— It is out of step with the continent’s values, many bishops say, and threatens to derail expansion in the church’s fastest growing region in the world.
by
The Vatican’s recent declaration allowing the blessing of same-sex couples caused a stir around the globe, but perhaps most of all in Africa, a rising center of the Roman Catholic Church’s future. In one statement after the next, bishops in several countries spoke of the fear and confusion the declaration has caused among their flocks, and said it was out of step with the continent’s culture and values.
The bishops also harbored a deeper fear: that in a place where the church is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, and where many forms of Christianity are competing for worshipers, the declaration could slow the church’s expansion on the continent.
Bishop John Oballa of the Ngong Diocese near Nairobi said that a woman had written to him saying that a friend told her he wanted clarification on the declaration, or else he would convert to the Methodist Church.
“There’s a lot of vibrancy in many, many dioceses of Africa,” Bishop Oballa said in an interview. “We need to safeguard against anything that might derail that growth.”
He said he would advise his priests to give blessings to same-sex couples only if they were seeking God’s strength in helping “to stop living in same-sex unions.”
But if the couple merely wanted a blessing and planned to continue living the way they were, “it may give the impression of recognition,” he said, adding that he would advise clergy “not to bless because it may be scandalous to others — it may weaken the faith of others.”
This past week, the Vatican sought to placate those bishops alarmed by the new rule, saying that allowances should be made for “local culture,” but that it would remain church policy. Bishops opposed to the change, it said in a statement, should take an “extended period of pastoral reflection” to wrap their heads around why the Vatican says the blessing of same-sex couples is in keeping with church teaching.
Home to 236 million of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, Africa accounted for more than half of the 16.2 million people who joined the church worldwide in 2021. As bishops and other church leaders on the continent deal with the fallout among their parishioners over the declaration, broader concerns have been raised about whether it could lead to a rift between Pope Francis and a region that is a demographic bright spot for Catholicism.
“I think there is a rebellion already that’s started to say, ‘We’re not going implement this,’” said Father Russell Pollitt, the director of the Jesuit Institute South Africa, referring to the responses of bishops across the continent.
Some African clergy said they expected the Vatican and church leaders in Africa to work through their differences. But the declaration has complicated the relationship and will force difficult conversations between the church’s central authority and its African leaders. Some bishops have even hinted at a split between the values of African nations and the West, where some clergy had for years been running afoul of the Vatican’s guidance by blessing same-sex unions.
“In our African context, while recognizing the confusion existing in the more developed countries of new, unchristian models of ‘conjugal union’ and ‘styles of life,’ we are very clear on what a family and marriage is,” said a statement from the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Without exception, church leaders in Africa have emphasized to their flocks that the declaration approved by Francis was explicit in saying that marriage remained a union between a man and a woman. They have stressed that the church’s doctrine on marriage has not changed, and that the declaration is about blessing the individuals, not their relationships.
Bishops in Malawi and Zambia have already said that, to avoid confusion, their clergy would be instructed not to give blessings to same-sex couples. The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria did not take a firm position on the issue, and said in a statement that “asking for God’s blessing is not dependent on how good one is.” But it added that there was “no possibility in the church of blessing same-sex unions and activities,” a nod to the declaration’s nuance of blessing gay individuals not relationships.
The Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference affirmed that distinction in its statement. But it went further in saying that the church’s position was that “all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, must be treated with the dignity that they deserve as God’s children, made to feel welcome in the church, and not be discriminated against or harmed.”
The Vatican’s declaration has laid bare a tension for the church in Africa: How can it welcome homosexuals while not upsetting believers who stand firmly behind the church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin?
Some African church leaders feel strongly that they should not even talk about homosexuality “because it is un-African,” said Bishop Sithembele Sipuka of the Mthatha Diocese in South Africa, who is also the president of the Southern African conference. Others, he added, felt differently because they personally knew gay people. “It is not our experience that it’s this thing they got from Europe,” he said.
His conference has interpreted the declaration to mean that people in same-sex relationships can be blessed, he said, but individually and not presented together.
Months before the Vatican’s declaration, Bishop Martin Mtumbuka of the Karonga Diocese in Malawi delivered a fiery sermon accusing Western pastors of trying to bend the word of God to accept homosexuals as a way of attracting a larger pool of priests and other religious vocations.
“Any one of us pastors who champions this is just being heretical and fooling himself,” Bishop Mtumbuka said, according to an audio recording of the sermon, which circulated widely on social media after the Vatican’s declaration.
Francisco Maoza, 48, a parishioner who lives in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, said he was relieved when his country’s bishops said they would not permit blessings for same-sex couples.
“I still think the position by the pope is wrong,” said Mr. Maoza, a carpenter. “In the African context, even in Malawian culture, we don’t allow men and women to marry people of their own sex. So why should priests be allowed to bless such unions?”
Another Catholic in Malawi, Josephine Chinawa, said she felt that Francis needed to step down because of the declaration.
“I really couldn’t understand his motivation,” she said. “Maybe he is too old.”
