Category: Gay Catholics

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Local Gay Catholics React to Archbishop’s Statement on Fired Gay Teacher

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Yesterday, we reported that Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput issued a statement over the recent termination of openly gay Waldron Mercy Academy teacher Margie Winters. In it, he stated that was “very grateful to the Religious Sisters of Mercy and to the principal and board members of Waldron Mercy for taking the steps to ensure that the Catholic faith is presented in a way fully in accord with the teaching of the Church.” We wanted to see the reaction of local gay Philadelphians who identify as Catholic (or, in some cases, recovering Catholics), so we asked them how the rhetoric from Chaput and other Catholic leaders impacts their faith and belief in the Church.

“Obviously I don’t agree with [the Church’s] decisions. It’s a shame but every religion has it’s oddball decisions and leading characters. I respect their decision as it’s still technically okay to discriminate against someone’s sexual orientation, though I personally don’t think you should be allowed to do so. I do still think certain messages religion brings, including togetherness and treating others respectfully, is still important for people to hear. If [the teacher’s firing] is based on her marriage and not her performance, then that goes against the core teachings I was brought up to believe.”-Matt O’Neill

“I don’t that that it is right, obviously. I feel that with Catholics, we are kind of forced to believe certain things, and some things I do just because that is how I was raised and how most of my family is. Do I think that it is necessarily right? No. I believe that even though that Catholics believe that being gay is wrong, I still believe when I die that I will go to heaven, at least that is what I pray for everyday. I hardly go to church anymore not do I believe in confession. I guess it is just being raised Catholic that I still believe in some of the beliefs but not necessarily all of them. One of the stories from the bible that I remember being told when I went to Catholic schools is the story of Mary Magdeline, who was basically a hooker and when people were going to ‘stone’ her for what she was doing, Jesus stopped it and said something like ‘let he who is without sin, cast the first stone’ and no one threw a stone. This resonates a lot with me because I feel that in that scenario, Jesus doesn’t judge, and no one else shouldn’t either. Even though that Catholics believe being gay is a sin, there are many other sins that people do. However, I feel like if I have good morals and a firm belief in God, I will eventually get accepted into heaven.”-Michael Niedbalski

“Personally, the hypocrisy and passive-aggressive bigotry and ignorance they spew made me feel very unwelcome. This sort of rhetoric is what drove me from their church, but I don’t think it by any means is an exclusively Catholic message. However, it has to be partially responsible why so many Catholic schools have shut their doors and the church itself is failing. When you alienate so many people and the people who care for them, it can’t be surprising when many feel unrepresented and unwelcome. It definitely did harm to me growing up in that mentality. The message I got as a prepubescent boy was that unless you were married to a woman with children, then you didn’t matter, unless you wanted to become a priest. Frankly those were the only options presented to me. And the Catholic church’s archaic stance on safe sex and abstinence-only policies for their students definitely had a contributing factor in my seroconversion and HIV status at the age of 17.”-Greg Schell

“I am embarrassed to be Catholic. I go back to what I was taught in Catholic school. They beat this one phrase in your head: ‘Judge not least ye be judged!’ That gives me the strength at times to continue, knowing that those hiding behind religion will be judged by God at the End of Days. What hurts me so much about this is the Catholic Church moved their priests around who molested their own parishioners and protected them, yet they will viciously go after the LGTB community and call us, me, a sinner or unclean when their own priests hurt kids both mentally and physically.”-Patrick Hagerty

“Chaput’s statement does not dishearten me because it does not reflect the living Church. It reflects a stagnant, dying Church. Years ago, myself and a fellow gay Catholic started a young adult Catholic community in Philadelphia. The majority of our young adult Catholics (straight and gay) attend mass every Sunday, are involved in parish-life, serve their local communities, and also disagree with a number of the Church’s teachings, especially its position on homosexuality. Catholics that disagree with Church leadership, and its antiquated teachings, have found voice, and have found one another. We’re not going anywhere. Together, we have found ways to work around those, like Chaput, who interfere with our faith, and our unconditional love for all others, without distinction. While sometimes difficult to see, many Catholics are promoting LGBT-friendly changes within the Church, its affiliated organizations (including Catholic schools), and in communities near and far. Such change has emerged, is occurring, and will continue to unfold in spite of leaders like Chaput. And this change is only fueled by a Pope who appears to be far more loving and compassionate than our Bishop Chaput.”-Seth Jacobson
Complete Article HERE!

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What is it about some Catholics…

What is it about some Catholics and their persecution complex?

 

Gay Marriage Opponents Act Like an Oppressed Minority in Catholic Group’s Ad Message is even styled as a coming-out announcement

By Kristina Monllos

About halfway through this two-and-a-half-minute film from conservative nonprofit the Catholic Vote, its treacly, overlystylized message becomes clear. These Catholics are nervous about revealing their stance on same-sex marriage because they’re (spoiler alert!) against it.

That stance is nothing new. And everyone is entitled to their opinion, as long as it doesn’t lead to legislation that discriminates. No, what’s galling about the ad is its appropriation of LGBTQ themes to marginalize LGBTQ people.

