Father O'Fondle And Catholicism

This is the poem.

ELI, ELI

"It would be bad enough if I were the next-door neighbor. But this is like God doing it. Jesus doing it."

—"First Person: The Confession of Father X"

Father O'Fondle comes to town
Hoping that your pants are down
What's your sport, me lad, says he
Can you sit upon me knee
(I have sport enow for thee!)
Let me look upon your dangle
Try Confession from THIS angle
What I beat is not a drum
Who put the "cum" in "Vobiscum"?
(Which of you dare call me "scum"?)
Bishop, Bishop, though I'm lacking
I know you will send me packing
To another parish bright
Where I'm sure I'll do all right
I'll bring "God" to them and theirs
And they'll remember in their prayers
In the night when dreams are wet
They will see me smiling yet
Holding out God's helping hand  
There's a sweet and sacred band!
Till Hell turns to ice and freezes
You'll make Love to me--and Jesus
I'll apply the priestly arts
To your troubled private parts
Here, my lad, 's a welcome solace
Let me touch your throbbing phallus
Hear the Sacred Choir thrumming
As I prepare my Second Coming!
Father O'Fondle, troubled man
Needing love, and under ban
In such desire for the Son,
Would I have done as you have done?

And this is a letter I received about it:

Mr. Foley,

My name is Stephanie and I am a freshman at Mary Washington College in
Fredericksburg Virginia. I chose your poem "Eli, Eli" for an interpretative
reading/ critical interpretation for my Global Issues in Literature class this
semester and, after having trouble finding straight forward information on you
or your work, I decided to come straight to the source via your e-mail off of
www.alsopreview.com.
One can assume from your use of Latin and familiarity with the problem of
priest pedophilia in the Catholic Church that you yourself are, or at one time
were, Catholic. Do you still subscribe to the Catholic faith? And if you left
Catholicism, on what terms? Would you characterize "Eli, Eli" as a criticism of
the Catholic religion as a whole or the priests that commit pedophilia? My
assignment is due tomorrow, but I'd love your responses to these questions for
my own benefit.

_____

Dear Stephanie,
Thank you for your interest.
I'd be quite interested to see your paper about my poem.
Did you come upon "Eli, Eli" through Ishmael Reed's anthology, From Totems to Hip-Hop?
Send me your address and I'll be glad to snail mail you a short autobiography I wrote
for Gale Research a few years ago.
As for your questions: I did indeed have a Roman Catholic childhood. Not only that:
I am also half Irish (Foley is an Irish name) and half Italian. I deliberately made
Father O'Fondle an Irish priest. Priestly pedophilia is, unfortunately, very often a
problem of specifically Irish priests. I drifted away from (rather than "left") the
Catholic church many, many years ago. (I am 63 years old.) The reasons were many, but
one of them was certainly my inability to believe in "God" as anything other than an
extraordinary fiction. There are many things about Catholicism I admire and still love
—but I don't believe in the central issue. A close friend of mine regards himself
as Catholic despite this difficulty. His motto is, "There is no God, and Mary is his
mother." I realize that this sounds like a joke, but it isn't really. That friend and
some others have claimed that, despite my disbelief, I am a "Catholic" writer--which
is of course possible. I asked my friend whether I should send "Eli, Eli" to
The New Yorker, where he has published; he said, "They wouldn't touch that
poem with a ten-foot pole!" I sometimes say that I am an "ex" Catholic--but I mean "ex"
as a pun: "ex" as in "ex husband," but also "ex" as in "ex cathedra," which, as you
may know, means "from the chair." (A "cathedral" is a place which has a "cathedra"
in it.) I am writing "from" the point of view of Catholicism ("ex Catholicism"),
though I am also writing from a point of view which is "ex" Catholicism--outside
of it, beyond it.
"Eli, Eli" is about priestly pedophilia, as you say, but there is a moment in the
poem when I mean it to move outward, though only slightly, into issues about the
Church as a whole:

Father O'Fondle, troubled man
Needing love, and under ban
In such desire for the Son....

