Month: December 2023

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The Church, Living in Christmas Past

By Maureen Dowd

My mom loved Christmas so much, she would sometimes leave the tree up until April.

She dyed a sheet blue for the sky behind the crèche and made a star of tin foil. The cradle would stay empty until Christmas morning; when we tumbled downstairs, the baby would be in his place, and the house would smell of roasting turkey.

Mom always took it personally if you didn’t wear red or green on Christmas, and she signed all the presents “Love, Baby Jesus,” “Love, Virgin Mary” or “Love, St. Joseph.”

(My brother Kevin was always upset that Joseph got short shrift, disappearing from the Bible; why wasn’t he around to boast about Jesus turning water into wine?)

We went to midnight Mass back then, and it was magical, despite some boys wearing Washington Redskins bathrobes as they carried presents down the aisle for Baby Jesus.

In 2005, when my mom was dying, I played Christmas music for her, even though it was July and the muted TV showed Lance Armstrong cycling in the Tour de France.

Christmas was never my favorite holiday; I thought it was materialistic and stressful. But I try to honor my mom’s feeling that it is the happiest time of the year.

Now that my Christmas is more secular — my bond with the Catholic Church faded over the years of cascading pedophilia scandals — I miss the rituals, choirs and incense.

I didn’t mean to, but I succumbed to the irresistible pull of the TCM holiday doubleheader of “Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” It’s hard to beat Ingrid Bergman’s luminous nun coaching a bullied kid in “the manly art of self-defense” — i.e., boxing — as Bing Crosby’s bemused Father O’Malley looks on.

As bonding agents, religion and patriotism have been superseded by Facebook and TikTok. But somehow social media, which was touted as an engine of connectivity, has left us disconnected and often lonely, not to mention combative. We’re all in our corners. We understand one another less than ever and have less desire to try.

When we ran up against mean priests as children, my mother would say the church was not the men who ran it. The church was God, and He was all kind and all just. But it was increasingly hard for me to stay loyal to a church plagued with scandals and cover-ups and to an institution that seemed to delight in excluding so many.

At a time when the church is shrinking in the West, Pope Francis has been on a mission to make it more tolerant and inclusive.

On Monday the 87-year-old pope decreed that priests could bless same-sex couples. But the Catholic Church and Francis say that men with a “deep-seated tendency” for homosexuality should not be ordained as priests.

The pope did not change church doctrine that marriage is only between a man and a woman. The blessing is not a sacrament and cannot be connected through “clothing, gestures or words” to a wedding.

“Blessings instead are better imparted, the Vatican says, during a meeting with a priest, a visit to a shrine, during a pilgrimage or a prayer recited in a group,” The Times’s Jason Horowitz explained.

It’s better than nothing, and it’s certainly better than the 2021 Vatican ruling that inveighed against blessing gay unions, arguing that God “cannot bless sin” and that sexual unions outside marriage, like gay unions, did not conform with “God’s designs.”

But the declaration — “Fiducia Supplicans” — seems like a narrow gesture, designed to be delivered in a furtive way.

If the pope wants to move beyond the suffocating stranglehold and hypocrisy of the conservative cardinals so the church survives and grows, he must be bolder.

When he started, in a puff of white smoke, he seemed open to change. He does believe in a more pastoral, less rule-driven church, but he’s not ready to change the archaic rules.

That’s true not only with gay people but also with women. Allowing women to just give readings during Mass, serve as altar girls and distribute communion is not going to cut it. Jesus surrounded himself with strong women, even a soi-disant fallen woman, but his church has long been run by misogynists. Nothing major has changed for women since that 1945 classic “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” except that nuns have been muzzled by the Vatican. Ordaining women as priests is not on the table, any more than allowing priests to marry is.

It’s passing strange that a church with Mary at the center of its founding story could suffocate women’s voices for centuries. The cloistered club of men running the church grew warped. They were more concerned with shielding the church from scandal than ensuring the safety of boys and girls being preyed upon by criminal priests.

The church can’t succeed in a time warp, moving at the pace of a snail on Ambien. Even Saudi Arabia is modernizing faster.

It is simply immoral to treat women and gay people as unworthy of an equal role in their church. After all, isn’t the whole point of the church to teach us what is right? And it’s not right to treat people as partial humans.

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Have yourself a… 2023

Let your heart be light
From now on,
our troubles will be out of sight

 

teddys

Make the Yule-tide gay,
From now on,
our troubles will be miles away.

Here we are as in olden days,
Happy golden days of yore.
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Gather near to us once more.

