FAV Gone Wild

It sounds like a cheesy Showtime movie – sex, booze, murder, suicide, the Catholic Church – but Fr. Ryan Ericskson’s story really happened. If you haven’t heard of it, you’re not alone, as it hardly made national news. A 31-year old Catholic priest hung himself after being questioned for a 2-year old unsolved murder case, and it just gets weirder and more bizarre from there.

For some reason, this story makes me angry as I think it is endemic of what bothers me about the Catholic Church and conservatives (what a hateful bunch!) in particular: hypocrisy. Here’s a young priest who, just by looking at his pictures, you could tell was gay. He kinda reminded you of nerdy boys in your class who pontificated at every chance and you didn’t really want to hang out with because they creeped you out; boys who were so far right in their Catholicism that priests you knew actually tried to get them out of the chapel once in a while and into the soccer field. That he was probably gay was not the problem here, but that he tried so hard to NOT BE gay, even going as far as becoming a fire-and-brimstone priest, maybe hoping that in distancing himself from himself, he could exorcise his demons.

Of course a lot of conservatives are using this horrific story to justify Eggs Benedict’s Gay Busters Brigade. The irony is, if Erickson was alive, he would probably be joining the holier-than-thou crowd in this stone-throwing party.

So, I’m angry and creeped out, not because a gay-looking dude hung himself, but because in the end, Erickson WAS the very person he would probably have condemned into hell, and he didn’t even have the guts to accept it. It’s a good thing God is more merciful than His/Her followers.

(No pictures of Her Hotness, Delia Gallagher on this post... this is just too weird a story...)