How Queer and Trans Artists Reshape Divinity in Their Own Image

— For contemporary artists like Río Edén, Mx. Zeloszelos Marchandt, and Elliot Barnhill, making religious art is a revolutionary act

Río Edén, “Created in Divine image” (2020)

By Emma Cieslik

Surrounded by tulips and lilacs, a Black person with top surgery scars and a chest tattoo reading “Resurrected 01-26-2012” raises their face up to the sky. Titled “Created in Divine image” (2020), a phrase repeated in pink text against a background of gray clouds, that person’s hollow face is pierced by rays of pink, white, and blue light — the colors of the trans pride flag. In the Instagram caption accompanying his work, trans artist Río Edén wrote, “Blessed be those who live outside the binary, bless be those who challenge the binary, bless be those who are trans.”

Edén, also known as The Brooklyn Bruja, is part of a growing artistic movement visualizing the divinity of queer bodies and the queerness of religious figures. This movement gained steam in the last three years, right as scholars are rediscovering how Jesus and the saints may have been queer according to personal writings and hagiographies and have been depicted as queer for centuries by LGBTQ+ artists and others grappling with how divinity supersedes gender binaries. I myself have written about genderqueer-ness in Medieval theologians’ interpretations of Christ. At the same time, artists like Edén are depicting saints and religious figures as visually queer through the inclusion of top surgery scars, breast augmentation, body hair, and other attributes, while also celebrating the divinity and queer sainthood of LGBTQ+ folx today.

Edén is a trans autistic person of color, with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and anxiety. He grew up in a Baptist family that later converted to Pentecostalism — an extremely homophobic religious sect. He was outed by his mom at 15 and entered conversion therapy at 17.  He was thus forced back into the closet, only officially coming out at 21. He began to medically transition almost three years ago, first starting hormone replacement therapy in June 2021.

Río Edén, collage featuring Daniel Davis Aston with freshly healed top surgery scars, surrounded by a pink and gold halo, candles, and flowers. This collage was created and shared on social media just two days after Aston’s murder in the Club Q shooting

“Created in Divine image” is made in Edén’s typical style of ethereal collages overlapping faceless figures, natural backgrounds, halos, and shimmering color gradients. Its religious imagery is strikingly similar to another collage featuring Daniel Davis Aston. In that work, Edén memorializes Aston, who was killed in the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs in November of 2022, as a queer saint martyred in the fight for trans existence.

For those who know Edén’s backstory, it may seem anathema for him to reclaim the religious words and symbols that made him feel shame. But Edén disagrees. He views his art as a form of divine protest. “I was taught that man and woman were created in the image of God,” he explained to Hyperallergic, “but then when they talk about trans and queer people, that message starts to fade off, and I don’t like to have queer people feel the way that I did where they feel excluded from having that divineness too.” For Edén, creating religious art is in of itself a revolutionary act: The White, straight, Christians who surrounded him growing up have controlled what Jesus and God look like for too long.

If they can depict Jesus as a cishet, monogamous White man, Edén argued, then he too can show that Jesus was made in his own image, as a trans person of color.

 Mx. Zeloszelos Marchandt, “Ecce Homo” (2023)

Edén’s practice is not just about dismantling heteronormativity in religious art, but also about depicting LGBTQ+ individuals of color as divine, in a similar vein to trans performance and visual artist Mx. Zeloszelos Marchandt. In “Ecce Homo” (2023), for instance, Marchandt depicts himself as a Black, Indigenous, and trans Jesus. Both Edén and Marchandt encounter Him through their own bodies, and thus visualize Jesus — mouthpiece for God on Earth — as a spokesperson for communities facing oppression today.

As Edén argues, no one really knows how Jesus presented or identified. The same is true of many saints, but in Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt’s 2021 book Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, Medieval scholars argue that illuminators visualized Jesus and God as transcending the human concept of gender. Many saints were queer and because of their proximity to God were depicted as visually queer by Medieval artists.

Elliott Barnhill  “Heavenly Body 1” (2023)

Queer depictions of saints date back centuries, and queer creators today are reclaiming and reviving this artistic tradition. Elliott Barnhill, a disabled transmasc queer Catholic and seminary graduate, reimagines saints who have canonically been depicted as straight, hyperfeminine, or hypermasculine. His own coming out was predicated upon “becoming aware that the things we now call queerness can be found in the lives of saints,” he told me. His mission to spread that awareness extends beyond visual depictions: He founded the Instagram account Queer Catholic Icons and the podcast Blessed are the Binary Breakers.

With seraphs bearing top surgery scars, Barnhill creates distinctly modern queer Catholic icons in bold defiance of the Church’s queerphobic stance. Similarly, queer femme artist Dani explores butchfemme identity in her portraits of Catholic saints through her Instagram account AndHerSaints. With intimate portraits of St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Joan of Arc, their works center on dignity: acknowledging that queer lives and experiences are sacred and holy.

All of these artists, along with others like text-based artist Girl of Sword and whole zines dedicated to trans+ Christian art such as The Transient Theology Project, are part of a queer artistic Renaissance that affirms the dignity and divinity of queer people centuries ago and today. In doing so, they not only challenge the dichotomy of queerness and religion, but disrupt queerphobic religious teachings that seek to harm queer folx. As these artists and scholars argue, their queerness just brings them that much closer to God.

Dani, “St. Thérèse & St. Joan of Arc” (2023)
Río Edén, “Our transness is omnipresent” ( 2023)

Complete Article HERE!

What does the Bible say about homosexuality?

— For starters, Jesus wasn’t a homophobe

By

Pope Francis was recently asked about his views on homosexuality. He reportedly replied:

This (laws around the world criminalising LGBTI people) is not right. Persons with homosexual tendencies are children of God. God loves them. God accompanies them … condemning a person like this is a sin. Criminalising people with homosexual tendencies is an injustice.

This isn’t the first time Pope Francis has shown himself to be a progressive leader when it comes to, among other things, gay Catholics.

It’s a stance that has drawn the ire of some high-ranking bishops and ordinary Catholics, both on the African continent and elsewhere in the world.

Some of these Catholics may argue that Pope Francis’s approach to LGBTI matters is a misinterpretation of Scripture (or the Bible). But is it?

Scripture is particularly important for Christians. When church leaders refer to “the Bible” or “the Scriptures”, they usually mean “the Bible as we understand it through our theological doctrines”. The Bible is always interpreted by our churches through their particular theological lenses.

As a biblical scholar, I would suggest that church leaders who use their cultures and theology to exclude homosexuals don’t read Scripture carefully. Instead, they allow their patriarchal fears to distort it, seeking to find in the Bible proof-texts that will support attitudes of exclusion.

There are several instances in the Bible that underscore my point.

Love of God and neighbour

Mark’s Gospel, found in the New Testament, records that Jesus entered the Jerusalem temple on three occasions. First, he visited briefly, and “looked around at everything” (11:11).

