Gay and Catholic: What it’s like to be queer in the church
After the synod’s slightly reformist report, LGBT Catholics reflect on their religion and sexuality
Before the 14th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops even began, it was obvious it would be no friendly gathering of the Catholic Church’s leaders and laity when it came to gay rights and other social issues.
While Pope Francis’ message of greater inclusion often played well with the press and a significant fraction of the faithful, some conservative cardinals, archbishops and bishops responded with negativity, anger and outright derision.
Cardinal Raymond Burke said that the pope “cannot change church doctrine.” A controversial letter signed by 13 of the most conservative cardinals and archbishops, including New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and delivered as the synod was about to begin, criticized the process, saying it was “designed to facilitate predetermined results.”
The pontiff called the synod to discuss “the vocation and mission of the family in the church and in the contemporary world.” And outside the Vatican walls, the very definition of family in the contemporary world has changed. Catholics get divorced and remarried. Catholic congregants and even priests are now openly gay.
But as the world’s Catholics read the bishops’ official account of the synod, gay Catholics were bound to be disappointed. While the document said they should be “treated with respect” and should not fall victim to “unjust discrimination,” it effectively shut the door on same-sex marriage.
In America many gay Catholics, gay priests and their supporters in the church are still hewing to Francis’ message of more tolerance and openness. They believe that the debate over the church’s attitude toward LGBT issues has only just begun and that the results of the synod are not going to derail it. Their lives and experiences reveal that in America there is a thriving culture of gay Catholics who openly embrace both their faith and their sexuality.
A 2004 report by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York put the number of gay priests and seminarians at anywhere from 15 to 58 percent. One of those priests is the Rev. Fred Daley, now the pastor at All Saints Parish in Syracuse, New York. Spurred by what he called the “scapegoating” of gay priests during the church’s sex abuse scandal, Daley came out in 2004. He had been a priest for 30 years.
His story shows the anguish that many gay priests often feel. When he first thought about becoming a priest, he says, his sexuality wasn’t an issue. “To be honest,” he says, “growing up as a kid in high school, I had no inkling of being gay.” He was three or four years into his priesthood, he says, when reality struck. “I became in touch with a sort of ache within me that was really my sexuality sort of bubbling forth, and I began to be in touch with sexual attractions, and I was horrified. I thought this was terrible and I’m going to go to hell.”
He worked with a Jesuit spiritual adviser who, he says, “put me on a journey of recognizing my orientation, accepting it and ultimately rejoicing in who God created me to be.” It was a process that took nearly 10 years, and at the end of it, he says, “I was freely able to choose celibacy, because I really continued to feel the strong call to ordained ministry. But I discovered that I had the capacity for intimacy.”
Celibacy is one of the the things that define the Roman Catholic priesthood. Priests may be gay or straight, as long as they’re celibate. When asked about gay priests, Francis famously said, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?” That’s miles from his predecessor Benedict XVI, who in 2005 signed a document that said men with “strong gay tendencies” should not be priests and, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1986, authored a letter, approved by Pope John Paul II, calling homosexuality “intrinsically disordered.”
That change in attitude has been embraced by gay Catholics, who have struggled to keep faith with a church that, at the top, has refused to recognize or respect the movement for LGBT rights.
There is no mention of homosexuality in the church’s canon law. Even sodomy laws, she says, refer to “two heterosexual men having sex in order to honor a false god in a ritual.” She believes the conservative opposition to gays in the church comes largely from outdated rules.
Daley agrees. “I would say a considerable number of the clergy have not updated themselves on what is the contemporary understanding of what is sexual orientation,” he says. “They’re mouthing what they learned 30 or 40 years ago, which is a real problem.”
But that is an opinion from an American priest. One thing that is increasingly defining Catholicism’s future tackling of LGBT rights is the church’s changing demographics.
Because while Catholicism struggles to hold on to the faithful in its traditional strongholds like Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, the numbers are growing at a rapid pace in one part of the world known for its cultural hostility to gay rights: sub-Saharan Africa.