However, Father Pollitt said that some church leaders in Africa were being hypocritical. While they severely criticize homosexuality, he said, they say little about other “irregular unions” identified in the Vatican’s declaration, such as unmarried heterosexual couples who live together. The document says that priests can bless them, too. There have also been many cases on the continent of priests breaking celibacy rules by having children, but that does not get the same scrutiny among church leaders, he said.
“Let’s face facts: There is a lot of homophobia in Africa,” Father Pollitt said.
How the controversy over the blessing of same-sex couples plays out in the long run in Africa remains an open question. Some analysts say there may end up being very little tension, primarily because few gay couples are expected to actually ask for blessings.
“I don’t think they would even have the courage to introduce their partners to their parents, let alone coming to receive a blessing from the priest,” Bishop Oballa said.
Bishop Sipuka said that the Vatican and African church leaders would eventually find a way forward.
“I foresee a softening of position, maybe, by some who have reacted very strongly, as the document gets explained and discussed,” he said.
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The Catholic Women Priests Fighting for Reproductive Justice
— The church forbids women to become priests, but RCWP-USA believes that they are aptly situated to minister on abortion and offer a new, progressive stance.
By Molly Morrow
Victoria Rue’s first abortion happened in a hospital in California, after the state legalized abortion just before Roe v. Wade. She was out of college, struggling to find work as an actress, and not in a steady relationship. The man who had gotten her pregnant—another young actor from one of her classes—offered to pay for her abortion. He came with her to the hospital, and was there when she woke up.
Rue’s second abortion was very different. She was still young, still struggling to find work, still not wishing to have a child. It was 1973, just after the legalization of abortion nationwide, but Rue did not have the money to pay for a hospital visit. Instead, she underwent a menstrual extraction, a procedure used to induce abortion in the early stages of pregnancy. It took place inside a storefront, not a hospital, and was much more affordable.
Rue didn’t speak with anyone before undergoing the procedure: She felt too ashamed to tell family or friends, and she had no relationship with the man that had gotten her pregnant. “I remember sitting in my Volkswagen across the street from it in a parking lot, just sitting there looking at the storefront across the street, preparing myself to go in,” Rue said. “And just feeling so alone.”
Many years later, Rue’s life looks quite different: She became a playwright, an activist, and a professor. She is also a Roman Catholic woman priest, part of an organization of women who have ordained themselves in the face of the church’s opposition. Most recently, she has become an outspoken pro-choice voice within the Catholic Church.
The institutional Catholic Church forbids women to become priests, citing the Bible’s record that Jesus only chose male apostles, as well as the nearly 2,000 years of precedent. These women practice as Roman Catholics, but most have been excommunicated by choosing to be ordained.
Roman Catholic women priests come to be ordained in a variety of ways: Several of the earliest—the “Danube Seven”—were ordained by a male bishop on the Danube River in 2002, and since then, many more have been ordained by female bishops across the world. Despite opposition from the Vatican, there are nearly 200 women priests in the United States and others in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
The Catholic Church believes abortion is murder, opposing all medical procedures where the purpose is to induce abortion. It has repeatedly affirmed this teaching, from the 1974 “Declaration on Procured Abortion” by Pope Paul VI to Pope John Paul II’s 1992 “Evangelium Vitae.” In response to a statement from 31 Catholic Democrats in the US House of Representatives, the church reaffirmed its opposition again in June. The congresspeople’s “Renewed Statement of Principles” was released on June 24—the one-year anniversary of the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which allowed many states across the U.S. to severely restrict or ban abortions—arguing for a pro-choice Catholic teaching of abortion based on care for the poor, the priority of informed conscience, and the principle of religious freedom. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) responded by saying that the House statement “grievously distort[s] the faith” and that abortion violates the right to life “with respect to preborn children and brings untold suffering to countless women.”
Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, attributes this belief to a strong interest in the vocation of women first as mothers within the Catholic Church, and suggests that the church’s teaching is one of the most conservative in the United States. “No other religious tradition has a teaching on abortion the way the Catholic Church does, nor the teaching on contraception,” said Manson. “It’s very radical, even for conservative traditions like Evangelicals and Mormons.”
The Catholic Church’s stance on abortion has varied over time, however: Although the USCCB states that the church has always “distinguished themselves from surrounding pagan cultures by rejecting abortion and infanticide,” only in 1965 was abortion officially considered homicide; before, it was merely a sexual sin. The Catholic ‘right to life’ argument took shape alongside second wave feminists’ calls for legal abortion in the 1970s, leading to their stance today.
Now, abortion is as much a part of the lives of Catholics as anyone else: A majority of Catholics think that abortion should be legal in the United States, and approximately 24 percent of those who obtain abortions identify as Catholic.
Roman Catholic women priests believe that they are aptly situated to minister on the issue and offer a new, progressive Catholic stance on abortion, precisely because of their commitment to the religious tenets of Catholicism.
On June 21, 2023, the American branch of the women priests’ formal organization, Roman Catholic Women Priests-USA (RCWP), gathered for a historic forum to discuss abortion and reproductive justice three days before the anniversary of the Dobbs decision. While the topic of abortion was always a foremost concern for a progressive Catholic organization of primarily women, the Dobbs decision marked a renewed interest in advocating for an issue so fraught within the mainstream Catholic Church.