On the second visit he acted, driving “out those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves” (11:15). Jesus specifically targeted those who exploited the poorest of the people coming to the temple.

On his third visit, Jesus spent considerable time in the temple itself (11:27-13:2). He met the full array of temple leadership, including chief priests, teachers of the law and elders. Each of these leadership sectors used their interpretation of Scripture to exclude rather than to include.

The “ordinary people” (11:32 and 12:12) recognised that Jesus proclaimed a gospel of inclusion. They eagerly embraced him as he walked through the temple.

In Mark 12:24, Jesus addresses the Sadducees, who were the traditional high priests of ancient Israel and played an important role in the temple. Among those who confronted Jesus, they represented the group that held to a conservative theological position and used their interpretation of the Scripture to exclude. Jesus said to them:

Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures or the power of God?

Jesus recognised that they chose to interpret Scripture in a way that prevented it from being understood in non-traditional ways. Thus they limited God’s power to be different from traditional understandings of him. Jesus was saying God refused to be the exclusive property of the Sadducees. The ordinary people who followed Jesus understood that he represented a different understanding of God.

This message of inclusion becomes even clearer when Jesus is later confronted by a single scribe (12:28). In answer to the scribe’s question on the most important laws, Jesus summarised the theological ethic of his gospel: love of God and love of neighbour (12:29-31).

Inclusion, not exclusion

Those who would exclude homosexuals from God’s kingdom choose to ignore Jesus, turning instead to the Old Testament – most particularly to Genesis 19, the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Their interpretation of the story is that it is about homosexuality. It isn’t. It relates to hospitality.

The story begins in Genesis 18 when three visitors (God and two angels, appearing as “men”) came before Abraham, a Hebrew patriarch. What did Abraham and his wife Sarah do? They offered hospitality.

The two angels then left Abraham and the Lord and travelled into Sodom (19:1) where they met Lot, Abraham’s nephew. What did Lot do? He offered hospitality. The two incidents of hospitality are explained in exactly the same language.

The “men of Sodom” (19:4), as the Bible describes them, didn’t offer the same hospitality to these angels in disguise. Instead they sought to humiliate them (and Lot (19:9)) by threatening to rape them. We know they were heterosexual because Lot, in attempting to protect himself and his guests, offered his virgin daughters to them (19:8).

Heterosexual rape of men by men is a common act of humiliation. This is an extreme form of inhospitality. The story contrasts extreme hospitality (Abraham and Lot) with the extreme inhospitality of the men of Sodom. It is a story of inclusion, not exclusion. Abraham and Lot included the strangers; the men of Sodom excluded them.

Clothed in Christ

When confronted by the inclusive gospel of Jesus and a careful reading of the story of Sodom as one about hospitality, those who disavow Pope Francis’s approach will likely jump to other Scriptures. Why? Because they have a patriarchal agenda and are looking for any Scripture that might support their position.

But the other Scriptures they use also require careful reading. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, for example, are not about “homosexuality” as we now understand it – as the caring, loving and sexual relationship between people of the same sex. These texts are about relationships that cross boundaries of purity (between clean and unclean) and ethnicity (Israelite and Canaanite).

In Galatians 3:28 in the New Testament, Paul the apostle yearns for a Christian community where:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Paul built his theological argument on the Jew-Greek distinction, but then extended it to the slave-free distinction and the male-female distinction. Christians – no matter which church they belong to – should follow Paul and extend it to the heterosexual-homosexual distinction.

We are all “clothed in Christ” (3:27): God only sees Christ, not our different sexualities.

Complete Article HERE!

Blessing of Same-Sex Couples Rankles Africa’s Catholics

— It is out of step with the continent’s values, many bishops say, and threatens to derail expansion in the church’s fastest growing region in the world.

Worshipers of the Legio Maria of African Church Mission gathering for the Christmas Eve Mass in December at a church near Ugunja, Kenya.

by

The Vatican’s recent declaration allowing the blessing of same-sex couples caused a stir around the globe, but perhaps most of all in Africa, a rising center of the Roman Catholic Church’s future. In one statement after the next, bishops in several countries spoke of the fear and confusion the declaration has caused among their flocks, and said it was out of step with the continent’s culture and values.

The bishops also harbored a deeper fear: that in a place where the church is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, and where many forms of Christianity are competing for worshipers, the declaration could slow the church’s expansion on the continent.

Bishop John Oballa of the Ngong Diocese near Nairobi said that a woman had written to him saying that a friend told her he wanted clarification on the declaration, or else he would convert to the Methodist Church.

“There’s a lot of vibrancy in many, many dioceses of Africa,” Bishop Oballa said in an interview. “We need to safeguard against anything that might derail that growth.”

He said he would advise his priests to give blessings to same-sex couples only if they were seeking God’s strength in helping “to stop living in same-sex unions.”

But if the couple merely wanted a blessing and planned to continue living the way they were, “it may give the impression of recognition,” he said, adding that he would advise clergy “not to bless because it may be scandalous to others — it may weaken the faith of others.”

This past week, the Vatican sought to placate those bishops alarmed by the new rule, saying that allowances should be made for “local culture,” but that it would remain church policy. Bishops opposed to the change, it said in a statement, should take an “extended period of pastoral reflection” to wrap their heads around why the Vatican says the blessing of same-sex couples is in keeping with church teaching.

Home to 236 million of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, Africa accounted for more than half of the 16.2 million people who joined the church worldwide in 2021. As bishops and other church leaders on the continent deal with the fallout among their parishioners over the declaration, broader concerns have been raised about whether it could lead to a rift between Pope Francis and a region that is a demographic bright spot for Catholicism.

“I think there is a rebellion already that’s started to say, ‘We’re not going implement this,’” said Father Russell Pollitt, the director of the Jesuit Institute South Africa, referring to the responses of bishops across the continent.

A cathedral with people filling the pews. Pope Francis is onstage.
Pope Francis meeting leaders of the Roman Catholic Church last February at the Cathedral of St. Theresa in Juba, South Sudan’s capital.

Some African clergy said they expected the Vatican and church leaders in Africa to work through their differences. But the declaration has complicated the relationship and will force difficult conversations between the church’s central authority and its African leaders. Some bishops have even hinted at a split between the values of African nations and the West, where some clergy had for years been running afoul of the Vatican’s guidance by blessing same-sex unions.

“In our African context, while recognizing the confusion existing in the more developed countries of new, unchristian models of ‘conjugal union’ and ‘styles of life,’ we are very clear on what a family and marriage is,” said a statement from the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Without exception, church leaders in Africa have emphasized to their flocks that the declaration approved by Francis was explicit in saying that marriage remained a union between a man and a woman. They have stressed that the church’s doctrine on marriage has not changed, and that the declaration is about blessing the individuals, not their relationships.

