In a long-gone decade in a well-known order of monks, the abbot of the Trappist monastery I entered was recruiting barely legal colts for his stable. Boys aged roughly seventeen to twenty were being accepted as novices, an age generally considered too young by the Order's standards elsewhere. These boys would often go on to become the abbot's lovers, and because he conducted himself very discreetly, the clandestine affairs probably could have gone unnoticed indefinitely. But he dropped them as they got older, and eventually there was a row over the ensuing favoritism and how the place was being governed. This brought in a tribunal of two outside abbots to investigate the cause of the friction. But even after two weeks of listening to everyone's grievances, the visiting abbots were still openly puzzled about what the real stakes were. So four of us went to them as a bloc and described what we had seen and heard, signing affadavits, etc. During a four hour interview, we described various circumstances and fragments of conversations which, when pieced together, comprised a compelling picture of malfeasance in office. The abbot and his current lovers were expelled at once. The monastery's status as a self-governing community was suspended indefinitely, and we were placed under the direct supervision a superior brought in from the outside by the hierarchy. A more enlightened and egalitarian epoch, it seemed, was at hand.

But over the next year and a half we whistlebowers were separately told we'd never had authentic callings to be monks in the first place. One by one we were advised that each of us had a serious psychological problem with authority, that we were ill-suited to the tranquil discipline of the monastic life, and hence we should all seek counseling for these neurotic twists some place more appropriate. On January 5, 1965 my two brothers came to give me a ride home. The guest house was empty because of a snow storm. Mike had brought fifths of Jack Daniels and Johnny Walker Black, and we drank until well past a monk's 2:15 A.M. wake-up time. The next day, even with my first hangover in five and a half years, things weren't nearly as scary as they'd seemed a day before. Booze gave me an adequate measure of hope and strength in a situation where I felt as though the metaphysical rug had been yanked out from under me.

As priest scandals go, it seems pretty tame. After all, these were consenting adults. But the real story here is the cover-up and the Church's chilling indifference to the consequences in the lives and careers of everyone involved. Once all the participants and all the witnesses were scattered, history was rewritten and life went on as if nothing of the kind had ever happened. A monastery is not the Pentagon or IBM. It's an idealistically humanitarian sanctuary within a Church whose only stated mission was to save every soul on the planet and, "extra ecclesiam nulla salus." Alan Watts once said that the church (any church) is an autocratic, secretive, vested-interest organization, so it would be naive to expect to hear the truth in a place like that -- as I was to learn first-hand. "It never happened", a very well connected priest told me. "I forbid you to say ever again that it happened or even to believe that it happened." That was just the nudge I needed to leave organized religion completely, and for twenty four years I found my solace in booze. Now, after eleven years of sobriety, but with no compunction to reconcile my beliefs with the tenets of Christianity, I've come to see these episodes more as multi-colored tiles in a mosaic, an ephemeral picture that I catch a momentary glimpse of now and then.

To understand why I became a monk in the first place, a thumbnail bio is unavoidable. I was born into the uptown side of Frank McCourt's world, the New York Social Register Irish Catholics, the ones Stephen Birmingham depicted in "Real Lace." Mother, sitting next to her personally autographed photo of Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli (Pope Pius XII), would say that once a man had made real money, that man was a saint, and how he made that money was nobody's business. My parents and many of their closest friends were ideologically loyal to Pacelli as he is described in John Cornwell's new book, "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII". In that book, you'll meet in passing (pp. 178, 201) my great aunt, Genevieve Garvan Brady (Mrs. Nicholas, d.1937). She and her husband (d.1929), the founder of Consolidated Edison of New York, had bought themselves the last Papal Duchy, and their "man in Rome" was Eugenio Pacelli. Later, Gen's protege in the Vatican and personal gopher was a young American Monsignor named Francis Spellman. In 1934, Gen plucked my father out of the Harvard biz school to manage her estate, and he remained its Executor until it was finally closed down in 1995. When I was fourteen, my father let me in on the "family business". One evening shortly before dinner, as if inducting me into a legacy, he showed me photos of an investment trip that he and Gen had taken under Pacelli's tutelage to Germany in 1936, as well as the tiny lapel swastika Hitler personally gave him to commemorate the occasion. The rationale for Gen's financial support, he explained, was that a strong, belligerent and antisemitic Germany was Christendom's only logical defense against its real enemies, Stalin and the Bolsheviks.