Through the years
We all will be together,
If the Fates allow
Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.
And have yourself A merry little Christmas now.

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Pope’s Shift on Gay Couples Followed Quiet Talks and Loud Resistance

— Pope Francis spoke with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics and their supporters for years before letting priests bless same-sex couples. But the move’s timing also owed something to its conservative opponents.

By Jason Horowitz

In March 2021, as stunned L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics grappled with a Vatican document approved by Pope Francis that ruled against blessing same-sex unions, one of his confidants, who is gay, says they spoke on the phone.

Juan Carlos Cruz, a sexual abuse survivor who had befriended the pope over years of conversations, says that Francis, who had just returned from Iraq, gave him the sense that the Vatican “machine” had gotten ahead of him in the ruling; it stated that God “cannot bless sin.”

But he says Francis “acknowledged that the buck stops with him. I got the impression that he wanted to fix it.”

For Mr. Cruz, who visited Francis for his 87th birthday over the weekend, and for many L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, Francis did just that this week. He signed off on a major declaration by the same Vatican office on church doctrine that had issued the negative ruling two years before.

The new rule allows priests to bless same-sex couples as long as the blessing is not connected to the ceremony of a same-sex union, to avoid confusion with the sacrament of marriage. While the declaration does not change church teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” it is a concrete sign of acceptance for a portion of the faithful that the church has long castigated.

Juan Carlos Cruz, clean-shaven and with short dark hair, in a gray V-neck sweater and checked shirt.
Juan Carlos Cruz, a sexual abuse survivor from Chile who befriended the pope.

Now, as liberals celebrate and same-sex couples begin receiving public blessings, some are wondering why the pope delivered the groundbreaking rule now, more than a decade after he started his pontificate with a resoundingly inclusive message on gay issues. “Who am I to judge?” he famously said in 2013, when asked about a priest rumored to be gay.

People who have talked to him over the years and Vatican analysts say Francis’ thinking evolved through frequent private conversations with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics and the priests and nuns who minister to them.

It was a long process, filled with fits and starts, but also the result of a gradual reorganization of the church by Francis, including the recent appointment to top jobs of like-minded churchmen who were amenable to the changes. The death last year of his conservative predecessor freed the pope’s hand, experts say, but they also believe that the overreach of Vatican antagonists — who sought to box Francis in — played a part, backfiring spectacularly.

“Like anyone, he learns from listening,” said Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, who has met frequently with Francis, a fellow Jesuit, and talked to him about the need to better recognize these members of the church.

Speaking this week, Father Martin would not divulge the content of those meetings over recent years, though he noted they had become “longer and longer.” During the most recent conversation in October, around the time of a major church assembly, he said that Francis “encouraged me, as he always does, to focus on the individual, to focus on the person, to focus on the pastoral needs.” The new document, he said, “is very much in line with that, that approach.”

Father James Martin, with a hand upraised, blessing two men in an apartment.
Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, gave a blessing this week after the church ruling.

Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based advocacy group for gay Catholics, said he also met with the pope in October and sensed a similar opening to a change. Among the others at the meeting, he said, was Sister Jeannine Gramick, an American nun who has ministered to L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics for a half century and was censured by Francis’ predecessors. Mr. DeBernardo said they met with Francis for 50 minutes and talked about blessings.

“Out of the blue, he said, ‘You know, what gets me most upset are priests who chastise people in the confessional, who reprimand them,’” Mr. DeBernardo recalled. It is that instinct, to emphasize pastoral welcoming over “giving litmus tests for orthodoxy,” that he sees as key to the new document.

The Vatican and the office responsible for the declaration did not reply to requests for comment about specific meetings or the decision-making process behind the document.

In his decade as pope, Francis has filled L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics with hope. He made a point to congratulate Sister Gramick and encourage her work. He met with and ministered to transgender Catholics himself and counseled gay couples on the upbringing of their children. He said homosexuality should not be criminalized and supported civil unions. And he recently made it clear that transgender people can be baptized, serve as godparents and be witnesses at church weddings.

But he also frequently confounded L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics with mixed messages, making it difficult to tell where Francis, for all his inclusive language, actually stood.

After the 2021 ruling against blessings, many of Francis’s liberal supporters note that he immediately sought to distance himself from it. They argue that it was rammed through without the pope’s understanding its full import or that he allowed it to go forward only under pressure from the doctrinal office, an explanation that top conservative cardinals mocked and that members of the office at the time said was simply not true.

Throughout, Francis kept talking to gay Catholics and their advocates, even as he had to weigh tensions on the left and the right that could affect the future of the church.