Bishops in Malawi and Zambia have already said that, to avoid confusion, their clergy would be instructed not to give blessings to same-sex couples. The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria did not take a firm position on the issue, and said in a statement that “asking for God’s blessing is not dependent on how good one is.” But it added that there was “no possibility in the church of blessing same-sex unions and activities,” a nod to the declaration’s nuance of blessing gay individuals not relationships.

People standing in the pews of a large church. Two candles are lit in front.
Catholic worshipers singing last year at the Emmanuel Cathedral in Durban, South Africa, during a New Year’s service.

The Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference affirmed that distinction in its statement. But it went further in saying that the church’s position was that “all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, must be treated with the dignity that they deserve as God’s children, made to feel welcome in the church, and not be discriminated against or harmed.”

The Vatican’s declaration has laid bare a tension for the church in Africa: How can it welcome homosexuals while not upsetting believers who stand firmly behind the church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin?

Some African church leaders feel strongly that they should not even talk about homosexuality “because it is un-African,” said Bishop Sithembele Sipuka of the Mthatha Diocese in South Africa, who is also the president of the Southern African conference. Others, he added, felt differently because they personally knew gay people. “It is not our experience that it’s this thing they got from Europe,” he said.

His conference has interpreted the declaration to mean that people in same-sex relationships can be blessed, he said, but individually and not presented together.

Months before the Vatican’s declaration, Bishop Martin Mtumbuka of the Karonga Diocese in Malawi delivered a fiery sermon accusing Western pastors of trying to bend the word of God to accept homosexuals as a way of attracting a larger pool of priests and other religious vocations.

“Any one of us pastors who champions this is just being heretical and fooling himself,” Bishop Mtumbuka said, according to an audio recording of the sermon, which circulated widely on social media after the Vatican’s declaration.

A crowd of people outside a church. One man is holding a sign saying, “Don’t normalize abnormal.”
A man carrying an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sign in July in Lilongwe, Malawi, at the beginning of nationwide marches organized by churches in the country.

Francisco Maoza, 48, a parishioner who lives in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, said he was relieved when his country’s bishops said they would not permit blessings for same-sex couples.

“I still think the position by the pope is wrong,” said Mr. Maoza, a carpenter. “In the African context, even in Malawian culture, we don’t allow men and women to marry people of their own sex. So why should priests be allowed to bless such unions?”

Another Catholic in Malawi, Josephine Chinawa, said she felt that Francis needed to step down because of the declaration.

“I really couldn’t understand his motivation,” she said. “Maybe he is too old.”

However, Father Pollitt said that some church leaders in Africa were being hypocritical. While they severely criticize homosexuality, he said, they say little about other “irregular unions” identified in the Vatican’s declaration, such as unmarried heterosexual couples who live together. The document says that priests can bless them, too. There have also been many cases on the continent of priests breaking celibacy rules by having children, but that does not get the same scrutiny among church leaders, he said.

“Let’s face facts: There is a lot of homophobia in Africa,” Father Pollitt said.

How the controversy over the blessing of same-sex couples plays out in the long run in Africa remains an open question. Some analysts say there may end up being very little tension, primarily because few gay couples are expected to actually ask for blessings.

“I don’t think they would even have the courage to introduce their partners to their parents, let alone coming to receive a blessing from the priest,” Bishop Oballa said.

Bishop Sipuka said that the Vatican and African church leaders would eventually find a way forward.

“I foresee a softening of position, maybe, by some who have reacted very strongly, as the document gets explained and discussed,” he said.

Children facing away from the camera are lined up in a single file along a road. Across the way is a huge crowd of people many rows deep.
Waiting for Pope Francis last February in Juba

Complete Article HERE!

Pope Francis allows blessings of same-sex couples, shifting Vatican guidance

Same-sex couples receiving blessings in front of Germany’s Cologne Cathedral in September. The Vatican formally approved such blessings on Monday.

By and 

The Vatican on Monday issued formal, definitive permission for Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples, as long as those benedictions are kept separate from marriage, a decree that amounts to an about-face after decades of discord between the LBGTQ+ community and the Catholic Church, which has long upheld that homosexuals are “disordered” and said any nod to their unions would be tantamount to blessing sin.

The guidance from the powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued after papal review and approval, largely reverses a 2021 ruling and expands on a far briefer statement of support for such blessings issued by Francis in September in response to questions raised by conservative clerics.

The document issued Monday says that blessings of same-sex couples should not suggest even the trappings of sacramental marriage — including traditional wedding vestments — or even ceremonies formally recognizing same-sex unions. But it offers guidelines for offering benedictions to people in same-sex relationships and explicitly gives permission to “ordained ministers” to conduct such blessings, while asking priests to use their own “prudent and fatherly discernment” to decide when doing so is appropriate.

Couples in “irregular situations” as well as “couples of the same sex” may receive priestly blessings, the Vatican said, so that these “human relationships may mature and grow in fidelity to the Gospel.”

“With its untiring wisdom and motherly care, the Church welcomes all who approach God with humble hearts, accompanying them with those spiritual aids that enable everyone to understand and realize God’s will fully in their existence,” the Vatican said.

The document departs from a 2021 Vatican statement that confirmed a ban on blessing same-sex unions, calling them not “even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.” At the time, the ruling dashed the hopes of gay Catholics and seemed to indicate the limits of Francis’s reformist intentions.

>But since then, Francis had only mildly reprimanded priests in Western Europe who ventured to defy the ban. And he removed the conservative officials said to be the architects of the 2021 decision and appointed a fellow Argentine and ally, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, to the head the ministry in charge of Vatican doctrine. Fernández signed Monday’s decree.

“The Vatican’s new declaration is a huge a step forward for the church’s ministry for LGBTQ people,” said the Rev. James Martin, an American priest who ministers to the LGBTQ+ community and was handpicked as a delegate by Francis. “It provides guidelines, and it leaves a lot of it up to the minister. But this is a gift to LGBTQ Catholics and the document itself is a blessing.”

The global Catholic Church, with 1.3 billion adherents, is deeply divided on the issue of homosexuality. Liberal German, Belgian and Swiss priests have conducted same-sex blessings for years, prompting denouncements from conservative Catholic voices in the United States, while some Catholic bishops in Africa have refused to oppose legislation imposing the death penalty for homosexual acts.< The ruling on Monday, a declaration titled “Fiducia Supplicans,” again demonstrated how Francis has become less cautious and more willing to move against his conservative critics in the latter stage of his papacy. This year, he has decried the “strong reactionary attitude” among American conservative Catholics; removed one critic, Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland; and stripped another, U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, of his traditional privileges.

Francis began to open a door to the gay community shortly after becoming pope, declaring, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about gay priests. He has invited LGBTQ+ advocates to the Vatican, supported national laws for same-sex civil unions and called on church leaders to welcome gay Catholics.