We then rejoined our dinner guests. These were a British Jesuit named Martin Cyril D'Arcy, the International Chaplain of the Knights of Malta, who periodically stayed in our house for weeks at a time, and a couple from Ridgefield, Connecticut, Frederick and Maria Shrady. Maria, an Austrian war bride (nee Linkar-Waltersdorf), was a passionate Nazi who bragged openly that she had sold secret information on the whereabouts of Jews in hiding in Vienna to the Gestapo. (In 1980 I called an OSI deputy in Washington who confirmed that they were in possession of Gestapo ledgers in which routine payments to this woman were meticulously recorded. But he added that this activity did not constitute a war crime and hence was not grounds for deportation.) All of these people dreamed out loud of a Fourth Reich, an era when all countries would be governed by fascist dictators who favored the rich but nevertheless answered to the Pope. As you'll read in Cornwell's book, this was also Pacelli's vision of the future. I can't now recall exactly when I got the idea that I would be disowned, ostracized or worse if I defected or rebelled. But I did, and it scared the hell out of me. By the time I was nineteen, I'd been privy to too many such conversations to walk off the stage unnoticed--a kid who knew too much, if you will. Besides, I despised everything they espoused: rigid authoritarianism, the jingoistic and brutal enforcement of their beliefs, and antisemitism. So following the pacifist, Thomas Merton, into the Trappists was not just a retreat of convenience. It was also a perfectly well understood snub to everything my parents and their political bedfellows stood for, and they responded to it as such. My parents, now both deceased, never fully forgave me for it.

The monastic experience is hard to relate in cameo. In my favorite Gahan Wilson cartoon, two Buddhist monks are sitting cross-legged, and the old sourpuss says to the young one, "This is it. Nothing happens next." Over the last thirty-five years I've taken occasional stabs at telling people what it was like being a monk, and the usual response has been something like, "Oh, I know all about that. My cousin is a Jesuit." Then I say, "No, you don't understand." And after an awkward second or two, we change the subject and get back on common ground. Joseph Campbell told a parallel story about one of those pipe-smoking NYU Comparative Religion professors at an ecumenical conference, interviewing a Japanese Shinto priest. "I'm not sure I understand your theology, your philosophy," said the prof. "I'm not sure we really have a theology or a philosophy," the priest replied, "We dance." I guess that's why I find it so hard to talk about having been a monk. As the old saw goes, if you've been there, no explanation is necessary, and if you haven't, none will suffice. And while you can certainly take the boy out of the monastery, you'll never completely take the monastery out of the boy. I've since gotten two degrees and owned a business. I have a twenty-nine year old daughter from a failed marriage, and I'm a recovering alcoholic. But the monk years are somehow the canvas on which all the rest of it, before and after, is painted.

In the Fall of 1988 I was making six dollars an hour as a greenskeeper at a golf course, and winter was coming. I'd been evicted from four places to live in the previous two years. I wanted to stop drinking whenever I was dry-heaving, but twenty minutes later I was ready to start up again. Somehow I got the idea that if I could reconnect with my lost faith, it might spark a real desire to stop for keeps. I bought the thousand-page edition of Thomas Merton's Collected Poetry, but it sat unread for months. Finally, on Friday, January 6, 1989, I took my last drink and on Monday the 9th I checked into an AA drunk farm. In my suitcase, just in case I got really bored, was the Merton poetry book. The director turned me over to a staffer who showed me my room and told me to put the suitcase on the bed, explaining that they would rifle it for contraband during lunch. An hour later I was in a tiny non-sectarian chapel with forty two fellow gin lovers, where the only icons were the original black and white glossies of some of AA's pioneers. While he was speaking, the director pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and read from notes he'd made the night before. And as he spoke, I felt a strange new energy surge through my body, starting in the solar plexus and spreading out into my arms and legs. For against what seemed incalculable odds, the man was quoting Thomas Merton. That was my first glimpse of the mosaic.