The solutions and ministries these women priests are working for are not traditional political activism. Central to the forum—and to their approach—is what these priests call accompaniment, an individual-focused approach they hope to adopt in order to be nonjudgmental spiritual advisors to those considering abortion or who have already undergone the procedure. The term comes from liberation theology, a Catholic ideology created by Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, combining Catholic teaching with class politics. It is frequently invoked by progressive Catholics on matters of public health and social work for the poor. The term ‘accompaniment’ is also used by Latin American feminists to describe the process of being present with and supporting those seeking abortions.
No matter their personal beliefs on abortion—nor the beliefs of those they serve—these women priests’ stated goal is to offer impartiality and empathy, regardless of what the person considering abortion ultimately chooses.
Leading the charge is Rue, who has made it her goal to address the issue of abortion and determine how her organization might be a progressive force for change. Despite growing up religious and spending a year in a Catholic convent, Rue cites the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s as her church after she drifted from Catholicism. Rue’s activism eventually led her to protest outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City as a part of Dignity New York, an LGBTQ+ Catholic activist group formed in response to the 1986 Vatican “Halloween letter,” which deemed homosexuality an “objective disorder.”
At this protest, like many others staged by Dignity New York, a Catholic mass was celebrated. These services were far different from those hosted within the walls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The words of the service diverged from tradition: Source material included Walt Whitman as much as it did the Christian bible. The sacrament of communion centered around the notion that the bread being broken represented everyone, not just Jesus.
Rue had been asked by members of the group to co-lead such a service with an out gay Catholic priest and agreed. “I began to understand myself to be a priest,” said Rue. “And that I had been ordained by the people in the very act of celebrating mass, as opposed to the laying on of hands.” Years later, after learning about Roman Catholic women priests, Rue was ordained a deacon on the Danube river in 2004, and ordained a priest in 2005 on the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Rue worked as a professor at San Jose State University while also writing plays. In the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision leak, she began a project with fellow playwright Martha Boesing called “Voices from the Silenced: Pre-Roe Abortion Stories from Rossmoor.” For the play, Rue asked women in her senior living community who had had abortions to write their stories down for her, and she and Boesing shaped the roughly 30 responses into a play, told by seven women actors and a narrator who is a member of the pre-Roe underground abortion service provider the Jane Collective. The American Medical Women’s Association is showing the play to all of its coalitions including medical school students.
For Rue—and many members of RCWP—the commitment to being a woman priest is a simultaneous commitment to activism. In fact, one region within the RCWP organization is called the “Region for the Holy Margins,” a non-geographical group of women priests who have a particular interest in serving vulnerable communities. They see themselves as more than just female priests, but, rather, activists who seek systemic change within the Catholic tradition beyond just allowing women to be priests.
The Dobbs decision, for many of these women priests, was an inflection point in their activism, a moment in which the many causes they involved themselves in—women’s rights, racial justice, care for the poor, etc.—came to a head around a major political moment.
Despite enthusiasm from its members, the official RCWP organization has been disunited in its activist work, with a lack of consensus over their official stance on abortion and their ministers spread out across the country. The national organization meets only every few years, though the regions meet more regularly. “What RCWP has been unified in its online presence about is simply ordaining women. That’s it. That’s been the clearest ‘social justice’ piece that we’ve done,” said Rue. “We’re advocating for the presence of social justice in the forefront, as much as ordaining women.”
In the June forum, Rue presented a number of suggestions for how women priests might be able to support women considering abortion. They intend to educate and train themselves on reproductive justice teachings and use their national network to serve as clinic escorts, and to create a more formal process for women considering abortion to get in contact with and receive support from a woman priest.
This goal is personal for Rue, who wished she had had a woman priest to support her during her second abortion. Although no one she knew was there to support her, she recalled how the man performing her abortion called in his 12-year-old daughter, who held her hand during the procedure. “She really held my hand,” said Rue. “I’d never seen her before, but boy was I happy she was there.”
Such themes—physical presence, emotional support, and the ability to listen without judgment—came up again and again in the forum. The conversation also included a suggestion to ritualize abortion in order to help women better cope with the experience, as well as an emphasis on following up with the women afterward and continuing to support them. Many of the women priests gathered at the forum also hope to organize around an intersectional approach to abortion rights activism.
Much of the moral justification for women priests’ understanding of abortion and other social justice issues hinges on the Catholic concept of the “primacy of conscience,” the notion that each individual knows their circumstances best and can make moral decisions based on their own situations. During a second RCWP forum in July on reproductive justice, Jamie Manson and the women priest participants pointed to the choice Mary had in the Christian bible to say “yes” or “no” to her pregnancy, grounding her decision in autonomy. This understanding of conscience, they believe, is central to reproductive justice.
In the future, RCWP plans to continue speaking to experts in the field of reproductive justice and to consider the advocacy they hope to do as an organization. One of these plans for the future is to participate in a program spearheaded by Catholics for Choice, the revival of the Clergy Consultation Service, a cross-denominational group of American religious leaders that helped pregnant people obtain abortions before Roe made abortion legal nationwide.
“Faith communities have always been essential to political change” Manson said. “And I think the secular pro-choice movement has made a terrible mistake marginalizing those voices.”
