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.”

Complete Article HERE!

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.”

Complete Article HERE!

Two Sides of the Same Coin

— LGBTQ Catholics consider different ways to fit into the Church

by Maggie Phillips

Pope Francis recently gained media attention when he spoke out against the criminalization of homosexuality ahead of a trip to Africa, where many countries have such laws on the books. The move highlighted the precarious situation of many LGBTQ people around the world, and was hailed in much of the American press as a milestone. His follow-up statement, in which he acknowledged the inevitable objection he would receive from some quarters within his church—that homosexual activity is a sin—garnered less fanfare. (“Yes, but it is a sin,,” Francis said. “Fine, but first let us distinguish between a sin and a crime.”) This remark, however, echoed loudly in the LGBTQ Catholic community, whose members hold diverse visions for their Church—which Francis has called “a mother” who “cares for her children and guides them on the path of salvation.” Like many mother-child relationships, it’s complicated.

Jesuit priest James Martin was on the cutting edge when he published Building a Bridge, a book he wrote following the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2016. “The book came in response to what I saw as a real lack of response from the U.S. bishops after the Pulse massacre,” Martin said in an email to Tablet. While the book drew him into LGBTQ ministry, garnering invitations to speak to Catholic audiences on related issues, including the Vatican’s 2018 World Meeting of Families, he said it also “caused some intense reactions—both positive and negative.” Martin continues undaunted. In 2020, he launched Outreach, an annual conference for LGBTQ Catholics, which has expanded to include a website with resources and articles intended to support them. The fourth Outreach conference was held June 16-18 this year at Fordham University, and featured a variety of panelists and speakers representing the spectrum of LGBTQ Catholicism.

A 2020 UCLA study estimates there are around 1.3 million LGBT adult Catholics in the U.S., although, said Martin, “I would guess, given how they often feel excluded and rejected, probably a lower percentage than their straight counterparts” are practicing. This year, the Outreach conference coincided with a rally at Dodger Stadium, as thousands protested the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who received a Community Hero award as part of the team’s Pride night (the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops voiced their disapproval of the group’s recognition and urged prayer, but distanced themselves from the rally).

The official teaching of the Catholic Church is laid out in its catechism, a nearly thousand-page compendium of every Church teaching on virtually every subject first commissioned by Pope John Paul II in 1986. He approved its definitive form in 1992, drawing from the Bible as well as Catholic theologians, saints, and thinkers throughout history. Its section on sexuality lays out that sex must not be detached from its “unitive and procreative purposes” within a heterosexual marriage, and that every baptized Catholic is “called to lead a chaste life in keeping with their particular states of life.” This stance is part and parcel of their official opprobrium of gay sex (or indeed any sex outside of a marriage, including between a man and woman). Nevertheless, the catechism says in the same section that gay people “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided,” even as it acknowledges its teaching on chastity may lead gay Catholics to encounter “difficulties.” This, as Christians are fond of saying about more controversial teachings, is a “hard saying.” So it may seem surprising that there are out, gay Catholics who have embraced it. It may be even more surprising that there are gay Catholics who disagree with the Church’s teaching on homosexuality, but who have remained in the fold, working for change from within, rather than decamping for other Christian denominations that already allow same-sex marriage, such as the Episcopal Church, certain branches of the United Methodist Church, or the Presbyterian Church (USA). The two sides of this coin are often known in wider gay Catholic circles as “Side A” (supportive of gay marriage and relationships, hopeful for church recognition), and “Side B” (promoting celibacy). These distinctions are primarily used by LGBTQ Catholics in the pews. Leadership is a different story. “Catholic teaching prohibits both same-sex relations and same-sex marriage,” Martin said in his email. “But, for example, the German bishops have been very vocal about thinking about blessing same-sex unions.”

Like any binary, the Side A/Side B terminology contains nuances, misses subtleties, and obscures touchpoints. What is clear from the existence of groups and conferences allied with both sides is a sense that more institutional support for gay Catholics is needed. And even in a church that famously “thinks in centuries” instead of decades, there are indications that they are beginning to respond to the signs of the times.

