Father Stephens believed in the Catholic Church.
Everything about it.
And, he loved the Apostle Paul.
“For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my own flesh and blood…”
Romans chapter nine, verse three. Paul got it. Paul understood.
It was five o’clock. Thursday, a hot afternoon in mid July. The old Miami church he found himself sitting in had been built over a century ago, replacing an older, far more ancient building that had been erected in the early days of colonialism by the Spanish. It had that kind of almost-pastel Miami aesthetic to it, and the off-pink walls both in and outside the building had always reminded him of flamingos. It was hot in the confessional booth because Monsignor Rowling, the head pastor, had forbade them to turn on the air conditioning during the week. Like so many parishes he’d served in throughout his career, this church was also always strapped for cash and, as a result, an extravagant luxury like central air was reserved only for Sundays. In the church proper this was not so bad. You could open the windows and the tall 19th century ceiling meant most of the hot air collected far above your head but, in the tiny confessional… boy, it was brutal. Sweat was dripping from Father Stephens’ face and his own body odor was becoming more and more apparent to himself by the minute. He’d rolled his sleeves up to his elbows and his pants up to mid-shin to try and cool down but, the worst of it, the collar that seemed to be choking the life out of him under the oppressive heat…
The collar he would not remove.
Not while on duty.
Not while saving souls.
…
Father Stephens believed the Catholic Church.
Everything about it.
Not one for half-measures, Father Stephens was a relatively young man, just on the cusp of being properly “middle aged”, but, possessed of an old soul. Speaking to him, one got the sense that he was sort of out of place, as though he’d been meant for an earlier time but the angels delivering his soul to his body got mixed up and came too late. He looked, for example, ridiculous holding a cell phone, or even driving a car, but once, on retreat after seminary, he’d been taken on a horse ride… and he had looked downright iconic.
Hair whipping in the wind, legs firm in the stirrups, reigns gripped in one hand and a wide-brimmed hat in the other, he would not have been out of place landing on the beaches of Miami with the conquistadors, and he knew it. He kept a photo of himself on that horse in his office. The one and only self-portrait he had ever owned.
Father Stephens was a hard man, but oddly gentle. He had spent his whole life trying to balance the rough, demanding God of the Old Testament with the Loving, Turn-the-Other-Cheek God of the New. They were the same deity of course, and he knew that because the Catholic Church said so, but… even he had to admit quietly to himself that sometimes he didn’t always understand how. He just, he just... he never felt that he was getting right. Always, always, he felt he was being either too hard or too soft, constantly oscillating between extremes. One day he would wake up, convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt he was doomed to Hell, the next, convinced absolutely of God’s infinite mercy. He kept this bipolarity mostly centered on himself, accusing and forgiving his own soul in equal measure, but, in the past, it had occasionally spilled out onto his flocks, a defect for which he’d more than once been reprimanded.
That’s how he’d ended up here. In Maimi.
American Catholics… well, at least White American Catholics, they hated that sort of thing. Fire and brimstone, a priest actually worried about Hell… it just wasn’t popular anymore. The Puerto Ricans, the Cubans, they could still stomach that sort of behavior. They didn’t really like it, no. But they understood it. Little four foot - eight Puerto Rican grandmothers occasionally grabbed his arm after mass and thanked him for “speaking boldly” and “steering their children right.” That was nice. It was nice to be appreciated, even if only by little old women. After five years his Spanish was actually starting to get passable and sometimes he forgot that still, in his heart, he was a midwestern boy from Wichita, born to anabaptist parents, and that he was a deep-seated carrier of Anglo genes and sensibilities. He was Germanic…
A fact his confessor never let him forget it.
