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!

Italian priest joins splinter Anglican Church, citing ‘inclusivity’

Father Andrea Barberini.

By Crux Staff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complete Article HERE!

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!

Gay Catholic bishop explains why he refuses to give up on religion and love

— ‘I saw the plan of God’

Luca Rodrigues Cavallaro is a happily married gay Catholic bishop.

Gian Luca Rodrigues Cavallaro has a unique claim to fame: he’s a gay Catholic bishop who’s happily married – and he’s got a powerful message of love and inclusivity for the world.

by Patrick Kelleher

It should go without saying that Gian isn’t a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church – homosexuality is strictly frowned upon by the church, and gay sex is still viewed as a sin.

Instead, he’s a bishop in the Inclusive Portuguese Catholic Church, where he preaches his message that love is for all.

Gian was just eight years old when he felt the calling to become a priest, he tells PinkNews. Before long, he started to realise that he was also gay – and spent his next few years tormented.

“On the one hand I wanted to become a priest, but on the other, I didn’t want to give up on the idea of a relationship,” he says.

“My dream was to become a priest and marry at the same time with my future boyfriend, but I thought this was not possible.”

After he finished school, Gian went to a Roman Catholic seminary to train as a priest.

“I was willing to even renounce my emotional sphere,” he says. But after six months, he left the seminary due to what he describes as “the hypocrisy of some superiors”.

It was shortly after he left the seminary that he met a female priest from another church (Roman Catholicism doesn’t allow women to become priests). That chance encounter made him see another way was possible.

“That meeting, as if by magic, opened me up to a completely new world,” he says.

“Finally, I saw the plan of God, that was already written. My path was to be a priest without renouncing my emotional sphere.”

At first, Gian became a priest with the Reformed Old Catholic Church in Italy. In 2019, he moved to Portugal, but he struggled to find others there who wanted to be part of an inclusive Catholic Church.

“It was difficult and, in the beginning, I was a bit demoralised because without structure and without resources, it was difficult to reach people,” he says.

“But, with the grace of God, I was able to meet some people that were willing to share this path with me.”

Gian Luca Rodrigues Cavallaro pictured with members of the Inclusive Portuguese Catholic Church.
Gian Luca Rodrigues Cavallaro pictured with members of the Inclusive Portuguese Catholic Church.

It wasn’t until 2022 that Gian and others who believed in his mission decided to set up the Inclusive Portuguese Catholic Church. Shortly afterwards, members chose him to serve as a bishop within the group.

Gay Catholic bishop believes he and his husband were ‘predestined’ to be together

It was also in Portugal that Gian met Robson, the man who would go on to become his husband.

“He is Brazilian and I am Italian so it is curious that two people born in far-off countries could meet, but God chose us before the foundation of the world,” he says, referencing a passage in the New Testament.

“I am convinced that we were predestined to be together.”

Gian’s husband hasn’t always shared his love for religion and God – when they first met, he was “apathetic” about it, although he always supported Gian’s calling.

I had the joy to baptise him. No one forced him, it was his choice and he asked me.

However, before long, Robson embarked on a “personal path”, which led to him forming his own faith.

“This year, I had the joy to baptise him. No one forced him, it was his choice and he asked me,” Gian says.

Gian Luca Rodrigues Cavallaro with his husband Robson.
Gian’s husband Robson was “apathetic” about religion when they first got together, but he eventually found his faith.

While Gian has found fulfilment in his own church, he understands why so many LGBTQ+ people still see organised religion as an alienating and harmful concept.

His message to the Catholic Church is a simple one – he hopes it will come to see LGBTQ+ people as human beings who deserve love.

“I have the impression that sometimes they forget about the primacy of personal conscience, and they excommunicate priests and religious people just because they preach the gospel,” he says.

Pope Francis has a ‘strange attitude’ towards LGBTQ+ community

He doesn’t have much time for Pope Francis – the pontiff has won praise in some quarters from people who argue that he’s taken a more understanding, compassionate approach to LGBTQ+ people than his predecessors.

Others have pointed out that he’s not actually all that liberal – under his rule the Vatican has remained resolutely opposed to any progress on LGBTQ+ inclusion.

Gian says the pope has “a strange attitude”.

Even if ecumenically he works quite well, I have not a general good impression, especially in his approach with the LGBTQ+ community.

“In public, he says something that generates positive impressions – maybe in an attempt not to lose the faithful – but then in private he signs documents that contradict his declarations,” he says.

Gian Luca Rodrigues Cavallaro kissing his husband Robson on their wedding day.
The happy couple on their wedding day.

“Even if ecumenically he works quite well, I have not a general good impression, especially in his approach with the LGBTQ+ community.”

That’s why Gian is determined to amplify the voices of LGBTQ+ Catholics and create a space for them to share their faith with others.

“Some people think that I give interviews to have visibility, but that’s absolutely wrong,” he says.

“If I wanted visibility, I would be an actor, but I am a priest and so that’s not my purpose.

“I give interviews because I know that these interviews help people.”

Complete Article HERE!

Gay priest who stood up to US church at height of Aids crisis ‘so proud’ of Ireland’s progress

Bernárd Lynch with Elton John

By Catherine Healy

When the Aids epidemic hit New York in the early 1980s, Bernárd Lynch did all he could to care for the sick and dying. The Ennis-born priest founded the first ministry for people with Aids in the city, supporting countless gay men who had been shunned by their families. He saw many of his friends succumb to the condition. Nobody knew the cause back then, and there was no such thing as treatment.