Before Martin, there was Father Patrick Nidorf, an Augustinian priest in California who in 1969 launched Dignity, a group for gay Catholics to address what he saw as “an excessive and unreal problem of guilt that was sometimes reinforced in the confessional instead of being resolved.” The name, he said later, “just came to me as appropriate since one of our basic goals was to bring dignity into the spiritual and social lives of some very special people.” Nidorf ran the group with extraordinary sensitivity, taking steps to protect the identities and safety of members (age restrictions, requiring applications—even occasionally personal interviews—to determine good faith, holding closed meetings in private homes). The concept spread quickly, initially by word of mouth around Los Angeles and San Diego, where Nidorf was based. Nidorf published ads in the Los Angeles Free Press and later, The Advocate, with an address to write to for more information. He would then disseminate a newsletter with dates and addresses for upcoming meetings. “His mission really was a place to provide a safe, affirming place for people to find ways to integrate their sexual orientation and their faith,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the organization’s current executive director, and a keynote speaker at Outreach 2023. “Church teaching on sexuality was not terribly articulated at that point, there was just an assumption that everybody was straight.”

In 1971, Nidorf complied when his archbishop told him to cease his involvement with Dignity. Now lay-led, it continued gathering steam, and throughout the 1970s, chapters began to crop up around the country. As it grew over the decades, Dignity representatives advocated for gay rights legislation and cultural change on a broader level. Members also met with bishops to encourage an end to anti-gay discrimination and the promotion of civil rights, to call for more official Church outreach to gay Catholics, and to express concerns over the U.S. bishops’ opposition to legislation supporting initiatives like gay marriage and adoption.

Duddy-Burke attended her first local chapter meeting in 1982 at the suggestion of her straight roommate, who had read about the organization in The Boston Globe Sunday edition, and accompanied her that same night. Duddy-Burke was pursuing a masters in divinity at a Jesuit seminary in the city at the time. A recent college graduate, she had been asked as an undergraduate to resign from her position as president of the college’s Newman Society (a Catholic organization for college students), when the chaplain had learned she was a lesbian. Speaking to me over Zoom, Duddy-Burke was visibly emotional recalling the confrontation that occurred more than 40 years ago. “Catholicism had been just central to my life,” she said. “I was a sophomore in college at that point, and I just lost my connection to Catholic community. I didn’t lose my faith, I didn’t feel any less Catholic, but there just really wasn’t a comfortable place for me to pray and worship as a Catholic, so when my roommate read about Dignity, she’s like, ‘This sounds perfect for you!’” Duddy-Burke felt totally at home she said, and “never left.”

Participants at the fourth Outreach Conference, held in June this year at Fordham University
Participants at the fourth Outreach Conference, held in June this year at Fordham University

Duddy-Burke places Dignity’s founding within the context of a changing, post-Vatican II Catholicism. What today is considered a challenge to Church teaching was, at the time, “just another call for the Church to look at things differently,” she said. “Here was this group of gay people, gay and lesbian people, and some straight supporters, who felt like, OK, we’re part of the church, too, and we’re not finding what we need.” Now called DignityUSA (there are now chapters in Canada, as well), its mission statement reads: “We believe that we can express our sexuality physically, in a unitive manner that is loving, life-giving, and life-affirming. We believe that all sexuality should be exercised in an ethically responsible and unselfish way. We believe that our transgender and queer communities can express their core identities in a sincere, affirming, and authentic manner.”

It would be an anachronism to call Dignity “Side A,” since its foundation predated the term (and, by a few months, the Stonewall riots); DignityUSA doesn’t use “Side A/Side B” terminology on its website, and Duddy-Burke never used the phrase in her interview. But the organization anticipated a Side A worldview that it continues to put forward today, maintaining the classic Side A position that gay Catholics can express their sexuality in a physical relationship. In its work, DignityUSA seeks to obviate what it sees as a needless contradiction with Church teaching, and is determined to ensure the Church hears its views.

Today, Duddy-Burke said DignityUSA has a network of about 37 active chapters around the country, as well as nationwide caucuses organized around interest or identity (categories include women, trans, aging, young adult, racial justice). “Our work today is really broad,” Duddy-Burke said. In addition to “maintaining affirming communities for the queer community,” she said, DignityUSA also engages in advocacy work. At Catholic institutions, that means challenging the termination of LGBTQ employees, as well as what they see as anti-trans policies; it also means sending reports to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Vatican from listening sessions they’ve held with LGBTQ Catholics. Outside the Church, she said, DignityUSA’s advocacy includes “working with supportive presidential administrations to ensure that conscience provisions that would allow health care workers to refuse to treat LGBTQ people, or to provide certain medical services, are stripped from regulations,” and working to make foster care “more suited to serving queer youth.” They also send a contingent of queer youth to the Catholic Church’s international World Youth Day, which will be held in August of this year in Lisbon, Portugal. “We make sure that at these local, international church events, we have a group of people who are willing to say queer people and family members are part of our church now, and we need appropriate pastoral care, and we need theology and doctrine that recognizes our humanity and affirms our rights.”