There was a theory you see that the entirety of The Reformation could be chalked up simply to Germanic autism. The flowery, ornate language and culture of The Italians and The Spanish and The Portuguese often used very precise and technical terms, sure… but natives of those cultures knew they were never meant to take anything too seriously. Mortal sin, indulgences, anathemas, prohibitions and all that, though any pronouncement of the Church might sound definitive and absolute on paper… in practice every good Mediterranean man knew that the actual infallible doctrine was whatever his mother and grandmother said it was, and those women were brilliant theologians, able to dismiss the condemnation of entire nations with the wave of a spaghetti spoon. Uncle Mattia might have been a serial adultery and Grandpa Leandro an alcoholic who committed some war crimes, but, when they died Mamãe began instantly talking about how they were in heaven and would send up prayers to them at any opportunity, making every family member a de facto saint, the plethora of their personal sins be damned. Whereas the Germans read church documents and took them seriously… trying to work out the logical inconsistencies and spiritual dilemmas presented in those pages with fear and trembling, as though they were engineering a car, The Meds knew you were supposed to take everything with a wink and a nod. You couldn’t say that… no. That would give the game away. But, it was expected that everyone else would eventually get it, and most people did.
Not the Germanics though.
The Germans, the English, the Scandinavians.
Not a wink and a nod people.
“You’re as bad as Luther!” his confessor would scream at him. “He was the same as you, you know. Taking everything too seriously. Always running to the confessional every time he had a dirty thought. That’s not Faith. You can’t write Faith down in documents, or figure out the truth by pitting the sayings of one saint against another. Terrible habit you have. Will drive you insane.”
And it had.
It had driven Father Stephens insane.
For the life of him, no matter how much Spanish or Latin he learned and no matter how hard he tried to enter into a truly Catholic mindset, he couldn’t figure out why so many saints and bishops and popes would declare that the mass of Man was damned if they didn’t really mean you to think so. Even now, as he sat in the sweltering confession booth, he stared at the words of a saint printed on a card he’d taped to the wall, the words of a man who, according to the Church, was certainly in Heaven. A man he was supposed to assume had advanced spiritual knowledge.
“The number of the elect is so small that, were we to know how small it is, we would faint away with grief.”
That’s what the card said.
St. Louis de Montfort had said it.
It seemed serious, and Father Stephens had not a spaghetti spoon.
He looked at the clock. Five-fifteen. If he was coming, he’d be coming soon.
Father Stephens had never seen Gabriel’s face. The option to sit in front of the priest was available in his confessional but, Gabriel had never used it. Father Stephens only knew the boy from his voice and the vague outline and shadow through the screen between them, but yet, somehow, he felt closer to Gabriel than to any other human soul. Day after day, sometimes up to four or five times a week, Gabriel would turn up at the booth a little after five and confess his sins. Always the same sins. Over and over again as if the young man existed on a loop. Father Stephens appreciated that. He was also in a loop, internally always going round and round with himself. What’s more, the sins that Gabriel confessed were often vices he himself struggled with, so in the priest’s mind they were kindred spirits, beleaguered Christian soldiers in the trenches of a Holy War against sin. Masturbation, pornography, taking the Lord’s name in vain, pride, uncharitable thoughts… so much of Gabriel’s struggle was his own struggle, and Father Stephens felt that here, at last, in this young Hispanic man he had found someone who took their failings as seriously as he himself did. Gabriel was worried about Hell. Genuinely fearful of it. That was nice.
It was nice for Father Stephens to not feel totally alone.
Gabriel believed the Catholic Church.
Everything about it.
Just one unconfessed mortal sin, one major failing before your death, and that was it. Eternal damnation. Multiple saints declared it. Official documents from the Vatican could be pulled which agreed. It was in the catechisms. It was in the prayer books. Such thinking was currently extremely unfashionable but source after source after source could be cited to prove it. Baptism washed away the stains of iniquity but, if, as an adult above the age of reason, you willfully committed a serious sin… a mortal sin… and died without confessing it and receiving absolution from a priest… you went to Hell. To outer darkness. To the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth where you sat in complete blackness all alone forever burning in fire that somehow did not illuminate, separated from everyone you ever knew and loved, with absolutely no hope of ever seeing them again.
That was the truth.
That was the dogma.
And so why wouldn’t you be worried about it?
It would’ve been psychotic not to be.
What was a serious sin? A mortal sin?