The extent of that welcome became the most divisive issue during October’s month-long meeting in Vatican City on the direction of the faith. The wording of a concluding report failed to use inclusive language coined by the pope and declined to even repeat the term LGBTQ+. During that meeting, conservative bishops from Poland, Hungary, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Australia and elsewhere categorically rejected same-sex blessings, saying they would condone “sin” and amount to a “colonial” imposition from liberal Western Europeans.

Some conservatives noted Monday that while the document was being taken as broad acceptance of same-sex blessings, the new guidelines still don’t condone the most controversial practices in countries such as Germany, where some Catholic priests have overseen marriage-like ceremonies for same-sex couples. The document specifically notes that “this blessing should never be imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding.”

>But Martin and others interpreted the text as standing permission to hold such services inside Catholic churches, as long as they were framed in ways that avoided a reference to a Catholic sacrament or liturgical ritual.

Conservative Catholics expressed indignation. The right-wing Catholic outlet LifeSite News described the decision as “in contradiction to the unchangeable Catholic teaching that the Church cannot bless sinful relationships.” The Catholic church official teachings still describe homosexuality as “intrinsically disordered.”

“This document is scandalous and wrong, because of one underlying reason: You’re not blessing an individual who wants to change his life, as much as the couple that objectively lives in sin and has no intention of getting out of that,” said Roberto de Mattei, president of the conservative Catholic Lepanto Foundation. “I think this document will chiefly supply munitions to the most radical among Francis opposers … a minority convinced that Pope Francis’s words and gestures amount to heresy.”

In a significant way, however, the declaration simply expanded on the teachings of Francis already issued in September, when the Vatican made public the pope’s official response to conservative clerics, including Burke, who had demanded that he clarify the church’s position on same-sex blessings. In the response, dated Sept. 25, Francis wrote that there are “situations” that may not be “morally acceptable” but where a priest can assess, on a case-by-case basis, whether blessings may be given — as long as such blessings are kept separate from the sacrament of marriage.

“We cannot be judges who only deny, push back and exclude,” Francis wrote. “As such, pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or several people, that do not convey a wrong idea of a matrimony. Because when one seeks a blessing, one is requesting help from God.”

Innocenzo Pontillo, a gay Catholic activist in Florence who is in a same-sex union, called Monday’s decision long overdue — while acknowledging the double message the Vatican seemed to be sending by going to such great lengths to separate those blessings from the sacrament of marriage.

>“There were no doctrine-based justifications for not doing it, because, in the Catholic Church, they also bless tanks, cars, tractors, even salt,” he said. “A blessing only means a wishing for the best. It’s painful, though, that they should still feel compelled to reiterate: Remember, it’s not marriage! Look, we know it already.”

Complete Article HERE!

The Pope and LGBT Catholics: Francis faces a conservative backlash

— As the pontiff apparently seeks to create more welcoming Catholic Church, a cadre of traditionalists have become emboldened in airing ferocious criticism

Pope Francis’ recent meeting with Sr Jeannine Gramick was the latest sign of an apparent opening of the church towards the LGBT community.

By Naomi O’Leary

The photograph released on the Vatican’s official news channels was in many ways unremarkable, showing a smiling nun meeting Pope Francis in his official residence.

But close observers of the Catholic Church recognised something far from routine. This nun was Sr Jeannine Gramick, an advocate for LGBT Catholics who through the decades had been denounced by church authorities and once even feared excommunication.

Here she was, being welcomed by the man at the top. “The meeting was very emotional for me,” Sr Gramick said after the encounter last month. It was described by her LGBT advocacy organisation New Ways Ministry as “once unimaginable”.

It was the latest sign of an apparent opening of the church under Francis towards the LGBT community, which has drawn tentative optimism from some more liberal believers, but the outrage of a conservative flank.

It has deepened the suspicions of hardliners within the church that Francis is a dangerous reformer who risks worsening what they see as the confusion and undermining of church authority begun by the landmark 1960s Vatican II reforms.

Last weekend, Francis acted to impose his authority against a coterie of such traditionalists, who had become increasingly emboldened in airing public criticism.

Diabolically disordered clown
—  Bishop Strickland criticising Pope Francis on Twitter

In a highly unusual move, the Vatican stripped Texas bishop Joseph Strickland of his position.

A vocal conservative and supporter of former US president Donald Trump, Strickland had been one of Francis’ fiercest critics in the United States, using a large media presence to criticise the pope’s efforts to give lay people responsibility and make the church more welcoming to LGBT people.

Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland speaks outside the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore.

“Vatican officials promote immorality,” Strickland wrote on Twitter last year. In another message, he approvingly shared a video in which Francis was criticised as a “diabolically disordered clown”.

A church investigation had found “that the continuation in office of Bishop Strickland was not feasible”, the Vatican statement said.

Can Catholic beliefs change with the times?

This was one of the questions posed by five conservative cardinals to Francis this year, in a list of queries they published in an apparent open challenge to the pope.

Asked whether divine revelation can be reinterpreted based on the changing norms of the day, Francis responded: “If it is understood as ‘interpret better’, the expression is valid.” He said some aspects of the Bible are of their time, such as slavery.

In another question, the cardinals asked whether it is permissible to bless same-sex unions, as some Catholic churches in Germany and Belgium have begun to do.

While only traditional marriages are recognised as such, “we must not lose the pastoral charity”, Francis told the cardinals. “Pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing . . . that do not convey a mistaken concept of marriage.”

By telling the cardinals that same-sex unions could blessed on a case-by-case basis, Francis opened the door on a past taboo.

Catholic priests give blessings to same-sex couples during a protest outside Cologne Cathedral, in Cologne, Germany in September 2023.

Since then, the pontiff has said that transgender people can be baptised, serve as witnesses and become godparents in some cases.

He has made clear that being gay is not in itself a “sin”, though remains of the view that homosexual acts are, along with all sexual activity outside traditional marriage.

But his papacy has striven to some extent to send the message that regardless, people should not be excluded from the church and denied pastoral care.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” he famously responded to a journalist shortly after his election in 2013.

Last month, former president of Ireland Mary McAleese, who is a doctor of Canon law, welcomed comments from Francis about blessings for same-sex couples but pointed out the pontiff’s stance is a “complete contradiction” of what he had said previously.

In December 2022, she accused him of “misogynistic drivel”, following an interview with a US-based Catholic magazine where he said women were not being deprived by being denied the right to become priests.

Former president Mary McAleese last month welcomed comments from Francis about blessings for same-sex couples but pointed out the pontiff’s stance is a ‘complete contradiction’ of what he had said previously.

The life story of Sr Gramick starkly illustrates the shift in approach towards LGBT people since Francis became pope.

Sr Gramick began ministering to US LGBT communities in the 1970s and became an advocate for gay people within the church, holding workshops for Catholics that explained the spectrum of human sexuality.