It’s difficult to generalize about “Side B” gay Catholics, who are trying to live out fulfilling lives in observance of their Church’s teaching on homosexuality. Eve Tushnet, author of Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith, and an outspoken apologist for the Church’s teachings on this issue, and Grant Hartley, a celibate gay Catholic master’s of divinity student, both spoke with Tablet about their experiences.

Although the precise origin of the terms “Side A” and “Side B” is unclear, they seem to have begun showing up in the 1990s. (Today, two additional “sides,” X and Y, are sometimes included: X stands for “ex-gay” Christians, and Side Y are gay Christians who eschew identifying as gay or LGBTQ.) It’s a complex ecosystem with some overlap as well as wide chasms; Christian podcast Life on Side B” provides a helpful if lengthy primer on the different approaches on its website. A Side B Catholic himself, Hartley is one of the podcast’s rotating cast of hosts, and, like Duddy-Burke, an Outreach 2023 panelist.

According to Hartley, the underlying idea behind adopting the language of Sides A and B was so that gay Christians who took different views on how to live out their faith and sexuality “could both be a part of this community.” The intent was to avoid charged language, he said in a phone interview, “like ‘affirming’ and ‘nonaffirming’ can sometimes be, or ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive.’”

A former evangelical Christian, Hartley has only been Catholic a couple of years. He attended the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, the Church’s required course for converts, for a year-and-a-half prior to his conversion. “I wanted to make absolutely sure,” he said. “I took my time.” He cites the Catholic Church’s historic and aesthetic legacies as the things that initially attracted him, as well as the biographies of Henry Nouwen and Gerard Manley Hopkins. “I sensed that there was a sort of gay Catholic, queer Catholic theme running through the Church tradition,” he said.

Grant Hartley
Grant Hartley

“I was sort of searching for something that would make sense of sexual ethics for me,” Hartley said. “I had long been convinced of general teachings about sexuality, about sex reserved for a marriage covenant between a man and a woman for life.” However, Hartley said, “I never really had a high view of celibacy until I sort of had to wrestle through, oh, maybe I’m supposed to be celibate, so I gotta figure out how to love this. And it seemed that the Catholic tradition—I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. The Catholic tradition had a lot to offer when it comes to sort of a system to understand sexuality and marriage, and a lot of thinking about celibacy, just riches, that were really encouraging for me.”

As Hartley surveyed the Catholic tradition, he found that monasticism, celibacy, and same-sex love “are kind of intertwined in a lot of spaces,” he said. “Maybe my being gay was actually more of a strength than a weakness.”

Hartley is careful to note, “that’s not the vibe in the whole Church. There’s portions of the Church I’ve come into contact with that I don’t feel especially safe or welcome in.”

As for his relationships with his Side A counterparts in the Church, Hartley is quick to respond when asked if he’s friends with any. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I think one of the drawbacks of Side A/Side B language is that it ends up grouping people who come to these conclusions for lots of different reasons into the same sort of camp, and I think that maybe there’s some distinctions. So, because one is Side B doesn’t say a whole lot about how they got there, or about their approach to LGBTQ culture.”

Saying the Side A/Side B language can still be divisive, and that he “has a lot in common with a lot of Side A folks,” and as an academic and speaker, Hartley said he isn’t always warmly received by some on Side B when he speaks positively about LGBTQ culture “in a nuanced and often really positive way. I see a lot of beauty there.”

Hartley said his own approach is one of reserved humility when approaching other gay Catholics who don’t share his theology. “We’re all just trying to sort of survive,” he said. “I don’t want to judge anyone for how they’re trying to survive LGBTQ Catholic world.”

From one side, Hartley said celibate Catholics can be challenged by Catholics who view their choice as something that is either a judgment on noncelibate gay Catholics, or minimized as simply a personal decision. On the other side, he said celibate gay Catholics can receive pushback from more conservative Catholics who object to the use of sexual identity language as an identification “with sinful proclivities or temptations,” and for their engagement with wider secular LGBTQ culture. Pride, he said, “feels worse” this year. “It definitely feels like an uptick in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in the Christian world,” he said. “All the talk about drag that is just—I just don’t think that people understand what drag is, actually.”

Duddy-Burke said something similar, observing that she sometimes feels LGBTQ Catholics are “used as political pawns,” and it’s less about the issues themselves than “it’s about promoting a Christian nationalist agenda,” citing recent furor over drag queens and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence being honored at the Dodgers game.

Hartley came recommended to me by Tushnet, a well-known writer and speaker in the Catholic world, a lesbian convert to the faith who also espouses a celibate sexual ethic. On Zoom, she is soft-spoken and thoughtful, occasionally pausing to find just the right turn of phrase to describe her nuanced positions on very delicate issues within the Church.

