A Tribute To The Reverend Steven J. Scherer
May 24, 1953 - July 15, 1999
By Edward Ditterline
As each of us trudges down this road called life, once in a great while we meet a fellow traveler who affects the course of our journey so remarkably our life is changed forever. When I met The Rev. Steven J. Scherer, just such a transformation occurred within me. Without question, in the spiritual sense at least, Father Scherer saved my life.
At the time, I was angry and resentful at the misdeeds I had witnessed and experienced which were being carried out in the name of Jesus Christ. I could barely utter the word “Christianity” without feeling the need to spit out the word as an epithet in bitterness and anger, accompanied by tears of rage.
Indeed, I thought I was destined to a hell here on earth -- forget the afterlife -- when it came to the seemingly impossible reconciliation between my heartfelt love for my Creator and the way in which many people in the modern Christian church punished others like me. All because some of us can not or will not accept the presupposed literal interpretation of the “Word of God” as recorded by mere mortals almost 2,000 years ago.
For several years, I had heard stories of a Diocesan priest named Father Scherer who ministered to his flock in the Florida Keys. Many people told me of this openly gay man who frequently celebrated holy mass and administered the sacraments at St. Mary’s in Key West and at St. Peter’s on Big Pine. I could hardly believe there was such a person.
Certainly, everyone has plenty of stories of gay Catholic priests they have known, but I had never heard of a single one who was openly homosexual and who still had all his “faculties” -- a joke Father Scherer used frequently in double entendre, referring to his battle with AIDS, as well as the fact he was authorized by the church to officiate at holy mass and to administer the sacrament.
Father Scherer was a man greatly loved and admired. Everyone told me he worked tirelessly and with irrepressible good humor, toiling on the battlefield against AIDS and against many other afflictions of the human body, mind and spirit. Friends advised me to go see him in my search for spiritual peace.
Having long sought counsel from every possible source imaginable in such matters, I called Father Scherer one bright spring day several years back and I asked if I might meet with him on the subject of my badly needed reconciliation of the teachings of the Christian church versus the practices of some of its members.
In a maddeningly cheerful mood, which indeed never seemed to leave him during the years it was my pleasure to have known him, the padre invited me to his home, a lovely haven in Key West tucked quietly away on a shady tropical street where it seemed the tourists had never tread, nor had the hustle and bustle of modern life ruined the precious island life which had lured me here so intoxicatingly almost 25 years ago.
From the moment I set foot in Father Scherer’s home, I was enveloped by a sense of warmth, comfort and safety...as well as the irrepressible lilt of whimsy which seemed to pervade every pore of his being.
One of the many outward manifestations of Father Scherer’s boundless good humor was his collection of fat, colorful, ceramic Franciscan priests which found all manner of utilitarian uses as cookie jars, salt and pepper shakers, sugar bowls, jelly jars and every other example of campy hilarity one might possibly imagine.
As every collector of such effluvia will attest, the item itself must positively exude good humor or else it is nothing more than an ordinary dust catcher. And as I learned early on that first afternoon, there was nothing in Father Scherer’s life which was allowed to sit around and catch dust. Most especially him.
At first, I was fairly stunned by the frail look of the Father, his obviously once handsome face drawn and gaunt from the ravages of AIDS, his fine brown hair not really wanting to lay down on his head the way it was supposed to. However, while Father Scherer was clearly in great pain, Steve, as he insisted I call him, moved with the grace and carriage of a matinee movie idol. And all about him was this inescapable sense that truly, I was in the presence of a man of God.
There was such a feeling of peace and serenity about this remarkable human being, that my own customary high energy settled almost immediately into a wondrously comfortable ebb and flow of his own energies. I shall never forget that feeling of peace as long as I live. If only I could recall it at will.
Without the slightest bit of pretense, nor with any of the frequent arrogance I have come to expect from so many former seminarians who had dedicated their lives to the so-called saving of my “lost” soul, Steve settled into a large, comfortable chair and directed me with the gentle wave of a bony hand for me to do the same.
At the time, Father Scherer was 44, and yet, because of the progression of the disease, he had the outward look of a man well beyond his years. However, when I stared directly into his large brown eyes, limpid and kind, and expressive beyond all measure, I was transfixed by the boyish quality of his grin and by how positively radiant his face was.
When I commented on this observation, he attributed, in an entirely red-faced manner, anything positive about him to the grace of God which he had been fortunate enough to experience during those four and a half decades.
As I sat in his living room, sipping a delicate infusion of aromatic herbal tea, I listened to this man’s slow, deliberate and almost prescient sense of spiritual revelation. I felt the delicate island breezes gently enliven the air and our conversation, while the delicious aroma of his freshly baked bread permeated my nostrils and my ears picked up the crowing of one of Key West’s famously confused roosters, which erupt in maddening comment at any given moment throughout the day.