In Germany, where the church is liberal, priests have been blessing gay unions against Vatican orders, and bishops in Belgium have even published guidelines for blessings at same-sex ceremonies, something the new declaration prohibits. But in conservative African nations, where the church sees its future, opposition to gay rights and unions is fervent.

Already there have been some signs of revolt, with the conservative publication The Catholic Herald reporting that Archbishop Tomash Peta of Saint Mary in Astana, Kazakhstan, had sent a letter prohibiting his priests from performing blessings for same-sex couples, calling the declaration a “great deception.”

Two men standing on front of a priest outside a Gothic cathedral.
Same-sex couples participating in a public blessing ceremony in front of Cologne Cathedral in September. In Germany, where the church is liberal, priests have been blessing gay unions against Vatican orders.

But as Francis has aged, and ailed, he seems to be in more of a hurry to finish remaking his church.

In January last year, he fired the doctrine office’s No. 2 official, Archbishop Giacomo Morandi, who was widely considered responsible for the 2021 document, sending him to a small Italian town. (Archbishop Morandi did not return a request for comment.) In July, the pope then reorganized the office, appointing a close adviser and fellow Argentine, Víctor Manuel Fernández, as its chief.

“Finally after 10 years of pontificate, Francis was able to appoint a cardinal that responds to his vision of the church,” said Mr. Politi.

Sandro Magister, another longtime Vatican expert who thinks that Francis’ unilateral decisions are undercutting his professed belief in a church governed by consensus, agreed that Cardinal Fernández was key, as was the death of the pope’s predecessor, Benedict XVI.

“After Benedict died, Francis has started to dare,” he said. Had Benedict remained alive, he added, Francis would never have made Cardinal Fernández watchdog of the church’s doctrine, a position Benedict held for more than 20 years.

Early in his tenure, Cardinal Fernández, loathed by conservatives, indicated that the question of gay blessings was likely to be examined again. It didn’t take long for conservatives to test him, and Francis.

Víctor Manuel Fernández leading Mass as an archbishop.
Francis appointed a close adviser and fellow Argentine, Víctor Manuel Fernández, to lead the church’s doctrine office.

Over the summer, Cardinal Raymond Burke — an American and the de facto leader of the opposition to the pope — and other conservatives sent a letter to Francis asking for a definitive answer on the blessings. The 2021 document seemed to give them a precedent, and an advantage.

Then they made their demand for clarification public just before a major October assembly of bishops and laypeople that was expected to tackle such sensitive topics. It seemed like a clear warning shot to Francis and his doctrine office.

Cardinal Fernández responded by publishing Francis’ private response. While the pope clearly upheld the church position that marriage could exist only between a man and a woman, he said that priests should exercise “pastoral charity” when it came to requests for blessings, a seeming reversal of the “cannot bless sin” ruling.

Francis seemed to have opened the door a crack. Then, this week, Cardinal Fernández burst through it.

In his introduction to the new rule, he cited the pope’s response to Cardinal Burke as a critical factor in the ruling. It provided, he wrote, “important clarifications for this reflection and represents a decisive element.”

In other words, the conservatives kept pushing for an answer, and they got one.

“Let us remain vigilant,” Pope Francis said Thursday in his traditional Christmas greetings to members of the Curia, the bureaucracy that runs the Vatican, “against rigid ideological positions that often, under the guise of good intentions, separate us from reality and prevent us from moving forward.”

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Activists hope pope’s approval of same-sex blessings will ease anti-LGBTQ+ bias and repression

The Rev. Wolfgang Rothe, left, blesses Christine Walter, center, and Almut Muenster during a service in St. Benedict’s Church in Munich in 2021.

By NICOLE WINFIELD

Pope Francis’ green light for Catholic priests to offer blessings to same-sex couples is in many ways a recognition of what has been happening in some European parishes for years. But his decision to officially spell out his approval could send a message of tolerance to places where gay rights are far more restricted.

From Uganda to the United States, laws that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people or even criminalize homosexuality have increased in recent years, leaving communities feeling under attack. Pastors in some conservative Christian denominations, and the Catholic Church in particular, have sometimes supported such measures as consistent with biblical teaching about homosexuality.

In Zimbabwe, a country with a history of state harassment of LGBTQ+ people and a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, news of Francis’ approval was met with cautious optimism among activists.

But Chesterfield Samba, director of Zimbabwe’s GALZ association, which represents LGBTQ+ people, said same-sex unions would likely remain taboo regardless of the pope’s stance.

“Christians here are of the view that they are devoid of sin and cannot be aligned with LGBTQ+ people,” Samba told the Associated Press.

