MEN'S ACTS RETREAT!

More on St. Patrick Cathedrals enduring fascination with Dr. John Pilch.

Excerpt from: Day of the Ly'in Hos, the University of Texas at El Paso Story.
Copyright: 2005
First Refusal Rights: Simon and Schuster, New York, New York

"I guess you can say there really is something to the old saw of being able to cook yourself up a boiled frog or two by heating the water in your sauce pan gradually until the frog (or frogs) are well cooked. Because if you turn up the heat all at once, they're out of there. Pronto.

"For example, by Thursday, January 19th, 2006, I knew the Diocesan-mandated textbooks hand picked and heavily subsidized by a fine old gentleman old enough to be my father but who had lost what few marbles he'd ever claimed as his own long ago were really bad.

"By 10:10 a.m. that same morning I had long since excused myself from the first class day at the Cathedral Bible Studies group because it was clear that our two teachers were grimly committed to a dead end road. One, because of her blind obedience to Father Rick Mattey, the other for no better reason then that she had long since arrived at that happy point in life where she was content to spend half of her time over medicated and the rest acting like it.

"Like their male counterpart who was bank-rolling all of this, old enough to be my father, either one of these good ladies could have been my own mother, for all I'm around the big six zero myself.

"Anyway, let's take alook at this Doctor Pilch's take on Jesus and John the Baptist. Anyone who wanted to see just what Pilch was really saying about their relationship as master shaman, or holy man, and apprentice shaman, or witch doctor (comma) holy man could find out easily.

"English speakers, me, for example, could read something along these lines as treated by a real-deal anthropologist in J. Lorand Matory's Sexual Secrets, Candomblé, Brazil, and the Multiple Intimacies of the African Diaspora.

"As Matory puts it in his first paragraph, page 157 of editor Andrew Syryock's 2004 masterpiece, Off Stage On Display, Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture, Stanford University Press:

[There is an] apparent irony that some very famous [pagan] priests have been men and, for many international opinion makers, the scandal that many of them appear to have been 'passive homosexuals.'

"Then on page 158, the author elaborates more on the public's perception of this Possession Priesthood business:

As a Brazilian colleague pointed out to me, there might be no more homosexual men in the Candomblé priesthood than in the Roman Catholic priesthood, the psychiatric profession, or even the general population.

Yet numerous nonhomosexual priests have told me that they or their families struggled against their calling for fear that, once it became common knowledge that they had been possessed by Candomblé gods, other people would assume they were homosexuals.

"Further down, near the bottom of page 175 Matory puts this even more explicitly:

Indeed, the term of 'possession priest' (elégun) means 'the mounted one.' The term refers to what a 'rider does to a horse.'

"What this all added up to, in my own point of view, at least, was that either a) Father Rick Mattey was totally out of his depth in the so-called Bible Studies Classes going on under his very nose, or b) that he did indeed know what Dr. John Pilch had on his mind when describing Saint John the Baptist's relationship to Jesus Christ in roughly similar terms of a 'Possession Priesthood.'

"Predictably enough, any attempts to bring this up in class led to immediate counter attacks agianst me personally by the two(2) co-teachers. These ladies were by then totally committed to the so-called Dr. John Pilch Fifth Gospel and would tolerate no dissent. Period.

"Indeed, their reaction was identical to that of the Reverend Father Paul Tague's henchmen, Messers "Fico" Añoveros and his cuñado Juan Marquez, when the then two militant homosexuals-in-residence at the misamed Jesus and Mary Chapel located at Yandell and Mundey were called out by yours truly on their Maplethrope-style art exhibit.

"Brother Gabriel had placed a beautiful picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe in an open to all toilet facing the toilet itself on the first floor, then had gone on to place a picture of the Last Supper facing the religious mens' toilet on the second floor.

"Even the nationally syndicated latina columnist Maria Elena Salinas admitted in an email to me she had never heard of this supposedly authentic Mexican cultural custom, but when we brought it up in a small class with two male minors, and the question was asked:

What would you do if you walked into a public toilet and saw that a picture of your mother was hanging there?

"Father Paul Tague's two designated watch dogs were ready. Knowing his job was to stifle any such debate, and before the younger men could answer, Mr. Añoveros jumped in ahead of his cuñado, Mr. Marquez:

I'd say hello, mom!

"A whimsical component to all this, of course, was that when the top man in the Society of St. Pius X, Father Francis Schmidberger, came by to stay on premises at Jesus and Mary Chapel in El Paso himself for several days, he observed all this and had no comment, either...

"Like one famous writer put it, the devil works best in this 'ole world when he works in pairs. Father Rick Mattey's militantly gay agenda with elements of his Mens ACTS Retreat movement, plus his parish's rigid adherence to the Fifth Gospel of Dr. John Pilch, when combined with the Society of St. Pius X's equally militant Gay Agenda here in El Paso at Jesus and Mary Chapel, together make for a textbook example.

"Damn! say I:

Who could pick a more fascinating era historically in which to live, and work and above all, to fight the good fight?

"And so far as the outting of both Father Rick Mattey and UTEP's Professor Richard Gutierrez goes and that of their hardcorps homosexual click within the Mens ACTS Retreat movement?

"So much iceing on the cake, ¡Nomás!"