Canadian Archbishop Paul-Andre Durocher of Gatineau, Quebec, arrives for the opening Mass of the Synod of Bishops on the family celebrated by Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Basilica Oct. 4.
By Carol Glatz Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Canadian Archbishop Paul-Andre Durocher of Gatineau, Quebec, said the synod should reflect on the possibility of allowing for female deacons as it seeks ways to open up more opportunities for women in church life.
Where possible, qualified women should be given higher positions and decision-making authority within church structures and new opportunities in ministry, he told Catholic News Service Oct. 6.
Discussing a number of proposals he offered the synod fathers to think about, he said, “I think we should really start looking seriously at the possibility of ordaining women deacons because the diaconate in the church’s tradition has been defined as not being ordered toward priesthood but toward ministry.”
Currently, the Catholic Church permits only men to be ordained as deacons. Deacons can preach and preside at baptisms, funerals and weddings, but may not celebrate Mass or hear confessions.
Speaking to participants at the Synod of Bishops on the family Oct. 6, Archbishop Durocher said he dedicated his three-minute intervention to the role of women in the church — one of the many themes highlighted in the synod’s working document.
The working document, which is guiding the first three weeks of the synod’s discussions, proposed giving women greater responsibility in the church, particularly through involving them in “the decision-making process, their participation — not simply in a formal way — in the governing of some institutions; and their involvement in the formation of ordained ministers.”
Archbishop Durocher, who recently ended his term as president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, told CNS that much of his brief talk was focused on the lingering problem of violence against women, including domestic violence. He said the World Health Organization estimates that 30 percent of women worldwide experience violence by their partner.
He reminded the synod fathers that in the apostolic exhortation “Familiaris Consortio” in 1981, St. John Paul II basically told the church that “we have to make a concerted and clear effort to make sure that there is no more degradation of women in our world, particularly in marriage. And I said, ‘Well, here we are 30 years later and we’re still facing these kinds of numbers.’”
He said he recommended one thing they could do to address this problem was, “as a synod, clearly state that you cannot justify the domination of men over women — certainly not violence — through biblical interpretation,” particularly incorrect interpretations of St. Paul’s call for women to be submissive to their husbands.
In his presentation the archbishop also noted that Pope Benedict XVI had talked about the question of new ministries for women in the church. “It’s a just question to ask. Shouldn’t we be opening up new venues for ministry of women in the church?” he said.
In addition to the possibility of allowing for women deacons, he said he also proposed that women be hired for “decision-making jobs” that could be opened to women in the Roman Curia, diocesan chanceries and large-scale church initiatives and events.
Another thing, he said, “would be to look at the possibility of allowing married couples — men and women, who have been properly trained and accompanied — to speak during Sunday homilies so that they can testify, give witness to the relationship between God’s word and their own marriage life and their own life as families.”
Remember Lance Sanderson, the Christian Brothers High School student who was suspended Monday after asking if he could bring a same-sex date to his school’s Homecoming dance?
Lance didn’t do anything wrong, and after being denied his request, he didn’t even attend the dance, but administrators in his private Memphis, Tennessee school suspended him anyway.
One local elected official took to Facebook to denounce Lance, and the entire LGBT community.
Clark Plunk, the Lakeland, Tennessee Commissioner, on his Facebook page, according to WMC Action News 5, dared Lance to sue the school, calling him a “little homo,” calling all gay people “vicious spiteful people,” and saying gay people are “a threat to our values, our Christian values,” and “mean, cruel spiteful people with an axe to grind.”
Below is Plunk’s full Facebook comment, exactly as reported by Towleroad:
It’s a Christian school so i you don’t like the rules don’t go there. As usual you have one person trying to change the rules just for himself. I’m told by the alumni the gay kid is looking for publicity. I hate the term gay. It makes them sound like they are happy and ‘Gay’ And they want to call people that criticize them homophobes to make them sound mean. As a whole, gays are mean, cruel spiteful people with an axe to grind.
The kids love the school a hate their school is in the limelight over a gay kid and his gay boyfriend….This is not about a homo and his rights it’s about a school that is loved by thousands and their memories and their right to keep their history and Christian values intact.