Lynch will never forget the terror of those early crisis years. “We used to go to patients in hospital and find their food had been left outside the door for days because staff were so afraid of contracting Aids. When you visited people, you dressed up like you were going on a moonwalk — covered from head to toe. You wouldn’t drink from the same cup or use the same toilet seat as anyone who had it.”

The ministry’s work was often more practical than spiritual. “I spent more time shopping, changing diapers and cleaning up urine than giving the last rites or praying with the sick,” says Lynch.

He had appealed for volunteers at St Francis Xavier Church in Greenwich Village after becoming overwhelmed with requests for help. The ministry grew to more than 1,000 members, but about half of them had died within a few years. Many were abandoned by their families when it was discovered they had Aids, while fellow priests who became ill were excluded by their diocese and religious communities.

Yet there were also moments of great tenderness. “I picked up one Irish mother at JFK whose son was in hospital. ‘How’s Michael?’ she asked, and I had to tell her he was quite ill. ‘He has the Rock Hudson disease,’ she said, referring to the actor who died of the condition in 1985, and I said, ‘Yes, he does’.”

“She found out he was gay about two weeks before he died, but she was formidable. I took the funeral and asked her if she’d like to say a few words. She went up to the altar in front of around 200 people — a woman who had never spoken in public before — and said: ‘Thank you. You were his real family.’ It was inspirational to see at a time when so many others had rejected their sons on their deathbeds.”

He is talking to the Independent after donating his personal papers to the National Library of Ireland. The Fr Bernárd Lynch Archive includes records of smear campaigns against him, personal letters to his family while he was coming out as a gay man, and letters from people struggling to reconcile their sexuality with church teaching.

What impact did his time in New York have on him? “Well, I was radicalised. I was devastated, but I had no time to cry — and no time to recover. Day after day, you were in and out of funeral homes and hospitals visiting the sick. And, of course, we all thought we had it. I went home in 1982 to tell my family about what was happening and to make a will for the first time in my life, because I genuinely thought my number was up.”

Lynch has struggled with his faith in the years since, but he stops short of describing himself as a non-believer. “Maybe I’m a coward, but I couldn’t have kept going if I didn’t hold on to something. Even today, it’s a hope more than a belief.”

There were no such doubts growing up in 1950s Ireland. Mass at Ennis Cathedral was, he says, like Broadway. “It was our theatre, to put it in secular terms. With the pre-Vatican II church, everything was in Latin and everything felt very dramatic. Men and boys went around in the fanciest of clothes, and I just found it extraordinary.”

But he also came to appreciate the spiritual aspects of religion. “I had an interest in things that were unexplainable, and things other than what we perceive. You know, the beauty of creation and all that.”

Coming home

After seminary training and a stint in Zambia, Lynch was sent to New York in 1975 to pursue graduate studies. It was here that he finally came to terms with his sexuality.

He contacted Dignity, a Catholic LGBT group, but was nervous about getting involved. “When I first joined, I didn’t tell anyone I was a priest or even give my second name,” he says. He only became more disillusioned with Catholic authorities when the Aids crisis took hold. Church leaders expressed little sympathy with the dying, and a Vatican spokesman went as far as to suggest Aids was a punishment for immoral behaviour.

At the height of the epidemic, the Archdiocese of New York opposed the passing of legislation banning discrimination against gay people in employment and housing.

“People with Aids were being fired and thrown out of their homes,” Lynch recalls. “Cardinal John O’Connor of New York did everything in his power to stop that legislation and was succeeding. Council members were told they wouldn’t get the Catholic vote if they voted for the bill. People said to me that if I testified in favour, as a priest, a lot of these Catholic members would take courage. I went to City Hall and testified, and it did finally pass — although not for that reason alone.”

The Archdiocese of New York refused to renew his licence to minister as a priest. He approached other bishops but was shut out. It was, he says, the end of his career in America.

In 1992, Lynch left for London, where he started working with an Aids counselling group. Treatment has improved since then, but he is conscious that stigma endures. He knows people in Ireland who still hide the cause of their loved one’s death. “There are families I can’t visit even today because it might draw attention,” he says. “The fear is that I’ll be recognised in their locality, and then the secret will be out.’”

It was in London that Lynch met his now husband, fellow Irishman Billy Desmond. In 2006, he became — it’s believed — the first Catholic priest to enter a civil partnership. The couple held their wedding in Co Clare in 2017, two years after the passing of the marriage equality referendum.

“To be able to come back and marry in my own home county was such a gift,” he says. “You know, we left home because we couldn’t stay, but there are people who stayed and have now given us a country to come home to. I really am so proud of Ireland.”

Lynch has remained a prominent activist, meeting such figures as President Mary Robinson and Elton John.

Bernárd Lynch with Mary Robinson

He remains deeply troubled by the church’s position on LGBT issues. As founder of a support group for gay clergy in London, he has met countless priests torn between their jobs and sexuality. “Things might be a bit softer under Pope Francis, but the teaching is still that we’re disordered in our nature and evil in our love. It’s a toxic teaching that does such damage to people. The church still won’t come out and say loud and clear that that teaching is wrong and that gay people are as much loved by God and accepted as straight people.”

