A Funeral for McCusker

Katherine Hawker

March 2005

Our congregation celebrated a memorial service for a beloved colleague this week. It was a festive if sorrowful affair, with music that stirred the soul, readings that reflected on the meaning of life, and stories that alternately moved us to laughter and tears. Clergy processed with flowing red stoles while families stood with wee ones in the back. Folding chairs were brought in to accommodate the overflow crowd, a carefully crafted Order of Worship was double and triple checked for accuracy, and a sumptuous array of finger foods were set out for the reception. The celebration was grand. And exhausting.

Funerals and memorial services are a lot of work. They don't happen as if by magic, and so I am tempted on this morning after to be sympathetic to the Diocese of San Diego. The funeral for a beloved community leader, John McCusker, was scheduled to happen this week in a catholic church within the diocese, and the Bishop called if off. This funeral would have been a big one with lots of community brass. I understand that the church is short staffed and not able to meet all of the requests presented. Sometimes you just have to say "no".

When a friend emailed the news that the funeral had been cancelled because the dead man was gay, I wasn't convinced. We clergy bury people all the time whose beliefs, orientations, lifestyles and choices are different from our own. We routinely say kind words of faith for people that we loved and those we barely tolerated and even more often for total strangers. When asked to do a funeral, we don't ask for a resume or a statement of beliefs, we simply open our calendars and check the family's requested date and time against our already over programmed lives. And often, too often, we have to say "no".

But my friend's email included an urgent call to action, so I took a few minutes to google the story. Sure that the news flash was misleading, I began to read the article in the San Diego Union-Tribune with quotes from Chancellor Rodrigo Valdivia, a diocese spokesman, that the funeral was cancelled. Not only from the requested Immaculata Chapel at the University of San Diego, but in all catholic parishes within the diocese. Of course the man's orientation is not a problem, Valdivia assured the press, we church people bury gay men all the time. The problem is that McCusker's "public activity" as a businessman is "inconsistent with Catholic moral teaching".

I know that my profession has come under much scrutiny in recent years for our hypocrisy, for our coziness with sin of all kinds. Abusers not held accountable, organized (though not disorganized) crime finding a blessing, embezzlement and self serving too often the order of the day. I know that we have been called to clean up our act, to be a part of the solution rather than the problem, to assist in the creation of churches which model the kind of truth and justice to which Jesus bore witness.

So I would like to believe that Bishop Broom of the Diocese of San Diego is responding to a calling more lofty than a busy calendar and more faithful than gay bashing. Perhaps this is a signal that we can expect from Broom a refusal to allow church participation in the lives of anyone involved in business activities which stray from the norms of our faith. Of course this would mean a refusal to share services with slum landlords, those involved with the Enron scandal, and proponents of the proposed federal 2006 Budget, for neither our sacred texts nor Catholic social teaching leave any wiggle room when it come to the oppression of the poor. Certainly there will be no space under the funeral pall for criminals or sexual predators, priest or otherwise. And maybe this means that the church will finally extricate itself from the likes of the Soprano clan.

But unless this is Bishop Broom's intention, he owes the McCusker family an apology. A full calendar and a shortage of priests we would have believed, the purity of the organized church is a bit more of a stretch.