I would say let the little homo sue all he wants. The alumni of CBHS will meet him dollar for dollar and lawyer for lawyer. This is a threat to our values, our Christian values. Everyone shudders when the homosexuals say the word sue. They are vicious spiteful people.
Plunk told WREG, “I stand by what I said, maybe I didn’t say it the right way.”
“I have been shown a few intolerant comments that were made against myself and other LGBT people,” the teen writes. “I have nothing but forgiveness for the people who wrote or agree with these comments.”
“I recognize that we all have different beliefs and were taught from varying viewpoints. I hope that individuals and the community as a whole will use this as an opportunity to learn about other people’s beliefs. I know that through education and acceptance, we will move forward as a stronger community,” Lance added.
“So it’s one thing to attack an 18-year-old high school student, Will Batts told WMC News. “That’s a problem in and of itself. But the comments themselves are talking about all of us. All of us in the LGBT community.”
Batts reminds the Commissioner that he “has people in his community that are LGBT. People that he serves, pay his salary, and he’s making these hurtful, just dangerous comments.”
He adds, “we know there are plenty of studies that show that this type of speech is what causes harm to young people.”
Plunk’s Facebook page contains this quote: “Be kind to each person you meet because each person is carrying their own special burden.”
Monsignor Krzystof Charamsa smiles as he leaves at the end of his news conference in downtown Rome October 3, 2015.
The Vatican dismissed a priest from his post in a Holy See office on Saturday after he told a newspaper he was gay and urged the Catholic Church to change its stance on homosexuality.
Monsignor Krzystof Charamsa was removed from his position at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal arm where he had worked since 2003, a statement said.
Charamsa, 43, and a Polish theologian, announced he was gay and had a partner in a long interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper on Saturday.
He later held a news conference with his partner, a Spanish man, and gay activists at a Rome restaurant. They had planned a demonstration in front of the Vatican but changed the venue several hours before it was due to have started.
The Vatican said Charamsa’s dismissal had nothing to do with his comments on his personal situation, which it said “merit respect”.
But it said giving the interview and the planned demonstration was “grave and irresponsible” given their timing on the eve of a synod of bishops who will discuss family issues, including how to reach out to gays.
It said his actions would subject the synod, which Pope Francis is due to open on Sunday, to “undue media pressure”.
Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa with his boyfriend, Eduardo
The issue of homosexuality and the Church has dominated the aftermath of the pope’s visit to the United States last week.
In Saturday’s interview, Charamsa said his partner had helped him come to terms with his sexuality and knew he would have to give up the priesthood, although the Vatican statement made no reference to this outcome.
“It’s time for the Church to open its eyes about gay Catholics and to understand that the solution it proposes to them — total abstinence from a life of love — is inhuman,” he was quoted as saying.
The Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is not a sin but that homosexual acts are.
The Vatican has been embarrassed by controversy over the pope’s meeting with Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who went to jail in September for refusing to honor a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and issue same-sex marriage licences.
The Vatican said on Friday that “the only real audience” the pope had during his visit to Washington was with a small group that included a gay couple. Complete Article HERE!
A private Christian high school has suspended a male student who wanted to bring a male date to his Homecoming dance – even after he didn’t go.
Lance Sanderson
Lance Sanderson wanted to bring a date to his high school’s Homecoming dance. The administrators at Christian Brothers High School in Memphis, a college prep school “in the Catholic and Lasallian traditions,” told him no – for “logistical reasons.”
So he started a Change.org petition which garnered almost 24,000 supporters, and his story made headlines.
Apparently, that was exactly what the administration didn’t want.
Even though Lance decided to not even attempt to bring a date – he didn’t even attend the dance Saturday night – Monday morning he was suspended.
“Today I arrived at school around 6:30am,” Lance wrote in a letter to the school’s administrators, to explain his side of the story.
“I sat down to complete my assignments for the classes I planned on attending today. At 7:30am, I was speaking to a teacher when an administrator walked into the room and told me to gather my books and come to the office.
“When I arrived at the office I was told that the administration ‘had 890 other students to worry about’ and could not deal with me. I was told to go home for the week. I said goodbye to a few teachers and students, then drove home.”