Since 1980, the number of Catholics in Africa has grown by 238 percent. Perhaps more important, 70 percent of them attend Sunday Mass regularly, compared with just 29 percent in the Americas. Some countries with the fastest growth — Uganda, Nigeria and Kenya — have or are considering laws that make homosexual acts punishable by long prison terms or, in some cases, execution.
But the numbers can’t be ignored, and African bishops are leading the charge against the progressives and reportedly to a bigger role in the synod. Longtime Vatican observer John Allen, who covered the synod for Crux, writes that progressives “met stiff resistance from several African bishops who no longer consider themselves junior partners in Catholicism Inc. This time, they’re ready for the boardroom.”
The synod ended on Oct. 25, and the bishops’ report was released almost immediately. While the language was open to interpretation, two things were clear: Little is likely to change, and a full third of the bishops dissented from the pope’s positions. But Francis can accept the document, ignore it or make any changes he wants to it. His is the final word, and it’s his emphasis on mercy that gives gay Catholics what Olivares calls “little flickers of hope.”
“I tell my friends, ‘Look, we’ve been knocking this whole time on the door asking the church to let us in. Are we going to leave before they even answer the door?’” he says.
Lewis Speakes-Tanner, the president of Dignity USA, says he has seen small changes, small victories for LGBT Catholics. “There are a lot of good priests and good bishops who are willing to help and to do things behind the scenes,” he says. “Unfortunately, under the years of Pope John Paul II and Benedict, they weren’t allowed really to have a voice because if they spoke up, they were quickly silenced by the bishops. Under Francis, more people are able actually to speak.”
For Daley, the Francis effect has already begun. “What Francis has done, which I think has affected gay people as well as everyone else, is he has a different sense of priorities. Doctrine is important, but it’s not No. 1. Mercy, compassion, understanding come before doctrine. And he also makes it clear that, ultimately, we have to follow our consciences.”
Complete Article HERE!
My appearance on the BBC’s program World Have Your Say
I was honored to be among today’s guests on the BBC’s program: World Have Your Say. Today’s topic — Being LGBT And Catholic.
If you missed the live program, check out the archive HERE!!
Gay priest decries ‘inhuman’ treatment of homosexual Catholics
A senior Vatican priest, stripped of his post after admitting being in a gay relationship, has launched a scathing attack on the Roman Catholic Church.
In a letter to Pope Francis this month, Krzysztof Charamsa accused the Church of making the lives of millions of gay Catholics globally “a hell”.
He criticised what he called the Vatican’s hypocrisy in banning gay priests, even though he said the clergy was “full of homosexuals”.
Pope Francis has yet to respond.
Until 3 October, Monsignor Charamsa held a senior post at the Vatican at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the department that upholds Roman Catholic doctrine.
The Vatican immediately stripped him of his post after he held a news conference in a restaurant in Rome to announce that he was both gay and in a relationship. Roman Catholic priests are meant to be celibate.
At the time, the Holy See said the priest’s decision to come out on the eve of the Vatican’s synod on the family had been “irresponsible, since it aims to subject the synod assembly to undue media pressure”.
‘Rights denied’
The Polish priest has released to the BBC a copy of the letter he sent to the Pope, written the same day as the announcement, in which he criticises the Church for “persecuting” and causing “immeasurable suffering” to homosexual Catholics and their families.
He says that after a “long and tormented period of discernment and prayer”, he had taken the decision to “publicly reject the violence of the Church towards homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersexual people”.
The 43-year-old says that while the Roman Catholic clergy is “full of homosexuals”, it is also “frequently violently homophobic”, and he calls on “all gay cardinals, gay bishops and gay priests [to] have the courage to abandon this insensitive, unfair and brutal Church”.
He says he can no longer bear the “homophobic hate of the Church, the exclusion, the marginalisation and the stigmatisation of people like me”, whose “human rights are denied” by the Church.
Church attitude unchanged
The priest goes on to thank Pope Francis – who is thought to have a more lenient attitude on homosexuality than some of his predecessors – for some of his words and gestures towards gay people.
