Tag: Misogyny

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“We Will Fight You for It”

— Can Womenpriests Save the Catholic Church?

Angela Nevitt Meyer

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Every Sunday, 17,000 Roman Catholic parishes in the United States hold Mass. For the most part, the service in Brownsburg, Indiana, looks and sounds like the rest.

There are songs and Scripture readings. The white-robed priest delivers the homily. The Eucharistic Prayer features the consecration of the bread and wine on the altar, transforming them into what more than one billion Catholics worldwide believe is the flesh and blood of Jesus. Then all solemnly consume the bread and wine as the sacrament of Holy Communion.

But this Mass does have distinguishing features. The creed includes an invocation not just of God and Jesus but also “the Holy Spirit, the breath of Wisdom Sophia, who energizes and guides us in building caring communities and in challenging oppression, exploitation, and injustices.” The Lord’s Prayer begins here with the words, “Our Mother-Father God, who is in heaven . . .”

And the priest is Angela Nevitt Meyer, newly ordained and the 42-year-old mother of two children. For her first official Mass as a priest, both of her kids are in attendance, along with her husband Jarrett. He is the one playing the keyboard.

In return for daring to perform the Mass, Meyer and 250 others across the world who call themselves Roman Catholic womenpriests have been automatically excommunicated by Vatican decree. (The combination of women and priests into one name derives from the German word priesterin, used in the early stages of the European movement of ordained women.) The men controlling the 2,000-plus-year-old institution say these women are attacking the Church. Meyer and the womenpriests say they are saving it.

There is evidence that their movement is gaining momentum. More than half of U.S. states have at least one womanpriest-led congregation. Many, like Meyer’s Indiana congregation, began as home churches but soon outgrew the space. Several womenpriests were favorably featured in a lengthy June 2021 New Yorker magazine profile, others in a recent BBC documentary. The Women’s Ordination Conference, which advocates for Church reform, finds hope in ongoing Church discussions to open the diaconate to women, and multiple German bishops have signaled that they are open to adding women to the priesthood. Catholic catechism features the concept of sensus fidelum, a consensus among believers on matters of faith. Consensus on women priests is not yet reached, but a trend can be observed: a Pew Research Center poll showed 59 percent of U.S. Catholics support women’s ordination as priests. Many Catholics are excited that the ongoing global Catholic synod process has yielded an official Vatican synopsis of listening sessions that acknowledges that many Catholics call for women’s ordination, an admission that some ordination advocates call a “small revolution.”

THERE ARE STRONG scriptural and historical arguments for women assuming church leadership roles. The books of the New Testament show Jesus regularly bucking the patriarchy of the day to embrace women as central to his community and ministry. The Gospel of John tells of a Samaritan woman being the first Christian preacher to the Gentiles. The most notable among the women disciples was Mary of Magdala, the first witness to Jesus’ resurrection and thus commissioned to be the apostle to the apostles.

In the Hebrew Bible, women such as Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah were considered to be prophets. The stories of the earliest Church told in the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles repeatedly depict women in leadership roles. Of course, some of that material is breathtakingly sexist. There is the assertion in 1 Corinthians 11:7 that only man is made in God’s image, and Timothy 2:11 says that “the role of women is to learn, listening quietly and with due submission.”

As feminist Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther wrote, “Catholic Biblical studies have shown that there is no valid case to be made against the ordination of women from the Scriptures.” Historians like Gary Macy and Phyllis Zagano have chronicled women playing leadership roles in early churches. “Women were ordained in the early Middle Ages,” Macy flatly concludes in his 2008 Oxford University Press book, The History of Women’s Ordination. “According to the understanding of ordination held by themselves and their contemporaries, they were just as truly ordained as any bishop, priest, or deacon.” Women performed baptisms, anointed the sick, and participated at the altar, says Zagano, a church historian and professor at Hofstra University.

But the Second Lateran Council of 1139 convened by Pope Innocent III shut the door on any debate, officially redefining the clergy as being limited to male priests. Those priests were given the sole authority to perform the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. To justify excluding ordained women from the clergy, theologians of the eleventh and twelfth centuries created what Macy calls “one of the most successful propaganda efforts ever launched.” Paul’s letters to the early Church were reinterpreted to explain away references to women in church leadership roles. The idea that priests must anatomically resemble Jesus—imago Christi–was elevated to the highest importance. Women were formally consigned to the church sidelines.