By contrast, a Catholic priest in the United States — Alex Santora of Hoboken, N.J. — was elated by the pope’s declaration, hoping it would clear the path for him to bless a same-sex couple who had been part of the parish throughout his 19-year tenure there.

The Vatican says gay people should be treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” Francis hasn’t changed that teaching, but he has spent much of his 10-year pontificate offering a more welcoming attitude to LGBTQ+ Catholics.

The Vatican statement Monday marked a new step in Francis’ campaign, explicitly authorizing priests to offer non-sacramental blessings to same-sex couples. The blessings must in no way resemble a wedding, which the church teaches can only happen between a man and a woman.

The Rev. Wolfgang Rothe, a German priest who participated in open worship services blessing same-sex couples in May 2021, said Tuesday that the approval essentially validated what he and other priests in Germany have been doing for years. But he suggested it would make life easier for homosexual couples in more conservative societies.

“In my church, such blessings always take place when anyone has the need,” Rothe said.

But “in many countries around the world there are opposing moves to maintain homophobia in the church,” he added. “For homosexual couples living there, the document will be a huge relief.”

In Nigeria, authorities arrested dozens of gay people in October in a crackdown that human rights groups said relied on a same-sex prohibition law.

Nigeria is among 30 of Africa’s 54 countries where homosexuality is criminalized with broad public support, though its constitution guarantees freedom from discrimination.

Uganda’s president this year signed into law anti-gay legislation that prescribes the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” which is defined as sexual relations involving people infected with HIV, as well as with minors and other vulnerable people.

In the United States, the Human Rights Campaign has identified an “unprecedented and dangerous” spike in discriminatory laws sweeping statehouses this year, with more than 525 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced.

“Given the homophobic and transphobic climate created by many bishops in the United States, the average same-sex couple likely still won’t feel comfortable presenting themselves to their local bishop or priest to ask for a blessing,” said Jamie Manson, a lesbian and president of Catholics for Choice.

Starting from his famous “Who am I to judge” comment in 2013 about a purportedly gay priest, Francis has evolved his position to increasingly make clear that everyone is a child of God, is loved by God and welcome in the church.

In January, Francis told the Associated Press: “Being homosexual is not a crime.”

Raul Peña, a spokesman for Crismhom, Madrid’s main Catholic LGBTQ+ association, said small-town, conservative dioceses in rural Spain could benefit from Francis’ message.

“If the priest from your town talks about gays being the devil in his sermons each Sunday, which some priests do, now you have the pope signing a document saying that homosexuals who live as a couple can be blessed,” he said. “It’s a fundamental step for those hierarchies and for those people who are in places where being LGBT is difficult.”

Santora, pastor of the Church of Our Lady of Grace in New Jersey, said the pope’s declaration would be welcome in a parish that celebrates an annual Pride Mass and has many LGBTQ+ parishioners.

“This is a very important step, people realizing the church is finally recognizing the goodness of their lives,” he said.

Santora wants to set a date soon to bless a same-sex couple that has been part of the church for many years. Santora recently learned that they had yearned for his blessing but feared getting him in trouble.

“So this comes at the right time,” the priest said. “It’s a new way to set a date.”

Santora worries, though, that some gay and lesbian Catholic couples in the U.S. won’t be so fortunate.

“There are priests, many of them young, who are behind the times — they won’t do this,” he said. “It’s going to cause more hurt in some communities.”

Gary Stavella, a 70-year-old retiree, helps lead the LGBTQ+ outreach ministry at Our Lady of Grace.

He said he was elated by the pope’s declaration, particularly on behalf of LGBTQ+ Catholics in countries where homosexuality is criminalized.

“There are a lot of anti-LGBTQ cardinals in those countries, and in ours,” Stavella said. “For their boss to say, ’You can’t condemn them, you should bless them’ is a sea change. It can save lives.”

Antonella Allaria, who lives in New York City with her wife, Amanda, and their 6-month-old son, said the pope’s decision is a positive step for her family and the church as a whole.

“I’m gay and it’s OK to be a person and to be gay. Where before yesterday, in the Catholic Church, it was not that OK,” she said. “I feel things are getting normalized. And it’s about time.”

Kimo Jung of Pittsburgh, a lifelong Catholic, met his future husband 34 years ago when they both attended a New York parish. Jung, 60, sees the Vatican declaration as monumental for the church, but less so for himself and his husband, whom he married in a civil ceremony in 2016.

“I would certainly ask my friends who are priests to convey such a blessing, but I wouldn’t approach any other church official to demand a rite to be blessed, because I already know God has blessed my relationship.”