“Virtually anyone who considers themselves to be an LGBTQ or same-sex-attracted Catholic has gone on some kind of journey,” she said. Describing “overlapping, intertwining queer and same-sex-attracted communities,” Tushnet said something that helps them understand each other is that “we’ve often shared parts of our journey, we’ve wrestled with some of the same things. Sometimes that makes it hard, I think for some people. It’s very much like, ‘well, why didn’t you come to the conclusion that I did—the correct one?’ But I think for other people, the fact of that shared journey can be very powerful.”

Tushnet’s understanding of celibate gay Catholic life is complex. Arguments against gay sex from first principles, she has said in interviews elsewhere, have never made sense to her, but she was able to find her way into the Church’s arguments around sexuality, marriage, and family life through her trust in its interpretation of the Bible. However, in writing her second book, Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love, she same to realize that other gay Catholics, due to their experience with both the Church and their fellow Catholics, were not able to arrive at that same sort of trust when it came to living out something as profoundly countercultural and self-denying as lifelong celibacy.

“There are still pockets of the Catholic Church where people are still having experiences in 2023 that sound like they came from 1980,” she said. “Like, I actually did a bunch of interviews with people who had gone to Catholic schools, and I’ll have to say, the bad experiences especially, people said the same thing from the ’70s and like, five years ago.” Echoing Duddy-Burke, Tushnet said she found there is a persistent attitude that everyone in Catholic circles is straight.

She is now working on an educational resource for Catholic institutions, Building Catholic Futures, intended for both kids and parents. The materials are “created by queer people to serve the needs of queer kids in the next generation,” and while staying faithful to Catholic orthodoxy, attempts to avoid catering to the paranoias and fears of what she described as the “concerned mom person,” the parent who is perplexed by the way the world has changed from the one she grew up in, and who might be swayed in an anti-gay direction by some of the existing resources for Christian parents.

“People really said [to me], ‘One thing that would have been really helpful to me is just to know that there had been gay Christians, ever,’” she said. “So a real lack of any kind of role model and therefore any kind of vision for my own future. This comes up again and again, this is why Building Catholic Futures is called this.” She remembers being a “totally secular progressive kid” in high school obsessively scouring history, pop culture, and song lyrics to figure out who was or might be gay. “I think a big part of that was kind of, ‘what are the possibilities for me?’ So not having anyone who shares your faith, who’s in your world in that way, who shares the thing that you’ve been told all your life is the most important thing in life, and it is actually the most important thing in life, and there’s nobody who you can look up to in a way that fits with this experience that you’re beginning to realize that you have, is really devastating—and even with the internet does still happen.”

Tushnet said she has found in working on Building Catholic Futures that the gay Catholics she encounters frequently cite queer artists and writers who had an influence on them, even if they were not themselves Catholic, or were perhaps dissenters from traditional Catholicism.

“It made me conscious of how much overlap there really is in both kind of like, the joyful and beautiful aspects of queer experience,” she said, “and then also the like painful experience of being targeted and marginalized, that we can really use the guidance of people who disagree with us profoundly on the authority of the Church or the role of obedience or the nature of sexuality.”

In speaking with Catholic adults who work with young people, Tushnet said, “This is really an area where kids do not feel like the Church is giving them anything to hold on to.”

Even though Duddy-Burke, Hartley, and Tushnet may differ on the particulars, they all share a hope that the Church is beginning to listen to new approaches being developed by the laity.

When we spoke, Hartley was amping up to speak in a few weeks on the Bible and homosexuality and living a life of chastity at Outreach 2023. He admitted to being less nervous about the chastity panel than another one, on the Bible and homosexuality. “I feel really comfortable talking about why celibacy has been really liberating for me, and not like a restrictive straitjacket,” he said. “But I had to do a lot of research and thinking for the panel on the Bible and homosexuality” and what he calls “the clobber passages”: verses from Leviticus condemning homosexual sex, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and various letters from the early Church thinkers to fledgling Christian congregations. “Those aren’t really the bedrock of my sexual ethics,” he said, “But they are something that LGBTQ folks in religious spaces have to wrestle with because those are the ones that we’re confronted with.” The other passages, such as some contents of the Apostle Paul’s letters, are not necessarily the “slam dunks” against homosexuality that many Bible-quoting Christians think they are, said Hartley: “I just don’t think that’s true.”

Virtually anyone who considers themselves to be an LGBTQ or same-sex attracted Catholic has gone on some kind of journey.