It was not long before I became aware that Father Scherer and I had both experienced many of the same painful experiences where the church was concerned. While he was Roman Catholic and I was United Methodist, there was little difference in our trials and tribulations as being two men who loved God with all our hearts and who both frequently found that love ripped out of our chests by those who professed to be followers of Jesus Christ.
The only real difference between us, I perceived, was Father Steve had taken his own unfortunate experiences inside and outside the church to his Creator and had dealt with them positively while I, conversely, had wallowed in the misery of how badly I and others like me had been treated by so many who had considered themselves fellow Christians.
“Ed, I can completely identify with how you feel,” Father Steve told me. “My entire life has been like walking a tightrope,” he said, in his characteristically understated manner. The mere thought of his being a practicing homosexual and a practicing priest simultaneously, made me shudder, and there were all manner of questions which popped into my mind, such as the expected cliché: “How do you reconcile this or that or the other...” But for once, I simply listened and I really heard what the man said, primarily because when Father Steve talked, he really said something.
He spoke to my head, my heart and my soul of the need for forgiveness, for the value of the perceptible change which is occurring within the modern Christian church. He spoke of the importance of me being involved with that change. And he spoke of the need for me to know that I, too, am a child of God, regardless of what anyone might choose to say.
I sat in that big comfy chair of his for the better part of the afternoon and I shed many tears of pain and sorrow which I had forced deep within me for so many years.
While so much of what we shared that afternoon was far too painful and personal to recount here, I will say I was touched for the first time by the beauty and peace of having learned a modicum of acceptance for the shortcomings of others as I stumbled forth in my own journey of dealing with shortcomings of my own. Also, that afternoon, I experienced for the first time how it felt to accept others as I so badly sought acceptance for myself.
Father Steve’s calling came early in life, for by the first grade in Algoma, Wisconsin, when other boys were talking about being policemen and firemen, Steve had decided he would become a priest. He pursued his dream, graduating from St. Norbert College in DePere, Wisconsin. He studied theology and was graduated from St. Francis Seminary of Pastoral Ministry in Milwaukee. And he was ordained in 1979 for the diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin. “The state to have the first gay rights laws in the nation,” he reminded me softly.
Like many gay men, Father Steve wanted to be the best little boy in the world and he was, but somehow, he also knew he was different, because in grade school “I became interested in what boys looked like,” he told me.
“For years, I managed to deal with my homosexuality because I focused on what the church had told me - that is, being homosexual isn’t a sin, but acting on it is.” After years of maddening internal conflict, Father Steve realized he had to reconcile his sexuality with his spirituality because they were both integral parts of the same human being. And he did.
In Wisconsin, throughout his life in brilliant service to God, Father Scherer ministered to the needs of the sick in hospitals. He started a chapter of Dignity, the organization for gay and lesbian Catholics. He even managed, much to his own surprise, to be able to deliver messages to Catholic high school students about safer sex and condoms.
That afternoon in quiet, intensely personal conversation, Father Scherer changed my life. Indeed, in the numerous times over the next two years before his untimely death of AIDS related illnesses this year on July 15, each time I had the privilege to be in Father Steve’s presence, I felt honored. When I had dinner with him, his stalwart, irrepressible spirit never once faltered. His wonderful wicked sense of humor was always present. When I visited him in the hospital he always wanted to know how I was and what was going on with me, when we both knew he was the one who was going to die.
When I saw him at the Metropolitan Community Church in Key West where he was a beloved friend and celebrant, I saw him smile through the acute pain of walking up the steps to the sanctuary. Hearing his strong, masculine voice answer the phone at AIDS Help, Inc., bolstered my sagging spirits on more than one occasion.
Even when I called him at home once after he had just returned from dialysis, which of course he did not tell me -- someone else did -- he patiently walked me through my anger at the Rev. James Kennedy and his Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale, where those awful reparative therapy ads have been originating.
Regardless of the pain and torment he endured as the AIDS related conditions ravaged his body, Father Steve never once forgot our conversation that afternoon, nor did he ever fail to ask me how I was doing with my reconciliation of my spirituality and my sexuality.
Now that Father Steve is gone, I am no longer able to call upon him in times of faltering faith. I am no longer able to laugh with him instead of rage over the injustices of the Christian faith. I am no longer able to give thanks that this wonderful man is a part of my life. I am only able to give thanks that he was a part of my life, even though it was for a very short time.
Today, missing Father Steve terribly, I ask God to please not have anyone else tell me the AIDS crisis is over, for I have no interest in hearing such an absurd statement. Because until all people, and especially people like The Rev. Steven J. Scherer, are no longer dying of AIDS, there will always be an AIDS crisis. And AIDS will continue to lessen the quality of the lives of those of us who are left behind.