FOR CENTURIES, THE WALL blocking most women from the clergy stood strong. Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, cracks began to appear. Most mainline Protestant denominations began to ordain women, as did Jewish denominations. Reform in the Episcopal Church USA was triggered by civil disobedience: After 11 women were illicitly ordained as Episcopal priests in the mid-1970s, their church officially opened ordination to women.

For some Roman Catholic women, this idea of full contra legum—in the Catholic’s case, directly violating Canon Law 1024, “only a baptized man can validly receive ordination”—began to seem like a possibility. They noted that the Gospel is replete with Jesus flouting unjust religious and civil laws and that the earliest Christians were by definition criminals. “We must obey God rather than men,” Acts 5:29 says. Joan of Arc famously defied church leaders, and Mother Theodore Guerin, founder of the Sisters of Providence, was imprisoned and excommunicated for clashing with a bishop. Both Joan and Guerin were eventually canonized.

So, on June 29, 2002, on a ship cruising international waters on the Danube Rover near Passau, Germany, two male Roman Catholic bishops ordained seven women as priests. The bishops’ role allows the womenpriests to assert they were ordained in Apostolic Succession, which purportedly allows current Roman Catholic clergy to trace their ordination back to Jesus’ original apostles.

Shortly after the Danube Seven took their vows, two of them—Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger and Gisela Forster—were ordained as bishops by three Roman Catholic male bishops. This act allowed the women to ordain their own, and the current 250 Roman Catholic womenpriests across the world trace their lineage from there. Mayr-Lumetzberger ordained as bishop Nancy Meyer, who in 2021 ordained Angela Meyer (no relation) as a priest.

The Danube Seven and the bishop who ordained them, Bishop Romulo Antonio Braschi, were quickly excommunicated. In 2008, the Vatican decreed that a woman who attempts to be ordained and persons attempting to ordain her are excommunicated latae sententiae—automatically, the instant they perform the act.

Compared to his predecessors, Pope Francis has struck a progressive pose on many issues. So far, women’s ordination is not one of them. “That door is closed,” he said in 2013. Instead, Francis echoes the Church’s longtime argument that women are so special that they don’t need to be ordained. “Women make their contribution to the Church in a way that is properly theirs by making present the tender strength of Mary the Mother,” he wrote in 2020.

GROWING UP IN Bartonville, Illinois, Angela Meyer became one of the first girls in her diocese to be an altar server. Then, at her confirmation in the Church, a close friend of Meyer’s posed a question to the presiding bishop at a reception following the ceremony. “What if I have a different view than the Church about whether contraception should be allowed?” the girl asked. The bishop shot her down immediately. When he articulated any view he was speaking for the Pope, who in turn was speaking for God, he said. End of discussion.

Meyer’s friend eventually took that response as her cue to leave the Church. Meyer’s reaction was different. It foreshadowed a mindset she carried with her as she continued a lifetime of attending Mass and immersing herself in Catholic communities in college and beyond, all the while carrying her great-grandmother’s rosary in her pocket. “When the bishop said that, I just thought, ‘Well, I guess I am going to have to fight you,’” she says. Later, Meyer connects her teenage reaction to the philosophy of the womenpriests movement when they confront repression by clerical hierarchy: “This is our church, the church of the people. And we will fight you for it.”

It is one fight among many that Catholics are waging within the Church. The institution is reeling from the continued revelations of a global scourge of priests abusing children, followed by church leaders further enabling the abusers and covering up the assaults. A Church-sponsored study showed more than 4,000 U.S. Catholic priests and deacons were credibly accused of abuse-related crimes during the second half of the twentieth century. Resulting lawsuits have cost the Church more than $3 billion. In the U.S. alone, 31 dioceses and orders have declared bankruptcy.

Millions of U.S. Catholics are heading for the exits. In the U.S., a full 13 percent of the adult population are former Catholics, a number far larger than the entire number of congregants for any single non-Catholic denomination. Despite the influx of Hispanic Catholics into the U.S., the overall Catholic population has sharply declined in the past few decades.

Among the U.S. Catholics still hanging in, millions are profoundly disaffected. Many Catholics disagree with the Church’s rules on birth control, same-sex marriage, and yes, the barring of women from the priesthood. A recent survey showed that less than one in four U.S. women who identify as Catholic attend Mass weekly.

Over the past half-century, the number of U.S. priests has shrunk by 60 percent, leaving many parishes without a pastor. Angela Meyer and other womenpriests make the obvious argument that opening up the priesthood to women and married men would immediately help ease that crisis. Less obvious is their desire to do so. They could easily follow the path of millions of other ex-Catholics who switched to other denominations, almost all of which would happily welcome them as clergy. In the Episcopal Church USA alone, one of every eight congregants are former Catholics.

