Ireland is worse than the pagans for legalising gay marriage, says senior cardinal

File under:  It’s all about the fancy dress

By Katherine Backler, Liz Dodd

Ireland has gone further than paganism and “defied God” by legalising gay marriage, one of the Church’s most senior cardinals has said.RL Burke in cappa2

Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was recently moved from a senior role in the Vatican to be patron of the Order of Malta, told the Newman Society, Oxford University’s Catholic Society, last night that he struggled to understand “any nation redefining marriage”.

Visibly moved, he went on: “I mean, this is a defiance of God. It’s just incredible. Pagans may have tolerated homosexual behaviours, they never dared to say this was marriage.”

A total of 1.2 million people voted in favour of amending the constitution to allow same-sex couples to marry, with 734,300 against the proposal, making Ireland the first country to introduce gay marriage by popular vote.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, told RTE afterwards that “the Church needs a reality check right across the board [and to ask] have we drifted away completely from young people?”

Raymond Cardinal Leo Burke visits the Oratory of Ss. Gregory and Augustine to celebrate Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament followed by a Reception. As Archbishop of St Louis, Cardinal Burke canonically established the Oratory on the first Sunday of AdveCardinal Burke, who speaking on the intellectual heritage of Pope Benedict XVI, went on to say “liturgical abuses” had taken place after the Second Vatican Council, after which he said there had been “a radical, even violent approach to liturgical reform”. Quoting Pope Benedict, he said that the desire among some of the faithful for the old form of the liturgy arose because the new missal was “actually understood as authorising, or even requiring, creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear.”

On Tuesday Cardinal Burke presided over Mass at the Oxford Oratory, and on Wednesday he led Vespers and Benediction for the intentions of the Order of Malta.

Speaking at the lecture afterwards Cardinal Burke stressed the continuity between liturgical forms before and after the council. “The life of the Church is organic; it is a living tradition handed down in an unbroken line from the apostles,” he said. “It does not admit of discontinuity, of revolutions.”

Paraphrasing Pope Benedict, Cardinal Burke said that after the council, there had been a battle between a hermeneutic of Burke+Mass+9discontinuity and rupture, and the hermeneutic of reform. This was because the nature and authority of the council had been “basically misunderstood.” Apparently departing from his script, the Cardinal voiced his own concern about similar misunderstandings around the upcoming Synod. “There seems to be a certain element who think that the Synod has the capacity to create some totally new teaching in the Church, which is simply false.” He went on to speak of the damage caused by “an antinomianism which is inherent in the hermeneutic of discontinuity.”

Though the talk consisted primarily in an overview of Pope Benedict XVI’s chiefest intellectual contributions, Cardinal Burke adopted a more personal note in his answers to questions at the end. Responding to a question about the marginalisation of faith in the public sphere, he stressed the primary importance of fortifying the family in its understanding of how faith “illumines daily living”. ‘The culture is thoroughly corrupted, if I may say so, and the children are being exposed to this, especially through the internet.’

He told the audience that he was “constantly” telling his nieces and nephews to keep their family computers in public areas of the house so that their children would not “imbibe this poison that’s out there.”
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Archbishop Diarmuid Martin: ‘I encourage everyone to vote and to reflect carefully’

 ‘My position is that of Pope Francis, who . . . made it very clear that he was against legalising same-sex marriage, yet he was consistent in telling people not to make judgments on any individual’

Diarmuid Martin

Police search St. John’s Abbey for Hoefgen files

By David Unze

An investigator from the Hastings Police Department served a search warrant last week at St. John’s Abbey in connection with the prosecution of former abbey monk Fran Hoefgen.Fran Hoefgen

The investigator was seeking abbey personnel records on Hoefgen, who is accused of abusing an altar boy between 1989 and 1992 when Hoefgen was a priest at a Hastings church.

Hoefgen, 64, is scheduled to stand trial beginning Monday in Dakota County.