The Pope recently met a gay former student of his during his recent visit to the US, and has previously said that gay people should not be marginalised in society.
But Krzysztof Charamsa says that the pontiff’s words will only be worthwhile when all the statements from the Holy See that are offensive and violent against homosexuals are withdrawn.
He also urged the Church to annul a decision taken by his predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, to sign a document in 2005 that forbids men with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies from becoming priests.
The Polish priest terms “diabolical” Pope Benedict’s statement that homosexuality was “a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil”.
The priest writes that LGBT Catholics have a right to family life, “even if the Church does not want to bless it”.
He later criticises the Vatican for putting pressure on states which have legalised equal or same-sex marriage.
He also expresses his fears about the impact his coming out may have on the treatment of his mother in Poland, “a woman of unshakeable faith”, saying she bears no responsibility for his actions.
The synod ended on Sunday, but made no change to its pastoral attitude to gay Catholics.
The final document agreed by the Synod Fathers reiterated Church teaching that gay Catholics should be welcomed with “respect” and “dignity”. But it restated that there was “no basis for any comparison, however remote, between homosexual unions and God’s design for marriage and the family”.
The synod voted through a paragraph saying that it was unacceptable for pressure to be put upon local churches over their attitude towards same-sex unions, or for international organisations to make financial help contingent on poor countries introducing laws to “allow or institutionalise” marriage between people of the same sex.
Complete Article HERE!
Polish bishop defrocks gay priest who sparked Vatican fury
A Polish bishop on Wednesday defrocked a high-ranking Catholic priest fired by a furious Vatican earlier this month after he came out as gay on the eve of a key synod on the family.
Bishop Ryszard Kasyna has decided that Krzystof Charamsa should no longer be able to celebrate mass, administer sacraments like communion and baptism or wear a cassock, according to a statement on the website of their northern Pelplin diocese.
Charamsa had held a senior position working for the Vatican office for protecting Catholic dogma, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The 43-year-old priest sparked outrage at the Vatican on October 3 by publicly declaring his homosexuality — and presenting his Catalan boyfriend Eduardo — on the eve of a bishops’ synod set to touch on the divisive issue of the Catholic Church’s relationship to gay believers.
Bishop Kasyna said he was forced to defrock Charamsa for failing to abide by his vow of celibacy following an earlier official warning.
“Considering Father Charamsa’s lack of will to correct his behaviour and public statements indicating he will continue to break rules governing the behaviour of Catholic priests,” the bishop decided to defrock him, the statement said.
“This penalty is intended to encourage Father Charamsa to mend his ways and can be rescinded depending on his behaviour,” it said.
While Charamsa can no longer perform priestly duties, he has not been excommunicated, a move that would entirely banish him from the Catholic church.
After coming out, Charamsa presented a 10-point “liberation manifesto” against “institutionalised homophobia in the Church”, which he said particularly oppressed the gay men who, according to him, make up the majority of priests.
He also revealed plans for a book about his 12 years at the heart of a Vatican bureaucracy only just recovering from a scandal under previous pope Benedict XVI over the influence of a “gay lobby” among senior clergy.
A Vatican spokesman described Charamsa’s action as “very serious and irresponsible”.
Crisis for Pope Francis as top-level cardinals tell him: your synod could lead to the collapse of the church
Update, 3.20pm Monday: As I write this, various cardinals have said they didn’t sign the letter, some of them waiting several hours before distancing themselves from it. Now Erdö says he didn’t sign it. It’s extremely hard to get at the truth. ‘Not signing’ can mean a number of things, ranging from an outright false claim that a cardinal supported the letter to panicky backtracking by cardinals who did assent to it but are grasping at the technicality that they didn’t personally append their signature. But the damage to the synod is done.
A group of cardinals – including some of the most powerful figures in the Catholic Church – have written to Pope Francis telling him that his Synod on the Family, now meeting in Rome, has gone badly off the rails and could cause the church to collapse.
Their leaked letter, written as the synod started, presumably explains why a few days ago the Pope suddenly warned against ‘conspiracy’ and reminded the cardinals that he, and only he, will decide the outcome of the synod.