That was the worst part. Nobody knew for sure. Despite the topic plaguing the Church for centuries no one had ever succeeded in making a dogmatic list of which sins were and which sins were not, mortal. Worse, extenuating factors could turn a sin that would ordinarily be mortal into one of lesser degree or, conversely, a minor sin into something much, much more dangerous. Murder for example. Most everyone thought murder was mortal. But, what if the murderer were insane? What if he were under the influence of drugs? What if he were abused as a child, or had brain damage, or any number of other things which might lessen his ability to control himself and thus his culpability? Was it still a mortal sin then?
God knew.
That was terrible.
Father Stephens needed to know too.
Masturbation, also, had historically been considered by many to be a mortal sin and, if so, then Montfort was certainly correct, for the number of Pornhub downloads in Miami far exceeded the number of confessions made his booth. Abortion? Again, probably mortal. Again, probably a huge number of people going to Hell. Drug use? Mortal. Birth Control Pill? Mortal. Condom? Mortal. Intoxication? Mortal. Blasphemy? Mortal. Sacrilege? Mortal. Theft? Maybe mortal, depending on the circumstance. Lying? Again, there was a chance it was mortal… When Father Stephens thought about it it made his head spin. So much sin in the world. So much sin in every human heart. If you believed it… if you really believed it…
How could you think about anything else?
How could you go about your day knowing that most everyone around you, those you love, those you care about, and you yourself, would be damned, cut off from God and tortured in a lake of fire for all eternity. Perhaps it was his Germanic autism but, Father Stephens could not be persuaded from the conclusion that, in fact, most people did not believe it. Most people were not Christians. Most people did not believe that Hell was real or, if they did, had so little love in their hearts that they didn’t care to try and stop others from going there. Either way, it was the same thing. Many are called, few are chosen. The Massa Damnata. Father Stephens was terrified, and he hated himself for being so, because, as the Bible said, Perfect Love should cast out all fear.
He didn’t have perfect love.
More evidence that he was damned.
The door to the confessional clicked open. It was Gabriel. Father Stephens knew by the familiar sound of his sighs.
“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession.”
On his side of the screen Father Stephens made the sign of the cross.
“How are you Gabriel?”
“Not good Father. It is not… I… I haven’t been living a Holy Life.”
“Masturbation again?”
“Yes, but, not just that. I fornicated with this girl some and, um, you know the guys, they uh, we, uh, we went out the other night and um…”
The trepidation in Gabriel’s voice was palpable. Talking about one’s sexual habits to a holy man is never easy but experienced penitents like Gabriel eventually got fairly comfortable with it. This was different. This wasn’t the normal sins. In the five years that he’d been at this parish he’d heard Gabriel in a similar state only a handful of times, none of them ever good.
“Did it happen again?”
“Yeah.” Gabriel said haltingly. “Yea, it did. It was pretty bad.”
Gabriel was an addict. A druggy hooked on pretty much everything under the sun and, as a result, increasingly entwined with a pretty bad crowd. Mostly he was a functioning addict but that had been less true over the past few months and, sometimes, like now, the group of friends he ran with had led him down very dark roads. He’d confessed to raping a girl last year, both of them under the influence. She was passed out and he had his way with her, saying that, “if she were awake, I figured she’d be into it.” Well… when she had woken she wasn’t. Rather than call the police her boyfriend simply stabbed him. Gabriel had almost died. Wouldn’t rat the guy out though. They were part of the same gang.
As he listened to the sobs, Father Stephens was just thankful Gabriel was here. Alive. Two weeks between confessions was almost unheard of for Gabriel and Father Stephens had all but given him up for dead. Rotting in an alley from an overdose or something, or maybe gunned down in a drug deal gone bad. He’d spent hours praying, agonizing, beating his mattress with his fists pleading for Gabriel to be okay. The thought of him dead, sins unconfessed, rejected by God…
Father Stephens hadn’t slept in days.
Now… Well… It was okay. Whatever Gabriel had done was okay. He was alive, confessing. That was enough. There was hope for his soul.
