YVON THIVIERGE: PAPA RATZI RATTLES A LOT OF PEOPLE'S NERVES

jeudi 17 avril 2008

PAPA RATZI RATTLES A LOT OF PEOPLE'S NERVES

This is my comment on PageOneQ contributor Michael-Angelo Signorile's testimony about then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger enabling his catharsis awakening:

I was studying theology in Ottawa, Canada when Joseph Ratzinger enabled you to experience your catharsis awakening.
My gay activist days were already behind me as I was having my own spiritual discernment. But I still had that indignation and militancy inside me as I clearly remember denouncing Joseph Ratzinger for being indirectly responsible for the death of my sexual ethics professor, an OMI priest, by demanding that he retract his gay-positive approach in his latest work.
Then, later while sojourning in Rome, I purposely turned the other way in order to avoid having to shake the hand of that reformer-turned-oppressor on the occasion of his 70th birthday at Rome's Santa Maria in Trastevere basilica.

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MY BIOGRAPHY, MA BIOGRAPHIE, MI BIOGRAFIA, LA MIA BIOGRAFIA

While I was born in Canada's capital, I was raised in Sault Sainte Marie and pursued secondary and pedagogical studies in Sudbury, both Northern Ontario cities, then earned bachelor's degrees in Français and, eventually, in Théologie from universities in Ottawa.

Although I started off as a school teacher in the Soo and eastern Ontario and finished off doing supply teaching in my hometown, I worked and lived most of my life as an English-to-French translator for the federal government in the Outaouais area.

After travelling through most of Europe and parts of Latin America, including for study trips in Spain and Mexico, intermingled with lengthy periods of dedicated gay rights militancy, I spent a few enriching years in Italy where I taught languages and performed in music ensembles at Rome's most prestigious venues, including for Papa Ratzi, whom I avoided, when he was still a cardinal.

I worked a couple of years for Jean Vanier's l'Arche as a live-in care-giver for the mentally-challenged, lived many months in a Quebec City boarding house on welfare then in a Catholic monastery south of Chicago as a postulant.

I am now living precariously back in the Sault that I was so eager to leave and where I am paradoxically, despite francophobic, homophobic and police repression drawbacks, enjoying life more than ever before.