Katherine McSharry, acting director of the National Library, describes the donation of Lynch’s archive as an important addition to its collections. Lynch’s papers provide insights into “important questions in our national life, including the nature of faith and organised religion, the taboos around sexuality and individual expression, and the impact the Aids crisis had on the LGBTI+ community”, she says.

There will be an event on Monday to mark the acquisition of the archive, after which it will be available for public consultation. Libraries in the US and UK had also expressed interest, but Lynch is pleased his papers have ended up in Dublin. “What this is doing, as I understand it, is bringing the diaspora home,” he says. “There were so many who left and then couldn’t come back when they were ill; who never saw their families again. All those nameless Irish people in the archive, who can’t be named even today, are in a sense now coming home. It’s about them, not me.”

Complete Article HERE!

Walter Brueggemann

— How to read the Bible on homosexuality


Walter Brueggemann, one of the world’s most renowned biblical scholars, whose scriptural scholarship includes a specific focus on the Hebrew prophets, taught from 1961 to 1986 at the Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Groves, Mo. Born in northeastern Nebraska, he earned a Ph.D. in education from St. Louis University in 1974.

By Ryan Di Corpo

What Scripture has to say

It is easy enough to see at first glance why LGBTQ people, and those who stand in solidarity with them, look askance at the Bible. After all, the two most cited biblical texts on the subject are the following, from the old purity codes of ancient Israel:

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination (Lev. 18:22).

If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them (Lev. 20:13).

There they are. There is no way around them; there is no ambiguity in them. They are, moreover, seconded by another verse that occurs in a list of exclusions from the holy people of God:

No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord (Deut. 23:1).

This text apparently concerns those who had willingly become eunuchs in order to serve in foreign courts. For those who want it simple and clear and clean, these texts will serve well. They seem, moreover, to be echoed in this famous passage from the Apostle Paul:

They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error (Rom. 1:23-27).

Paul’s intention here is not fully clear, but he wants to name the most extreme affront of the Gentiles before the creator God, and Paul takes disordered sexual relations as the ultimate affront. This indictment is not as clear as those in the tradition of Leviticus, but it does serve as an echo of those texts. It is impossible to explain away these texts.

Given these most frequently cited texts (that we may designate as texts of rigor), how may we understand the Bible given a cultural circumstance that is very different from that assumed by and reflected in these old traditions?

Well, start with the awareness that the Bible does not speak with a single voice on any topic. Inspired by God as it is, all sorts of persons have a say in the complexity of Scripture, and we are under mandate to listen, as best we can, to all of its voices.

On the question of gender equity and inclusiveness, consider the following to be set alongside the most frequently cited texts. We may designate these texts as texts of welcome. Thus, the Bible permits very different voices to speak that seem to contradict those texts cited above. Therefore, the prophetic poetry of Isaiah 56:3-8 has been taken to be an exact refutation of the prohibition in Deuteronomy 23:1:

Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”; and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off … for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered (Is. 56:3-8).

This text issues a grand welcome to those who have been excluded, so that all are gathered in by this generous gathering God. The temple is for “all peoples,” not just the ones who have kept the purity codes.

Beyond this text, we may notice other texts that are tilted toward the inclusion of all persons without asking about their qualifications, or measuring up the costs that have been articulated by those in control. Jesus issues a welcoming summons to all those who are weary and heavy laden:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Mt. 11:28-30).

No qualification, no exclusion. Jesus is on the side of those who are “worn out.” They may be “worn out” by being lower-class people who do all the heavy lifting, or it may be those who are “worn out” by the heavy demands of Torah, imposed by those who make the Torah filled with judgment and exclusion.

Since Jesus mentions his “yoke,” he contrasts his simple requirements with the heavy demands that are imposed on the community by teachers of rigor. Jesus’ quarrel is not with the Torah, but with Torah interpretation that had become, in his time, excessively demanding and restrictive. The burden of discipleship to Jesus is easy, contrasted to the more rigorous teaching of some of his contemporaries. Indeed, they had made the Torah, in his time, exhausting, specializing in trivialities while disregarding the neighborly accents of justice, mercy and faithfulness (cf. Mt. 23:23).

A text in Paul (unlike that of Romans 1) echoes a baptismal formula in which all are welcome without distinction:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ (Gal. 3:28).

No ethnic distinctions, no class distinctions and no gender distinctions. None of that makes any difference “in Christ,” that is, in the church. We are all one, and we all may be one. Paul has become impatient with his friends in the churches in Galatia who have tried to order the church according to the rigors of an exclusionary Torah. In response, he issues a welcome that overrides all the distinctions that they may have preferred to make.

Start with the awareness that the Bible does not speak with a single voice on any topic. Inspired by God as it is, all sorts of persons have a say in the complexity of Scripture, and we are under mandate to listen, as best we can, to all of its voices.

Finally, among the texts I will cite is the remarkable narrative of Acts of the Apostles 10. The Apostle Peter has raised objections to eating food that, according to the purity codes, is unclean; thus, he adheres to the rigor of the priestly codes, not unlike the ones we have seen in Leviticus. His objection, however, is countered by “a voice” that he takes to be the voice of the Lord. Three times that voice came to Peter amid his vigorous objection:

What God has made clean, you must not call profane (Acts 10:15).