This is the gravest crisis he has faced, worse than anything that happened to Benedict XVI, and he knows it.
And, talking of the Pope Emeritus, I suspect that, had he been free to sign the letter, he would have done so.
The cardinals warn the Pope, in diplomatic language, that (a) the synod is being hijacked by liberals obsessed with the narrow issue of giving Communion to divorced and remarried people; (b) going down the route of ‘pastoral flexibility’ could lead to the Catholic Church falling apart in the same way as liberal Protestant denominations; and (c) the synod working papers prepared by the Pope’s allies Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri and Archbishop Bruno Forte are a mess and going down badly with the Synod Fathers.
The seniority of the signatories shows how close the church is to civil war. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith – the Church’s doctrinal watchdog – is on the list. So is Cardinal George Pell, head of the Vatican’s finances, and Cardinal Robert Sarah, in charge of the Church’s worship.
Sarah is the most prominent African cardinal in the church, along with Cardinal Wilfred Napier of Durban, who has also signed. Add to that the name of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, and it becomes clear that the loss of confidence in Pope Francis extends far beyond the Vatican.
He is, however, passionately supported by liberal cardinals in Europe and Latin America, among them Cardinal Reinhard Marx, head of the German bishops. He can also count of the unquestioning loyalty of Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster.
As the Catholic Herald reported this morning:
Two of the cardinals who signed the letter, published in full by [Vatican commentator] Sandro Magister, have prominent roles in the synod. Cardinal Péter Erdö is its relator general, and Cardinal Wilfrid Napier is a president delegate. [NB: On Monday afternoon, several hours after it appeared Cardinal Erdö denied signing the letter.]
Other signatories included Vatican officials Cardinal Gerhard Müller and Cardinal George Pell.
In the letter, the cardinals expressed concern that ‘a synod designed to address a vital pastoral matter – reinforcing the dignity of marriage and family – may become dominated by the theological/doctrinal issue of Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried’.
The letter continued: ‘The collapse of liberal Protestant churches in the modern era, accelerated by their abandonment of key elements of Christian belief and practice in the name of pastoral adaptation, warrants great caution in our own synodal discussions.’
The cardinals also asked the Pope to ‘consider a number of concerns we have heard from other synod fathers, and which we share’ and criticised the synod’s Instrumentum Laboris, or working document.
‘While the synod’s preparatory document, the Instrumentum Laboris, has admirable elements, it also has sections that would benefit from substantial reflection and reworking,’ the letter said.
‘The new procedures guiding the synod seem to guarantee it excessive influence on the synod’s deliberations and on the final synodal document. As it stands, and given the concerns we have already heard from many of the fathers about its various problematic sections, the Instrumentum cannot adequately serve as a guiding text or the foundation of a final document.’
Here is the list as originally reported by Magister:
- Carlo Caffarra, archbishop of Bologna, Italy, theologian, formerly the first president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family;
- Thomas C. Collins, archbishop of Toronto, Canada;
- Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York, United States;
- Willem J. Eijk, archbishop of Utrecht, Holland;
- Péter Erdö, archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, Hungary, president of the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe and relator general of the synod underway, as also at the previous session of October 2014 [He has now denied signing the letter, though there was a noticeable delay before he did so];
- Gerhard L. Müller, former bishop of Regensburg, Germany, since 2012 prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith;
- Wilfrid Fox Napier, archbishop of Durban, South Africa, president delegate of the synod underway as also at the previous session of the synod of October 2014;
- George Pell, archbishop emeritus of Sydney, Australia, since 2014 prefect in the Vatican of the secretariat for the economy;
- Mauro Piacenza, Genoa, Italy, former prefect of the congregation for the clergy, since 2013 penitentiary major. [He now denies signing the letter];
- Robert Sarah, former archbishop of Conakry, Guinea, since 2014 prefect of the congregation for divine worship and the discipline;
- Angelo Scola, archbishop of Milan, Italy. [He now denies signing the letter];
Jorge L. Urosa Savino, archbishop of Caracas, Venezuela; - André Vingt-Trois, archbishop of Paris, France, president delegate of the synod underway as also at the previous session of the synod of October 2014. [He now denies signing the letter.]