Unlike the ex-Jesuit on Morley Safer's 60 Minutes piece, I can't document my story with hard evidence, and that's what has always bothered me about telling it. The abbot's modus operandi of seduction was brilliantly concealed behind the guise of guru-novice relationships, as well as by what I'd call a conspiracy of self-deception. No one lies more effectively than the guy who really believes his own bullshit, and I'm pretty sure the abbot thought he had a theological justification for his behavior. In hindsight, I'm also sure that he was attracted to me, and there were many subtle double entendres in our conversations that I was too naive to pick up on at the time. But he never pressed, and I really doubt that coercion was ever his style. Instead, he would give incredibly scholarly homilies on divine friendship, ably quoting lengthy passages from Sts. Aelred and Bernard from memory. At one point (in ' 62 or so) he attended a big monastic spirituality conference at St. Joesph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts chaired by a prolific Belgian scholar, Dom Jean Leclerq, OSB. It should have lasted a week, but he was suddenly home three days later. The grapvine had it that when his turn came to speak one evening, Leclerq turned beet-red and pounded the table, yelling, "You have twisted Bernard to suit your own sick way of thinking!" Our abbot thereupon bolted from the room and then comandeered one of the Brothers to drive him to Logan Airport in Boston well before dawn the following morning.

The priest who forbade me to say it ever happened, Martin Cyril D'Arcy, SJ, was a frequent house-guest in my parents' home, and definitely not your friendly neighborhood Fordham padre. He was one of those rare Jesuits who were accountable only to the Father General of the Society of Jesus and who, in turn, answers directly to the Pope. Which is to say that he was exempt from the usual chain of command governing priests in that Order or any other. Even as teenagers, my sibs and I had surmised that he was a special Vatican envoy with directly delegated Papal authority. His covert mission was to seek out wealthy Catholics whose sins could not, under Church law, be forgiven by ordinary priests or bishops. In return, these penitents were expected to make meaningful contributions to the Vatican's coffers. Within that context, D'Arcy's gag order actually freed me to walk away from a corrupt Church with a clear heart. On the other hand, his tone was so vehement that I took it also as a personal threat on behalf of some prominent Catholics, primarily J. Peter Grace, who was the American Trappists' greatest financial benefactor and, as was my father, a Knight of Malta. And, prior to his death in 1995, Grace was in fact the U.S. Grand Pooh-Bah of that storied order of laymen. My only regret is that I let that implied threat inhibit me for so long. But I gotta tell you, when I heard about that thirty million dollar jury award in Dallas in 1998 to some former altar boys who had been molested by a priest, I gave God the high-five. And though that was only one of many similar verdicts in recent years, the staggering amount of that award was in itself a clear rebuke to a Church which still regards its internal codes of conduct as immune to democratic civil process.