The voice contradicts the old purity codes! From this, Peter is able to enter into new associations in the church. He declares:

You yourselves know that it is unlawful for Jews to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean (Acts 10:28).

And from this Peter further deduces:

I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him (v. 34).

This is a remarkable moment in the life of Peter and in the life of the church, for it makes clear that the social ordering governed by Christ is beyond the bounds of the rigors of the old exclusivism.

I take the texts I have cited to be a fair representation of the very different voices that sound in Scripture. It is impossible to harmonize the mandates to exclusion in Leviticus 18:22, 20:13 and Deuteronomy 23:1 with the welcome stance of Isaiah 56, Matthew 11:28-30, Galatians 3:28 and Acts 10.

Other texts might be cited as well, but these are typical and representative. As often happens in Scripture, we are left with texts in deep tension, if not in contradiction, with each other. The work of reading the Bible responsibly is the process of adjudicating these texts that will not be fit together.

The reason the Bible seems to speak “in one voice” concerning matters that pertain to LGBTQ persons is that the loud voices most often cite only one set of texts, to the determined disregard of the texts that offer a counter-position. But our serious reading does not allow such a disregard, so that we must have all of the texts in our purview.

The process of the adjudication of biblical texts that do not readily fit together is the work of interpretation. I have termed it “emancipatory work,” and I will hope to show why this is so. Every reading of the Bible—no exceptions—is an act of interpretation. There are no “innocent” or “objective” readings, no matter how sure and absolute they may sound.

Everyone is engaged in interpretation, so that one must pay attention to how we do interpretation. In what follows, I will identify five things I have learned concerning interpretation, learnings that I hope will be useful as we read the Bible, responsibly, around the crisis of gender identity in our culture.

The reason the Bible seems to speak “in one voice” concerning matters that pertain to LGBTQ persons is that the loud voices most often cite only one set of texts, to the determined disregard of the texts that offer a counter-position.

1. All interpretation filters the text through the interpreter’s life.

All interpretation filters the text through life experience of the interpreter. The matter is inescapable and cannot be avoided. The result, of course, is that with a little effort, one can prove anything in the Bible. It is immensely useful to recognize this filtering process. More specifically, I suggest that we can identify three layers of personhood that likely operate for us in doing interpretation.

First, we read the text according to our vested interests. Sometimes we are aware of our vested interests, sometimes we are not. It is not difficult to see this process at work concerning gender issues in the Bible. Second, beneath our vested interests, we read the Bible through the lens of our fears that are sometimes powerful, even if unacknowledged. Third, at bottom, beneath our vested interests and our fears, I believe we read the Bible through our hurts that we often keep hidden not only from others, but from ourselves as well.

The defining power of our vested interests, our fears and our hurts makes our reading lens seem to us sure and reliable. We pretend that we do not read in this way, but it is useful that we have as much self-critical awareness as possible. Clearly, the matter is urgent for our adjudication of the texts I have cited.

It is not difficult to imagine how a certain set of vested interests, fears and hurts might lead to an embrace of the insistences of texts of rigor that I have cited. Conversely, it is not difficult to see how LGBTQ persons and their allies operate with a different set of filters, and so gravitate to the texts of welcome.

2. Context inescapably looms large in interpretation.

There are no texts without contexts and there are no interpreters without context that positions one to read in a distinct way. Thus, the purity codes of Leviticus reflect a social context in which a community under intense pressure sought to delineate, in a clear way, its membership, purpose and boundaries.

The text from Isaiah 56 has as its context the intense struggle, upon return from exile, to delineate the character and quality of the restored community of Israel. One cannot read Isaiah 56 without reference to the opponents of its position in the more rigorous texts, for example, in Ezekiel. And the texts from Acts and Galatians concern a church coming to terms with the radicality of the graciousness of the Gospel, a radicality rooted in Judaism that had implications for the church’s rich appropriation of its Jewish inheritance.

Each of us, as interpreter, has a specific context. But we can say something quite general about our shared interpretive context. It is evident that Western culture (and our place in it) is at a decisive point wherein we are leaving behind many old, long-established patterns of power and meaning, and we are observing the emergence of new patterns of power and meaning. It is not difficult to see our moment as an instance anticipated by the prophetic poet:

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Is. 43:18-19)

The “old things” among us have long been organized around white male power, with its tacit, strong assumption of heterosexuality, plus a strong accent on American domination. The “new thing” emerging among us is a multiethnic, multicultural, multiracial, multi-gendered culture in which old privileges and positions of power are placed in deep jeopardy.

We can see how our current politico-cultural struggles (down to the local school board) have to do with resisting what is new and protecting and maintaining what is old or, conversely, welcoming what is new with a ready abandonment of what is old.

If this formulation from Isaiah roughly fits our circumstance in Western culture, then we can see that the texts of welcome are appropriate to our “new thing,” while the texts of rigor function as a defense of what is old. In many specific ways our cultural conflicts—and the decisions we must make—reverberate with the big issue of God’s coming newness.

In the rhetoric of Jesus, this new arrival may approximate among us the “coming of the kingdom of God,” except that the coming kingdom is never fully here but is only “at hand,” and we must not overestimate the arrival of newness. It is inescapable that we do our interpretive work in a context that is, in general ways, impacted by and shaped through this struggle for what is old and what is new.