“We beat this guy’s ass Father. He disrespected Luis. Looked at his girl. We were just supposed to teach him a lesson but… but when he fell his head, his head hit the curb you know and…”
Murder.
Father Stephens’ fourth murder in his career as a confessor.
That was the most shocking thing about being a priest. Murder, and the desire to murder, were far, far more common than he’d ever realized.
And he couldn’t tell anyone.
The seal of confession was sacred.
If he broke it, he’d go to Hell.
Behind his screen he nodded. The priest had suspected as much. Not murder necessarily but, something in that ballpark. Junkies seldom disappear for days on end because something positive happened. The not knowing had tortured his soul endlessly and now, even though Gabriel was bringing him literally the worst possible scenario, it was somehow comforting to have gotten it over with. To have pulled off the band-aid. To know. Gabriel had committed a murder or, at the very least been party to one. Fine. Okay. That was why he’d prepared. Father Stephens listened to the vague, incoherent sobbing mess of a story come through the screen between them, picking up only scraps but enough to provide absolution.
And the thought felt like a stone. A stone sinking in his chest.
For how long? The priest thought to himself.
Absolution…for how long?
Gabriel wasn’t going to amend his ways. He couldn’t. It was all a part of him, and can a leopard change its spots? For years he had listened to this poor young man pour his heart out in anguish over his sins, only to relapse into them again and again and again and again and…
And how many more agains did Gabriel have?
How long until his actions got him killed? A year? A month? The priest had spent all last week already thinking it was too late. He could provide all the absolution he wanted but the second Gabriel walked out through the door of the Church he was the Devil’s again. A plaything for demons. Gabriel would sin again, mortally, and soon.
And then he would die.
And this poor man, this child, this sheep entrusted to his care…
Would go to hell.
“For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my own flesh and blood…”
Father Stephens couldn’t let that happen.
He waited until the young man quieted down and then set his teeth in firm resolve. On his side of the booth Father Stephens stood up, smoothed the wrinkles out of his black shirt, and walked himself around the partition to look Gabriel in the eyes.
“Father?”
Gabriel did not want to be looked at in the eyes. He was ashamed of himself. He hated seeing his own image in the mirror and certainly did not want a holy man to see it. Reflexively he half covered his face, peering at the man in the collar with only one eye from between his fingers.
And Father Stephens smiled.
His heart softened.
The boy looked even younger than he’d imagined. A mere baby. Twenty-two years old, tops… if that. He was scrawny and disheveled and reminded him for all the world of his own self at that age, someone out of time, someone born in the wrong Now.
“Gabriel,” Father Stephens said as he made the sign of the cross, his heart at that moment absolutely bursting with love. “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Then he knelt down and took Gabriel’s hands in his own and looked full into the young man’s face.
Brown eyes.
Beautiful brown eyes.
“Gabriel. God loves you. I love you. God forgives you. I forgive you.”
Then Father Stephens stood, took the gun from his back pocket, and shot Gabriel directly in the middle of his head.
When the police arrived fifteen minutes later, Father Stephens was sweaty, covered in blood, and sitting on the floor of the confessional stroking Gabriel’s hair with one hand while fumbling over the beads of his rosary with the other. They hauled him away, and the trial was quick, and open, and shut. Father Stephens pleaded guilty. Why lie? And all the papers made a big deal of it, and he was on the news, and every bishop in America condemned the act and called it crazy and the internet was full of people making videos and podcasts and blog articles trying to make sense of what had just happened, a task made all the more difficult by the fact that Father Stephens never once bothered to try and explain himself.
Why would he?
For the first time in his life, Father Stephens wasn’t afraid.
Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
— John 15:13
You have tackled in your story the very real paradoxes of which I have inwardly pondered on in regards to the church. Quite astonishing. Actually, I think this story truly encapsulates your Title. Holy is He Who Wrestles. I will sit on this one for some time.
Two lost souls, who found each other. But no soul remains lost. Perhaps misplaced or hidden is a better term. Nothing is forever, apart from ourselves, as part of the infinite or God or whatever name is attached to the all that defies naming.