UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
On the day that news broke of the pope’s meeting with Kim Davis, I was finishing Mary Dispenza’s painful, liberating account of her struggle to come to terms with her sexual abuse by a priest as a little girl, followed by her struggle to come to terms with her gay sexual orientation as an adult — and, in both cases, her narrative centers on her difficult attempt to deal with the callousness and cruelty of Catholic “pastoral” leaders as she struggled along. And so Mary Dispenza’s story now blends together in my mind with the revelation that, while refusing to meet with a single LGBT Catholic on his recent tour of “mercy” in the U.S., Pope Francis met with Kim Davis. Of all people . . . .
I learned of Mary Dispenza’s memoir SPLIT: A Child, a Priest, and the Catholic Church (Bellevue, WA: Moon Day, 2014) at the SNAP conference two months ago, where the book was cited several times by presenters in sessions I attended. And then I came home and asked my library to obtain a copy for me via interlibrary loan — which resulted in the library’s notifying me that it wanted, instead, to buy a copy for the library.
What follows is not really a review of SPLIT. It’s more a set of disconnected booknotes.
What really grabbed my attention as I read Mary’s memoir was, of course, her painful attempt to deal with the reality that she is lesbian, in a church (which was her employer at the time) whose pastoral leaders commonly make life a living hell for LGBT human beings. I won’t deny that I found it difficult to read the first part of her memoir, recounting her repeated sexual abuse by Father George Neville Rucker when she was a little girl attending a Catholic school in East Los Angeles.
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