For Rue—and the rest of RCWP—that political work looks very different from secular reproductive justice political activism. A key point Rue stressed over and over was that, in her view, women priests need not agree with abortion on a personal level, but instead merely provide a nonjudgmental, spiritual presence for pregnant individuals, whose beliefs on abortion also may vary greatly.
From the roots of her priesthood in LGBTQ+ activism to today, Rue believes that religious ministry and her activist work are not disparate at all, but intimately connected and mutually reinforcing. “I think the core of the many hats that I have worn and do wear is the body, particularly women’s bodies,” said Rue. “How could one be involved in anything that is anti-body, anti-women? All these issues come to bear, I think, on the beauty, and the grace, and the suffering, and the pain of the human body.”
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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.”
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.
“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.”
“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.”
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Catholics call for Vatican to embrace women in leadership, LGBTQ community, report says
An unprecedented global canvassing of Catholics has called for the church to take concrete steps to promote women to decision-making roles, for a “radical inclusion” of the LGBTQ+ community and for new accountability measures to check how bishops exercise authority.
The Vatican on Tuesday released the synthesis of a two-year consultation process, publishing a working document that will form the basis of discussion for a big meeting of bishops and laypeople in October. The synod, as it is known, is a key priority of Pope Francis, reflecting his vision of a church that is more about the faithful rank-and-file than its priests.
Already Francis has made his mark on the synod, letting lay people and in particular women have a vote alongside bishops. That reform is a concrete step toward what he calls “synodality,” a new way of being a church that envisions more co-responsibility in governance and the key mission of spreading the Catholic faith.
The document highlights key concerns that emerged during the consultation process, which began at the local parish level and concluded with seven continent-wide assemblies. It flagged in particular the devastating impact that clergy sexual abuse crisis has had on the faithful, costing the hierarchy its credibility and sparking calls for structural changes to remove their near-absolute power.
The synthesis found a “unanimous” and “crucial” call for women to be allowed to access positions of responsibility and governance. Without raising the prospect of women’s ordination to the priesthood, it asked whether new ministries could be created, including the diaconate – a reflection of a years-long call by some women to be ordained deacons in the church.
The document noted that “most” of the continent-wide assemblies and “several” bishops’ conferences called for the diaconate question to be considered by the synod.
The document also asked what concrete steps the church can take to better welcome LGBTQ+ people and others who have felt marginalized and unrecognized by the church so that they don’t feel judged: the poor, migrants, the elderly and disabled, as well as those who by tribal or caste feel excluded.
Perhaps most significantly, the document used the terminology “LGBTQ+ persons” rather than the Vatican’s traditional “persons with homosexual tendencies,” suggesting a level of acceptance that Francis ushered in a decade ago with his famous “Who am I to judge” comment.
Even the seating arrangements for the synod are designed to be inclusive. Delegates are to be seated at round tables, with around a dozen laity and clergy mixed together in the Vatican’s big auditorium.
Previously, synods took place in the Vatican’s theater-like synod hall, where cardinals and bishops would take the front rows and priests, nuns and finally lay people getting seated in the back rows, far from the stage.
Unlike past working documents, the synthesis doesn’t stake out firm points, proposals or conclusions, but rather poses a series of questions for further discussion during the October assembly. The synod process continues in 2024 with the second phase, after which Francis is expected to issue a concluding document considering the proposals that have been put to him by the delegates.
The working document re-proposed a call for debate on whether married priests could be considered to relieve the clergy shortage in some parts of the world. Amazonian bishops had proposed allowing married priests to minister to their faithful who sometimes go months at a time without Mass, but Francis shot down the proposal after an Amazonian synod in 2019.
It called for more “meaningful and concrete steps” to offer justice to survivors of sexual abuse. It noted that the faithful have also been victims of other types of abuse: “spiritual, economic, power and conscience abuse” that have “eroded the credibility of the Church and compromised the effectiveness of its mission.”
It suggested that the church must reevaluate the way authority is exercised by the hierarchy, suggesting structural, canonical and institutional reforms to eradicate the “clericalism,” or privilege that is afforded to clergy.
It acknowledged the fear and opposition that the synodal process has sparked among some bishops who see it as undermining their authority and power, but said transparency and accountability were absolutely necessary and that bishops should even be evaluated as a way to rebuild trust.
“The synodal process asks them (bishops) to live a radical trust in the action of the spirit in the life of their communities, without fear that the participation of everyone need be a threat to their ministry of community leadership,” it says.
Even before the synod began, the document and the consultative process that preceded it were already having an effect.
Sister Nadia Coppa, who heads the umbrella group of women’s religious orders, said anyone who exercises governance in religious orders was being called to develop a new way of exercising authority.
“It will be important for us to propose a style of governance that develops structures and participatory procedures in which members can together discern a new vision for the church,” Coppa told a press conference.
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Rev. Frank Griswold III, Episcopal champion of gay clergy, dies at 85
By Brian Murphy
Just before dusk on Nov. 2, 2003, Bishop Frank Griswold III looked out at more than 3,000 congregants, clergy and protesters at the University of New Hampshire’s ice hockey arena. He was moments away from consecrating the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church.