“But I am Catholic,” Meyer says in response to the question. “To walk away from the religion that raised me feels like saying what the church leaders are doing is OK. And it is not OK.” In other words, she maintains the stance she took with the Illinois bishop of her youth: It is my Church too. And I will fight you for it.

The official position of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests is the same: “The movement ‘RC Womenpriests’ does not perceive itself as a counter-current movement against the Roman Catholic Church. It wants neither a schism nor a break from the Roman Catholic Church, but rather wants to work positively within the Church.”

That within-the-Church approach does not mean that the womenpriests adopt the same approaches to the clergy or the liturgy. Virtually all womenpriests follow the worker priest model, a necessity for a movement without a substantial financial base. Meyer is a full-time family advocate working with public hospital patients in high-risk maternity and neonatal intensive care units. Other womenpriests in her area include a physician’s assistant and a retired teacher. The morning after Gisela Forster made history as one of the ordained Danube Seven, she reported back to her job as a nurse.

Although Meyer and others are determined to claim for themselves and others the status of priests, they resist most of the trappings of clericalism and hierarchy. They point to the Gospels’ examples where Jesus scoffed at clergy taking on elitist airs. In the Roman Catholic Womenpriest governing meetings, lay members have the same vote and opportunity to speak as priests and even bishops. After most womenpriests deliver a homily at Mass, they invite the congregants to share their own views with all who have gathered. When describing this “shared homily” approach, Meyer cites John 15:15, where Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants … instead, I have called you as friends.”

Given the centrality of the Eucharist in the Catholic mass, perhaps the most democratic aspect of the womenpriest approach is that the sacred words consecrating the body and blood of Christ are not said by the priest alone. In a conscious embrace of the earliest Church practices, and rejection of the current orthodoxy that only a celibate ordained male can perform this most holy act, the community at Roman Catholic womenpriest Masses says the words together.

In further contrast to the institutional Roman Catholic Church, the womenpriest community aims to be as broad as the community at large. The Indiana church where Meyer co-pastors is called the Brownsburg Inclusive Catholic Community. Meyer’s new womenpriest bishop for the Midwest USA is a lesbian who has been with her wife for 30 years.

“Discrimination, no matter how clever the language of justification, is a sin,” Meyer said in her first homily as a priest. “By coming together today, by me standing here as an ordained priest, we are witnessing and participating in the movement of the Spirit that challenges injustice.”

In that homily, Meyer pointed out that there is plenty of historical precedent for similar movements forcing radical changes in even the most hidebound of institutions. Among those institutions is the Church, which once condoned slavery and was unapologetically antisemitic before eventually reversing itself on both counts. Ironically, one of the most compelling examples of radical Church doctrine change is the very twelfth-century switch that pushed women out of ordination and leadership roles they had held for more than a thousand years.

The Church has changed many times, Angela Meyer says, and it can change again. “For the Body of the Church, the whole self is suffering,” she said in her first homily. “The Good News is that we have the ability to sing a new Church into being, to heal and become whole. More than having the ability, we are doing it.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Women’s ordination, transgender ideology move forward at German Synodal Way

Delegates at the fifth assembly of the German Synodal Way, meeting in Frankfurt, Germany, on March 11, 2023, applaud after the he passage of a text calling for changes to the German Church’s approach to gender identity.

By Jonathan Liedl

Delegates of the German Synodal Way on Saturday overwhelmingly passed measures to change Church practices based on transgender ideology and to push the universal Church to ordain women to the sacramental diaconate.

The votes took place on the final day of the process’ concluding assembly, held in Frankfurt March 9-11. On previous days, delegates voted overwhelmingly to adopt same-sex blessings, normalize lay preaching, and ask Rome to “reexamine” the discipline of priestly celibacy.

While the Germans pushed forward with these controversial measures, the assembly held back from crossing a line laid down by the Vatican concerning the establishing synodal councils at the national, diocesan, and parochial levels. The Vatican has said the synodal council model, which involves shared governance between bishops and the laity, is not consistent with Catholic ecclesiology.

The synodal assembly decided to delay voting on the proposal. Instead, it will be considered by a newly established synodal committee over the next three years, while Synodal Way leadership attempts to change the minds of Vatican officials and garner more widespread approval in the universal Church.

At the concluding press conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, president of the bishops’ conference, said that the results give a mandate to the bishops to make some changes in Germany now while pushing for broader reform.