The investigator requested the same files from the attorney representing Hoefgen but received copies from which certain documents removed because they were “personal, private or privileged,” according to the search warrant filed in Stearns County District Court.

Investigator Christopher Nelson then sought the warrant to get from the abbey the “complete, original, unredacted personnel, personal, historical, incident” and any other files related to Hoefgen for “evidence related to the alleged incidents of sexual assault,” according to the warrant.

The warrant’s inventory receipt, which shows what investigators collected during the search, shows Nelson left with seven file folders. Five of the folders had Hoefgen’s name on them and were listed as personnel records and canonical and personal files.

Hoefgen was accused of abusing the altar boy when the boy was 9 to 12 years old.Hastings police were first notified in November 2013.

Hoefgen was laicized in December 2011. That is a process in which a cleric is made a layperson.

Hoefgen had been placed on restriction by St. John’s Abbey in 2002 after it received credible allegations against him of sexual misconduct.

He was a St. John’s Abbey monk assigned as priest to the St. Boniface parish in Cold Spring when, in 1983, he sexually abused a 17-year-old boy who was living with him temporarily at the parish residence.

Hoefgen was interviewed by police and admitted the abuse. Within days Hoefgen was sent by the abbey to St. Luke Institute in Maryland, where he spent six months for evaluation and treatment.

He never was charged in Stearns County related to that abuse.

Hoefgen, after his stay at St. Luke Institute, was assigned by the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to St. Boniface parish in Hastings. Hoefgen served there from 1985-1992, during which time he abused the victim that led to the criminal charges, according to court documents.

Months after the abbey announced in 2002 that Hoefgen was facing restrictions, he remained the guest master of the St. John’s Abbey guest house. The guest house accepts all who want shelter in its quiet environment among the wooded St. John’s terrain.

In the year in which Hoefgen was guest master, the abbey guest house took in 1,200 guests from 40 states and 14 countries.

Abbot John Klassen removed Hoefgen as guest master after reports in the Times about Hoefgen’s past activities and the fact that he was supposed to be prevented from having access to children.

Klassen at the same time removed the Rev. Allan Tarlton as director of the abbey’s Oblate program. Tarlton was assistant guest master at the guest house.

He was involved in a recent settlement of a lawsuit accusing him of sexual abuse. As part of that court process, a document surfaced that was a biographical text written by Tarlton in which he admitted sexually abusing boys.
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Colombian bishop floats idea of gay apostle, lesbian Mary Magdalene

Bishop Juan Vicente Córdoba says ‘no one chooses to be gay or straight’

By Inés San Martín

A Colombian bishop, insisting that being homosexual is not a sin, said Thursday it’s possible that one of the twelve apostles of Jesus was gay or that Mary Magdalene, another key New Testament figure, was a lesbian.

Bishop Juan Vicente Córdoba of Fontibón, Colombia, also said the Catholic Church does not oppose same-sex couples making a life together, but does not consider such arrangements to be a marriage or a family.

“No one chooses to be gay or straight,” Córdoba said. “One simply feels, loves, experiments, is attracted, and no attraction is bad.”

Córdoba was speaking at a conference about gay marriage and adoption hosted by the local University of Los Andes, at a time when Colombia is debating gay marriage and adoption rights.

Although Córdoba reiterated Church teaching when it comes to marriage – that it’s a union between a man and a woman, permanent, and open to children – he said that homosexuality isn’t a sin.

“Sin is something else. It’s not respecting the dignity of others. Not loving God and our neighbors as we love ourselves, not feeding the hungry, not giving water to the thirsty,” Córdoba said.

He added that he prefers “a thousand times over” for Colombians to have dignity, a proper health system and food for all, rather than talking about whether they’re gay or straight.

According to local reports, Córdoba said that in the Bible there’s no explicit rejection of homosexuality, suggesting there’s no basis for making a condemnation of homosexuality a Church doctrine.

“We don’t know if one of Jesus’ disciples” had a same-sex orientation, he said. “We don’t know either if Mary Magdalene was a lesbian.”