Note that not all these cardinals are regarded as outright conservatives: Cardinal Dolan, for example, is gently orthodox, an amiable figure far removed from the thundering traditionalist Cardinal Raymond Burke, who has been excluded from the synod.
Moreover – and this is very dangerous for Francis – the main point of contention is not the question of whether the church should be give communion to divorce people in second marriages, or whether gay unions should be given some degree of recognition.
This is an argument about the wisdom of calling the synod in the first place, and expresses the suspicion of over 100 Synod Fathers that the organisers are manipulating proceedings by confronting them with working papers and procedures designed to push them in a liberal direction. Others are simply fed up with the amateurish nature of the proceedings and wonder why, after last year’s chaotic preparatory synod, the Pope left the same people in charge. To quote the Australian Archbishop Mark Coleridge, ‘At times our work has seemed more muddled than methodical’.
I’m one of countless commentators who has warned that holding this synod could split the church. Now it’s happening, much faster than any of us anticipated.
Complete Article HERE!
I have a better idea…
Yes, Pope Had a Private Meeting — With a Gay Couple
One day before he met antigay Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, Pope Francis had a private meeting at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C. with a gay man and his partner, who the pontiff knew from Argentina, CNN reports.
Yayo Grassi, who has been with his partner, Iwan, for nearly 20 years, told CNN that Pope Francis personally arranged the meeting, and welcomed both men warmly with hugs at the Vatican Embassy in D.C. on September 23.
“Three weeks before the trip, he called me on the phone and said he would love to give me a hug,” Grassi, a caterer who lives in D.C., told CNN.
Grassi has long maintained a correspondence with Pope Francis, who originally served as Grassi’s high school literature and psychology teacher when he was Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, according to National Geographic.
After Bergoglio came out against Argentina’s marriage equality efforts in 2010, Grassi struck up an email correspondence with the future pope, expressing his disappointment that his former mentor was taking a stance so personally hurtful to Grassi.
While American LGBT Catholics were disappointed that Pope Francis declined repeated invites to meet with the disenfranchised faithful, the news that the pope did hold an audience with a same-sex couple comes as a surprise, especially in the wake of outrage following Davis’s claims that she had a private audience with the pope, where he affirmed her ongoing religious-based refusal to issue marriage licenses.
The Vatican this morning disputed Davis and her attorney’s claims that she had a private audience with the pope, saying instead that she was among dozens of people who greeted Pope Francis in a receiving line as he departed Washington, D.C.
“The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” said Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi in a statement. “The only real audience granted by the Pope at the Nunciature [Vatican embassy] was with one of his former students and his family.”
“That was me,” Grassi told CNN.
Grassi’s partner posted video of the couple’s papal encounter on Facebook; click HERE to watch.
Complete Article HERE!
Pope Francis’ Kim Davis Visit Is the Dumbest Thing He’s Ever Done
Why, Frank?
The big news today seems to be that Kim Davis, the goldbricking county clerk from Kentucky, met secretly with Papa Francesco in Washington and that he endorsed her current status as a faith-based layabout. Given this pope’s deft gift for strategic ambiguity and shrewd public relations, it’s hard for me to understand how he could commit such a hamhanded blunder as picking a side in this fight. And it’s odd that he (or someone) sought to publicize it through an American media entity that is not wholly sympathetic to his papacy. Inside The Vatican, the e-newsletter that broke the story, is edited by Robert Moynihan, a 79-year old whose patron was Benedict XVI.
God, the crowing from the Right is going to be deafening. Everything he said about capitalism and about the environment is going to be drowned out because he wandered into a noisy American culture-war scuffle in which one side, apparently the one he picked, has a seemingly ceaseless megaphone for its views. What a fcking blunder. What a sin against charity, as the nuns used to say.