“The Church is visibly changing, and that is important,” Bätzing said.

Irme Stetter-Karp, president of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), said the results show that the synodal path in Germany will continue.

“It does not end here. It is just the beginning,” she said.

Observers, including 103 international bishops who signed a letter warning that the Synodal Way could lead to schism, have expressed concern about the heterodox ideas promoted by the process and the effect it could have on the wider Church if the Vatican does not sufficiently intervene.

Vote on gender ideology

The implementation text “Dealing with gender diversity” passed with support from 96% of the 197 voting delegates. Thirty-eight bishops voted for it, while only seven voted against it. Thirteen abstained from voting.

Consistent with a pattern running throughout the assembly, there would have been enough votes to block the measure if those abstaining had voted against it. Critics of the Synodal Way say that organizers’ removal of the secret ballot has created a fear-driven atmosphere that has prohibited many bishops from voting freely.

The resolution calls for “concrete improvements for intersex and transgender faithful,” including changing baptism records to match someone’s self-identified gender, banning one’s gender identity from consideration for pastoral ministerial roles, and mandatory education for priests and church employees to “deal with the topic of gender diversity.” Intersex refers to people born with mixed sexual characteristics.

The text also bars “external sexual characteristics” from being used as a criterion for “accepting a man as a candidate for the priesthood,” a measure that could open the door for attempted ordinations of women.

During the debate, a small minority of bishops voiced opposition to the measure, while emphasizing that the Church should improve its pastoral care of those identifying as transgender. Auxiliary Bishop Stefan Zekorn of Bistum Münster said he could not support a text based on gender ideology, while Bishop Stefen Oster of Passau said that the document failed to emphasize that a Christian’s primary identity should be rooted in Jesus Christ.

But the vast majority of those who spoke expressed support for the measure. Gregor Podschun, the head of the heterodoxical Federation of German Catholic Youth, said the claims of gender ideology were “a scientific fact,” and that the Church’s denial was causing people to commit suicide. Julianne Eckstein, a professor of theology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, claimed that the book of Genesis was an inadequate basis for questions of sexual anthropology. And Viola Kohlberger, a young adult from Augsburg, said that there is no “norm” for gender and that the tradition of the Catholic Church was holding back progress.

“And I would like to break it today,” she said.

When the vote passed, delegates stood to applaud, while some unfurled rainbow flags expressing support for homosexuality and transgender ideology.

Support for women’s ordination

Delegates passed the implementation text “Women in sacramental ministry: Perspectives for the universal Church dialogue” by a similarly large margin. Only 10 of 58 bishops voted against the measure, which calls for the German bishops to advance the issue of the sacramental ordination of women at the continental and universal level of the Church.

A motion adopted by the assembly replaced a call for the establishment of a “sacramental diaconate of women” with “opening the sacramental diaconate for women.” The distinction made clear that the Synodal Way is pushing for women to be integrated into already existing holy orders, an idea the Church has repeatedly affirmed is impossible.

Delegates adopted another motion that modified priorities related to the all-male priesthood, calling for the practice to be simply reexamined, rather than ended, at the universal level of the Church. Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising said that the motion was needed to “build consensus” for changes to the Church’s dogmatic teaching related to the priesthood.

Others were less interested in the slow approach. Several women delegates were seen in tears after the vote, saddened that the text did not more explicitly call for female priests.

“Discriminating against someone because of their gender must be put to an end in the Catholic Church,” said delegate Susanne Schumacher-Godemann.

“The patriarchy needs to be destroyed,” added Podschun.

Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer of Regensburg spoke up in opposition to the text, characterizing the push for ordaining women to the diaconate as “a first step toward opening up” the priesthood and the episcopacy, too.

The Regensburg bishop, a close friend of Pope Benedict XVI, is one of only three German bishops to have publicly voted against each of the Synodal Way’s controversial texts.

The synodal assembly also elected 20 members to the transitory synodal committee that will work over the next three years to prepare for the establishment of a permanent synodal council at the national level. The 20 elected members, which consisted of 19 laypeople and one auxiliary bishop, will join the 27 bishops who head dioceses and 27 members of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) already on the committee.