Lance says he is “hurt by this exclusion,” and notes that it “goes against the Lasallian value of brotherhood that the school is supposed to stand for.”
“You won’t let me dance with my date and you won’t let me go to class now either. I had hoped that today would be one for positive conversation going forward. Instead, I was sent home.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong and haven’t hurt anybody,” Lance notes. “I want to be welcomed back to the school building today and I want this mean-spirited semi-suspension ended, so that I can do my classwork like anybody else.”
NewNowNext, which first published Lance’s letter today, reports that all he did was “speak out for LGBT students everywhere who experience discrimination from faculty and school administrators citing baseless, outdated policies.”
Apparently, that’s enough to warrant a week’s suspension.
On its website, Christian Brothers High School says tuition and fees total nearly $14,000 a year.
Told they have “890 other students to worry about” while his rights and the respect he deserves are being ignored? Hardly the way to educate anyone.
The Rev. John McNeill, an openly gay Roman Catholic priest who, from the 1970s onward, publicly pressed the church to welcome gay men and lesbians — and who was expelled from his order as a result — died on Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 90.
Rev. John McNeill, second from right, in New York’s gay pride march in the 1980s. He wrote “The Church and the Homosexual.”
His death was announced by DignityUSA, an organization that supports gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics. Father McNeill had helped found its New York chapter in 1972.
A Jesuit who was ordained in 1959, Father McNeill was known in the decades that followed as an author, activist and psychotherapist specializing in the needs of gay clients. He first came to wide, explosive attention in 1976 with the publication of his book “The Church and the Homosexual.”
That book was the first extended nonjudgmental work about gay Catholics, a subject that had long been taboo in official church discourse. It has been credited with helping to set in motion the re-evaluation of the religious stance toward gay people — not only among Catholics but also among those of other faiths — that continues today.
“John McNeill is one of the most important voices in the history of the L.G.B.T. civil rights movement,” Brendan Fay, the director of “Taking a Chance on God,” a 2011 documentary film about Father McNeill, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “ ‘The Church and the Homosexual’ became the primary text that is still considered the key in transforming the conversation on religion and homosexuality.”
For Father McNeill, the book, and his disclosure soon after its publication that he was gay, would lead to years of public opprobrium, censure by the church, exclusion from his order and, in the end, a newfound level of activism that sustained him to the end of his life.
“He was a gay man who was a Jesuit priest — and being a gay man who is a Jesuit priest, by the way, is not an unusual thing,” Mary E. Hunt, a Roman Catholic feminist theologian and longtime friend of Father McNeill’s, said on Friday. “The difference is that John McNeill was honest, and he was honest early. And being honest early meant that he paid a large price.”
“The Church and the Homosexual” drew on Father McNeill’s deep academic training in theology and, though only tacitly, on his own experience. In the book, he argued that a stable, loving same-sex relationship was just as moral, and just as godly, as a heterosexual one and should be acknowledged as such by church leaders.
After an extensive review of the manuscript by a panel of theologians, “The Church and the Homosexual” was published under the imprimatur of the Vatican.
Translated into several languages, the book caused an international sensation. In the United States, Father McNeill appeared on a spate of national television programs. In a 1976 interview with Tom Brokaw on the “Today” show, he publicly identified himself as gay.
“He’s the first priest to come out on national television,” Mr. Fay said.
At the time, Father McNeill described himself in interviews as a celibate gay man. It was a claim he made in public out of necessity: As it was, he was receiving stacks of hate mail, including death threats, from incensed strangers. In private, however, he was living with Charles Chiarelli, his lover since 1965.
John McNeill was born on Sept. 2, 1925, in Buffalo. When he was 4, his mother died; to rear him and his four older siblings, his mother’s sister married his father. In keeping with Old World tradition, they agreed to live celibately as brother and sister.
“We children grew up with the burden of our responsibility for our parents’ frustration and unhappiness,” Father McNeill wrote in his 1998 memoir, “Both Feet Firmly Planted in Midair: My Spiritual Journey.”