3. Texts do not come at us one at a time

Texts do not come at us one at a time, ad seriatim, but always in clusters through a trajectory of interpretation. Thus, it may be correct to say that our several church “denominations” are, importantly, trajectories of interpretation. Location in such a trajectory is important, both because it imposes restraints upon us, and because it invites bold imagination in the context of the trajectory.

We do not, for the most part, do our interpretation in a vacuum. Rather we are “surrounded by a cloud of [nameable] witnesses” who are present with us as we do our interpretive work (Heb. 12:1).

For now, I worship in a United Methodist congregation, and it is easy enough to see the good impact of the interpretive trajectory of Methodism. Rooted largely in Paul’s witness concerning God’s grace, the specific Methodist dialect, mediated through Pelagius and then Arminius, evokes an accent on the “good works” of the church community in response to God’s goodness.

That tradition, of course, passed through and was shaped by the wise, knowing hands of John Wesley, and we may say that, at present, it reflects the general perspective of the World Council of Churches with its acute accent on social justice. The interpretive work of a member of this congregation is happily and inevitably informed by this lively tradition.

It is not different with other interpretive trajectories that are variously housed in other denominational settings. We are situated in such interpretive trajectories that allow for both innovation and continuity. Each trajectory provides for its members some guardrails for interpretation that we may not run too far afield, but that also is a matter of adjudication—quite often a matter of deeply contested adjudication.

4. We are in a “crisis of the other”

We are, for now, deeply situated in a crisis of the other. We face folk who are quite unlike us, and their presence among us is inescapable. We are no longer able to live our lives in a homogenous community of culture-related “look alikes.” There are, to be sure, many reasons for this new social reality: global trade, easier mobility, electronic communication and mass migrations among them.

We are thus required to come to terms with the “other,” who disturbs our reductionist management of life through sameness. We have a fairly simple choice that can refer to the other as a threat, a rival enemy, a competitor, or we may take the other as a neighbor. The facts on the ground are always complex, but the simple human realities with each other are not so complex.

While the matter is pressing and acute in our time, this is not a new challenge to us. The Bible provides ongoing evidence about the emergency of coming to terms with the other. Thus, the land settlements in the Book of Joshua brought Israel face-to-face with the Canaanites, a confrontation that was mixed and tended toward violence (Judg. 1).

The struggle to maintain the identity and the “purity” of the holy people of God was always a matter of dispute and contention. In the New Testament, the long, hard process of coming to terms with “Gentiles” was a major preoccupation of the early church, and a defining issue among the Apostles. We are able to see in the Book of Acts that over time, the early church reached a readiness to allow non-Jews into the community of faith.

The new thing emerging among us is a multiethnic, multicultural, multiracial, multi-gendered culture in which old privileges and positions of power are placed in deep jeopardy.

And now among us the continuing arrival of many “new peoples” is an important challenge. There is no doubt that the texts of rigor and the texts of welcome offer different stances in the affirmation or negation of the other. And certainly among the “not like us” folk are LGBTQ persons, who readily violate the old canons of conformity and sameness. Such persons are among those who easily qualify as “other,” but they are no more and no less a challenge than many other “others” among us.

And so the church is always re-deciding about the other, for we know that the “other”—LBGTQ persons among us—are not going to go away. Thus, we are required to come to terms with them. The trajectory of the texts of welcome is that they are to be seen as neighbors who are welcomed to the resources of the community and invited to make contributions to the common wellbeing of the community. By no stretch of any imagination can it be the truth of the Gospel that such “others” as LGBTQ persons are unwelcome in the community.

In that community, there are no second-class citizens. We had to learn that concerning people of color and concerning women. And now, the time has come to face the same gospel reality about LGBTQ persons as others are welcomed as first-class citizens in the community of faithfulness and justice.  We learn that the other is not an unacceptable danger and that the other is not required to give up “otherness” in order to belong fully to the community. We in the community of faith, as in the Old and New Testaments, are always called to respond to the other as a neighbor who belongs with “us,” even as “we” belong with and for the “other.”

5. The Gospel is not to be confused with the Bible.

The Gospel is not to be confused with or identified with the Bible. The Bible contains all sorts of voices that are inimical to the good news of God’s love, mercy and justice. Thus, “biblicism” is a dangerous threat to the faith of the church, because it allows into our thinking claims that are contradictory to the news of the Gospel. The Gospel, unlike the Bible, is unambiguous about God’s deep love for all peoples. And where the Bible contradicts that news, as in the texts of rigor, these texts are to be seen as “beyond the pale” of gospel attentiveness.

Because:

our interpretation is filtered through our close experience,

our context calls for an embrace of God’s newness,

our interpretive trajectory is bent toward justice and mercy,

our faith calls us to the embrace of the other and

our hope is in the God of the gospel and in no other,

the full acceptance and embrace of LGBTQ persons follows as a clear mandate of the Gospel in our time. Claims to the contrary are contradictions of the truth of the Gospel on all the counts indicated above.

These several learnings about the interpretive process help us grow in faith:

  • We are warned about the subjectivity of our interpretive inclinations;
  • we are invited in our context to receive and welcome God’s newness;
  • we can identify our interpretive trajectory as one bent toward justice and mercy;
  • we may acknowledge the “other” as a neighbor;
  • we can trust the gospel in its critical stance concerning the Bible.

All of these angles of interpretation, taken together, authorize a sign for LGBTQ persons: Welcome!