The Synodal Way, which began in 2019, has been a collaborative effort between the ZdK and the German bishops’ conference.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Rigidity and Tolerance within the Vatican

ope Francis with a child on his shoulders – graffiti in Rome

By Jan Lundius

“The Roman curia suffers from spiritual Alzheimer [and] existential schizophrenia; this is the disease of those who live a double life, the fruit of that hypocrisy typical of the mediocre and of a progressive spiritual emptiness which no doctorates or academic titles can fill. […] When appearances, the colour of our clothes and our titles of honour become the primary object in life, [it] leads us to be men and woman of deceit. […] Be careful around those who are rigid. Be careful around Christians – be they laity, priests, bishops – who present themselves as so ‘perfect’. Be careful. There’s no Spirit of God there. They lack the spirit of liberty [..] We are all sinners. But may the Lord not let us be hypocrites. Hypocrites don’t know the meaning of forgiveness, joy and the love of God.”
Pope Francis I

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Feb 8 2023 (IPS) – When the Pope Emeritus Benedict XIV/Ratzinger died on the last day of 2022 it did not cause much of a stir in the global newsfeed. Maybe a sign that religion has ceased to play a decisive role in modern society Nevertheless, religious hierarchies are still highly influential, not least for the world’s 1, 4 billion baptized Catholics, and a pope’s policies have a bearing not only on morals, but also on political and economic issues. By contrast, there are more Muslims in the world, 1.9 billion, though adherents are not so centrally controlled and supervised as Catholics and hierarchies do not have a comparable influence on global affairs.

When Benedict abdicated in 2013 he retained his papal name, continued to wear the white, papal cassock, adopted the title Pope Emeritus and moved into a monastery in the Vatican Gardens. It must have been a somewhat cumbersome presence for a new, more radical pope, particularly since Benedict became a symbol of traditional values and served as an inspiration for critics of the current papacy.

By the end of his reign, John Paul II was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and Cardinal Ratzinger was in effect running the Vatican and when he was elected Pope in 2005, his closest runner-up was Cardinal Bergoglio from Buenos Aires. What would have happened if Borgoglio, who eventually became Francis I, had been elected? Would he have been able to more effectively deal with clerical sexual abuse and Vatican corruption?

When Joseph Ratzinger became pope, he had for 27 years served John Paul II by heading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), investigating and condemning birth control, acceptance of homosexuals, “gender theory” and Liberation Theology, a theological approach with a specific concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed people.

Under Cardinal Ratzinger the CDF generally overlooked an often shady economic cooperation financing Pope John Paul II’s successful battle against Communism, while covering up clerical sexual abuse and marginalizing “progressive” priests. Several Latin American liberation theologians agreed that John Paul II in several ways was an asset to the Church, though he mistreated clerics who actually believed in Jesus’s declaration that he was chosen to “bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” John Paul II and his “watchdog” Joseph Ratzinger were considered to have “armoured fists hidden in silk gloves.”

Ratzinger censured and silenced a number of leading “liberal” priests, like the Latin American Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff and the American Charles Curran, who supported same sex marriages. Both were defrocked. Under Ratzinger’s CDF rule, several clerics were excommunicated for allowing abortions, like the American nun Margaret McBride, and the ordination of women priests, among them the Argentinian priest Rómulo Braschi and the French priest Roy Bourgeois.

Ratzinger/Benedict wrote 66 books, in which a common theme was Truth, which according to him was “self-sacrificing love”, guided by principles promulgated by the Pope and implemented by the Curia, the administrative body of the Vatican:

“Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting one be tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

A strict adherence to Catholic Doctrine meant bringing the Church back to what Benedict XVI considered as its proper roots. If this alienated some believers, so be it. Numerous times he stated that the Church might well be healthier if it was smaller. A point of view opposed to the one expressed by Francis I:

“Changes need to be made […] Law cannot be kept in a refrigerator. Law accompanies life, and life goes on. Like morals, it is being perfected. Both the Church and society have made important changes over time on issues as slavery and the possession of atomic weapons, moral life is also progressing along the same line. Human thought and development grows and consolidates with the passage of time. Human understanding changes over time, and human consciousness deepens.”

Benedict XVI allowed the issue of human sexuality to overshadow support to environmentalism and human rights. He wanted to “purify the Church” in accordance with rules laid down in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1992 and written under direction of the then Cardinal Ratzinger. The Catechism might be considered as a counterweight to “relativistic theories seeking to justify religious pluralism, while supporting decline in general moral standards.”

Pope Benedict endeavoured to reintegrate hard-core traditionalists back into the fold, maintaining and strengthening traditional qualms related to sexual conduct and abortion. He declared that modern society had diminished “the morality of sexual love to a matter of personal sentiments, feelings, [and] customs. […], isolating it from its procreative purposes.” Accordingly, “homosexual acts” were in the Catechism described as “violating natural law” and could “under no circumstances be approved.”