The ad, with a straight face, position Catholics as a persecuted group for not having their message of intolerance (here blatantly recast as its opposite) widely accepted these days. It even plays like a coming-out video for Catholics who are afraid to take the “brave” step of voicing their objection to equality. That’s a pretty audacious tactic—disingenuous and disrespectful, to say the least.

 

Beyond that, it is rather illogical. You can’t reposition a group as oppressed when there is no movement to oppress them. And you certainly can’t equate being called a bigot for spouting intolerance with anything near what members of the LGBTQ community have experienced for decades.

The empowering music is on point, though.

Oh, and thankfully there’s already a parody…


Complete Article HERE!

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Gay Catholics Will Be Silenced During Pope Francis’ Philadelphia Visit: Archbishop

By Philip Pullella

Homosexuals can attend a Catholic family congress in Philadelphia during Pope Francis’ U.S. visit this year but won’t be allowed to use it to attack Church teachings, the city’s archbishop said on Thursday.

bishop chaput2

“We don’t want to provide a platform at the meeting for people to lobby for positions contrary to the life of our Church,” said Archbishop Charles Chaput. The Catholic Church teaches homosexuality is not sinful but homosexual acts are.

“We are not providing that kind of lobbying opportunity,” he told a news conference presenting the September 22-27 congress known as the World Meeting of Families.

Gay Catholic groups and families headed by gay Catholics had asked for an official presence at the gathering to present their view that homosexuals should be fully welcomed in the Church.

The pope will attend the last two days of the Philadelphia meeting at the end of a trip that will take him to Cuba as well as New York and Washington.

About 15,000 people from around the world are expected to attend the family congress to hear lectures and take part in workshops on family issues before the pope arrives to close the gathering.

“We hope that everyone feels welcome and certainly people who have experienced same-sex attraction are welcome like everyone else,” Chaput said.

Bishop John McIntyre, also of Philadelphia, said the only event dedicated to gay issues at the congress will be one by Ron Belgau, a celibate gay Catholic and founder of the Spiritual Friendship Initiative.

Belgau blogs and lectures about how Catholic gays can live by the Church’s teaching.

McIntyre said Belgau “will talk about his own coming to terms with his sexual orientation and the manner in which he embraced the teachings of the Church” and his mother will also speak.

The program for an event Belgau addressed last year at the University of Notre Dame said he spoke of “a faithful and orthodox response to the challenge of homosexuality”.

Catholic gay couples have contested the Church’s ban on homosexual activity, saying it deprives them of the intimacy that is part of a loving relationship.

It will be the eighth World Meeting of Families since the event was started by the late Pope John Paul in 1994 to promote traditional family values. It is held every three years in a different city.

Organizers said they expect up to two million people to attend the final event, a Mass by the pope on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a boulevard that runs through they city.

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Report: Former Twin Cities archbishop John Nienstedt tried to limit investigation

The former archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, John Nienstedt, interfered with an investigation by an outside law firm into allegations of his misconduct, Minnesota Public Radio reported Friday.

While Nienstedt authorized the investigation in the hope of clearing his name, the results threatened to ruin it. Several of his top advisers gathered privately in April 2014, and read sworn statements gathered by the lawyers that accused Nienstedt of inappropriate behavior, including sexual advances toward priests. Each adviser agreed he should resign.Archbishop John Nienstedt

A few days later, Auxiliary Bishops Lee Piche and Andrew Cozzens traveled to Washington to tell the papal ambassador; MPR was unable to learn what transpired there. But soon after the bishops returned home, the investigation as originally conceived ended, with Piche limiting the probe to allegations of crimes and grave sins. A new law firm eventually took over.

The Vatican announced Nienstedt’s and Piche’s resignationsMonday. They stepped down amid an intensifying scandal over how the archdiocese handled cases of clerical sexual misconduct. The archdiocese sought bankruptcy protection in January as abuse claims rose, and prosecutors filed criminal child-endangerment charges against the archdiocese earlier this month for allegedly turning a blind eye to Curtis Wehmeyer, a now-imprisoned former priest convicted of molesting two boys.

MPR said its details of how Nienstedt tried to limit the investigation came from interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of the inquiry, including four people who provided affidavits to investigators, current and former archdiocese officials, and others who spoke with the investigators.

MPR could not reach Nienstedt for comment on the new allegations. In a 2014 interview, Nienstedt said, “I’ve done nothing criminally wrong ever, and nothing immoral” and that he hadn’t interfered with the investigation.

But attorneys at the Greene Espel law firm — the initial firm on the Nienstedt investigation — disputed the archbishop’s claim of noninterference as well as a recent similar statement from Piche.

“We strongly disagree with those statements. Greene Espel’s investigation and work will not be mischaracterized without a response by us,” attorneys Matt Forsgren and David Wallace-Jackson told MPR.

The attorneys had wanted to know whether Nienstedt had a personal relationship with Wehmeyer, and whether that influenced his decision to keep Wehmeyer in ministry despite knowing about his past misconduct. Nienstedt told MPR in 2014 he did not have a sexually inappropriate relationship with Wehmeyer.