Now was the time, the Rev. Griswold told the crowd, for anyone to raise an objection. He knew what was coming. For months, the planned elevation to bishop of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson had tested the unity within the Episcopal Church in the United States and its bonds to other Anglican communities around the world.
The atmosphere was so tense that the Rev. Griswold and Robinson wore bulletproof vests under their robes.
A few people walked out of the arena in a show of opposition. Some shouted insults. A priest from Pittsburgh began to describe sexual acts between men. “Spare us the details,” the Rev. Griswold said, cutting him off.
In the end, the ordination went ahead with a mix of celebration and defiance. It also underscored the struggles of change-versus-tradition that would define the Episcopal Church leadership of the Rev. Griswold, who died March 5 at a hospital in Philadelphia at 85. He served as presiding bishop, the leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, from 1997 to 2006.
“It has not been easy to be the presiding bishop in this season … My basic task is to keep as many people at the table as possible,” he told PBS in 2004.
The rifts opened by the Rev. Griswold were significant, but they were not new. They reflected wider demographic and cultural shifts pulling at the global Anglican Communion, a loose fellowship of more than 80 million worshipers across denominations including the Episcopal Church and the Church of England
In some parts of the Anglican world, including the United States and Canada, issues such as same-sex marriage and women’s role in church leadership were atop the agenda. Yet the Anglican center of gravity was with churches in Africa and other parts of the former British colonial map — often holding more traditional views on Christianity and seeking to emphasize issues such as poverty and education
The Catholic Church and some mainline Protestant denominations face similar internal pressures as flocks grow in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The battles within the Anglican churches, however, have set some of sharpest dividing lines.
The Rev. Griswold was often left trying to explain himself to both sides. (The Anglican-affiliated Church of Nigeria, for example, has an estimated 18 million members and is growing, while the Episcopal Church has been shrinking for decades, with now about 2 million followers.)
For decades, he said the Episcopal Church needed to make its “big tent” credo even bigger. In Chicago, as bishop from 1987 to 1998, the number of female priests in the diocese went from zero to 41, or more than a quarter of the total diocesan priests. When Robinson was proposed as bishop of New Hampshire, the Rev. Griswold said he could see “no impediment” because of his sexual orientation.
The Rev. Griswold had already made his position known. In 1994, he was among 90 bishops who signed a statement that called sexual orientation “morally neutral” in terms of church teaching and that same-sex couples should be treated with the same dignity as others.< He lamented, however, how the attention given to gender and sexuality had come at the expense of more pressing concerns for the church such as hunger and mortality rates in some parts of the developing world. “I find the endless fixation on sexuality, and more specifically homosexuality, a distraction from other areas that quite frankly are matters of life and death,” he said in a 2004 interview.
A feared full-scale rupture in the Anglican Communion did not occur over Robinson’s elevation to bishop. Yet some African churches assigned missionaries to the United States to try to lure disgruntled Episcopal members. Another faction split to form a more traditionalist Anglican Church in the United States and Canada.
The Episcopal Church itself was hit with several high-profile rebukes led by African and Asian church leaders, including a 2016 statement saying the Episcopal Church was no longer welcome on panels and commissions dealing with Anglican policies.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the nominal figurehead of the global Anglican churches, had to play mediator. He allowed traditionalists in Africa and elsewhere to vent their anger but also issued an apology to gay, transgender and other people in the Anglican fellowship who felt alienated
The Episcopal Church will always be a trigger for controversy, the Rev. Griswold believed. Despite its relatively small numbers, the church’s U.S. base carries outsize influence — for good and bad — across the Anglican world.
“I think often the Episcopal Church is so associated with American policy abroad that we are thought of as arrogant and insensitive to other cultural realities and other concerns,” he said.
Frank Tracy Griswold III, was born on Sept. 18, 1937, in Bryn Mawr, Pa. His father won the first Watkins Glen Grand Prix in 1948 in an Alfa Romeo coupe. His mother was a homemaker. A 19th-century relative, the Rev. Alexander Viets Griswold, served as the Episcopal presiding bishop from 1836 to 1843.
The Rev. Griswold graduated from Harvard University in 1959 with a degree in English literature and received a master’s degree in theology at the University of Oxford’s Oriel College in 1962. He was then ordained as a deacon and entered the priesthood in 1963, serving in several parishes in Pennsylvania.
As a priest in the mid-1970s, the Rev. Griswold helped draft revisions in the Episcopal Church’s main text, the Book of Common Prayer, which was compiled in the 16th century after King Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church and formed the Church of England in a dispute with the Vatican over his demand for an annulment.
During his time as presiding bishop, he helped negotiate a 2001 accord of “full communion” with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to share clergy, churches and missionary activities. In 2006, he was succeeded as presiding bishop by the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first woman to lead any church in the Anglican Communion.
His books included “Praying Our Days: A Guide and Companion” (2018) with short prayers to mark the rhythm of the day.
His daughter Eliza Griswold said her father died of respiratory-related problems. Other survivors include his wife of 58 years, the former Phoebe Wetzel; another daughter, Hannah Griswold; and three grandchildren.
The Rev. Griswold was always proud of his decision to open the way for greater inclusion in the church hierarchy. He often joked that it obscured the rest of his resume.