Welcome to the neighborhood! Welcome to the gifts of the community! Welcome to the work of the community! Welcome to the continuing emancipatory work of interpretation!

Complete Article HERE!

New documentary follows the Rev. James Martin ‘Building a Bridge’ to LGBTQ Catholics

‘I just hope that it helps LGBTQ Catholics see that there’s a place for them in their own church — it’s their church, too — and also for Catholic leaders to hear these voices,’ Martin said.

The Rev. James Martin at the Vatican in a scene from the documentary “Building A Bridge.”

By

The Rev. James Martin never pictured himself managing a website aimed at helping resource LGBTQ Catholics.

He never saw himself starring in a documentary about the Roman Catholic Church’s relationship with its LGBTQ members.

He never set out to write or speak on issues related to LGBTQ people and the Catholic Church at all, he said.

And yet a film chronicling Martin’s ministry to LGBTQ Catholics — “Building a Bridge,” which was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese and premiered last year at the Tribeca Film Festival — is streaming now on AMC+.

The documentary release comes as Martin launches an LGBTQ Catholic resource called Outreach, sponsored by America Media, where he is editor at large. Outreach includes a new website and a conference hosted in person for the first time this weekend at Fordham University in New York.

“I really feel like it’s been an invitation from the Holy Spirit to just continue to see where this goes,” Martin said.

The idea for the documentary about Martin’s ministry came to Brooklyn-based filmmaker Evan Mascagni not long after he moved to New York. Mascagni had grown up in a “really Catholic” community in Kentucky — so Catholic, he joked, he didn’t even realize there were other religions — but he had distanced himself from the church in college.

"Building A Bridge" film poster. Courtesy image
“Building A Bridge” film poster.

His mom kept sending him posts by “this cool priest she follows on Instagram,” who also was based in New York, he said.

When he finally attended a talk by the priest, who turned out to be Martin, Mascagni said he was “blown away.”

“I’d never felt energy like that in a Catholic church, honestly,” he said.

Mascagni also realized Martin’s story dovetailed with a story that co-director Shannon Post wanted to tell about a friend of hers who was among the 49 people killed when a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Pulse was one of the city’s best-known gay clubs, and the 2016 shooting was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history at the time.

The response to the shooting — or, rather, the lack of response — by the Catholic Church was one of the reasons Martin said he first felt “emboldened” to write and speak publicly about the church’s relationship with LGBTQ people, he said.

“I was a little disappointed with the church’s official response to the massacre. What struck me at the time was that even in death, this community is largely invisible to the Catholic Church,” he said.

“And so that led to a Facebook video, which led to some talks, which led to this book ‘Building a Bridge,’ which led to this ministry, which just keeps going in new directions.”

The filmmakers began following Martin not long after his book “Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter Into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity” was published in 2017.

A scene from the documentary "Building A Bridge." Photo courtesy Building A Bridge
A scene from the documentary “Building A Bridge.”

They filmed as some of the priest’s talks were canceled over fears of protest by conservative Catholic websites such as Church Militant, which also have organized social media campaigns against him. They kept rolling as he celebrated a Pre-Pride Mass at St. Francis of Assisi Church in New York and met at the Vatican with Pope Francis, who later wrote to Martin about the Outreach conference, previously held online.

“I pray for you to continue in this way, being close, compassionate and with great tenderness,” Francis wrote.

In that time, Martin said he’s become more confident — “primarily because I had that meeting with the pope.”

The priest’s message to the church has become “a little bolder,” he said.

“At the beginning, it was just like, ‘Treat these people with respect.’ Now it’s more, ‘Listen to them, accompany them, advocate for them,’ which is something I might not have said before.”

His message to the LGBTQ community has changed, too, as he’s been challenged by parish groups such as Out at St. Paul, featured in the “Building a Bridge” film. He’s realized the responsibility is on the church to reach out to the LGBTQ community, which has much less power, he said.

He sees the film as part of that work.

“I know that 1,000 times more people will see this movie than ever read my book or come to one of my talks. I understand the power of the media, and so, therefore, I wanted to support them as much as I could,” he said.

The Rev. James Martin in a scene from the documentary "Building A Bridge." Photo courtesy Building A Bridge
The Rev. James Martin in a scene from the documentary “Building A Bridge.”

Martin said he realized Mascagni and Post were serious about making a documentary about his ministry when they showed up in Dublin, where he was invited to speak to the World Meeting of Families organized by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life.

Being followed by cameras was “a threat to humility” as a priest, he said. But it came at the same time opponents were bombarding him with messages he was going to hell, so, he joked, “it balanced.”

It isn’t his first brush with fame. Martin has appeared on “The Colbert Report” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” as the unofficial chaplain of Colbert Nation. He also has worked with Scorsese on two previous films, appearing as a priest in “The Irishman” and offering insight as a consultant for “Silence.”

Scorsese ended up becoming executive producer of “Building a Bridge” after hearing the documentary was in the works and reaching out to Mascagni and Post.

“If Martin Scorsese is asking you to see a rough cut, you’re gonna work as hard and as fast as you can to get it done,” Mascagni said, laughing.

Alongside Martin, “Building a Bridge” shares the stories of LGBTQ Catholics, their families and their parish ministries as they intersect with the priest and with the church.