For Hartley, historical and cultural context matters. “You really have to enter into a story. It’s part of what brought me to the Catholic Church to begin with, is wanting to find myself in a big story of God’s involvement.” He cites the audience for the Apostle Paul’s letters, which are famous for some lines that appear to condemn gay sex. “Some of the people listening to [Paul’s] letters were not in a position to refuse sexual activity,” Hartley said, “And so when Paul is saying these things, it’s liberating for his audience. It’s about justice and not just about sexual morality between equals. So that’s something really important to keep in mind when thinking through these passages.”

The present matters, too. Citing Leviticus 20:13, Hartley said, “It struck me that the death penalty for same-sex sex is on the books now in countries around the world.”

As an evangelical influenced by Protestant sola scriptura beliefs, “I used to think it was just a matter of reading the Bible and applying it in a straightforward way to life,” said Hartley, a view he finds “now sometimes is just downright dangerous.” There is no talk of punishment or retribution for those who violate Church teaching in speaking to Tushnet and Hartley, who were both keen to express the breadth of experiences and viewpoints within the gay Catholic community, on both Sides A and B. Both made a point of stressing their lack of judgment for their fellow gay Catholics. Duddy-Burke said much of the outright opposition that organizations like DignityUSA receive comes from ultra-conservative Catholic individuals and organizations, and occasionally “ex-gay” Catholics. She said there is room for ideological tension within the Church, but “the line gets drawn” when people operating out of animus engage in attacks based on beliefs: calls to violence, “combing records to find out if Catholic school or Catholic parish staff have taken out marriage licenses, or combing Facebook pages or Instagram—it’s that kind of stuff that I think our Church leaders need to be better about challenging, like, that is bad action, your only goal here is to hurt another individual and that needs to be stopped.”

Eve Tushnet
Eve Tushnet

“Many Catholics are concerned more about LGBTQ people’s sexual morality than almost any other moral issue,” said Martin in his email. “For some reason (mainly homophobia) it’s the LGBTQ person whose moral life gets looked at under the microscope. And yet, as you say, Catholics tend to overlook all sorts of other people whose lives are not in total conformity with church teaching: straight couples who use birth control, for example. More fundamentally, we overlook people who are not forgiving, not generous to the poor, not loving, and so on, things at the heart of the Gospel.”

“In places like sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe,” Martin continued, “any mention of LGBTQ issues in the Church is incendiary. The Catholic bishops in Ghana, for example, supported criminalizing homosexuality. This is one reason why Pope Francis’ call to decriminalize homosexuality, which may seem tepid in the West, was such a big deal. He’s speaking to the worldwide Church. In other places, like the U.S. and Western Europe, the discussion is less contentious, but it is still a hot-button topic.”

Duddy-Burke said she knows gay Catholics in Uganda who have encountered intense violence and discrimination, and are now fleeing the prospect of death at the hands of their government. “For the pope to have said [homosexuality should not be criminalized] is incredibly important for the people of the world, certainly from a legal perspective but even more from a cultural perspective,” she said. “I mean, the tone the Catholic Church, the official Catholic Church, sets, impacts the lives of all 8-plus billion lives of people on the planet in some ways. The Catholic Church runs the largest private educational network in the world, the private social services network, private health care networks. You know, so, so many people across the world, their lives are just impacted in incredibly important ways by what our Church teaches and what our Church does.”

It is this concern for the marginalized, that when asked why she stays Catholic, Duddy-Burke said her reason was her “deep love of what the Catholic Church is really about,” specifically love and justice. Those two things, she said, “really are at the core of our Church teaching, and you know, that means a lot to me. I love the sacraments, the rituals of our Church,” and “truly believe that every person should have access to that.”

The final keynote speaker at Outreach spoke on Sunday, June 18. Juan Carlos Cruz is a gay Catholic who was appointed in 2021 to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, a whistleblower about Church sexual abuse who was initially accused by Pope Francis of calumny for sharing his own story of clerical sexual abuse. Today, “Juanca” and Francis are good friends; Cruz spoke of the process by which Francis came to realize the extent of the clerical abuse in Chile after more laity came forward with their stories, and recanted and apologized to Cruz. Cruz spoke about how he and Francis are in regular contact, initially with letters, then visits and frequent phone calls, with Francis sharing movie recommendations with Cruz during the pandemic. Cruz even helped draft Francis’ talking points on the decriminalization of homosexuality back in January.