“I hope that I’m known for something other than this issue,” he said.
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Ordain women as Catholic priests, says survey
— Published as women worldwide mark International Women’s Day, the survey shows a growing push for reform.
BY Ruth Gledhill
There are calls for the Catholic Church to ordain women as deacons and priests and to allow women to preach the homily during Mass from in a new survey of more than 17,000 Catholic women around the world.
The International Survey of Catholic Women, carried out last year in response to the call for submissions to the 2021-2024 Synod of Bishops on synodality, is published as women worldwide celebrate International Women’s Day.
Recommendations include changes to Canon Law to permit women to preach the homily during Mass and considering the ordination of women to the diaconate and priesthood as a legitimate expression of doctrinal development.
There are also calls to respect women’s freedom of conscience in matters of sexual and reproductive health and decision-making, and for changes to Catholic theology, doctrine and liturgical practice to ensure women, LGBTIQ+ Catholics, and divorced and remarried Catholics “are valued and fully included in all aspects of church life”.
The report, devised and managed by researchers Dr Tracy McEwan and Dr Kathleen McPhillips at the University of Newcastle in Australia and Professor Emerita Tina Beattie at the University of Roehampton, London, draws on 17,200 responses from women in 104 countries.
Of those surveyed, 79 per cent agreed women should be fully included at all levels of church leadership, 84 per cent agreed reform is needed, 85 per cent agreed clericalism is damaging the Church and 80 per cent agreed Church leaders are not doing enough to address the perpetration and cover-up of sexual abuse.
Participants were recruited across multiple networks and forums worldwide including dioceses, parishes, and women’s networks and organisations.
“There was a significant concern regarding the prevalence of sexual, spiritual, physical, and emotional abuse in church contexts,” the report says.
“Respondents highlighted the misuse and abuse of power as a central factor in historical and current sexual and gender-based harm. Clericalism was identified by a substantial majority of respondents as an abuse of power and an indicator of a need for urgent reform measures.
“Many respondents drew attention to a lack of accountability and transparency in church leadership and governance, particularly in the hierarchy’s handling of sexual abuse allegations. This was a barrier to participation in church life.”
Respondents also conveyed concern for those who are marginalised by Catholic theology, doctrine, and liturgical practice, including LGBTIQ+ Catholics, divorced Catholics, and single parent Catholics.
“There were differing interpretations of what inclusion of LGBTIQ+ Catholics means in the life in the Church. A slim majority of respondents supported same-sex marriage,” the survey says.
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Boff in favor of the priesthood of women | debate in the catholic church
Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, one of the greatest exponents of Latin American liberation theology along with Peru’s Gustavo Gutierrez, spoke in favor of the priestly ordination of women in the Catholic Church and argued in an article published on the site. digital religion what “There is no doctrinal or dogmatic barrier that prevents women from reaching the priesthood.” In 1994 and in the face of debate raised in the Church on the subject, the then Pope John Paul II spoke about it in an apostolic letter entitled “On the ordination of priesthood reserved for men”. on that occasion Karol Wojtyla explicitly states that “by virtue of his ministry of affirming the faith of the brethren, to remove any doubt as to a matter of great importance, which pertains to the very divine constitution of the Church (cf. Lk 22, 32), I declare that The Church in no way has the power to confer priestly ordination on women“And ruled that”This opinion should be considered definitive by all believers in the Church. Formally closing all discussions on the matter. Both Benedict XVI and Francis, his successor in the papacy, also took this view, despite the debate over the ordination of women to Catholic priesthood is still open both at the religious level and within the congregation. Other religious traditions, including Christian churches, ordained women to practice ministerial priesthood.
Leonardo Boff has always been a standard bearer in favor of a greater role for women in the Catholic Church. Now, faced with the designation by Francis of three women who would unify the episcopal (ministerial) for bishops, to propose the names of candidates for bishops to the Pope, Boff wrote that it was about “A Big Step, But Only the First”” and added that “just a small door was opened for Christian women to be able to participate in all professions and services for God’s people”.
The 83-year-old theologian published a book called “Church, Charisma and Power” in 1981, which made him the target of Vatican attacks and, given his status as a Franciscan priest and professor of theology, called for “silencing” him. to be ordered. and suspended the “one divine” by Pope John Paul II. Although the sanction that barred him from teaching and serving in public was later lifted, Boff renounced the priesthood in the church in 1992, but continued with his religious preaching and his activities involving theology and protecting the environment.
Following the election of Jorge Bergoglio as the supreme authority of the Catholic Church The relationship between Boff and Francisco has been extremely fluid. And Brazilians have been heard many times praising the pontiff’s work and his pronouncements on life, church and society.
,We are in favor of the priesthood of women in the Roman Catholic Church, selected and drawn from communities of faith,” Boff now wrote. And he added that “it is up to them (women) to give it a specific configuration, which is different from that of men.”
In his argument, the theologian states that “First of all, it must be affirmed that the feminine dimension is not exclusive to women, for both man and woman are, in their own ways, the carriers of the masculine and the feminine. This Nazareth K is also true for Jesus, being fully human he is completely divine.