I believe that Christianity made a wrong turn when, as early as Augustine, it polarized sexuality and contemplation into separate and incompatable impulses. This conceptual duality twisted monastic celibacy into a triumph of spirit over nature or, if you will, virtue over sin. For homosexual Catholics, whose sexual orientation is defined by church dogma as sinful, this made the monastery a kind of sexless asylum. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this mission against human nature must fail. Yet there's another and much older notion of monastic celibacy as an expression of the whole self, one in which the erotic isn't disowned, but deliberately transmuted and integrated into the quest for enlightenment. This version, which actually predates Christianity, has historically demonstrable roots in Sufism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and is perhaps best recounted in Aldous Huxley's "The Perennial Philosophy" (Harper, 1944). For a monk, abstinence from sexual relations is a freely chosen redirection of the erotic daemon, never the denial or repression of sexuality per se. I think that within our pulpit-versus-pornshop culture, we tend to see spirituality and sexuality as scarcely reconcilable impulses. Many Christian mystical writings are loaded with erotic metaphors. I'm convinced that the Song of Solomon would have been cut out of the Bible centuries ago were it not for the monks who preserved those texts through the Dark Ages. They were the keepers of the Gnostic flame, as Elaine Pagels has documented. Nor had they much use for St. Augustine and his neurotic guilt comlex about sex.

My friends and I didn't expect outsiders to understand this and we didn't try to explain it. "Nice to see you, Bishop. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out." In the Benedictine/Cistercian tradition, sexuality wasn't demonized or loathed as a base instinct of our lower nature, and young monks were repeatedly warned not to fancy themselves morally superior to anyone just because they were celibate. Rather, a monk should deliberately channel his sexual energy and consciously integrate it into his quest for God. He dissipates that energy if he focuses it on another human being. If pressed for a short label, I would call it the way of detachment, a spiritual discipline in which attachment to sex is really no better or worse than attachment to your Ford Explorer.

I'm not an historian, but I suspect this notion went deep under ground amid all the shouting and moral upmanship during and after the Protestant Reformation. Alan Watts said that the Christian churches have become little more than sex regulation societies, and he didn't intend it to be a compliment. I think Thomas Merton hit the nail on the head in 1968, when a reporter asked him to comment on Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's ban on birth control. Said Merton, "I don't understand why we [the Catholic clergy] are getting so up tight about birth control and abortion when we seem to have no problem with putting a tracer bullet through a pregnant Vietnamese peasant woman from the air." Spoken like a monk.

Unfortunately, my monastery, like many others, had ceased to tolerate this notion of being a monk. Instead, it had become an enterprise committed to providing a sanctuary for people who could not or would not honestly come to terms with their own sexuality and the personal accountability which that necessarily entails. When I first left the monastery, I really felt like an alien from another time and culture. I felt no more affinity with mainstream Christianity than I had before I went in. Nor have I ever fancied myself a lapsed Catholic. I was kicked out by the best, I bragged, and I'd do it all again. On the other hand, I bore no grudge against the Church and the obvious duplicity between preachment and practice where sex was concerned. It was an irreversible change of perception, not unlike Toto pulling down the curtain and exposing the Wizard's chicanery. Once celibacy and the monastic calling were behind me, my goal was to utilize the the best of what I had learned into living the rest of my life. I had lost time to make up for, and I was lucky enough to meet some women who heartily agreed. I went back to college and majored in psychology, got married and then went on to get a master's degree in the sociology of knowledge.

I soon realized, however, that I had become still more distrustful of any attempt to organize or institutionalize the truth into any sort of axiomatic deductive system, be it religious, anti-religious or otherwise. When asked what I then believed, I would glibly duck the question by saying that after 5 1/2 years with the Trappists, I had become a devout agnostic. I often still do. When I came back to New York in 1965, Freudian psychoanalysis was at the peak of its popularity, and most of my friends insisted on interpreting my attraction to monastic life in terms of sexual repression and sublimation. My Catholic friends and relatives took quite a different view, however, assuring me that I would eventually see the fallacy of defying church authority and thus return repentant. I soon tired of defending what I'd done in response to any such preconceptions, and became quite adept at trivializing all those conversations. "Goddam it, just go do it for five years," I would retort when severely pressed, "then we'll compare notes." And for fifteen years, I would visit the place for a day two or three times a year, if only to engage in small talk with other men who have the same mind-set.

In hindsight, the most tangible legacy I retained from the whole experience came from the writings of Carl Jung, who said, "I had learned that all the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble... They can never be solved, but only outgrown."

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