![]() ![]() Therefore, I hoped that I could find a strong and compassionate priest willing to guide me back towards sanity and God. Sadly, I could not immediately overcome that deep inner yearning for masculine affirmation. ![]() The collective pain within us was so great that we’d risk anything – even death. Sadly, I only come across other men who grew up similarly alienated from their fathers, brothers, and male peers. I was painfully shy and nearly friendless, yet most of all I longed to find a man I could look up to and admire. I understood that I would be at risk of contracting an incurable disease, but I couldn’t be alone one more day. Then, in my mind, a parish priest proved it to me.Īfter graduating from high-school, when I traveled to San Francisco, I thought I was fulfilling my God-given destiny. Almost since middle-school, I’d been told by priests that God truly loved me – but He also made me gay. In a sense, I was still that hurt and lonely teenage boy who walked away from the Church when he was sixteen years old. Even though I hadn’t even thought of the Catholic Church for many years – I knew I needed a priest. But my parents could not ease the psychological and spiritual torment I was experiencing. They provided me with a place to sleep and to heal I felt safe. Like the prodigal son from the Bible, I crawled back home and was welcomed by my long-suffering parents. In 1999 I was alive I had somehow survived over 10 years in the gay male community of San Francisco although countless men were dying around me, I lived through some of the worst years of the AIDS crisis. “There is nothing so strong as gentleness and there is nothing so gentle as real strength.” – Saint Francis de Sales Above: “La Messa al Campo” By Emilio Rizzi (1938).
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