It also features Michael Voris, founder of Church Militant. Mascagni said he wanted to show the impact Voris and his followers have had as they’ve opposed Martin’s ministry.

Voris told Religion News Service he thought the documentary was a “fair representation” of himself and Church Militant.

People opposing the Rev. James Martin in the documentary "Building A Bridge." Photo courtesy Building A Bridge
People opposing the Rev. James Martin in the documentary “Building A Bridge.”

But, he said, “What sticks in my craw about it is that the church’s teaching doesn’t catch any real airtime.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to “homosexual tendencies” as “objectively disordered.” It also calls for LGBTQ people to be “accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.”

The latter is the message Martin emphasizes, and the one the priest said he hopes audiences will take from “Building a Bridge.”

“I just hope that it helps LGBTQ Catholics see that there’s a place for them in their own church — it’s their church, too — and also for Catholic leaders to hear these voices,” Martin said.

“This is where Jesus not only wants us to be, but is. I mean, they are a part of the body of Christ.”

Complete Article HERE!

Makers of documentary hope it expands Catholic LGBTQ outreach

‘Building a Bridge’ is based on the book of the same name by Jesuit Father James Martin


Jesuit Father James Martin is seen in the documentary ‘Building a Bridge,’ a film about his LGBT ministry.

By Mark Pattison

The makers of the documentary Building a Bridge, which makes its debut on streaming platforms and video on demand on May 3, hope the film will extend the Church’s outreach to LGBTQ Catholics.

“I really want this film to be accessible in any part of the world, for that matter. We’re hoping that we’re going to launch educational opportunities to show in different high schools and colleges and universities and hopefully maybe have it at libraries,” said Evan Mascagni, one of two co-directors of the movie.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to do a lot of those grassroots community screenings, and follow that up with Q-and-A’s,” Mascagni added. “Hopefully our film can be a resource or a tool for a parish, like someone who wants to start their own LGBTQ ministry in a place like Kentucky,” from which he hails.

“I really hope that the film can reach young people, and people who might not know any other clear path and feel they can joining a community or even start a community like Out in St. Paul,” a gay Catholic ministry featured in Building a Bridge, said Shannon Post, the other co-director, during an April 28 conference call with Catholic News Service.

Building a Bridge is based on the book of the same name by Jesuit Father James Martin, editor at large of America magazine and a consultor to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication as well as being the author of several books.

Father Martin, who admitted being “uncomfortable” being the focus of the film — “the film should be about the ministry, not me,” he said on the conference call — added, “parishes, too,” as an important point outreach with the movie.

Post had wanted to make a documentary about the shooting rampage at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which killed 49 people, including a college classmate of hers

“My real target is the LGBTQ Catholic youth, who is wondering if there really is a place in the church for LGBTQ people,” Father Martin said. “They will see this and know that God loves them, and to quote Cardinal (Wilton D.) Gregory (of Washington), know that they are at the heart of the church.”

Post and Mascagni co-directed the 2015 documentary Circle of Poison, about the manufacture and sale in the United States of pesticides banned by the federal government for use in other nations.

Post had wanted to make a documentary about the shooting rampage at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which killed 49 people, including a college classmate of hers. Mascagni, who had pretty much turned his back on the Catholic Church in which he was brought up, relented to his mother’s importuning that he go to a talk given by “a cool priest” she’d found on Instagram.

The priest was Father Martin. “It was one of his first Building a Bridge talks, Mascagni recalled. He then went to Post and said, “I think there’s a story here.”

They convinced Father Martin to let himself be filmed. When he was invited to speak at the Vatican’s World Conference of Families in 2018 in Dublin, Mascagni and Post told him: “We’re going to Dublin.” “Why are you coming to Dublin?” he remembers asking them. “They said, ‘We’re making a documentary,'” which is when he realized “this wasn’t going to be a fly-by-night operation. This was going to be a serious documentary.”

Three years later, Building a Bridge had its cinematic debut at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Assessments by many of those featured in the movie had good things to say. Critics of Father Martin’s ministry — among them Michael Voris of Church Militant, who is featured in the documentary — have yet to weigh in.

But Mascagni said: “In the film, we point out all the trolling that happens on Father Martin’s social media. Now that we’ve announced the film on social media, we’re starting to get a tiny part of that.”

In addition to Post and Mascagni’s “impact plan” to take the movie on the road with post-screening question-and-answer sessions and LGBTQ profiles they couldn’t jam into a feature that already was running 90 minutes long — America Media is introducing in May a new website called https://outreach.faith.

Father Martin will coordinate news and resources to be posted on the website, as well as details for a new “Outreach” conference for LGBTQ Catholics in June at Jesuit-run Fordham University.

“Parishes, particularly in the West, are realizing they have to deal with LGBTQ kids — as well as LGBTQ parishioners themselves,” he said. “That trend is not going to change. People are not going to stop coming out.”

Building a Bridge will be available on video on demand May 3, followed by a launch on AMC+ June 21 and broadcast premiere on Sundance TV June 26.

Complete Article HERE!

Black gay priest in NYC challenges Catholicism from within

Rev. Bryan Massingale

By Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu 

Parishioners worshipping at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Harlem are greeted by a framed portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. — a Baptist minister named after a rebellious 16th century German priest excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

The Rev. Bryan Massingale, who sometimes preaches at St. Charles, pursues his ministry in ways that echo both Martin Luthers.