It also states that the Church of Life and the Magisterium is “not a pit of dead water” and, as a result, “is revived by experiencing the irreversible changes of history”. No matter how the Catholic tradition has so far manifested the opposite.
And just as “the equality of women in respect and rights with men is more and more attested all over the world” it is understandable that “it is not easy to eliminate centuries of patriarchy which means reducing women and marginalized”, maintains Boff. To add that “discrimination is slowly and steadily being removed and in some cases even punished” and that “in practice, all public places and the most diverse functions are open to women.”
patriarchal culture
according to brazilian The Catholic Church was “held hostage to a secular patriarchal culture, but it cannot become a bastion of conservatism and anti-feminism” in a world that leads to the prosperity of relations between men and women”. However, he believes that “Pope Francis has the ability to raise questions relevant to today’s world, such as the question of marital morality or homosexuality and Dealing with other minorities.”
To give greater importance to his statement, Boff recalls that “careful examination of high-level theologians such as Karl Rahner has revealed that there is no doctrinal or dogmatic barrier that precludes women’s access to the priesthood.”
Among other considerations, Boff states that “if a woman, Mary, was able to give birth to her son Jesus, how could she not represent him sacredly in the community? There is a clear contradiction here, which can only be understood in the context of the patriarchal, sexist church, which is made up of celibates in the leadership and animation body of the faith.,
And he predicts that “the time will come when the Roman Catholic Church will adjust to the path of the global feminist movement, along with other Christian churches that have women as priests and even bishops, and with the world.” , towards unification. ‘animus’ and ‘anima’ for human enrichment and for a more integral Christian experience and ultimately for the benefit of the Church”.
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Early Christianity a ‘feminist movement’?
— Catholic nun says it’s time for true ‘herstory’ to be told
Was the feminism fight central to the first century church?
That’s the question a Catholic nun takes on in a piece for the Global Sisters Report, a self-described “independent, nonprofit source of news and information about Catholic sisters and the critical issues facing the people they serve.”
Asserting that the Bible “shows how the early church was a feminist movement” and that it’s time for the true “herstory” of female discipleship to be told, the piece celebrates the news that Pope Francis opened the door to expand senior roles for women in the Catholic Church, citing scriptural reasons behind such a move.
The nun who wrote the piece is Nameeta Renu, a member of the Order of Consecrated Virgins in Bombay in Mumbai, India. She compared the church to Mary and Martha, two women who were followers of Jesus.
Renu, whose bio states that she has a doctorate in theology on spiritual guidance and integral formation, writes that while Martha embodied the “relatively conservative” early church views on women’s roles, which pointed toward more “traditional roles,” Mary “represents the feminist church as envisioned by Jesus.”
In questioning these two archetypes, Renu then suggests both Martha and Mary “represent the church at different points on the wide spectrum of feminism” and cites “Martha from the Margins: The Authority of Martha in Early Christian Tradition,” a paper co-edited by agnostic atheist Bart Ehrman.
After asserting that God “wants both men and women to be liberated from patriarchy,” Renu says this can only happen “when victims are freed from domination, and when oppressors are converted and liberated from sin.”
She goes on to call Mary Magdalene the “Apostle to the Apostles,” and suggests that such a claim to apostleship holds as much weight as the Apostle Paul.
“Mary Magdalene has a very important role in following Jesus, but she is excluded from the Twelve Apostles while Paul boldly calls himself an apostle to the Gentiles even though he is not a disciple of Jesus before his death and resurrection,” Renu writes.
Christian blogger Erica Lee, whose blog “Unfiltered & Free” looks at gender and other topics through a biblical lens, told The Christian Post that filtering Scripture through feminism will only fuel further division.
“The feminist movement is nothing more than another societal ploy to divide the population against themselves,” Lee said. “Satan is the master deceiver and he is hard at work.
“All social justice movements pit us against each other when we are all one Body in Christ. Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary was the great equalizer.”
Lee also said characterizing Mary Magdalene as a type of “13th apostle” is without scriptural basis.
“It appears to me that the author is simply uplifting an already significant female from the Bible to an elevated status as to remove perceived victimization,” said Lee. “Such twisting and manipulating of Scripture is dangerous.”
Renu’s piece also pushes back against the traditional interpretation of Acts 6:3, which says the apostles told the disciples, “Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty” of distributing to widows in the church.
According to Renu, there is little documentation about the identities of “the seven” who were chosen and that church fathers often used gendered language “to represent all the baptized,” even in the Nicene Creed of 325 A.D.
Renu suggests the seven might have been either men, women, or a combination of both.
She also argues that because the head of a family traditionally receives the blessing for all family members, “some of the seven names could indirectly refer to their daughters, sisters, mothers or other relatives.”
“They could even refer to couples or all the members of their families being selected for the service,” she added.
Lee told CP that such hermeneutical teaching is “a direct reflection of the modern church” and cited a recent study that found just 37% of pastors hold to a biblical worldview.
“That is a heartbreaking indictment on the church,” said Lee. “Therefore, as a result, we see articles such as this.”
Renu’s piece appears to have been written in response to news out of the Vatican that would allow women to serve alongside all-male clergy in senior management of the Catholic Church.
