In the final moment of his agony, a little story reports that Charles de Montesquieu, whom a prelate was forcefully trying to convert to Christianity with invocations and threats, sighed: “God is great but men are small.” A similar conclusion must have crossed the mind of the young Father William Nasarre when he came to announce to his bishop his decision, three years after his ordination, to “leave his ministry.” He explains his reasons in his “disturbing confidences of a man of the church.” These are confidences, not confessions.
He claims to have received grace at the age of eight when he attended his first service: the “magic” of the church’s liturgical gold worked an initial transformation in him. The ritual works ex opere operato, i.e., by its very implementation. Yet Christian theology demands a double condition for this to happen: that the minister performs the rite according to the intention of the believing community and that the faithful participate in a spirit of faith. The book tells us how the torments of the first ultimately overcame the second.
The “magic” that William Nasarre admits remains “distant from the mysteries of faith,” bastardizes this rite, somewhat stripping it of its symbolic charge and productive force. In his memories, the future prelate draws on numerous elements that contribute, certainly in hindsight, to instill doubt about his ecclesiastical vocation. A “sensitive and emotional” boy, “full of aspirations that always struggled to find expression,” young William acknowledges the “intimidation” caused by a father he likes to “replace with God” and confesses to social conformity in his courting of a young girl. In short, he embodies all the elements of a neurotic link of guilt to religion as so finely described by Father Jesuit and psychoanalyst Antoine Vergote, a recognized authority in the field, and a figure more esteemed than his colleague Tony Anatrella, taken in by the Vatican. From the five years at the seminary, the author unfortunately only shares the most anecdotal aspects: the omnipresence of either heterosexual or homosexual sexuality not always sublimated, the ribald jokes after supper, and the nicknames, not exactly Christian one might agree, used for seminarians and Father teachers. This is far from the infinite precautions of the Vade Mecum for priests, compiled by the ethnologist Pascal Dibié in his “sacred tribe” (Editions Métailié 2004), with a fundamental principle posed by the Church Fathers: everything beyond necessity “comes from the Devil.”
His narrative sheds more light on the pronounced interest of the Catholic hierarchy in the impulses of its novices. An unmerciful hunt against a backdrop of intellectual terrorism and perversion, if the author is to be believed. William Nasarre leaves the service of God for the love of an earthly creature. Man or woman, it hardly matters. Except to the Bishop of Bayonne who persists in discovering the sexual orientation of his seminarian probably to keep up to date with the Curia’s statistics. For if this is indeed the church as described from the inside by the former prelate, the decline in vocations becomes clearer: 200 novices in the booming periods of this diocese, less than thirty when William Nasarre was in his training. Independence is not allowed: criticizing Christianity, yes, but contesting it is forbidden, as he was already instructed at the seminary.
The death of his mother and then his accession to the priesthood would be experienced as moments that would complete his maturation. The churchman would be a man above all. The question of celibacy would be, if one dares say, at the heart of his divorce from the church. And more generally, that of the sexuality of priests which he recalls was authorized in the early times of Christianity. Seminary or psychoanalysis? In concluding his book with a sharp critique of the papal instruction concerning vocations for priests with “homosexual tendencies,” William Nasarre seems to want to “consecrate” an anthem he dedicates to a newfound freedom. A death and a resurrection. But this time of a man.
William Nasarre, Disturbing Confidences of a Churchman, Jean-Claude Gawsewitch Editions, 2006, 221 p., 17.90 Euros.
Jean-Luc Vannier
jlvannier@free.fr Tel: 06 16 52 55 20