Papal condemnation of homosexuality may seem somewhat strange considering that it is generally estimated that the percentage of gay Catholic priests might be 30 – 60, suggesting more homosexual men (active and non-active) within the Catholic priesthood than within society at large.

In 2019, Frédéric Martel’s In the Closet of the Vatican sent shock waves through the Catholic world. Based on years of interviews and collaboration with a vast array of researchers, priests and prostitutes, Martel described the double life of priests and the hypocrisy of homophobic cardinals and bishops living with their young “assistants”. He pinpointed members of the Catholic hierarchy as “closet gays”, revealed how “de-anonymised” data from homosexual dating apps (like Grindl) listed clergy users, described exclusive homosexual coteries within the Vatican, networks of prostitutes serving priests, as well as the anguish of homosexual priests trying to come to terms with their homosexual inclinations.

According to Martel, celibacy is a main reason for homosexuality among Catholic priesthood. For a homosexual youngster a respected male community might serve as a safe haven within a homophobic society.

By burdening homosexuality with guilt, covering up sexual abuse and opaque finances the Vatican has not supported what Benedict proclaimed, namely protect and preach the Truth. Behind the majority of cases of sexual abuse there are priests and bishops who protected aggressors because of their own homosexuality and out of fear that it might be revealed in the event of a scandal. The culture of secrecy needed to maintain silence about the prevalence of homosexuality in the Church, which allowed sexual abuse to be hidden and predators to act without punishment.

Cardinal Robert Sarah stated that “Western homosexual and abortion ideologies” are of “demonic origin” and compared them to “Nazism and Islamic terrorism.” Such opinions did in 2020 not hinder Pope Emeritus Benedict from writing a book together with Sarah – From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy and the Crisis of the Catholic Church. Among injunctions against abortion, safe sex, and women clergy, celibacy was fervently defended as not only “a mere precept of ecclesiastical law, but as a sharing in Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross and his identity as Bridegroom of the Church.” This in contrast to Francis I, who declared:

“It is time that the Church moves away from questions that divide believers and concentrate on the real issues: the poor, migrants, poverty. We can’t only insist on questions bound up with abortion, homosexual marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. It is not possible … It isn’t necessary to go on talking about it all the time.”

The current pope is not condoning abortion, though does not elevate it above the fight against poverty, climate change and the rights of migrants, which he proclaims to be “pro-life” issues in their own right. In 2021, Francis I stated that “same-sex civil unions are good and helpful to many.” He is of the opinion that Catholic priests ought to be celibate, but adds that this rule is not an unchangeable dogma and “the door is always open” to change. Francis propagates that women ought to be ordained as deacons; allowed to do priestly tasks, except giving absolution, anointing the sick, and celebrate mass and he has recruited women to several crucial administrative positions within the Vatican. Furthermore, he ordered all dioceses to report sexual abuse of minors to the Vatican, while notifying governmental law enforcement to allow for comprehensive investigations and perpetrators being judged by common – and not by canon law.

Just hours after Benedict’s funeral on 5 January Georg Gänswein’s memoir Nothing but the Truth — My Life Beside Benedict XVI, was distributed to the press. Gänswein, who was Benedict’s faithful companion and personal secretary, writes that for the Pope Emeritus the Doctrine of the Faith was the fundament of the Church, while Francis is more inclined to highlight “pastoral care”, i.e. guidance and support focusing on a person’s welfare, social and emotional needs, rather than purely educational ones.

In 2013, Gänswein entered in the service of Benedict XIV. He was professor in Canon Law, fluent in four languages, an able tennis player, excellent downhill skier and had a pilot’s licence. He was also an outspoken conservative and often critical of Francis I.

Shortly before his abdication, Benedict XVI appointed Cardinal Gänswein archbishop and made him Prefect of the Papal Household, deciding who could have an audience with Pope Francis I, while he at the same time was responsible for Benedict’s daily schedule, communications, and private and personal audiences. The Italian edition of the magazine Vanity Fair presented Gänswein on its cover, declaring “being handsome is not a sin” and calling him “the Georg Clooney of the Vatican”. Six years before Donatella Versace used Gänswein as inspiration for her fashion show Priest Chic.