This alarmed a number of bishops, and complaints triggered a Vatican investigation. The Vatican’s disciplinary arm, then led by the doctrinaire Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – who would later become Pope Benedict XVI – publicly lambasted her for failing to accurately represent church teaching on “the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts”.

She was ordered to desist in her work in 1999. She did not.

Her organisation, New Ways Ministry, was censured for issuing a leaflet as marriage equality debates raged in 2010, outlining why Catholics might support legal unions for gay people. In response, US bishops declared the group could not describe itself as Catholic.

With the election of Pope Francis in 2013, however, change appeared to be in the air.

In a 2020 documentary, the pontiff said: “Homosexual people have a right to be in a family . . . What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered.”

The comment landed in New Ways Ministry like a bombshell. “We were sanctioned by the US bishops for a position that the pope now held,” its executive director Francis DeBernardo recalled. “So I decided to write to Pope Francis.”

To his shock, a response arrived swiftly from the man himself on official Vatican letterhead, beginning a correspondence between Francis and Sr Gramick. In 2022, Francis wrote to the nun to congratulate her on 50 years of ministry, thanking her for the “compassion and tenderness” of her work, and saying her willingness to feel the pain of others and “condemn no one” was in the “style of God”.

This exchange culminated in the meeting in person last month.

“It still feels a little unreal,” said DeBernardo, who was in the meeting with Francis. “To realise that we have approval from the highest level of the church, when so many middle levels of the church had been against us for so long, it’s still sinking in.”

The issue of whether the church should open up further to LGBT people was among the topics discussed at an unprecedented gathering held in the Vatican last month.

The “synod on synodality” brought together hundreds of bishops, clerics, women in religious orders and Catholic lay people to deliberate on the future of the church, including issues such as the role of women and sexual abuse.

Participants wearing synod lanyards milled around side streets by the Vatican, excitedly greeting each other with the air of a grand reunion.

That expression – ‘We have always done it that way’ – is poison for the life of the church
—  Pope Francis

In a large hall usually used for papal audiences, they sat in small groups at round tables to discuss a series of questions, in sessions interspersed by prayer. Participants took turns to speak before the issues were put to a vote.

One observer likened it to Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly.

Its main emphasis was “listening to one another”, said Sr Patricia Murray, a senior Irish Loreto nun who was appointed to the commission that would draw up the synod’s conclusions. She described it as a way to “shift the feeling that the truth resides at the top of the hierarchy”.

Synods have been held since the 1960s, when they were introduced in Vatican II reforms as a way for bishops to advise the pope. But this was the first time it included non-clerics and women as voting members alongside bishops.

The idea of bringing the faithful into consultations was designed to overcome the polarising dynamics of social media that have amplified the divisions of the flock.

It was necessary to involve local churches “from the bottom up”, Francis said when he opened the synodal process, inviting congregations around the world to share their vision of the church.

“That expression – ‘We have always done it that way’ – is poison for the life of the church,” he said. “Those who think this way, perhaps without even realising it, make the mistake of not taking seriously the times in which we are living.”

Then came the backlash.

On the evening before synod participants were due to begin their deliberations in the Vatican, the de facto leader of a faction of fierce critics of Francis, US Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, held a counter event in a theatre nearby.

He spoke against the “state of confusion and errors of vision that permeate” the synod process, and urged attendees to read a book to which he had written the foreword, called The Synodal Process Is a Pandora’s Box.

The work’s publisher, The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), promotes the book as revealing the “heresy at work in the Synod” and an agenda to “distort doctrine, subvert tradition, and destroy the divinely instituted hierarchical nature of the church”.

Such groups encapsulate an extreme right-wing influence centred in the US, where a cadre of traditionalists, somewhat ironically, are vehemently opposed to the pope.

In the US, Pope Francis faces a church that is divided along culture war lines and which has increasingly attracted conservative young men as recruits to the priesthood.

Discomfort at Francis’ criticisms of capitalism and insinuations about Latin American radicalism are at the heart of this opposition, alongside concerns about social issues.

Ample funding seems to be available: according to its tax records, the US branch of TFP reported annual revenue of $19 million (€17.5 million) last year, mostly from “contributions and grants”.

In the US, Francis faces a church that is divided along culture war lines and which has increasingly attracted conservative young men as recruits to the priesthood.

Whereas in the 1960s 68 per cent of new ordinands described themselves as theologically “progressive” and “very progressive”, that number has dwindled almost to zero today, according to a recent mass survey of thousands of US priests. It found half of newly ordained priests now describe themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative”.

Particularly among younger priests, celebrating the traditional Latin Mass gained popularity under Francis as a symbol of resistance to his reforms, church observers say.

It is seen as a token of allegiance to Pope Benedict, who had liberalised the use of the Latin Mass in a key reform and was nostalgically remembered as an upholder of tradition and doctrine.

Since Francis imposed restrictions on the use of the Latin Mass in 2021, the issue has become a flashpoint for conservative resistance to the pope.

“Francis will die, the Latin Mass will live forever,” one popular traditionalist blog in the US thundered after the pope restricted the rite.

At one point during the synod, participants wept as they heard the story of a young woman who died by suicide. She was bisexual and did not feel welcome in the church.

“I wept,” Dominican friar Timothy Radcliffe told a synod assembly in a live-streamed address. “I hope it changed us.”

Yet when the synod released its voting results and concluding report, those ambitious for change were disappointed.

The term “LGBT”, which appeared in an earlier draft, had disappeared, reportedly due to the discomfort of bishops from the Global South who see the word as a western imposition.

The conclusions deferred the question of whether women can be deacons to further study and consideration. They expressed “a profound sense of love, mercy and compassion” for those who feel hurt or neglected by the church, and acknowledged that issues like gender identity, sexual orientation, and troubled marriages “are controversial not only in society, but also in the church”.

Several theologians and Catholic commentators have since argued that the media focus on the synod’s most controversial topics has obscured the main progress that was made: the establishment of the synod model itself.

Senior participants have said it is now impossible to go back to the prior model of involving only bishops, and that the inclusion of women and laypeople is now here to stay.

Where conservatives fear the undermining of authority, proponents see the synod model as continuing the most ancient Catholic traditions, recalling the community involvement recounted in the New Testament of the earliest days of the church.

“Some people in the aula were adamantly opposed to a more welcoming approach to LGBTQ people, but that didn’t mean that they were any less my brothers and sisters in Christ,” Fr James Martin, a Jesuit who has advocated for the inclusion of gay people, wrote of his experience of the synod.

“The real message of the synod is the synod itself: how we came together to discuss difficult topics. And I was amazed that the topic was discussed so openly and so extensively in the synod, surely a major step forward in the church.”

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Italian priest joins splinter Anglican Church, citing ‘inclusivity’

Father Andrea Barberini.