Cruz said he encounters attacks from Catholics for being openly gay, and from members of the LGBTQ community for his close relationship with the pope. Someone who speaks with disarming candor of Francis’ quirks and habits with the easy articulacy of the PR professional that he is, Cruz insists he is merely a friend and not the pope’s spokesperson. Rather, he feels he has a responsibility, as someone with a foot in both worlds. “As part of the LGBTQ community, I think it’s important for me to talk about it, to familiarize people who have never had access or have been close to this, to normalize it,” he said.

After his remarks, Martin asked Cruz when things are going to change for gay Catholics in the Church. “I really don’t know,” Cruz said. Contrary to the perception, it’s not easy for the pope to change doctrine with the stroke of the pen, he said

For now, Cruz said of Francis, “I love that he is on the side of those who suffer.”

Like Hartley, Tushnet looks to the past when thinking about how the Catholic Church could develop its doctrine going forward.

“Real people who already have partners come to the Church and say, you know, I made a life commitment to this person—nowadays, I may have married this person—and I’m beginning to ask questions about my faith, and wondering if I should kind of come home to the Church. What does that mean for me?” she said. “In the past, I think it was more likely, sadly, that they would be told to leave the person, and they would either be like, ‘Absolutely not, well, I guess this really isn’t as true as I thought it was,’ or you know, make some pretty tragic decisions.”

Tushnet believes that both the Bible and Catholic history provide options to recognize same-sex love. She cites the covenant between David and Jonathan, the love between Ruth and Naomi, as well as a practice from Eastern Christianity known as adelphopoiesis, a kinship bonding ceremony between two men that while not a marriage, was a liturgical recognition of sacrificial same-sex love and support. Tushnet is a fan of the book The Friend by Alan Bray, a historical examination of the deep emotional and spiritual component that informed these friendships in Christianity’s past. “People really rediscover these because they meet a reality, which is, that two people of the same sex are loving and caring for and cherishing one another, and what are we going to do about it?” she said. “Are we going to just say well, the Church can’t acknowledge that at all? And you look, and you don’t have to say that.”

But Tushnet is careful to caution against one-size-fits-all solutions for LGBTQ Catholics, slotting covenant friendships “into the cultural space now taken by marriage, with a loss of other models of community,” she said, citing the Catholic Worker and intentional community as other alternatives. “I really don’t want there to be one model and if you do not find this one model, then you are sort of condemned to loneliness or isolation, or you’ve failed in some way.”

Even DignityUSA doesn’t discount celibacy as a way of life for gay Catholics. “Dignity believes that there certainly are people who are called to celibacy either lifelong or for a part of their lives, and that’s fine, and it’s a sacred way of life in the same way, you know, lots of other ways of life are sacred. Our problem is that it should not be imposed based on identity,” said Duddy-Burke. “There needs to be a recognition that gender identity, that sexual orientation are an inherent part of who we are.” Acknowledging that “there are people who choose celibacy for good reasons, for healthy reasons, for whom it helps them to lead a good and healthy life,” she added that “it should not be demanded of people” out of what she called “a very outdated understanding of what humanity is.”

Although he arrives at a different conclusion, Hartley makes a similar point. “There has to come a point as a Side B person,” he said, “when you choose your life, too.” He notes a “long history of being constrained, of being chosen, and it feeling like, I didn’t have anything to do with it, God sort of has this for me.” He had to “choose it back,” he said. “Something opens up, and you get to find a lot of joy in your life. So that’s what I’m experiencing, or have experienced, over the past few years, and I hope to experience even more.”

Tushnet said she has begun to place increasing emphasis on solidarity in addressing LGBTQ Catholics. Whether or not gay Catholics choose to engage with the broader secular LGBTQ culture, Tushnet said she tries to remind them that “you do owe these people. You have not really fled to the Church as your haven, and you can just sort of hunker down there and be happy, you know, with the priest who knows and likes you. You do have some responsibility to give back.”

This solidarity is a key part of the philosophy, “or rather, the theology” behind the Outreach conference, said Martin. “It is very much along the lines of Pope Francis’ model of the Church as a field hospital,” he said, “which not only treats people who have been wounded—in this case, often by the Church itself—but is radically open. What people sometimes forget is that the heart of Church teaching is not a book. It’s a person: Jesus. And by embodying his welcome of everyone, we are embodying Church teaching.”

Complete Article HERE!

Catholics call for Vatican to embrace women in leadership, LGBTQ community, report says

By

An unprecedented global canvassing of Catholics has called for the church to take concrete steps to promote women to decision-making roles, for a “radical inclusion” of the LGBTQ+ community and for new accountability measures to check how bishops exercise authority.

The Vatican on Tuesday released the synthesis of a two-year consultation process, publishing a working document that will form the basis of discussion for a big meeting of bishops and laypeople in October. The synod, as it is known, is a key priority of Pope Francis, reflecting his vision of a church that is more about the faithful rank-and-file than its priests.

