Father Forgive Me For I Have Sinned

It's been twelve years since my last confession. I was raised Catholic and my grandmother would always tell me that I've got a bit of Satan in me and that I needed to pray constantly. I'd have to go to confession every Sunday to cleanse my soul, telling the priest every dirty sin I was able to achieve since the last confession. For the record, you can absolve homosexual thoughts about your soccer-playing chemistry partner with twenty Our Fathers and twenty Hail Marys.

I haven't had a lot of contact with the church since I came out of the closet because I just thought that God knew you loved him no matter where you were.

Today while walking back from lunch, I saw a group of clergymen leaving a restaurant and I swear I was about to fall on my knees in front of them... not to pray, of course. It was like someone took models from a J. Crew catalog and slapped some clerical collars on them. My mind immediately flashed to the love scene from The Thornbirds, but then progressed to me and all the young priests together doing a scene from The Other Side of Aspen 4. Oh yeah.

If this is the Vatican's new campaign to win people back into their flock, then it's fuckin working for me. I almost wanted to go up to one of them to ask some phony theological question or to appear as a spiritually lost young man who just saw the DaVinci Code and whose faith is now shaken and can only be brought back to the light by several intense one on one sessions in private quarters. Ok how many rosaries is it going to take to cancel out THAT impure thought?