 Wehmeyer told the investigators he couldn’t understand why Nienstedt wanted to spend time with him or why he kept him in ministry. He said Nienstedt made him uncomfortable and that he wasn’t interested in Nienstedt.

Ex-seminarian James Heathcott, who lives in Oregon, told MPR he enrolled at a Detroit seminary in 1987 when he was 18. Nienstedt became rector a year later, and the seminary’s tone immediately changed, he said.

According to the affidavit, Nienstedt asked Heathcott: “Have you explored your sexuality?” and “Do you think you have homosexual tendencies?”

Heathcott also said Nienstedt later invited him on a ski trip at a “private chalet.” Heathcott said he declined and told Nienstedt that the invitation appeared to contradict his own statements to seminarians about the importance of boundaries. He said Nienstedt told him a few days later to pack his belongings and leave.

“I consider Nienstedt’s interactions with me to be a kind of grooming … I believe he denied me the chance to continue exploring my calling to the priesthood to its fruition,” he said in the affidavit.

The archdiocese, which filed for bankruptcy in January, hasn’t said what it paid Greene Espel. MPR, citing people with direct knowledge, put the cost at several hundred thousand dollars. The firm wouldn’t comment either. The archdiocese paid the second firm, Wold Morrison, nearly $139,000 between October and January, but the filing didn’t say if it made any payments to either firm earlier.

Complete Article HERE!

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Bernard Lynch – the ‘Aids Priest’

by AMY SMITH

IT’S no surprise that Father Bernàrd Lynch’s life fills not one but three Channel 4 documen­taries. Nicknamed by newspapers “The Aids Priest”, Bernàrd, 67, spent almost four decades ministering to people with HIV and Aids in America and the UK. Based in Camden since 1992, he chairs the Camden LGBT Forum and the London Irish LGBT Network.

Bernard Lynch
Father Bernàrd Lynch

“Camden Town reminded me of New York – Greenwich Village and the East Village. It had all that bohemianism and artistic edge,” he says. “I’m at home here because it is truly catholic in the secular sense of the word.”

Bernàrd has publicly railed against inequalities in the Catholic Church and society. As an openly married gay man, the Church revoked his licence in 1989 yet he continues to perform mass at the behest of parish priests and works as a psychotherapist. A handsome, softly spoken man, the only outward symbol of his faith is the Celtic sign of hope he wears on a chain, subtly bringing it up to his lips at the mention of the gospel.

“I prefer to be called Bernàrd but I don’t make an issue of it,” he says. “As a priest, like a doctor or all caring professions, people come with all kinds of expectations, and some people need to call me ‘Father’ because that is the kind of relation­ship they want and that’s OK but it’s not my choice.”

The lightning speed at which Aids ravaged comm­unities in the 1980s has already been relegated to history; the misinforma­tion, the rumours, slurs and prejudice somehow mislaid. “But I will never forget,” he says. “I read in First World War memoirs ‘how does one go back to bagging corn from being in the trenches?’ Well, I’m back bagging corn. No one knows and that’s part of the pain.”

It was sectarian violence in Northern Ireland that triggered Bernàrd ’s campaigning spirit. Aged 17, he began training in the African Missions college near Belfast. There he found a definite separation between the seminary and contemporary politics. “I didn’t start out as a radical or a rebel, anything but. I was radicalised by what I saw,” he says. “I happen­ed to be in Northern Ireland for Bloody Sunday in 1972. The seminary was a very closed community but after seeing that massacre of 14 un­armed teenagers shot in the back they released us en masse to march against the atrocity and that was my first exposure to politics.”

Bernàrd cared for hundreds of men dying from Aids in New York. Time and time again he would encourage mothers to touch their sons. “It was incredible, the sense of contamina­tion,” he says. “I was literally taking their hands and saying you cannot get it, it’s OK. And they would thank me like I had done a miracle.” A week later he could be officiating at the funeral, always introduced as “a friend of the family”.

He remembers working with Mother Theresa in New York. She and her sisters would not allow gay partners at patients death­beds because they were “occas­ions of sin”.

“My own church blamed people for getting the disease. Can you think of anything more unchris­tian? A lot of Catholic men died in despair because of their church. At a time when the church should have been their hope, their way of easing them into their death, it became in fact the arbiter of hate.”

Yet Bernàrd’s faith stayed strong. He continues to separate his belief from the religion, distilling it into two words – “love and justice”.

Last month Bernàrd, with the London Irish LGBT Network, watched the results of the Irish marriage equality referen­dum at Ku Bar in Soho. It was a mixed crowd and though ecstatic at the overwhelming victory Bernàrd was moved by the stories he heard. Young men and women told how they had moved to London away from homophobic discrimination.

“I couldn’t delight more with the result and that isn’t anti-Cath­olic,” he says. “It’s good for the Church and that is certainly better for the Irish nation. The Church, in my mind, has no right to get into bed with anybody, that is not its business.”
Complete Article HERE!