By Crux Staff

In a reminder that while some Catholics may feel the Church is changing too much under Pope Francis, others obviously feel it isn’t changing enough, a priest in northern Italy said Thursday he’s leaving to affiliate with an offshoot of Anglicanism, claiming it’s more expressive of his “values of inclusivity.”

Father Andrea Barberini, formerly the vicar of the Catholic parish of St. Ambrogio in Cremona in the Italian region of Lombardy, made the announcement on his Facebook page.

“Becoming Anglican puts me in a distinct situation, that of no longer being in communion with the Catholic Church of Rome,” Barberini wrote. “However, it permits me to be in full harmony with my spirituality and the gift of priesthood, in tune with my vocation to a family and marriage.”

“I do this within a Church which, without any pretense of perfection, shares those values of inclusivity that I always hoped would be reached also within the Catholic Church.”

“In my new Church, I’ve discovered a community in which ecclesiastical leaders can be seen not as authority figures but as friends, and that’s an invaluable gift,” he wrote.

“Inclusivity” was among the watchwords of the recently concluded Oct. 4-29 Synod of Bishops on Synodality, which Pope Francis began by declaring that the Catholic Church must be open to “everyone, everyone.”

Nonetheless, Barberini seemed to want more than the institutional Catholic Church is prepared to deliver, choosing to join the “Inclusive Anglican Episcopal Church,” the Italian branch of the “Anglican Free Communion International,” which is an offshoot of a splinter group of Anglicans that dates to the late 19th century.

It is not recognized by the worldwide Anglican Communion led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, though it is a member of the World Council of Churches. Its presiding bishop is currently based in Florida in the U.S.

In Italy, the Inclusive Anglican Episcopal Church, based in Catania on the island of Sicily, is led by a former Catholic nun named Maria Vittoria Longhitano, who was recently named the provincial bishop for Europe of the Anglican Free Communion International. The Church endorses women’s ordination, married priests, and same-sex marriage, among other progressive positions, and uses a redacted version of the traditional Anglican Book of Common Prayer to eliminate gender-specific references to God.

Another former Catholic priest, Luca Ceccarelli, serves as a bishop in the Church after having left the Catholic priesthood 14 years ago upon announcing that he was gay, and today he’s civilly married to his longtime partner.

In presenting his reasons for leaving Catholicism, Barberini cited “doctrinal” and “theological” factors as well as motives “connected to my life journey.” Without specifying the identity of his partner, Barberini thanked “the person who is by my side in this new phase of life, whose understanding and sharing regarding the reasons for my choices are like a ‘supporting pillar’ that would destine everything to definitive collapse if it were to fail.”

Barberini made clear that he holds no “rancor” for the Catholic Church, and thanked Bishop Antonio Napolioni of Cremona for allowing him to take two years of paid leave while he pondered his future.

Nevertheless, Barberini also said some Catholics hadn’t been so understanding.

“I have to say with great displeasure that in these two years I’ve had to bandage some wounds,” he wrote. “My choice hasn’t gone down well with everyone. Different people have stopped saying hello to me, have revoked their friendship or even asked me not to contact them anymore.”

“When they sit in Church and receive Communion, they may think they are Christians, but perhaps they should reflect on what that faith really means,” Barberini wrote. If they don’t see me, a priest, as a person but only as a role, then perhaps what they feel is more of a deference to the institution.”

In terms of his future, Barberini said he’ll earn a living by teaching elementary school while dedicating himself to helping introduce more Italians to Anglicanism.

Complete Article HERE!

The Pope’s Coming Vatican Showdown with American Conservatives

— Francis’s recent journeys ahead of the October synod may be signals about the future direction of the Church.

Pope Francis’s trip to Mongolia expressed his desire that the Church go “to the margins.”

By

Pope Francis’s “apostolic journey” to Mongolia earlier this month had the unexpected consequence of bringing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a singular and controversial French Jesuit scientist who died nearly seventy years ago, into the news cycle. As it turns out, Teilhard’s theology of cosmic spiritual progress is a useful way to understand the challenges that Francis is currently facing, as he and the Church prepare for a global synod next month in Rome. There, three hundred and sixty-three clerical and lay leaders representing two rival conceptions of the Church will encounter one another for several weeks of behind-closed-doors dialogue—a process that is meant to be amicable but may lead to open conflict prior to a second session next October.

The main question surrounding the Pope’s journey was “Why Mongolia?” The country, with a population of around 3.3 million, has only fifteen hundred Catholics, fewer than in a large parish in Chicago—and far fewer than in other Asian nations, such as Vietnam, which has seven million Catholics and a complex history with the Church, and may have benefited from a papal visit. (By comparison, in early August, Francis celebrated Mass in Lisbon for a million and a half congregants, many of them young people there for World Youth Day.)

But the trip suited Francis’s stated wish for the Church to go “to the margins,” and allowed him to spend time with Giorgio Marengo, an Italian cleric who has lived for more than two decades in Mongolia, doing missionary work, such as fostering Catholic-Buddhist dialogue. In August of last year, Francis made Marengo, who is forty-nine, the youngest member of the College of Cardinals, where he is likely to be a progressive presence for decades to come. And being in Mongolia gave Francis an opportunity to direct remarks, implicitly, to the neighboring powers: Russia, whose war in Ukraine has occasioned a shifting and at times confusing response from him; and China, where the Vatican’s agreement to let the government choose which priests become bishops, in exchange for tolerating the Church’s presence in that nation, has been widely criticized.

The trip also expressed Francis’s own long-distance interest in Asia. As a young man in Argentina, he wanted to be a missionary in Japan; then and afterward, he hoped to follow in the footsteps of influential Jesuits who spent large parts of their careers in Asia: St. Francis Xavier, Matteo Ricci, Pedro Arrupe, and Teilhard de Chardin. Born in France in 1881, Teilhard was a restless, searching figure: a priest, a poet, a stretcher-bearer in the First World War, a paleontologist based in China (where, in the nineteen-twenties, he took part in an important expedition in search of human origins), and a mystical theologian. His written work, a sustained effort to reconcile Christian theology with the theory of evolution, placed him in the vanguard of twentieth-century theology—though lately otherwise appreciative theologians have expressed concern that his emphasis on progress through evolution led him to contrast “the advancing wing of humanity” with “definitively unprogressive ethnical groups,” thus aligning himself with movements in support of race-based eugenics. Teilhard’s notion that the earth would someday be surrounded by a complex information system powered by human consciousness has been seen as anticipating the Internet, and the Episcopal homilist at Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle, in 2018, alluded to one of Teilhard’s aphorisms: “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” But Teilhard’s most memorable concept is the notion that “tout ce qui monte, converge,” or “everything that rises must converge”—that the various forces of natural evolution and human civilization are all ascending in a pattern of spiritual progress and will converge in a “Point Omega” at the end of time.