Already Francis has made his mark on the synod, letting lay people and in particular women have a vote alongside bishops. That reform is a concrete step toward what he calls “synodality,” a new way of being a church that envisions more co-responsibility in governance and the key mission of spreading the Catholic faith.

The document highlights key concerns that emerged during the consultation process, which began at the local parish level and concluded with seven continent-wide assemblies. It flagged in particular the devastating impact that clergy sexual abuse crisis has had on the faithful, costing the hierarchy its credibility and sparking calls for structural changes to remove their near-absolute power.

The synthesis found a “unanimous” and “crucial” call for women to be allowed to access positions of responsibility and governance. Without raising the prospect of women’s ordination to the priesthood, it asked whether new ministries could be created, including the diaconate – a reflection of a years-long call by some women to be ordained deacons in the church.

The document noted that “most” of the continent-wide assemblies and “several” bishops’ conferences called for the diaconate question to be considered by the synod.

The document also asked what concrete steps the church can take to better welcome LGBTQ+ people and others who have felt marginalized and unrecognized by the church so that they don’t feel judged: the poor, migrants, the elderly and disabled, as well as those who by tribal or caste feel excluded.

Perhaps most significantly, the document used the terminology “LGBTQ+ persons” rather than the Vatican’s traditional “persons with homosexual tendencies,” suggesting a level of acceptance that Francis ushered in a decade ago with his famous “Who am I to judge” comment.

Even the seating arrangements for the synod are designed to be inclusive. Delegates are to be seated at round tables, with around a dozen laity and clergy mixed together in the Vatican’s big auditorium.

Previously, synods took place in the Vatican’s theater-like synod hall, where cardinals and bishops would take the front rows and priests, nuns and finally lay people getting seated in the back rows, far from the stage.

Unlike past working documents, the synthesis doesn’t stake out firm points, proposals or conclusions, but rather poses a series of questions for further discussion during the October assembly. The synod process continues in 2024 with the second phase, after which Francis is expected to issue a concluding document considering the proposals that have been put to him by the delegates.

The working document re-proposed a call for debate on whether married priests could be considered to relieve the clergy shortage in some parts of the world. Amazonian bishops had proposed allowing married priests to minister to their faithful who sometimes go months at a time without Mass, but Francis shot down the proposal after an Amazonian synod in 2019.

It called for more “meaningful and concrete steps” to offer justice to survivors of sexual abuse. It noted that the faithful have also been victims of other types of abuse: “spiritual, economic, power and conscience abuse” that have “eroded the credibility of the Church and compromised the effectiveness of its mission.”

It suggested that the church must reevaluate the way authority is exercised by the hierarchy, suggesting structural, canonical and institutional reforms to eradicate the “clericalism,” or privilege that is afforded to clergy.

It acknowledged the fear and opposition that the synodal process has sparked among some bishops who see it as undermining their authority and power, but said transparency and accountability were absolutely necessary and that bishops should even be evaluated as a way to rebuild trust.

“The synodal process asks them (bishops) to live a radical trust in the action of the spirit in the life of their communities, without fear that the participation of everyone need be a threat to their ministry of community leadership,” it says.

Even before the synod began, the document and the consultative process that preceded it were already having an effect.

Sister Nadia Coppa, who heads the umbrella group of women’s religious orders, said anyone who exercises governance in religious orders was being called to develop a new way of exercising authority.

“It will be important for us to propose a style of governance that develops structures and participatory procedures in which members can together discern a new vision for the church,” Coppa told a press conference.

Complete Article HERE!

What is the Sexuality of G-d According to The Bible?

— In the previous article, we established that G-d is androgynous in gender. If G-d is androgynous, then what is the sexuality of G-d?

by Rebecca Wallace Keene

What is the Sexuality of G-d in the Torah?

Bisexual

While some people may think of discussing G-d’s sexuality as blasphemy, the authors of  The Bible did not believe so. The Bible has a lot to say on the topic.

In the Torah, we see G-d as married to all of Israel, both male and female. Indeed, the Song of Songs has G-d speak of taking their lover, Israel, into their bed

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—
for your love is more delightful than wine.
3 Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
your name is like perfume poured out.
No wonder the young women love you!
4 Take me away with you—let us hurry!
Let the king bring me into his chambers.”

In this example, G-d is bisexual as Israel contains both men and women.

Pansexual

However, to definitively answer the question of what is the sexuality of G-d, we need to look at other examples of G-d’s sexuality in The Bible. G-d describes themself as having birthed Israel from their womb.