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Pope’s same-sex blessings policy triggers both healing and pain for LGBTQ Catholics

— Pope Francis made a historic change to Vatican policy Monday, allowing priests to bless same-sex couples.

Pope Francis during the weekly general audience at Paul-VI Audience Hall in the Vatican on Wednesday.

By Matt Lavietes

Greg Krajewski never misses Sunday Mass at his local Catholic church in Chicago. But even if he were to, it’s unclear if his fellow congregants would notice. As a gay man, he says he largely keeps to himself.

“People talk about the church being a place where people can come together, gather and be with each other,” he said. “That’s not what the church is for me, because it can’t be in many ways.”

But for the first time in his life, Krajewski, 34, has hope that could soon change.

Pope Francis made a historic change to Vatican policy Monday, allowing priests to bless same-sex couples. Some LGBTQ Catholics, including Krajweski, say the policy change may bring about a long-awaited healing to queer people who had faced the church’s decades of institutional rejection.

“Pope Francis is saying, ‘You belong here,’” Krajewski said. “‘No matter what you’ve been told, no matter what your quote-unquote sins are, you are wanted here.”

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, which advocates for LGBTQ rights within the Catholic Church, called the policy change “groundbreaking” for queer Catholics, and for straight and cisgender Catholics who have gay and transgender friends or family members.

“They will welcome this as a way of easing the tension that they may have felt for years between loving some important person in their life who’s in a relationship and church teachings that say that that’s less than God’s plan for humanity,” she said.

Kellen Flatt, 28, said Catholicism was at the center of her childhood, especially with her grandfather being a deacon at her local church in Marietta, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. But as a teenager, she said, she struggled with Sunday school teachings that often equated being gay with sins such as murder or robbery.

“A lot of times, I would leave and go to the bathroom and do my best not to cry, because at this time my religion was very important to me,” Flatt, who is gay, said. “It felt like it was no longer a home for me.”

Kellen Flatt.
Kellen Flatt.

Flatt left the church almost a decade ago and hasn’t been to Mass since. But on Monday, following Francis’ announcement, she was open to the idea of returning for the first time, she said.

“I don’t know if this is going to be something that leads me to start going back to Mass every Sunday, but it is something that when I drive by the church, I’m no longer going to feel like that is a part of my past,” she said. “I’m going to feel like that is a door that’s open for me.”

Conversely, some LGBTQ Catholics say that the policy change does not go far enough and that, in turn, brings old hostilities and pain to the surface.

The new Vatican policy allows for priests to bless same-sex couples, but it stresses that priests may not bless same-sex relationships themselves. It also reaffirmed that marriage is a lifelong sacrament between a man and a woman, and that same-sex blessings should not be given during civil union ceremonies that could be perceived as a wedding.

Carl Hendy, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, said they were excited when they first saw the news about the policy change, but after reading through its details described it “a lousy attempt from the pope to validate queer people.”

“It just felt very performative,” said Hendy, 30, who left the church when they were about 18. “What I want to see from the Catholic Church is them taking accountability for how they’ve treated LGBTQ people historically and then promise to validate them unconditionally by recognizing their marriages, their relationships, their families, the same way they do heterosexual people.”

Acknowledging the remaining caveats, Duddy-Burke said the policy change is nonetheless a step in the right direction for LGBTQ Catholics.

“It’s not everything that we who are looking for full equality and full inclusion want, but it’s a milestone on the journey that I think we have to pause and recognize and use to propel the next push towards those goals,” she said.

Krajewski met his husband in 2011 and said his family has always disapproved of their relationship because of their faith. The pair was not invited to attend the weddings of Krajewski’s sisters, because his family members did not want to appear as though they were endorsing his relationship, he said.

But now, following the pope’s announcement, he said he is hopeful his family may be open to reconciliation.

“This document is something that the church is saying out loud that says: We’re affirming you two, we’re OK if you’re here, and we’re going to bless your presence and the goodness that comes out of your relationship,” Krajewski said. “That’s the first time that the church has come out that I can think of, and said very specifically, something is happening here that is good. That’s a big change.”

Monday’s announcement regarding blessings for same-sex couples is just the latest example of Francis’ embrace of the LGBTQ community since becoming pope more than a decade ago, and particularly within the last year.

In January, Francis described laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust” in an interview with The Associated Press. The pope met with an international coalition of LGBTQ Catholics, including Duddy-Burke, at the Vatican in October. And just last month, the pontiff signed off on a document that said trans people can be baptized and can be godparents and witnesses at religious weddings.

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