While doing field work in Mongolia, in 1923, Teilhard celebrated what he called a Mass on the World; lacking bread and wine to consecrate in the usual fashion, he simply consecrated the whole physical world, represented by the vast steppe where he stood. The Mass was expressive of Teilhard’s thought, which, in 1927 and afterward, drew the attention of the Vatican, where officials objected to his dismissal of the idea that the human race descended from Adam and Eve, and his corresponding lack of emphasis on the idea of original sin.

During the next three decades, Teilhard elaborated on his outlook in a number of essays and two books, “The Divine Milieu” and “The Phenomenon of Man.” The Vatican and his Jesuit superiors forbade him to publish any theological writing, but he remained a faithful Catholic and an obedient Jesuit. Following a visit to the U.S. in 1948, he settled in a Jesuit residence in New York City, where he died in 1955, on Easter Sunday—and the posthumous publication of his work began. During the Second Vatican Council, which first convened in 1962, criticism of his work eased, and his books became standard texts for progressive theologians—until they fell out of favor again, under the traditionalist Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, even as they personally spoke warmly of him from time to time.

This Pope, however, has looked emphatically to Teilhard as an example. In “Laudato Si,” his landmark encyclical on the climate, from 2015—he is expected to issue another one next month—he cited Teilhard as an inspiration. After celebrating Sunday Mass in Mongolia, Francis spoke ardently about Teilhard, on the centenary of the Mass that he celebrated there. “This priest, often misunderstood,” he said, “intuited that ‘the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world.’ ” The Pope was bringing the priest back from the margins, and joining his own Asian journey to Teilhard’s.

Francis’s trademark style of discourse is to issue an offhand comment that is clearly on the side of progress, but to remain vague about how progress is to be achieved, and this tendency, too, has lately sparked controversy. Following a video call with young Russian Catholics, on August 25th, in which Francis urged them to connect with their roots in the “Great Russia of saints, rulers, Great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, that empire—great, enlightened, of great culture and great humanity,” Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, immediately castigated the Pope for celebrating Russian imperialism past and present. Then the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica published a transcript of a conversation that Francis had with Portuguese Jesuits during his trip earlier that month. When one asked about the open criticism of him by some American Catholics, including bishops, Francis replied at length. “You have seen that in the United States the situation is not easy: there is a very strong reactionary attitude. It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally,” he said. “I would like to remind those people that indietrismo”—backwardness—“is useless, and we need to understand that there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith.” He later added, “Those American groups you talk about, so closed, are isolating themselves. Instead of living by doctrine, by the true doctrine that always develops and bears fruit, they live by ideologies.”

Which American groups, everyone wanted to know, was Francis talking about? In the Times, C. Preston Noell III, of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (a Pennsylvania-based offshoot of a Brazilian group founded in 1960 to resist supposed communist influence on the Church), pointed out that Francis has spent less than a week in the United States as Pope, suggesting that he is poorly informed about the life of the Church here. The Washington Post ran a dossier of suspects, among them Raymond Arroyo, a host on the traditionalist Catholic cable network EWTN, based in Alabama, who has personified the network’s opposition to Francis. Others pointed to Cardinal Raymond Burke, who served as the archbishop of St. Louis and then as a Vatican official, until he was removed from one post in 2014 and replaced in a different one earlier this year. In the foreword to a new book, Burke writes that the October synod will cause “confusion and error” and lead to “the grave harm of many souls.” The book has been published in eight languages by the Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, which has sent copies to bishops and clergy, some of whom will be delegates to the synod.

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The Catholic Women Priests Fighting for Reproductive Justice

— The church forbids women to become priests, but RCWP-USA believes that they are aptly situated to minister on abortion and offer a new, progressive stance.

A woman receives a cup of wine from Rev. Victoria Rue during mass.

By Molly Morrow

Victoria Rue’s first abortion happened in a hospital in California, after the state legalized abortion just before Roe v. Wade. She was out of college, struggling to find work as an actress, and not in a steady relationship. The man who had gotten her pregnant—another young actor from one of her classes—offered to pay for her abortion. He came with her to the hospital, and was there when she woke up.

Rue’s second abortion was very different. She was still young, still struggling to find work, still not wishing to have a child. It was 1973, just after the legalization of abortion nationwide, but Rue did not have the money to pay for a hospital visit. Instead, she underwent a menstrual extraction, a procedure used to induce abortion in the early stages of pregnancy. It took place inside a storefront, not a hospital, and was much more affordable.

Rue didn’t speak with anyone before undergoing the procedure: She felt too ashamed to tell family or friends, and she had no relationship with the man that had gotten her pregnant. “I remember sitting in my Volkswagen across the street from it in a parking lot, just sitting there looking at the storefront across the street, preparing myself to go in,” Rue said. “And just feeling so alone.”

Many years later, Rue’s life looks quite different: She became a playwright, an activist, and a professor. She is also a Roman Catholic woman priest, part of an organization of women who have ordained themselves in the face of the church’s opposition. Most recently, she has become an outspoken pro-choice voice within the Catholic Church.

The institutional Catholic Church forbids women to become priests, citing the Bible’s record that Jesus only chose male apostles, as well as the nearly 2,000 years of precedent. These women practice as Roman Catholics, but most have been excommunicated by choosing to be ordained.

Roman Catholic women priests come to be ordained in a variety of ways: Several of the earliest—the “Danube Seven”—were ordained by a male bishop on the Danube River in 2002, and since then, many more have been ordained by female bishops across the world. Despite opposition from the Vatican, there are nearly 200 women priests in the United States and others in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

The Catholic Church believes abortion is murder, opposing all medical procedures where the purpose is to induce abortion. It has repeatedly affirmed this teaching, from the 1974 “Declaration on Procured Abortion” by Pope Paul VI to Pope John Paul II’s 1992 “Evangelium Vitae.” In response to a statement from 31 Catholic Democrats in the US House of Representatives, the church reaffirmed its opposition again in June. The congresspeople’s “Renewed Statement of Principles” was released on June 24—the one-year anniversary of the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which allowed many states across the U.S. to severely restrict or ban abortions—arguing for a pro-choice Catholic teaching of abortion based on care for the poor, the priority of informed conscience, and the principle of religious freedom. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) responded by saying that the House statement “grievously distort[s] the faith” and that abortion violates the right to life “with respect to preborn children and brings untold suffering to countless women.”

Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, attributes this belief to a strong interest in the vocation of women first as mothers within the Catholic Church, and suggests that the church’s teaching is one of the most conservative in the United States. “No other religious tradition has a teaching on abortion the way the Catholic Church does, nor the teaching on contraception,” said Manson. “It’s very radical, even for conservative traditions like Evangelicals and Mormons.”

The Catholic Church’s stance on abortion has varied over time, however: Although the USCCB states that the church has always “distinguished themselves from surrounding pagan cultures by rejecting abortion and infanticide,” only in 1965 was abortion officially considered homicide; before, it was merely a sexual sin. The Catholic ‘right to life’ argument took shape alongside second wave feminists’ calls for legal abortion in the 1970s, leading to their stance today.