What is one to make of a religion which has as its central object of worship a
nearly naked man (a "son") who is suffering terribly on the cross? Mightn't the
"sons" who come to Father O'Fondle for absolution remind him of the "son" whom he
is supposed to adore? Indeed, what does it mean to "adore" a naked, handsome man?
You may be aware of the Catholic Church's idea that all souls (both male and female)
are to be understood as "female" in relation to Jesus. Jesus is the only cock of
the walk. (This stipulation that all souls are "female" gets the Church out of the
problem of Jesus singing the highly erotic Song of Songs--which is supposedly His
love song to the Church--to a man or to men.) What might such conceptions mean for
a person's sexuality?
I don't think that priestly abstinence or celibacy is necessarily a cause of pedophilia.
Pedophilia occurs in people who marry and have children. I do think, though, that
people who are already having problems with their sexuality are likely to be attracted
to the idea of celibacy, which they mistakenly believe will present a "solution" to
their problem: no sex (celibacy), no problem. As I suggest above, I also think that,
in some sense, a kind of homoeroticism is built into the mythos of the Catholic Church.
I often perform my poetry, and I have performed "Eli, Eli" on a number of occasions.
People usually laugh at lines like "Who put the cum in vobiscum?"--and their laughter
is an indication that they believe they are in control, that they "understand" the poem.
It is, for them, relaxing and ego-affirming. But by the time I say, "Let me touch your
throbbing phallus" (with its somewhat odd and so unexpected rhyme for "solace"), they
are a little uneasy, a little thrown off. The poem suddenly becomes edgy, problematical.
I am looking directly at them, and I am saying, "Let me touch your throbbing phallus."
(The designation of the phallus as "throbbing" means that it must be erect.) Does Father
O'Fondle offer a kind of "solace" to the intense problems of adolescent males, who--
like Jesus--are "suffering"? It is at that moment, I think, that Father O'Fondle is at
his realest in the poem. I am speaking the poem, and I am Jack the author: but at that
moment I am transformed; I am, momentarily, Father O'Fondle. For a second or so, the
pedophile priest stands before the audience in all his ambiguity.

Of course the poem condemns him--but it does not condemn him in terms that suggest my
own moral superiority. In that situation (who is to say?) mightn't I have done the same
as he? Aren't we all sinners, after all?

Father O'Fondle, troubled man
Needing love, and under ban
In such desire for the Son
Would I have done as you have done?

It's already "tomorrow" where you are. Good luck with your paper!

______

Dear Stephanie,

You ask whether I ever considered changing religions.
No.
I was always very fond of James Joyce's response to the question about having lost
his faith. He had indeed lost his faith. He was then asked whether he had become,
instead of a Catholic, a Protestant. His answer (it's in his novel, A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man) was, "Why should I give up an absurdity which is logical
and coherent for an absurdity which is illogical and incoherent?" If I were to take
up any religion, it would be Catholicism--for me, "an absurdity which is logical and
coherent." When my son Sean was attending an Episcopal school, the headmaster bragged
to me about how ecumenical his parish and school was. "All manner of creeds have been
preached from this pulpit," he said proudly. I asked him whether atheism had been
preached from that pulpit. He said, "No."
In Port Chester, where I grew up, pretty much everybody was aligned with one sort of
religion or another. There were no "freethinkers" or "agnostics" or whatever. In that
context, it made sense to ask someone what his or her religion was: everyone "had" a
religion. But when I moved away into the university context--or even in New York City
--I discovered that most people "had" no particular religion. They may have been
"brought up" in a particular religion--but they didn't currently "have" one. You
asked people lots of questions about themselves, about their parents, about their
lives--and you might even ask about whether they "believed" in God. But no one seemed
to have a church to which they belonged or a religious practice. Very different from
Port Chester! And besides, I was interested in art, not religion. For some people, art
is displaced religion. For me, I suspect, religion was displaced art.
Having said this, however, I should add that I retained an interest in the intense
mystical experiences that many have had within the framework of the Church. I didn't
wish to deny that experience--which was, in fact, undeniable. However: might their
INTERPRETATION of the experience--that it was a gift from God, a merging with God--be
inaccurate? What would happen if you removed God from the explanation and tried to explain
it in other ways? How far could you get? This question has occupied me considerably at
different times of my life. What happens if you remove the idea of God from explanations
of behavior and events? Many things believed by people--including people who think they
don't believe in God--imply the idea of God. What happens if you try to reformulate such
ideas? What happens if you begin with the assumption that God is a pure fiction?
You see, when I discovered that one didn't HAVE to "have" a religion--when I discovered
that most of the people one knew DIDN'T have one--I felt that a great burden had been
lifted from me. You didn't have to make that particular life choice: hooray! I had never
much believed in God--and if that belief (that "fiction") isn't there, the whole edifice
more or less crumbles, though it remains a historical/psychological complex of considerable
interest. Do you know Saint Paul's definition of "faith" (Hebrews 11:1): "Faith is the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Even in English, it's a
wonderful formulation. "Substance" means things, objects, entities one can grasp: this
"substance" is merely "hoped for"--not there. "Evidence" is from Latin and has videre,
to see, in its root. But this "evidence" (something seen) is "not seen." Isn't that a
marvelous definition of fiction--and of the act of fictionalizing? Isn't fiction full of
"things hoped for," "things not seen"? Does "faith" turn out to be the activity of making
fictions? On that level, I can certainly accept it. And the biggest fiction of all would
be God.
End of sermon.
Your "ex" Catholic friend,
Jack