In the New Testament, there are hints that Mary Magdalene, a close follower of Jesus, was a prostitute. Córdoba said that may suggest she wasn’t actually a lesbian, but “we don’t know.”

Talking about same-sex adoption, the bishop, who heads the Commission on Life of the Colombian Episcopal Conference and was ordained bishop in 2004, said that children have the right to be raised by a mother and a father.

“We shouldn’t force minors to grow up under a gay couple, because when they become adolescents they’ll say they would have wanted to have a mom and a dad,” Córdoba said.

Córdoba said that the decision on gay marriage and adoption rights can’t be left “in the hands of a few,” adding that a referendum would be the right way to make the call.

He also asked for the debate not to be reduced to a political standoff.

“This is not a ‘genitals’ battle,” he said. Today the battles have to be in favor of the dignity of the poor, those that are not being heard,” Córdoba said.

If gay marriage is eventually legalized, Córdoba issued a challenge to homosexuals in Colombia.

“Gay brothers, when you get married, have nice homes, based in fidelity, and educate your children with love, preoccupied for the poor, the needy, so that there’s justice in Colombia,” he said.

Córdoba asked those in favor of the gay rights bill not to call the opposition “recalcitrant, dinosaurs, cavemen, retarded, because we also have the right to present our ideas and our emotions with respect.”

“There will come a time when the Catholic Church is a minority that will be crushed by the majority,” he warned. “Let us respect each other, without using adjectives or telling anyone they’re sick or disordered.”

“We can spare all the adjectives,” Córdoba said. “We have a noun, and it’s that we’re brothers and sisters.”
Complete Article HERE!

German Catholic Church opens labour law more to divorced and gays

By Tom Heneghan

(CURA Catholic hospital in Bad Honnef, Germany, February 2014/Leit)
CURA Catholic hospital in Bad Honnef, Germany

Germany’s Roman Catholic Church, an influential voice for reforms prompted by Pope Francis, has decided lay Catholic employees who divorce and remarry or form gay civil unions should no longer automatically lose their jobs.

Catholic bishops have voted to adjust Church labour law “to the multiple changes in legal practice, legislation and society” so employee lifestyles should not affect their status in the country’s many Catholic schools, hospitals and social services.

The change came as the worldwide Catholic Church debates loosening its traditional rejection of remarriage after a divorce and of gay sex, reforms for which German bishops and theologians have become prominent spokesmen.

“The new rule opens the way for decisions that do justice to the situations people live in,” Alois Glueck, head of the lay Central Committee of German Catholics, said after the decision on new labour guidelines was announced on Tuesday.

Over two-thirds of Germany’s 27 dioceses voted for the change, a Church spokesman said, indicating some opposition.

There is no worldwide Catholic policy on lay employees. German law allows churches to have their own labour rules that can override national guidelines.

But German courts have begun limiting the scope of Church labour laws and public opinion reacts badly when a Catholic hospital’s head doctor is fired for remarrying or a teacher is sacked after her lesbian union is discovered.

Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx, head of the bishops conference and a senior adviser to Pope Francis, has been a leading proponent of making the two-millennia-old Church more open to modern lifestyles that its doctrine officially rejects.

A worldwide synod of bishops at the Vatican last October was split on how flexible the Church should be in welcoming openly gay or divorced and remarried Catholics. A follow-up synod is due this October, with its result in doubt as debate continues.

Cologne Cardinal Rainer Woelki, the Francis-style pastor the pope appointed to Germany’s richest diocese, said the labour law did not negate official Church teaching that marriage is indissoluble, but brought it into line with actual practice.

“People who divorce and remarry are rarely fired,” he told the KNA news agency. “The point is to limit the consequences of remarriage or a same-sex union to the most serious cases (that would) compromise the Church’s integrity and credibility.”

Passages in the new version of Church labour law say that publicly advocating abortion or race hate, or officially quitting the Church, would be a “grave breach of loyalty” that could lead to an employee being fired.