“Listen to Me, O House of Jacob,
All that are left of the House of Israel,
Who have been carried since birth,
Supported since leaving the womb:
Till you grow old, I will still be the same;
When you turn gray, it is I who will carry;
I was the Maker, and I will be the Bearer;”

That implies G-d was at some point pregnant. So, who is the father? G-d often refers to themself as Israel’s father as well. Deuteronomy 1:31 says, “31 and in the wilderness. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place.” If G-d was pregnant, birthed a child, and was both mother and father, this is an example of asexual reproduction in The Bible. In this example, we see that G-d’s sexuality is fluid. G-d can and does play both the male and female roles in sexual relations.  G-d is not bound to sexual relations with only one gender, as G-d is androgynous in gender. In this sense, we might say that G-d is pansexual, able to have sexual relations with all genders.

Heteropoly

Further proof of G-d’s sexuality is that in addition to his metaphorical marriage to Israel, archaeology suggests that G-d had a goddess as a wife. William G. Dever, in his book Did God Have A Wife? Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel, explains that we have found inscriptions of people worshipping “Yahweh and his Asherah” in ancient Israel. Of course, The Torah we have today prohibits the worship of anyone, but G-d. However, scholars believe this is because Asherah was purposely written out by a patriarchal society. Whatever the reason, if G-d did or does have a wife and also proclaims to be married to Israel, G-d is a polygamist. That shouldn’t be shocking as most men in The Torah had multiple wives. Further, this does show G-d in a traditional heterosexual relationship with one other being, which is in contrast to the examples we have examined thus far.

What is the Sexuality of G-d in The New Testament?

Lesbian

Finally, The New Testament tells a story of the Holy Spirit coming upon Mary and impregnating her.  As we established in Do Spirits Have Genders According to The Bible? The Holy Spirit is feminine. The word Ruach is feminine in Hebrew and The Spirit functions as a messenger between G-d and a prophet. She is seen to have creative and sanctifying power. These powers are considered feminine. So, that means that when The Spirit comes upon Mary the union is that of two females. In this example, G-d’s sexuality would then be Lesbian.

Clearly, G-d has a wide range of sexuality in The Bible. Therefore, in today’s language, we would say that G-d is pansexual and poly. G-d doesn’t choose who they love based on their gender. Rather, G-d loves all their creation.   Do not judge those who love freely without boundaries, for they are acting in the nature of our G-d, who is love.

This is the last article in a series of four. Please, click here and read the previous three articles, if you have not already done so. Please, also read my book for more information about sexuality in The Bible.

Complete Article HERE!

Do Spirits Have Sexuality According to The Bible?

— In my last article, I showed that according to The Bible, spirits have genders. However, gender and sexuality are different things. Do spirits have sexuality?

by Rebecca Wallace Keene

Do Spirits Have Sexuality In The New Testament?

The Bible seems to suggest that yes Spirits do have sexuality.  Of course, the most obvious example comes from the New Testament when The Spirit of The Lord “comes upon” Mary and impregnates her. This is a clear description of a spirit having sexual relations which results in a birth.  Luke 1:35: “‘The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”

This is a very interesting passage because, as we established in the last article, The Holy  Spirit is feminine. This means The Spirit, female, came upon Mary, also female, and this union resulted in a child. As Sojourner once said, “Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From G-d and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him!” Yes. Lesbian sexuality is in The Bible, and, if you believe The New Testament, it created Jesus.

Do Spirits Have Sexuality In The Torah?

However, The New Testament is not the only place that shows spirits, or even G-d, as a sexual being. The Torah also has many verses that allude to Spirits having sexuality.

In Genesis 6:4, angels see the daughters of men and lust after them. Eventually, they mate with the women resulting in offspring. Clearly, they are sexual beings. The verse tells us: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.” The Nephilim, as described by the non-canonical Book of Enoch, were giants, who resulted from the union of humans and angels.

In The Song of Songs, we see G-d speaking about Israel as his wife, whom he wishes to take to bed.  This entire book reads like a love letter. Clearly, then G-d has sexual desire and sexuality. This passage, like the story of Mary and The Holy Spirit,  is also an overtly descriptive sexual scene. It says:

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—
for your love is more delightful than wine.
Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
your name is like perfume poured out.
No wonder the young women love you!
Take me away with you—let us hurry!
Let the king bring me into his chambers.”

While these are the most vivid examples of spirits being sexual in the Torah, they are far from the only examples.  So, the answer to our question is yes. Spirits do have sexuality and desire. What sexuality then do we assign to G-d?

For more information about sexuality in The Bible please read my book.

Complete Article HERE!