Betrayed But Still Faithful

 

Dianne Williamson, Worcester Telegram and Gazette

10/6/05

Richard J. Doyle sat alone in a rear pew Saturday at St. Paul Cathedral, the church to which his family has pledged their devotion for almost a century, and listened silently as the rector delivered an impassioned sermon against same-sex marriage. Later, he walked wordlessly past the table outside the vestibule, where parishioners were being urged to sign petitions to rescind the civil right of gay couples.

Mr. Doyle is a 46-year-old registered nurse who was forced to abandon his career when a debilitating illness made it difficult to minister to patients. Now he’s a high school teacher, a job he loves because he makes kids question and think. In June of 2004 he married his partner of 14 years, Clark “Chuck” Burritt, an architect for the city of Worcester They wed modestly at City Hall, just the two of them and the city clerk, and later celebrated their union with dinner at the Emerald Isle because Chuck likes the seafood chowder there.

Mr. Doyle left Mass Saturday with a heavy heart. He thought about his late grandfather, an Irish immigrant and a captain in the Worcester Fire Department, who was denied appointment as district chief because of the anti-Irish prejudice that was so rampant in the 1940s. He remembered his grandfather’s crucifix, the one bought by the men under his command when he retired.

“Life can take many things away from you, but you will always have your church and your faith,” his grandfather said then. “No one will ever take it from you.”

Mr. Doyle is a deeply religious man, and he always believed his grandfather. When he returned from Mass, though, he sat down and wrote a brief letter to the Rev. Richard Reidy, regretfully asking that he be removed as a registered member of the parish he had called home his whole life.

“I was really very numb,” Mr. Doyle said this week. “It was almost like the shock and disbelief you feel when someone dies, because the image of the church I loved was dying before my eyes. It was like watching a sinking ship, and you could do nothing. I watched people being encouraged to turn against me, one by one, and I had a small glimpse of what it must have been like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany, with neighbor turning against neighbor.”

As the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church spearheads an effort to write discrimination into the state constitution, Richard Doyle and other devout gay parishioners reluctantly conclude that their church no longer bears any resemblance to a place of acceptance and love. Rather, it has become an institution so blinded and weakened by its own bigotry that it can no longer recognize its need for members such as Mr. Doyle and his partner.

“It’s so hard for me to understand how the church I was raised in can alienate a whole group of people who have been faithful all their lives,” said Kelley Southwick, a colleague of Mr. Doyle, who called her fellow teacher “one of the kindest and most intelligent” men she’s ever known. “Going to church means so much to Richard. And he and Chuck are so loving and caring and supportive of each other.”

What of this couple, then, that the church has dubbed “intrinsically disordered?” The men met 15 years ago in North Carolina, after Mr. Doyle moved from Worcester to Chapel Hill to stay with a brother. They set up house together, had good jobs and a wide network of friends. After three years, they decided to return to Worcester to care for Mr. Doyle’s aging mother.

“She called me one day and said, ‘I’m so lonesome, I don’t know if I can bear it anymore,’ ” Mr. Doyle recalled. “She said, ‘Won’t you please come home?’ So I talked to Chuck, and we decided to do it.”

In the spring of 1993, they moved into a family two-decker in Main South with Mr. Doyle’s mother and a sick aunt. They cared for the aunt until she died of cancer in 1994; when Mr. Doyle’s mother died of emphysema in 2000, her son and his partner were literally holding her hands.

By then Mr. Doyle was facing his own health crisis. In 1994 he was diagnosed with systemic lupus, an autoimmune disease that slowly turns against the body. The most common symptoms are extreme fatigue, painful joints, fever and kidney problems Today, Mr. Doyle endures pain so intense that his partner often helps him get dressed in the morning. But he still teaches foreign languages at Leicester High School, a job he’s held for more than a decade. He worked as a nurse for many years before that, but gave up the career because of his illness.

“Every day I’m allowed to function is God’s strength in my life,” he said. “I don’t look at what I don’t have — I look at what I have, and I’m grateful for it. I’m very fortunate I have Chuck to help me. What can you say about someone who completes your life?”

The state’s acceptance of same-sex marriage was a godsend. Not only did it solidify their relationship in the eyes of society, but also it enabled Mr. Doyle to have access to better and more affordable health care through his partner’s health insurer. Mr. Doyle takes 12 pills a day; without his partner’s coverage, he would have been forced to select only the medication he can’t function without, he said.

Nor can he function without his faith. He said he still plans to attend Mass each weekend, but the anti-gay rhetoric has become too strident at the bishop’s home church.

“It’s just this repetition that you aren’t worth anything, you’re useless, you don’t fit,” he said. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘We must allow you to exist, but not to lead a fulfilling life. You must be celibate and alone. Don’t ask to come to the table.’ ”

Mr. Doyle said he’s not trying to change minds by speaking out, but hopes to open a heart or two. He is untouched by the church’s depiction of his marriage because his relationship sustains him, just as the faith of his father continues to nourish his soul. He goes to church to thank God for the gifts he’s been given, he said — not to listen to the men trying to take them away.

“Only God knows what’s in the heart and soul of a man, and He’s the only one who will judge us,” Mr. Doyle said. “This has soured me to the hierarchy but not the tenets of the church. I still believe in God’s sacrament and his love. It’s my right to have this religion and they’re not going to drive me out. My religion doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to God.”

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