Now, abortion is as much a part of the lives of Catholics as anyone else: A majority of Catholics think that abortion should be legal in the United States, and approximately 24 percent of those who obtain abortions identify as Catholic.

Roman Catholic women priests believe that they are aptly situated to minister on the issue and offer a new, progressive Catholic stance on abortion, precisely because of their commitment to the religious tenets of Catholicism.

On June 21, 2023, the American branch of the women priests’ formal organization, Roman Catholic Women Priests-USA (RCWP), gathered for a historic forum to discuss abortion and reproductive justice three days before the anniversary of the Dobbs decision. While the topic of abortion was always a foremost concern for a progressive Catholic organization of primarily women, the Dobbs decision marked a renewed interest in advocating for an issue so fraught within the mainstream Catholic Church.

The solutions and ministries these women priests are working for are not traditional political activism. Central to the forum—and to their approach—is what these priests call accompaniment, an individual-focused approach they hope to adopt in order to be nonjudgmental spiritual advisors to those considering abortion or who have already undergone the procedure. The term comes from liberation theology, a Catholic ideology created by Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, combining Catholic teaching with class politics. It is frequently invoked by progressive Catholics on matters of public health and social work for the poor. The term ‘accompaniment’ is also used by Latin American feminists to describe the process of being present with and supporting those seeking abortions.

No matter their personal beliefs on abortion—nor the beliefs of those they serve—these women priests’ stated goal is to offer impartiality and empathy, regardless of what the person considering abortion ultimately chooses.

Leading the charge is Rue, who has made it her goal to address the issue of abortion and determine how her organization might be a progressive force for change. Despite growing up religious and spending a year in a Catholic convent, Rue cites the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s as her church after she drifted from Catholicism. Rue’s activism eventually led her to protest outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City as a part of Dignity New York, an LGBTQ+ Catholic activist group formed in response to the 1986 Vatican “Halloween letter,” which deemed homosexuality an “objective disorder.”

At this protest, like many others staged by Dignity New York, a Catholic mass was celebrated. These services were far different from those hosted within the walls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The words of the service diverged from tradition: Source material included Walt Whitman as much as it did the Christian bible. The sacrament of communion centered around the notion that the bread being broken represented everyone, not just Jesus.

Rue had been asked by members of the group to co-lead such a service with an out gay Catholic priest and agreed. “I began to understand myself to be a priest,” said Rue. “And that I had been ordained by the people in the very act of celebrating mass, as opposed to the laying on of hands.” Years later, after learning about Roman Catholic women priests, Rue was ordained a deacon on the Danube river in 2004, and ordained a priest in 2005 on the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Rue worked as a professor at San Jose State University while also writing plays. In the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision leak, she began a project with fellow playwright Martha Boesing called “Voices from the Silenced: Pre-Roe Abortion Stories from Rossmoor.” For the play, Rue asked women in her senior living community who had had abortions to write their stories down for her, and she and Boesing shaped the roughly 30 responses into a play, told by seven women actors and a narrator who is a member of the pre-Roe underground abortion service provider the Jane Collective. The American Medical Women’s Association is showing the play to all of its coalitions including medical school students.

For Rue—and many members of RCWP—the commitment to being a woman priest is a simultaneous commitment to activism. In fact, one region within the RCWP organization is called the “Region for the Holy Margins,” a non-geographical group of women priests who have a particular interest in serving vulnerable communities. They see themselves as more than just female priests, but, rather, activists who seek systemic change within the Catholic tradition beyond just allowing women to be priests.

The Dobbs decision, for many of these women priests, was an inflection point in their activism, a moment in which the many causes they involved themselves in—women’s rights, racial justice, care for the poor, etc.—came to a head around a major political moment.

Despite enthusiasm from its members, the official RCWP organization has been disunited in its activist work, with a lack of consensus over their official stance on abortion and their ministers spread out across the country. The national organization meets only every few years, though the regions meet more regularly. “What RCWP has been unified in its online presence about is simply ordaining women. That’s it. That’s been the clearest ‘social justice’ piece that we’ve done,” said Rue. “We’re advocating for the presence of social justice in the forefront, as much as ordaining women.”

In the June forum, Rue presented a number of suggestions for how women priests might be able to support women considering abortion. They intend to educate and train themselves on reproductive justice teachings and use their national network to serve as clinic escorts, and to create a more formal process for women considering abortion to get in contact with and receive support from a woman priest.

This goal is personal for Rue, who wished she had had a woman priest to support her during her second abortion. Although no one she knew was there to support her, she recalled how the man performing her abortion called in his 12-year-old daughter, who held her hand during the procedure. “She really held my hand,” said Rue. “I’d never seen her before, but boy was I happy she was there.”

Such themes—physical presence, emotional support, and the ability to listen without judgment—came up again and again in the forum. The conversation also included a suggestion to ritualize abortion in order to help women better cope with the experience, as well as an emphasis on following up with the women afterward and continuing to support them. Many of the women priests gathered at the forum also hope to organize around an intersectional approach to abortion rights activism.

Much of the moral justification for women priests’ understanding of abortion and other social justice issues hinges on the Catholic concept of the “primacy of conscience,” the notion that each individual knows their circumstances best and can make moral decisions based on their own situations. During a second RCWP forum in July on reproductive justice, Jamie Manson and the women priest participants pointed to the choice Mary had in the Christian bible to say “yes” or “no” to her pregnancy, grounding her decision in autonomy. This understanding of conscience, they believe, is central to reproductive justice.

In the future, RCWP plans to continue speaking to experts in the field of reproductive justice and to consider the advocacy they hope to do as an organization. One of these plans for the future is to participate in a program spearheaded by Catholics for Choice, the revival of the Clergy Consultation Service, a cross-denominational group of American religious leaders that helped pregnant people obtain abortions before Roe made abortion legal nationwide.

“Faith communities have always been essential to political change” Manson said. “And I think the secular pro-choice movement has made a terrible mistake marginalizing those voices.”

For Rue—and the rest of RCWP—that political work looks very different from secular reproductive justice political activism. A key point Rue stressed over and over was that, in her view, women priests need not agree with abortion on a personal level, but instead merely provide a nonjudgmental, spiritual presence for pregnant individuals, whose beliefs on abortion also may vary greatly.

From the roots of her priesthood in LGBTQ+ activism to today, Rue believes that religious ministry and her activist work are not disparate at all, but intimately connected and mutually reinforcing. “I think the core of the many hats that I have worn and do wear is the body, particularly women’s bodies,” said Rue. “How could one be involved in anything that is anti-body, anti-women? All these issues come to bear, I think, on the beauty, and the grace, and the suffering, and the pain of the human body.”

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