Like King, Massingale decries the scourge of racial inequality in the United States. As a professor at Fordham University, he teaches African American religious approaches to ethics.

Like the German Martin Luther, Massingale is often at odds with official Catholic teaching — he supports the ordination of women and making celibacy optional for Catholic clergy. And, as a gay man, he vocally disagrees with the church’s doctrine on same-sex relations, instead advocating for full inclusion of LGBTQ Catholics within the church.

The Vatican holds that gays and lesbians should be treated with dignity and respect, but that gay sex is “intrinsically disordered” and sinful.

In his homily on a recent Sunday, Massingale – who became public about being gay in 2019 — envisioned a world “where the dignity of every person is respected and protected, where everyone is loved.”

But the message of equality and tolerance is one “that is resisted even within our own faith household,” he added. “Preach!” a worshiper shouted in response.

Massingale was born in 1957 in Milwaukee. His mother was a school secretary and his father a factory worker whose family migrated from Mississippi to escape racial segregation.

But even in Wisconsin, racism was common. Massingale said his father couldn’t work as a carpenter because of a color bar preventing African Americans from joining the carpenters’ union.

The Massingales also experienced racism when they moved to Milwaukee’s outskirts and ventured to a predominately white parish.

“This would not be a very comfortable parish for you to be a part of,” he recalled the parish priest saying. Thereafter, the family commuted to a predominantly Black Catholic church.

Massingale recalled another incident, as a newly ordained priest, after celebrating his first Mass at a predominantly white church.

“The first parishioner to greet me at the door said to me: ‘Father, you being here is the worst mistake the archbishop could have made. People will never accept you.‘”

Massingale says he considered leaving the Catholic Church, but decided he was needed.

“I’m not going to let the church’s racism rob me of my relationship with God,” he said. “I see it as my mission to make the church what it says it is: more universal and the institution that I believe Jesus wants it to be.”

For Massingale, racism within the U.S. Catholic Church is a reason for the exodus of some Black Catholics; he says the church is not doing enough to tackle racism within its ranks and in broader society.

Nearly half of Black U.S. adults who were raised Catholic no longer identify as such, with many becoming Protestants, according to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center. About 6% of Black U.S. adults identify as Catholic and close to 80% believe opposing racism is essential to their faith, the survey found.

The U.S. Catholic Church has had a checkered history with race. Some of its institutions, such as Georgetown University, were involved in the slave trade, and it has struggled to recruit African American priests.

Conversely, Catholic schools were among the first to desegregate and some government officials who opposed racial integration were excommunicated.

In 2018, U.S. bishops issued a pastoral letter decrying “the persistence of the evil of racism,” but Massingale was disappointed.

“The phrase ‘white nationalism’ is not stated in that document; it doesn’t talk about the Black Lives Matter movement,” he said. “The problem with the church’s teachings on racism is that they are written in a way that is calculated not to disturb white people.”

At Fordham, a Jesuit university, Massingale teaches a class on homosexuality and Christian ethics, using biblical texts to challenge church teaching on same-sex relations. He said he came to terms with his own sexuality at 22, upon reflecting on the book of Isaiah.

“I realized that no matter what the church said, God loved me and accepted me as a Black gay man,” he said.

His ordination in 1983 came in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that disproportionately affected gay men and Black Americans. Among his first funerals as a priest was that of a gay man whose family wanted no mention of his sexuality or the disease.

“They should have been able to turn to their church in their time of grief,” Massingale said. “Yet they couldn’t because that stigma existed in great measure because of how many ministers were speaking about homosexuality and AIDS as being a punishment for sin.”

Pope Francis has called for compassionate pastoral care for LGBTQ Catholics. However, he has described homosexuality among the clergy as worrisome, and Vatican law remains clear: same-sex unions cannot be blessed within the church. Some dioceses have fired openly LGBTQ employees.

Massingale has a different vision of the church: one where Catholics enjoy the same privileges regardless of sexual orientation.

“I think that one can express one’s sexuality in a way that is responsible, committed, life giving and an experience of joy,” he said.

Massingale has received recognition for his advocacy from like-minded organizations such as FutureChurch, which says priests should be allowed to marry and women should have more leadership roles within the church.

“He is one of the most prophetic, compelling, inspiring, transforming leaders in the Catholic Church,” said Deborah Rose-Milavec, the organization’s co-director. “When he speaks, you know very deep truth is being spoken.”

Along with his many admirers, Massingale has some vehement critics, such as the conservative Catholic news outlet Church Militant, which depicts his LGBTQ advocacy as sinful.

At Fordham, Massingale is well-respected by colleagues, and was honored by the university with a prestigious endowed chair. To the extent he has any critics among the Fordham faculty, they tend to keep their misgivings out of the public sphere.

He says he receives many messages of hope and support, but becoming public about his sexuality has come at a cost.

“I have lost some priest friends who find it difficult to be too closely associated with me because if they’re friends with me, ‘what will people say about them?’” he said.

Massingale remains optimistic about gradual change in the Catholic Church because of Pope Francis and recent signals from bishops in Europe who expressed a desire for changes, including blessing same-sex unions.

“My dream wedding would be either two men or two women standing before the church; marrying each other as an act of faith and I can be there as the official witness to say: “Yes, this is of God,” he said after a recent class at Fordham. “If they were Black, that would be wonderful.”