by Steve Duplantier

Steve: What was it like to date an ex-seminarian?

Kathleen: You were inexperienced.  I felt I had a lot to teach you.

Steve: Teach me what?

Kathleen: That you should bring money with you when we went on a date.

Steve: What do you think of celibacy?

Kathleen: It wouldn’t have worked for me.

Steve: How do you feel the church is handling the crisis with its pedophiles?

Kathleen: I think the church is in denial.  The bishops in charge of those pedophile priests should go to jail along with them.

Steve: Should they be in the same cell?

Kathleen: (laughs) It doesn’t matter.  Someone in jail will give it to both of them.

Steve: Were you ever hit upon by a priest?

Kathleen: Yes.  When I was in college.  I contacted the campus chaplain.  I wanted to discuss why I couldn’t marry a divorced man I was dating at the time.  The chaplain sent a cute young priest to talk to me.  We met in the chaplain’s office.  There were two chairs side by side in front of a big desk.  I started asking my question to this priest.  He got out of his chair to come sit next to me.  He then reached over toward me and grabbed my leg.  He was getting affectionate.  I got mad at him and as I got up to leave he went to the door and put his hand on it so I couldn’t go out.

There was a stained glass of the Virgin Mary in the office.  I felt like smashing it.  I forced my way out and went to my boyfriend’s house to tell him what happened.  He said, “What do you expect, he’s a man.”

Steve: Did you tell anyone else?

Kathleen: No, just my boyfriend.  I stopped going to church at that point.

Steve: Do you believe in Catholic teachings today?

Kathleen: No.  We tried to send the children to Catholic churches when they were young.  When I sent Camille, my middle daughter, to her first catechism classes, she came home crying.  I asked her what happened, and she said the religious education teacher said that if she wasn’t good a devil with a pitchfork was going to get her.  I was mad so I went to see the priest.  I told him I didn’t believe in a hell full of demons.  When he realized I was your wife, he asked: “What are you two, Buddhists or something?”

Actually, we are Buddhists of sorts.  In some practices anyway.  We are friends with a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Fairhope, Alabama, Geshe Thupten Dorje, whom we really admire.  When we lived in the states we would go to their Sangha.

We tried going to religious education at other Catholic churches, but they served the children candy and red Kool-Aid.  Our children were discouraged from eating such things, especially the Kool-Aid.  I asked them not to, but they did not, so we took them out.

We started going to a Unitarian church in Lacombe which was much more liberal and compatible with our beliefs.  We like the Unitarians.  We were good friends with the minister and her Jewish husband.

Steve: Did any Unitarians hit on you?

Kathleen: No.

Steve: Did you ever think you had a vocation?

Kathleen: Yes.  To be a mother.

Steve: Are you glad you married an ex-seminarian?

Kathleen: Yes.  One reason was that when you were a seminarian, one of your jobs was infirmarian, so you could take care of our children’s little hurts.

Steve: Is that all?

Kathleen: No, we balanced each other out.  You were well educated and had a lot of verbal skills.  I didn’t.  I was good in math and you weren’t.  You were impractical and I was very practical.  I was a good cook and you weren’t, at first.  But now you are a really good cook.  We had a lot to learn from one another.

Steve: Any other connections in our life with seminaries?

Kathleen: Most of our friends were ex-seminarians, priest or ex-priests and ex-nuns.  A priest introduced us. We were married by a priest you went to the seminary with.

Steve: Did you know any pedophile priests?

Kathleen: No.  There were rumors when I was young, but I personally never saw anything.

Steve: What did people say about priests and nuns when you were growing up?

Kathleen: When I was young, I thought nuns were spirits.  I did not know that there was anything under their habits.  I did not think they had bodies. But one day I went to the bathroom and there was a nun in the next stall who pooted. Then I knew she had a body, though I was surprised.

Steve: How old were you when this happened?

Kathleen: Probably too old to believe what I believed.  Fifth grade, I guess.

Steve: Did you like nuns and priests when you were little?

Kathleen: No, because a nun told me my mother could not go to heaven because she was not a Catholic.

Steve: Did you cry?

Kathleen: No, but it was the beginning of the end of my belief in the Catholic Church.  I used to see my daddy turn off his hearing aid when he went into church.  I asked him why he was doing that, and he said that if the priest was talking while God tried to speak to him, he wouldn’t be able to hear God.

Steve: Was there skepticism or cynicism regarding priests, nuns, and Catholic belief in your hometown?

Kathleen: No, not that I remember.  I had a pretty friend who always wore a low cut dress when she went to communion.  She was hoping that the host would fall between her breasts.

Steve: Why?

Kathleen: She wanted the cute young priest to have to take the host from between her breasts.  We thought it was odd that cute boys would go to the seminary.

Steve: Thanks.  So are you a Catholic today?

Kathleen: No.

October 21, 2005  Barrio Concepción, San Juan, Costa Rica

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