I stared at him, and he smiled at me. And even though I disagreed with everything he had said, or wanted to disagree with it, his overwhelming physical presence, and the undeniable and unassailable feeling that he was divine, and that, despite his denials, he was the Son of God, made his words penetrate to the core of my being, and the core of my faith. He spoke again.
I looked away and towards the crucifix hanging above the altar. It was a realistic depiction of Christ. Both the cross itself and Christ on top of it were carved out of wood from an olive tree. The nails could be seen through the hands and the ankles, and the look on Christ’s face was one of peace, calm, and serenity. A crown of thorns could be seen on his head, and his eyes were open. Christ himself was painted in what I would call a realistic manner, giving one the sense that it was a close representation of what the real Christ must have looked like during the Crucifixion. I had seen it a countless number of times, and had stood beneath it while celebrating mass for many years. I had prayed to it, asked it for advice, begged it for help, and sought it out in times of strife and sorrow. And while it was, to me, a representation of the Holy Trinity and the Catholic Church, I would be less than honest if I said that it held my attention the way the man next to me did, or if its presence had the same power his presence had. After two or three minutes, during which the only sound I heard was the two of us breathing, he put his hand on my thigh. I felt an immediate, and extremely powerful, rush, unlike anything I’d felt in my life, something that was in my blood, my bones, my heart, and my soul, something that literally took my breath away. And as I turned towards him, he stood and leaned over to me and gently kissed me on the cheek, holding his lips on my cheek. I closed my eyes, and I felt myself become erect, a sensation I was not entirely comfortable with and had always resisted with the fear that it would lead towards sin, but that felt wonderful, absolutely and stunningly wonderful. He held his lips against my cheek for a moment, and then ran them slowly towards my ear, where he whispered.
And he stood and he walked away.
Needless to say, I was stunned, and unable to move or think, and I stayed in the pew, in a heightened state, my heart pounding, my face burning, my skin tingling, and my penis erect, for a long time. When the physical sensations faded, I started thinking about what had happened, and felt a deep sense of conflict and confusion. While I had never felt so good before in my life, or felt love so powerfully, both physically and emotionally, everything I knew, and had been taught, and thought I believed, told me that what had just happened was wrong, terribly wrong, at best a sin and a transgression of my duties and responsibilities as a priest, and at worst blasphemy, heresy, and something that could result in my spending eternity burning in the fires of Hell. In my worship, I had never actually conceived, in a real way, what it might be like to stand in Christ’s presence, to hear his voice, to speak with him, and to have him touch me, to feel his love flowing through and affecting every cell in my body and every aspect of my soul. My thinking had always been abstracted, about what it would mean to meet Christ, but not what it would feel like to meet him. And while I could not reconcile all of his words and actions with those of the Savior, or what at the time I believed might be the words and actions of the Savior, the feelings I had felt when he spoke, and sat with me, and touched me, and kissed me, and was left with after his departure, felt very pure to me, and very true to what I now believe Christ must have made his believers feel. It was, more than anything, an overwhelming and very profound sense of love, innocent, unconditional, deep, and true. And it was after feeling it that, for the first time in my life, I truly knew what it meant to be close to God. Not the Catholic God, or the Jewish God, or the Muslim God, or any other God, but the true God. The God that is life, and the God that is love.
When I could, which was at least an hour later, and probably longer, I stood and left the church. I asked the deacon to handle my remaining responsibilities, and I went to my quarters in the rectory, where I kneeled before a small crucifix on my wall and tried to pray. I wanted to say a prayer of examination and contrition, which is something I said most evenings before I went to sleep, in which I examined my thoughts and actions and asked the Lord to make me a better person, and a better priest. As I stared at the crucifix, I kept thinking about what Ben had said, about the cross being nothing but a piece of dead wood, and I kept thinking of the feeling of his hand, and his lips, and the difference between what Ben made me feel and what the crucifix made me feel. I recited the traditional prayer of contrition, O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell; but most of all because they offend you, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of your grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life, amen, but I did not feel any better, or any different. I kept trying, and tried to put more spirit into the prayer, but nothing changed, so I started praying, and speaking, directly to the Almighty Father, telling him about the conflicts I was having, telling him about the potential sins I had committed, and begging for his forgiveness. Nothing changed, and if anything, the fact that prayer was not helping me made me think more about Ben and what he had made me feel.
Whenever I was in crisis, or felt lost or confused, or needed earthly guidance, I reached out to the man who had brought me to Christ, and to the church, a man I considered my father here on earth, who had loved me more than my biological father, and who had brought me to the Holy Father. He had excelled in the priesthood because of his devotion and piety, and had become an archbishop of the diocese in Michigan where I grew up. I felt like I needed him that day, and though Sunday is obviously a busy day for a Catholic bishop, and normally I would never expect him to take time from that day, God’s day, and a day when his diocese needed his leadership, I believed I truly required his counsel. It took two hours to get him on the phone, during which I only grew more confused and upset. When I heard his voice, and heard him tell me that he would always be there for me in my time of need, I felt better. I proceeded to tell him the entire story, from the moment I first saw Ben in the bathroom until the moment he left me sitting alone in the pew, and I included all my personal thoughts and emotions. When I finished, he told me that he was happy that I had reached out to him, and that my mortal soul was at great risk. The first issue he addressed was the church, and my feelings regarding some of its recent scandals. He said that while priests were human, and thus vulnerable to the same temptations as any human, the sexual abuse scandals were, in large part, a creation of the media, which was controlled by the Devil. He said that many of the allegations were invented as part of a smear campaign, and that the church protected the priests because they had done nothing except serve God, the church, and their parishes. He said that the campaign against the church was designed to destroy it, and was similar in conception to the Holocaust. And though the church did know of some transgressions, it had always handled them appropriately, and had done everything in its power to protect priests from unfounded accusations. He said he also believed that a large part of the campaign had to do with depleting the church’s wealth through frivolous lawsuits, and he believed that if something truly bad had been happening, God would have stopped it. God, he said, always looked after the interests of the one true universal church. God, he said, would not have allowed anything so perverted to exist within it. He reminded me that he believed God chose each of the priests who became ordained within the Roman Catholic Church, and that God did not make mistakes.
We moved from there to my specific experiences with Ben. He said he wholeheartedly believed that Ben was an agent of Satan, most likely a demon in human form, sent specifically to tempt me and destroy me. He told me that God obviously must have something greater in store for me if Satan was sending someone so powerful, and that I should continue with a strict prayer regimen, which would give me the strength that I needed to fight. He also said that if the situation got further out of control, the Vatican had a staff of approximately ten exorcists who worked exclusively in the United States. They could be called upon to confront the demon directly, and had the power to send him directly back to Hell. He directed me to alert the other priests in my parish to the demon’s presence, and said that all of us should keep holy water on our persons at all times, and that when the demon returned, we should splash him with it. I thanked him for his advice, and he told me he was proud of me, and that he was excited to see what the Holy Father had in store for me. I thanked him and said goodbye.
I spent the rest of the evening in prayer. I slept for a couple of hours and woke the next morning and resumed my duties and worked according to my normal schedule, celebrating mass, advising and comforting parishioners, and doing paperwork related to my church. Every free moment I had, I spent either reading the Bible or praying, hoping that God would respond to me in some way. I wanted, more than I had wanted anything in my life, to receive some sort of sign from the Holy Father, some sort of indication that all of the time I had spent on my knees and before the cross had not been wasted. Because of what I believed to be the gravity of the situation, I hoped to