There was an air of vanity and conservatism surrounding the acolytes of Benedict. Gänswein writes that working with both popes, the active one and the ”Emeritus” was a great challenge, not only in terms of work but in terms of style. Benedict XIV was a pope of aesthetics recognising that in a debased world there remain things of beauty, embodied in a Mozart sonata, a Latin mass, an altarpiece, an embroidered cape, or the cut of a cassock. The male-oriented lifestyle magazine Esquire included Pope Benedict in a “best-dressed men list”. Gänswein states that when Pope Francis in 2022 restricted the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass “I believe it broke Pope Benedict’s heart”.

Pope Francis is now 86, not much time remains for him as sovereign of the Catholic Church. Hopefully he will be able to change the Curia by staffing it with people who share his ambition to reform the Church by navigating away from doctrinal rigidity, vanity and seclusion towards inclusion, tolerance, human rights, poverty eradication and environmentalism.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Homosexuality and Hatred

By

Two prominent American priests recently made important statements that indicate an attempt to shift the Catholic discussion about homosexuality.

Taking their lead from former Justice Anthony Kennedy, the father of constitutional rights for same-sex couples, Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego and Fr. James Martin, S.J., have both spoken recently of “hatred”—even the “demonic”—animating those who uphold traditional Christian teaching on human sexuality and chastity in regard to homosexuality. They chose a fitting model; Kennedy’s technique was massively effective.

Over several years, Kennedy wrote the majority opinions that established the Supreme Court’s same-sex jurisprudence. The first was Romer v. Evans in 1996, in which the majority overturned a Colorado ballot initiative prohibiting antidiscrimination laws on the basis of sexual orientation. Kennedy there first played the animus card: “the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.”

Colorado’s voters were, lacking reason, motivated by “animus.” That’s a neat maneuver, discrediting motives before getting around to the legal arguments. That would sustain Kennedy for nearly twenty years. In his final triumph, Kennedy adopted a gracious posture in Obergefell, which created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. “Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here,” wrote Kennedy.

Yes and no, for Kennedy continued that when “sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the state itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied.”

“Animus” returns again, this time rooted in a supposedly “decent and honorable” desire to “exclude,” “demean and stigmatize.” It is clear that Kennedy thinks decent and honorable people really think the way that he does. Those who don’t are motivated by something other than reason.

Fr. Martin writes at Outreach, “An LGBTQ Catholic Resource” run by the Jesuit America magazine, which is more or less an LGBTQ Catholic Resource itself. Fr. Martin recently employed one of his favorite techniques, which is to report in detail the nasty things that nasty people say about him on the internet. If you wish to find animus somewhere, the internet is a good place to go fishing.

In a commentary upon his own commentary—a good bit of self-referentiality here, to use the favored term of Pope Francis—about the same-sex marriage of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Fr. Martin singles out opposition to his agenda as fueled by a special kind of hate:

The idea of two people of the same sex getting married repulses some people. . . . There is something about same-sex marriage, and same-sex relations, that unhinges some people, that infuriates them, that drives them to hysteria, enough to threaten death to people who say that it even exists.

. . . no amount of clarification will be enough for people whose rage is fueled by homophobia and hatred. No issue enrages some Catholics—not the Latin Mass, not the Synod, not Pope Francis, not women’s ordination—more than LGBTQ people. It is what sociologists call a “moral panic.” More basically, it is hatred.

These “some Catholics” do not have names, having been collected off the internet, but Fr. Martin’s point is clear. His gay-friendly Outreach is a kind of butterflies in the meadow operation over against the unhinged, hysterical rage of hate-filled homophobes. That he does not produce a credible author who is unhinged, hysterical, and hate-filled makes it easier to hurl the charge.

Meanwhile, Cardinal McElroy writes that the ongoing Catholic synodal process on synodality for a synodal Church is an excellent time to jettison various Catholic teachings, including the requirement that homosexual people strive to live chastely. I gave my view on that novelty here.

Writing in the dialogue-promoting pages of America magazine proper, Cardinal McElroy borrows a page from Fr. Martin in his estimation of those who might be attached to the Catholic tradition on chastity and other quaint virtues.

“It is a demonic mystery of the human soul why so many men and women have a profound and visceral animus toward members of the L.G.B.T. communities,” McElroy writes, deploying the same sensitive animus-detecting antennae that his fellow Californian Justice Kennedy has. “The church’s primary witness in the face of this bigotry must be one of embrace rather than distance or condemnation.”

“Demonic,” “visceral animus,” “bigotry,” “distance”—all this from McElroy in the same essay in which he includes a ritual lamentation of “polarization” in ecclesial life. It would be interesting to know whether McElroy considers the two California archbishops—Jose Gomez in Los Angeles and Salvatore Cordileone in San Francisco—to suffer from these deplorable afflictions.

