Seventy Times Seven
What do you do when the two most defining aspects of your identity - your faith and your sexuality -seemingly contradict one another? Salvatore Sapienza’s novel Seventy Times Seven takes on this question with humor and deep-seated, finely attuned understanding.
Vito Fortunato is a young monk preparing to take his final vows and commit himself to a lifetime of service to the Catholic Church. His sexuality is no secret, expect perhaps at the high school where he teaches Religion class: out and proud since age seventeen, Vito sees no reason why his service to God, and to the Church, should come into conflict with his essential identity as a gay man.
Or, for that matter, as a man of any sexuality. Brother Vito is only twenty-five, and like any young man he’s energetic and fun-loving. He hangs posters on the wall of his room; he goes to clubs and dances; and as for sex, while he honors his vow of chastity by never allowing himself to touch another man, he manages to rationalize the occasional session of mutual self-gratification in a shady video store or sauna. Life on the cusp between the worldly and the other-worldly requires a delicate balance, but Vito has long had faith that with God’s help he will manage.
But as he approaches the day when he will finalize his commitment to his order, Brother Vito increasingly struggles with the vexing question of how to reconcile his need for intimate human contact with the requirement that Catholic clergy refrain from expressions of sexuality. His best friends are loud, flamboyant, promiscuous gay men; his spiritual mentors worry that Vito’s time spent with those friends in bars will damage his spiritual development. But at every turn, Vito is faced with the prospect of being only half a man: devoted to the spiritual to the exclusion of human commitment and sexual intimacy if he finalizes his vows, or lost to the spiritual path he loves if he should choose the world and its temptations over the Church. Again and again, Vito encounters the same Biblical warning that those who wish to save their lives will lose their lives, while those who forsake their lives for Jesus will know eternal glory.
In fact, Vito is at the sort of crossroads where everything that presents itself to him seems to have a bearing on his dilemma. Every event, every new person he meets, even tabloid headlines - in one delectable, funny passage, Vito opens The National Enquirer to a story about conjoined twins, one of whom will not survive the necessary surgery to separate them and allow a single survivor to live - adds to the running debate that rages in his heart and his thoughts. Then, during a summer spent volunteering at an AIDS house, Vito meets the aptly named Gabriel, and realizes that the choice laid before him is not simply an abstract theological puzzle, but a matter of his very survival.
Sapienza has set his book in the early 1990s, when a young monk like Vito might still hope to change the system from within and make the Church less vicious toward gays. Certainly, this sort of book could not be set in 2006, in the wake of Pope Benedict’s instructions that gay seminarians be barred from the clergy. But the novel’s messages of struggle and comfort, and of reflexive religious intolerance for the totality of the human organism, versus the individual need to shake off the chains of cruel hierarchical repression and ignorance, are more relevant today than ever. Deeply moving and reverent, Sapienza’s novel is the perfect dose of medicine for anyone whose faith has attacked his spirit on the basis of his sexuality. Sapienza plucks the heart from his reader, graces it with the fires both of bodily desire and spiritual devotion, and tucks it back in place with the assurance that it’s perfectly okay to be both gay, and a person of faith.
by Salvatore Sapienza
Publisher: Harrington Park Press. Publication Date: May 19, 2006. Pages: 241. Price: $22.95. Format: Trade Paperback Orginal. ISBN-13: 978-1-56023-599-6
