Holy Oak Park! Church-goers in 2004. Evangelical gay-bashing? New Catholic pastor and the swearing-in. Pro-life upheld? Not? If you’re Irish and you’re Catholic, then what?

“Born-again bigot,” shouted the voice from the rear of Calvary Memorial Church on a Sunday in late September, 2004, during a sermon about gays and the Bible. The man stood next to TV cameras, which had lit him up. He was hustled out. This was in the morning, when the pastor, Ray Pritchard, was preaching.

But Pritchard was comparing himself, not gays, to mass-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer and other sinners. His best lines, to judge by audience response, was when he consigned himself and the entire congregation to the ranks of the worst sinners that ever lived.

“Preach, preach,” called out a listener, not when Pritchard said gays were going to hell (he didn’t) but when he said he was going there if he did not hurl himself on the mercy of Jesus. “Over the door to heaven is written ‘For sinners only,’” he said, and the place exploded. The bigotry seemed missing.

It was boiler-plate evangelical Christian talk, to be sure. The 6 p.m. guest preacher, evangelist Stephen Bennett, produced more of the same, presenting himself as a wretch saved by amazing grace.

He had led the “gay bar life” after succumbing to drink and sex as a 17-year-old Pratt Institute freshman, eventually acquiring more than 100 sex partners in eleven years, he told the Calvary audience. Once he was pummeled “by thugs” as a gay in heavily gay Provincetown, Massachusetts. Drug-addicted, alcoholic, bulimic, he got rehabilitated, turned to an “unsafe” church for two and a half years, and for three years partnered with “the man of [his] dreams.”

Then he met Cathy, who gave him a Bible and prayed for him and got her friend Irene, whom he later married, also to pray for him. He told Cathy he’d been born gay. She said nuts to that. (He chalked it up later to an emotionally distant and abusive father, with whom he became reconciled.) He took to Bible reading, bought the message, and in January, 1992, at 28, was “born again” (the first in his family) and gay no more.

He’s no mean troubadour. At Calvary he sang, “Let me show you Jesus, and I’ll show you life” and got the audience clapping along. He’s accused of hating gays, but his first reference to hating anyone was to call anti-gay preacher Fred Phelps “evil” for saying, “God hates fags,” which he called, unsurprisingly, “not a Christian message.”

His second reference was to talk-show host Bill O’Reilly, who in a toe-to-toe on-air meeting two years ago looked him in the eye and said, “You hate gays.” It was “like looking at the devil,” Bennett said.

O’Reilly is not alone in the opinion. Demonstrators offended by his claims of sin and repentance consider him “particularly dangerous,” according to a member of the Chicago Anti-Bashing Network. [A few months later renamed Gay Liberation Network] They “sent a clear message” that “hatred against any group needs to be opposed,” said another.

“I get it all the time,” said Bennett, who was flanked at some distance by two men in black who surveyed the audience. It’s from people who “hate the God of the Bible.” He was “not scared.”

For one who hates gays, he was in poor form at Calvary, however. Asked by an audience member to pray for the demonstrators, he asked God to “invade their stony hearts with love” - which as condemnations go is pretty weak.

A month later, another church, another matter . . .

A swearing in... The installation of the new St. Edmund’s pastor was a thing of beauty and a joy for all concerned. The local bishop preached, reading at length from a recent statement in which the Pope emphasized holiness — which came as no surprise to many but was still O.K. to say.

After everyone recited the Creed, the new pastor recited a special pledge of his own, about which more later. Then in a sort of welcoming ceremony, the parish’s non-priest staff and parish pastoral council members came one after the other to deliver brief hugs. One woman planted a motherly kiss on his cheek. Ushers brought empty collection baskets as part of the ceremony — to be filled later, noted the bishop, ad- libbing nicely.

The people were asked to accept Father John as pastor: “We will,” they said. All raised hands in blessing him, then applauded, and church bells rang. The baskets were passed and filled as the song leader led. She looked out at the congregation, of course, as did the priests. There were two others besides Father John and the bishop. Indeed, Father John at one point, apparently catching the eye of a friend, grinned briefly, then caught himself.

Mass over, he thanked everyone. In his four months as pastor, he had found the church “beautiful,” ditto the people, he said. He noted that his mother and the bishop’s mother, members of the same Evergreen Park parish, know each other and chat now and then, turning and admonishing the bishop, “So let’s both be careful.”

He had earlier been careful to say the new-pastor’s pledge of allegiance, which included his intention to go along with what bishops say as a group even when they are not pronouncing doctrine. “Religious submission of will and intellect” is what he promised.

A swearing off... Meanwhile, at Ascension Church a mile away, the pastor was rejecting U.S. bishops’ instructions to make pro-life issues a voter’s prime concern -- something the bishops had done by classing abortion and euthanasia as “preeminent threats to human life and dignity.”

Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George had put his own oar in, calling “the defense of every human life . . . not just one of a laundry list of moral concerns” but “key to pursuing the common good.”

He had said he refrains from refusing communion to pro-choice politicos “primarily because . . . it would turn the reception of Holy Communion into a circus.”

This pastor, on the other hand, rejected “one issue” voting and called heretical those bishops — he didn’t name them — who say it’s a sin not only to be but also to vote for pro-choice candidates. He also impugned bishops’ authority in general because they “looked the other way while some . . . priests hurt so many little children.”

It was courage and integrity on display, said a local newspaper, though in today’s climate it’s doubtful much will come of it. Won’t it be something, on the other hand, when a pastor at his installation refuses to make his promise of “religious submission” in the first place?

How to vote... As for Ascension parishioners, some had been instructed in voting their consciences by a Loop lawyer at a mid-October Adult Formation meeting - which unfortunately was a version of asking a Chevy or Toyota dealer what car to buy.

The lawyer was to provide “a well formed and informed Catholic perspective,” according to the parish bulletin, but he already had given $3,000 to the Kerry campaign; and his wife had given another $4,000, which made them Oak Park’s family with the mostest for the (pro-choice) man from Massachusetts. The lawyer was also finance chairman for state’s attorney Dick Devine, a Democrat.

This with other evidence too extensive to mention has led me to compose the following lyric, sung to the popular pre-K tune, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands”:

If you’re Irish and you’re Catholic, you’re a Dem,

If you’re Irish and you’re Catholic, you’re a Dem,

If you’re Irish and you’re Catholic, then you sure as heaven know it,

And no bishop has to tell you how to vote.

Amen!

Shock on avenue... St. Edmund parish can’t do that, can it? Put up a big sign saying it supports life, as it does for Pro-Life month? In Oak Park? Peace, OK. We get that. But life? Tacky.

Walking to pipes... Meanwhile, Oak Park’s illegal Latin-mass church, Our Lady Immaculate, at Ridgeland and Washington, had an old-fashioned Corpus Christi (Body of Christ) procession on the third-last day of May, 2005. Some 200 of us walked slowly down Ridgeland to the mournful strains of Emerald Society (Chicago Police Department) bagpipes, stopping a block away in a school doorway for Benediction. There we knelt, and after hymns - “O salutaris” and “Tantum ergo” - the priest raised the host in a gold table-lamp-size container called a “monstrance,” making the sign of the cross.

Halfway down Elmwood on the return route, the pipers broke into “The Wearin’ of the Green” -- “O Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that going round?/ The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground” — thus tapping chauvinism as well as piety. Another benediction at the church’s rear door on Washington, and we were back in the church.

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— more to come from A Short History of Oak Park, Volume 1, 2004-2005 —