kinds of heterodoxy also hurt innocent people. When I was a teenage pro-life activist, one of my fellow teen activists made a sly remark about Catholic couples with small families. One of the boys around, usually a very placid, cheerful boy, took this as an insult to his parents’ commitment to Catholic orthodoxy, as it very well may have been.

“Not everyone can have children easily, you know,” he snarled.

This conversation might have bewildered the Protestants, but we Humanae Vitae-loving young Catholics all understood why the boy had risen so angrily to his parents’ defence.

And I have heard the question again in adult life about other couples: “If they’re such great Catholics, why don’t they have any children?”

This question, which once merely annoyed me, now drives me wild. My mother, my sister-in-law and a bevy of my Catholic friends all got pregnant within a year of getting married; I didn’t. This is not surprising, since I got married at the ripe old age of 38. But if I don’t manage to have a baby, I will be sad, and if someone suggests it’s because I wasn’t such a great Catholic, I will go berserk.

So there you have it: a treatise about gossip, one that does not single out women, as the pillow story always does. It should be balanced with remarks about prudence, but prudence deserves a column of its own.