At 17, he enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the 87th Infantry. While serving in France, he was taken prisoner by the Nazis. Transported to a prisoner-of-war camp near Leukenwald, Germany, he was kept in a sealed boxcar for days without food or water. He licked frost from the boxcar nailheads until his tongue bled.
The Nazis endeavored to starve their prisoners to death; Mr. McNeill’s weight dropped to 80 pounds. One day, when their guard’s back was turned, a Polish captive threw Mr. McNeill a potato. When Mr. McNeill made a silent gesture of thanks, the Pole quietly made the sign of the cross.
“I always thought I wanted that kind of faith and that kind of courage,” Father McNeill said in Mr. Fay’s documentary. “To be ready to risk my life to help someone in need.”
After the war, he graduated magna cum laude from Canisius College in Buffalo and earned graduate degrees from Bellarmine College in upstate New York and Woodstock College in Maryland. In 1959, he was ordained by Cardinal Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York.
Father McNeill began doctoral studies at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, in 1961. He was achingly lonely, he recalled, and considered suicide. Then he fell in love with another man.
“The experience of the joy and peace that comes with that — it was a clear indication to me that homosexual love was in itself a good love and could be a holy love,” Father McNeill said in the film.
After receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1964, Father McNeill joined the faculty of Le Moyne College in Syracuse. Influenced by the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, he began protesting the Vietnam War.
By 1970, keenly aware of the self-hatred and depression that many gay Catholics experienced, he began ministering to them. He later trained as a psychotherapist at the Institutes of Religion and Health in New York.
He began speaking publicly on gay Catholic issues in the early 1970s, and in 1976 published “The Church and the Homosexual.”
Though the church had approved the book, it reneged over the next year, as Father McNeill became widely known as a gay-rights champion. In 1977, the Vatican ordered him not to speak or write publicly on the subject. Out of his deep fealty to his religion, and his feeling that the church needed time to come to terms with the issue, he agreed.
He obeyed the order for nearly a decade, though he continued quiet pastoral work with gay men and lesbians. Over time, however, two things spurred him to speak out, though he knew that in doing so he risked expulsion from his order.
The first spur was the AIDS epidemic, to which he increasingly turned his attention. With the Rev. Mychal Judge, Father McNeill, then living in New York, established an AIDS ministry, serving homeless people in Harlem. (Father Judge, a Roman Catholic priest who privately identified himself as gay, was killed in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center while aiding New York City firefighters.)
The second spur was an official document, “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” issued by the Vatican in October 1986. It was released above the signatures of Archbishop Alberto Bovone and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Cardinal Ratzinger, then the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, would serve from 2005 until 2013 as Pope Benedict XVI.
The document, known as a pastoral letter, declared that homosexuality was “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.”
In November, Father McNeill condemned the letter in a statement issued to The New York Times and The National Catholic Reporter. Cardinal Ratzinger responded by ordering him to keep silent on the subject, and to cease his pastoral work with gays and lesbians, or risk expulsion from his order.
Father McNeill demurred, and in early 1987, on the Vatican’s orders, he was expelled from the Jesuits. He was still nominally a priest, but for all practical purposes could perform few official priestly functions, including celebrating Mass.
Though the expulsion caused him great pain, Father McNeill said, it was liberating in other respects. He continued his psychotherapy practice and became more visible than ever as an activist. In 1987, he was the grand marshal of the New York City gay pride parade.
Father McNeill, who also taught at Fordham University and elsewhere, had lived in Fort Lauderdale in recent years. Mr. Chiarelli, whom he married in Toronto in 2008, is believed to be his only immediate survivor.
His other books include “Taking a Chance on God: Liberating Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Lovers, Families and Friends” (1988) and “Freedom, Glorious Freedom: The Spiritual Journey to the Fullness of Life for Gays, Lesbians and Everybody Else” (1995).
His expulsion notwithstanding, Father McNeill “remained very much a Catholic throughout his life, remained very much a Jesuit in his orientation throughout his life, and remained very much a priest throughout his life,” said Dr. Hunt, the theologian.
This was perhaps never more starkly evident than at the end of his life, during his final hospital stay. On the door of his room, Mr. Fay said, hung a sign that had been placed there at Father McNeill’s request.
