It was happening so fast.
Mary Schaffnit’s husband, Paul, died in her arms as she helped him into his wheelchair. After a routine kidney dialysis treatment, his heart stopped.
Now, at age 78, hers was breaking.
In the quiet of Pax Christi Catholic Church’s parish office two days later she began the widow’s work of planning a funeral for the man she married more than a half-century before.
Amid a blur of details, one thing was clear. She and her husband raised six children to be Roman Catholic. And even though everyone but her son Tom had left the church, its traditions were planted deep within them.
“I want to make sure no one tells them they can’t take Communion,” she told the Rev. Ken Przybyla.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
No questions were asked during that meeting last summer. No explanations were given.
The day of the funeral, her children stepped forward for Holy Communion. With them were the husbands and wives, companions and children that mark life’s milestones.
Tom gave the first eulogy. The second came from Jack Dow, a middle-aged man who was never far from Tom’s side.
Dow spoke of an acceptance he found within the Schaffnit family for so many years.
“One strong commonality Paul and I shared,” he said, “was in our choice of partners, his of 56 years, and mine of 25.”
Schaffnit sat in the front pew and wondered what those around her – other parishioners, her husband’s former co-workers, the neighbors at the Highlands Ranch retirement village, her priest – thought about Dow’s words
“Well,” she recalls thinking at the time, “It’s out now.”
Years before, Tom Schaffnit came to his parents as a teenager and asked them to hear what he needed to say.
He was gay.
“You think I didn’t know?” Mary Schaffnit said, forcing her mouth into a smile. She saw how difficult this was for her son. She wanted to make it easier.
Her husband didn’t say a word.
“Later,” she remembers, “I cried. Hard. But not where Tom could see. It wasn’t because he was gay or I thought it was a sin but because I worried about how hard his life would be.”
She suspects her husband wept too. “It was very hard for him at first. He would say, ‘It’s just not normal.’ But over time, he came around. There was nothing he would not do for our boys.”
Between 1949 and 1964, Paul and Mary Schaffnit had six children. Four boys, two girls. Three of the Schaffnit sons are gay; one, Michael, died of AIDS in 1994 at age 38.
Schaffnit begged God to let her youngest son be straight. He is.
The odds of having three gay sons are unfathomable for most people. “People do ask me about it, how it happened. I don’t even try to explain. I don’t know. My feeling is that’s the way God wants them to be.”
A generation ago, Catholic leadership declared that sexual orientation was not a choice, but innate, unchangeable and not unto itself sinful.
This is a softer stance than what is preached from some conservative Protestant pulpits, where homosexuality is seen as a sinful choice.
In fact, recent polls show that homosexuality is more likely to be perceived as “morally acceptable” among Catholics than non-Catholics.
But the Catholic leadership remains unbendable on one point. Sex outside of marriage – homosexual or heterosexual – is wrong. And anyone who crosses that line must be forbidden Holy Communion.
Schaffnit cannot accept this. She is a mother. Two of her daughters are divorced. Two of her surviving sons are gay. Tom was an altar boy and once wanted to be a priest.
They are whom Rome would deny.
On Thanksgiving Day 1947, Paul Schaffnit married a Good Catholic Girl.
Mary Helen Nuschy grew up going to confession every Saturday night. She helped the poor during the Great Depression. As a young adult she attended morning Mass on her way to her secretary’s job.
Although a fiery spirit lived inside her, in postwar America it was not a time to challenge convention. The Schaffnits, who met as teenagers in Bible study class, were in lockstep with thousands of young married Catholics.
Her son, Tom, has two distinct memories of his mother from childhood. When he was maybe 7, it was the thrill of being the child she chose to attend Novena services with her. He can still see her, with her head covered, as she sat quietly praying. If she forgot her hat she would fix a tissue over her hair with bobby pins.
Then, when Tom was a teenager, she came home from the doctor in tears. She was pregnant with her sixth child. She wasn’t sure she could handle another baby.
And even though she treasured her youngest, Paul David, born in 1964, soon afterward she and her husband decided to use birth control.
Those were heady times in America with social change in the air, and the Roman Catholic Church was experiencing its own changes. From 1962 through 1965 a series of councils took place to usher the church into modernity. They were collectively known as Vatican II, which, in part, confirmed that Catholics should search their individual consciences in matters of faith.
The rebel within Mary surged to life. She joined a group called Christians Searching to explore questions such as was it really a sin if you missed Mass and the role of women in Catholicism. The group was soon shut down as too controversial.
“That really upset me,” she says. “What is this that we can’t ask questions?”
Her husband was an engineer. He liked precision and predictability. He attended Mass because he was supposed to. He found comfort in tradition. She took the puzzle pieces of her faith out of the box and spread them on the table before putting them back together.
When her son Michael was a teenager – even before he acknowleged his homosexuality to himself – he was fired from a job as a waiter at St. Thomas More Catholic Church, where the family then attended. Some church members suspected the young men who worked at the church cafe might be gay. Michael was devastated, his mother furious.
“I kept going to Mass there, but I never forgave those people,” she says now.
Through the coming decades, as her sons acknowledged their homosexuality and her daughters divorced, Schaffnit became increasingly frustrated with the church’s rigidity. Once, she wrote the Denver Archdiocese to vent. Soon afterward, she says, copies of the Catholic Register mysteriously stopped coming to her house.
More recently, when Bishop Michael Sheridan wrote parish members warning them not to vote for candidates who supported abortion, Schaffnit slapped a John Kerry sticker on her car.
“Some Catholics might consider me bad,”
she says. “I’m definitely one of those ‘cafeteria Catholics.’ ”
Yet what is good?
She prays nightly, sometimes in the morning. She never misses Mass. She adores her priest and his compassion. A silver crucifix hangs around her neck. A ceramic Virgin Mary looks down from the fireplace mantle.
Those who want to tighten the rules and return to a more traditional church amuse her; she was once like them. Then her life happened.
“My faith is as strong as it ever was,” she says. “I think it’s the way I look at my faith that has changed. My God accepts everybody.”
WHAT CATHOLICS SAY
Just after the clergy-sex abuse scandal broke in Boston during 2002, weekly church attendance by American Catholics dropped to 35 percent – its lowest level since polling began in 1955. While it has rebounded more
recently, Protestants have
overtaken Catholics in weekly churchgoing.*
Average weekly
attendance by Catholics:
1955: 74 percent
1965: 67 percent
1975: 54 percent
1985: 53 percent
1995: 47 percent
2000: 52 percent
2005: 45 percent
*Protestant church attendance in
November 2003 was 48 percent.
That compares with 42 percent in 1955.
Source, Gallup poll