This is, obviously, the dumbest thing this Pope ever has done. It undermines everything he accomplished on his visit here. It undermines his pastoral message, and it diminishes his stature by involving him in a petty American political dispute. A secret meeting with this nutball? That undermines any credibility he had accrued on the issue of openness and transparency. Moreover, it means that he barbered the truth during the press conference he held on his flight back to Rome, in which he spoke vaguely about religious liberty, and freedom of conscience, but claimed, “I can’t have in mind all cases that can exist about conscience objection.” He certainly knew the details of this case.
I really wish I could blame this on some shadowy Vatican cabal. Not that there aren’t some really weird elements to the story.
In case you were wondering about the publication that got the message out, it’s an e-newsletter whose editor-in-chief, Moynihan, is entirely a creature of the Catholic Right, at least as far as his career as a journalist is concerned. He was originall encouraged in his efforts by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, and he built his publication specifically to take advantage of the climate of apologetics among conservative Catholics that Ratzinger best represented.
I then began making calls—to Phil Lawler, to Father Richard Neuhaus, to David Schindler, to Deal Hudson (who at that time was known as a Maritain scholar), to Stratford Caldecott, and to many others. I was seeking insight into what people thought was needed. What message would The Catholic World Report proclaim? I knew I did not want it to be superficial or knee-jerk; I wanted it to be profound, provocative, and fearless, looking at the world from a thoroughly Catholic perspective. One great concern I had was that we would be “too American.” Then Father Fessio explained that we would not be alone, but together with some French and Spanish editors in a group which would be called “I.Media,” short for “International Media.” The French would be financed by Vincent Montagne’s publishing group, Media-Participations, the largest Catholic publisher in France, and the Spanish by the Legionaries of Christ.
That list is more than something of a tell. His good friend, Father Joseph Fessio, is an important figure among American conservative Catholics. He founded Ignatius Press, and he was twice fired from his posts at Ave Maria University, the bungled attempt at creating a papist Bob Jones University—and recreating Franco’s Spain around it—in Florida funded by pizza billionaire Tom Monaghan. Lawler writes for an extremely conservative Catholic website, and he once chastised Sean Cardinal O’Malley because, in a sermon he’d given after the Boston Marathon bombings, O’Malley had mentioned this country’s lax gun-control laws as contributing to a “culture of death” which included abortion, and that O’Malley had failed to use the words “Islamic terrorism” in reference to the bombing. The late Father Neuhaus was the crackpot editor of First Things, in which he once published a symposium that appeared to call on American Catholics to commit sedition. Deal Hudson founded and edited Crisis, a conservative Catholic journal, and was the director of Catholic outreach for George W. Bush’s campaigns in 2000 and 2004. Hudson was forced to resign from a position at the Republican National Committee under very strange circumstances. And space limitations preclude discussing all the horrors of the Legionaries of Christ, which Moynihan says financed the Spanish edition of his publication.
There is no question that the conservative Catholic backlash began as a response to the ever-detonating scandal involving the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy, and the international conspiracy to obstruct justice that followed. An explosion of revelations was followed by a well-financed explosion of apologetics. The latter emphasized that liberal Catholics were using the scandal to attack the Church generally. I wrote extensively about it at my previous gig. This did not abate during the papacy of Benedict XVI, and there exists a kind of silent civil war in Catholicism that continues to this day.
(It’s here where I should mention that there is a serious line of thought among Catholic conservatives that Benedict was forced into retirement by a cabal of liberals. There’s even a new book on the subject that Rod Dreher found interesting, although I have to admit that, every time I hear the author’s name—Gottfried Danneels!—I hear it in the voice of W.C. Fields.)
So not only has the pope trashed whatever good will he’d accrued here, he (or someone) did so through a publication aligned with the forces in the church opposed to everything for which his papacy allegedly stood. He did a really stupid thing and he (or someone) is dealing with the dingier elements of the religious media to get the news out. Somebody needs to get fired behind this. Who are you to judge, Papa Francesco? I’m afraid you just did. I will pray for you, because, damn, son, you need it.
Complete Article HERE!