Published in March, the new constitution calls “for the involvement of laywomen and laymen, even in roles of government and responsibility.”
The document, however, did not alter the role for women as it pertains to worship in the Catholic Church.
In most countries, women were already serving as lectors and catechists in the Catholic Church. However, with the official ordination, more conservative bishops will be unable to prevent women in their dioceses from taking on those roles. Francis changed the laws of the Roman Catholic church in January 2021 to formally allow women to give readings from the Bible during Mass, act as altar servers and distribute communion.
Throughout his papacy, Francis has called for women to have more formal roles in the church, but has remained firm on forbidding women to become deacons or priests. Catholic doctrine prohibits the ordination of women as priests, as those roles are reserved for men.
In April 2020, the pope established a commission to study whether women should be granted the right to become ordained deacons. In this role, women would be permitted to preach and baptize, but not to conduct Mass.
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Marx supports change to teaching on homosexuality
The cardinal said that he had blessed a gay couple in Los Angeles some years ago, but said it had not been a marriage.
Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich is in favour of changing church teaching on homosexuality.
The catechism, which says that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered”, was “not set in stone” and it was permissible to question what it said, he pointed out in an interview in the German glossy weekly Stern.
“Homosexuality is not a sin. LGBTQ people are part of creation and loved by God, and we are called upon to stand up against discrimination [against them]. Whosoever threatens homosexuals and anyone else with hell has understood nothing,” Marx said.
The issue had already been discussed at the Synod on the Family in Rome in 2018, he recalled, “but there was a reluctance to put anything down in writing”. He had already pointed out at the time that homosexual couples “live in an intimate loving relationship that also has a sexual form of expression” and had posed the rhetorical question: “And we want to say that is not worth anything?”
He admitted that there were Catholics who wanted to limit sexuality to reproduction “but what do they say to couples who cannot have children?” the cardinal asked.
Marx admitted that “a few years ago” he had blessed a homosexual couple in Los Angeles who had come up to him after Mass. But it had not been a marriage, he pointed out. “We cannot offer the sacrament of marriage”, he emphasised.
It would not be easy to find consensus on the homosexuality issue in the universal Church, he said. “Africa and the Orthodox Churches partly have a very different take. Nothing is achieved if this issue leads to a split but at the same time we must not stand still.”
Finding consensus on the issue is meanwhile already running into difficulties in the German archdiocese of Paderborn.
The archdiocesan priests’ council has sent a letter of protest to Archbishop Hans-Josef Becker. Last Christmas Becker sent the more than one thousand priests in his archdiocese a book by emeritus Curia Cardinal Paul Cordes on the 60th anniversary of his priesthood. It now turns out that in one chapter Cordes says that homosexuality is “profoundly against God’s will”.
Enclosed in Cordes’ book was a letter by Archbishop Becker announcing that he had founded a work group to handle “queer-sensitive pastoral work” in the archdiocese.
The archdiocese explained on 31 March that Cordes, who was from the archdiocese of Paderborn, had dedicated his book to the archdiocese’s priests. “Opinions [on homosexuality] differ and these differences must be taken into consideration”, the archdiocesan statement said. A factual exchange was “crucial”.
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German Catholic Priests Come Out As Queer, Demand End For Institutional Discrimination
Around 125 people including former and current priests in Germany came out as gay and queer and demanded an end to institutional discrimination against the queer community.
Over 120 priests and employees with the Catholic church community in Germany came out as queer and launched a campaign demanding an end to institutional discrimination against LGBTQ people.
The Roman Catholic Church in Germany on Sunday faced renewed calls for better protection of LGBTQ rights and an end to institutional discrimination against queer people.
Around 125 people, including former and current priests, teachers, church administrators and volunteers, identified themselves as gay and queer, asking the church to take into account their demands and do away with “outdated statements of church doctrine” when it comes to sexuality and gender.
The members of the church community published seven demands on social media under the “OutInChurch” initiative. These demands range from queer people saying they should be able to live without fear and have access to all kinds of activities and occupations in the church without discrimination.
They said their sexual orientation must never be considered a breach of loyalty or reason for dismissal from their occupation. They ask the church to revise its statements on sexuality based on “theological and human-scientific findings.”
Besides asking for equal rights, employees also put down demands that the church takes accountability for their discrimination against people of the community throughout history, calling on the bishop to take responsibility on behalf of the church.
What has been the Vatican’s stance?
The Vatican, home of the pope and the Roman Catholic Church, ruled last year that priests cannot bless same-sex unions and that such blessings weren’t valid.
But the ruling also reignited a debate on the matter, and there was considerable resistance against it in some parts of Germany.
Last year, at least two bishops in Germany, including Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, one of the pope’s top advisers, showed some support for a kind of “pastoral” blessing for same-sex unions.
In Germany and the United States, parishes and ministers also began blessing same-sex unions in lieu of marriage, with growing calls for bishops to institutionalize gay marriage.
However, in response to formal questions from a number of dioceses on whether the practice was allowed, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) made clear it wasn’t, ruling: “negative.”
Pope Francis approved the response, adding that it was “not intended to be a form of unjust discrimination, but rather a reminder of the truth of the liturgical rite” of the sacrament of marriage.
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