Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir by Scott Pomfret Page A

time the Lives of the Saints seriously crossed my mind thereafter was when a thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer explained how his fraudster client was the incarnation of Mother Teresa.
    Martyr from the Mothballs
    Archbishop O’Malley brought the martyr in me out of retirement. I vowed to be this holy homo, a progressive porn god, who would lead the faithful by the nose (or some other extremity) to a new openness to gays in their midst.
    To prepare myself, I cracked open the Lives . In honor of the Shrine, I flipped straight to Saint Anthony.
    Bingo! Saint Anthony had been a lector, just like me! At the feast of the Pentecost in 1221, Anthony preached before a great assembly of fellow Franciscans. He had no prior speaking experience, and he stumbled at first — no doubt on Sosthenes and Habbakuk. But then his voice filled with the Holy Spirit, and he wowed the assembled audience with his oral skills.
    As an itinerant preacher, Anthony attracted upward of 30,000 people at every sermon. He needed a bodyguard to protect him from fans armed with scissors who wanted to snip off a piece of his habit as a relic. He called on the rich and powerful and accused them of greed, tyranny, and luxurious living. When no one listened, he preached instead to the fish in the sea. (Ecclesiastical history doesn’t record whether the flounders repented.)
    Anthony was no martyr; he died of natural causes. When exhumed as part of the canonization process, his body had decomposed, except for his tongue, which remained healthy and whole. Anthony is the patron saint of lost and stolen items, sailors, travelers, and fishermen. (Do fish have ears?)
    Lost dignity, stolen lives, a traveler in an alien world — it was a perfect fit. A man whose sermons caused people to patch quarrels and brought mortal enemies together! It even turned out “Anthony” was the thirteenth-century equivalent of a screen name; his real name was Fernando. (Can you hear the drums?) Saint Anthony became patron of my own cause, and my fishing expedition started with Archbishop O’Malley.
The Stalker’s To-Do List
1. Buy dark glasses.
2. Find- someone who knows Cardinal Sean’s most embarrassing secret from middle school
3. Google.
4. Listen to Guy Noir episodes on Prairie Home Companion .
5. Consult Massachusetts antistalking statute.
6. Blurk* a conservative Catholic blog to figure out what makes the enemy tick.
7. Google more.
8. Take Fernando as a screen name.
9. Induce Father Myron to drop a dime on Cardinal Sean and give up the fruits of the confessional —- the masturbation and the temper tantrums, the moments of doubt , the regret over beating I up on the gays, the clandestine sticking of pins in a B16 doll he I borrowed from the case in the lobby at the Shrine.
10. Find Archbishop Sean’s calendar of public appearances.
11. Learn Archbishop Sean’s screen name.
12. Have a friar make a religious doll of Archbishop Sean with religiously correct undergarments into which I could stick pins.
13. Give Archbishop Sean a big wet leper’s kiss.
    Stalking the Archbishop
    “Quiz me!” I demanded. “Ask me anything.”
    Scott looked at me like I was crazy. “I don’t want to.”
    “Quiz me!”
    “I’m not going to quiz you about your archbishop,” he said. “I don’t want to encourage your craziness.”
    “QUIZ ME!”
    “Can’t we just commit the sin that cries out to heaven?”
    “No.”
    Scott sighed. “OK,” he said. “What’s his favorite color?”
    “Brown, of course! He’s a Franciscan. Ask me something else.”
    “Favorite movie?”
    “Diabolique . He’s not all about angels.”
    “When was he born?”
    “June 29, 1944. Too easy. Ask me something hard.”
    “How many altar boys has he diddled?” “Very funny. Zero — as far as I know.”
    “Does he have any idea that you exist?”
    I was stumped. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Does it matter? This is going to be like Roger and Me . I just want to get in his face and give him a