Sounds noble, but what happens when your neighbor is a mighty cathedral and you’re a refuge for defrocked gay clergy?

Forget politics. If you’re seeking an institution that produces bizarre bedfellows, look no further than religion.

Bernard hasn’t made his spiritual journey to Maine yet. With a few mouse clicks earlier this spring, though, the 38-year-old triggered a real estate transaction that left some communicants at an adjacent Catholic church feeling violated.

Using eBay, an Internet auction site where you may spend $3.99 on the book “Find Freedom” by the Rev. Billy Graham or obtain the compact disc “Yes I Am” by openly lesbian rock star Melissa Etheridge for $7.99, Bernard dropped $180,000 and bought a brick building on the corner of Church and Horan streets.

The residence has come to represent chastity. Built by the Ursuline Sisters as a mission home, it was a convent for the Sisters of St. Joseph for 40 years. St. Rose of Lima, the shadowing church in question, owned the property before three brothers (relatives, not monks) bought it and rented out its rooms.

So far, so good

Soon the site will be inhabited by The Community of All Angels. It’s an order loosely affiliated with the Episcopalian Church and comprised of gay and lesbian ministers exiled from Roman Catholicism and other faiths due to frankness about their sexuality. Others are living with HIV and AIDS.

That sound you just heard wasn’t the St. Rose ladies’ auxiliary weaving a welcome mat.

“It’s a free country,” said Rev. Richard Senghas, pastor of St. Rose, where more than 1,300 families worship.

You could throw a rock from the paved parking lot of the church to the windows of the house, and on the other side of the street it’s nearly spitting distance from the front steps of Bernard’s new baby to the parish hall doors.

Thankfully, nobody has tried either. Decency reigns, for now.

“We’ve met, and from my experience he was a very pastoral man,” Bernard said. “He was fair, friendly and cordial.”

Both men express the hackneyed conviction of loving the sinner and hating the sin. But like thousands of Mainers, they stand a million miles apart on a perennially polarizing issue.

Even the contrast on their abutting lands is striking.

The old convent is sturdy, at best. Beige paint peels beneath a golden, cross-shaped door knocker. Duct tape holds one window together. An old-fashioned television antenna is mounted on a cement block.

God’s House

Maybe Bernard could enlist his neighbors’ groundskeeper. Visitors to St. Rose can’t miss the wafting scent of freshly mowed grass.

The edifice and most of its landmarks are built from granite, including large, block letters on the facade that read “Hic Domus Dei,” or “This is God’s House.”

Senghas asked Bernard to erect his own sign, clarifying that his ministry is not Catholic. The monk chuckles when he tells the story. Wonder how it will read.

Having withdrawn from study for the Roman Catholic priesthood to start his own monastery due to the church’s stand against homosexuality, Bernard doesn’t want any confusion, either.

His community eyes its third home in 12 years after stops in New York and Florida, but Bernard says he has never been the victim of a hate crime. Nothing resembling the graffiti that recently besmirched an Auburn synagogue.

“I’ve heard that Maine is pretty progressive,” Bernard said.

Yes, in pockets, it is. But not everybody in this blinking-stoplight hamlet attends church, either.

In a spacious parking lot behind the structure where the Angels soon will tread, a disabled, unregistered Chevrolet Blazer catches the warm, midday sun.

Two stickers decorate its back window. One is the image of a hunched-over man pointing to lipstick marks on his naked backside. The other is an off-color remark about homosexuals.

Welcome to Maine.

Kalle Oakes is staff columnist. He may be reached by e-mail at [email protected].