There was a time when it was fashionable in self-consciously progressive Christian circles to incant the slogan that “the world sets the agenda for the Church.” In relation to homosexuality, for the likes of Martin and McElroy, it is the Court that sets the agenda for the Church—and not only the agenda, but the strategy and tactics as well.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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LGBTQ+ Catholics recall ‘tremendous damage’ Pope Benedict XVI caused during his ‘painful’ reign

Pope Benedict XVI died aged 95.

By Patrick Kelleher

Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned as head of the Catholic Church in 2013, died on Saturday (31 December) aged 95, the Vatican confirmed in a statement.

As tributes poured in for the Pope Emeritus, LGBTQ+ Catholics recalled how his time in the Vatican marked a dark, painful era for queer people.

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of LGBTQ+ Catholic organisation DignityUSA, said Pope Benedict XVI’s words harmed queer people and damaged families.

“The death of any human being is an occasion of sorrow. We pray for Pope Benedict’s soul and express our condolences to his family, friends, and loved ones,” Duddy-Burke said in a statement.

He refused to recognise even the most basic human rights for LGBTQIA+ people.

“However, his death also calls us to reflect honestly on his legacy. Benedict’s leadership in the church, as Pope and before that as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), caused tremendous damage to LGBTQIA+ people and our loved ones.”

Pope Benedict XVI leads the Ash Wednesday service at the St. Peter's Basilica on February 13, 2013 in Vatican City, Vatican. Ash Wednesday opens the liturgical 40-day period of Lent, a time of prayer, fasting, penitence and alms giving leading up to Easter.
Pope Benedict XVI leads the Ash Wednesday service at the St. Peter’s Basilica on February 13, 2013 in Vatican City, Vatican.

She continued: “His words and writings forced our community out of Catholic Churches, tore families apart, silenced our supporters, and even cost lives.

“He refused to recognise even the most basic human rights for LGBTQIA+ people. Many of us experienced the most harsh and blatant religiously justified discrimination of our lives as a result of his policies.”

Pope Benedict XVI labelled queer people ‘objectively disordered’

DignityUSA pointed out that, as leader of the CDF, Pope Benedict XVI was responsible for a 1986 letter which labelled gay men and lesbians as “objectively disordered”.

The same letter said same-sex sexual relationships were “intrinsically evil” and “essentially self-indulgent”.

It is impossible to overstate the damage Pope Benedict’s repeated dehumanising of LGBTQIA+ people has caused.

Furthermore, DignityUSA condemned the former pontiff for banning the distribution of condoms by Catholic health and social services agencies – a move which impacted the spread of HIV.

In 2012 – during his final year as leader of the Catholic Church – he spoke out against same-sex marriage, saying it “destroyed the essence of the human creature”.

He also said allowing same-sex couples to adopt represented an “attack” on the “traditional family”.

“It is impossible to overstate the damage Pope Benedict’s repeated dehumanising of LGBTQIA+ people has caused,” Duddy-Burke added.

Pope Benedict XVI attends his final general audience in St. Peter's Square on February 27, 2013 in Vatican City, Vatican.
Pope Benedict XVI attends his final general audience in St. Peter’s Square on February 27, 2013 in Vatican City, Vatican.

“Individuals, families, and whole communities across the globe suffered tragic consequences, many of which are still felt today.

“We pray that the church will use the period of reflection following Pope Benedict’s death to acknowledge that in many cases he used his power in ways that failed to further the gospel message of love, human unity, and the responsibility to care for the marginalised.”

‘God’s Rottweiler’

Pope Benedict was a polarising force within the Catholic Church, and he was dubbed “God’s Rottweiler” during his time as pontiff for his careful adherence to traditional interpretations of church doctrine.

One of the biggest challenges he faced when he took over from Pope John Paul II was to tackle various sexual abuse scandals within the church – but he ultimately failed to take appropriate action.

In January 2022, a report found that he failed to take action against priests who abused children during his tenure as archbishop of Munich, even though he knew of allegations against them.

Honouring Pope Benedict XVI now is not only wrong. It is shameful.

Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an organisation that advocates for survivors, described Pope Benedict XVI as an “abuse enabler” in a press release shortly after news of his death was confirmed.

“Any celebration that marks the life of abuse enablers like Benedict must end,” the group said.

“It is past time for the Vatican to refocus on change: tell the truth about known abusive clergy, protect children and adults, and allow justice to those who have been hurt.

“Honouring Pope Benedict XVI now is not only wrong. It is shameful.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!