Category: Theological Debate

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Michael Moore angers religious community by joking that Jesus was gay

Social commentator and film-maker Michael Moore has attracted the wrath of the religious after joking that Jesus Christ was gay.

According to online magazine The Blaze, Moore – whose films include Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine – made the comment at at Washington D.C.’s Georgetown University on Friday.

He was invited to the school to discuss his latest book Here Comes Trouble.

But while there he also used religion to make political references to U.S. healthcare, President Barack Obama and tax rates for the wealthy.

While doing so, he insinuated Jesus was gay by saying: “You know those 12 men Jesus was always hanging out with? Mhm.”

Several people in the three-hundred strong audience laughed – although the comment has sparked anger among the online community.

In response, one person wrote on The Blaze website’s comment facility: “Blasphemy, eh Mr. Moore? In My Book, that’s a one-way ticket to the eternal furnace.

“BTW, why is a Catholic institution even allowing this liberal nut job on their premises? I suspect his soul is already spoken for and not much other than his contrition will save it from the pit.”

Full Article HERE!

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Protestant denomination to ordain openly gay minister in Madison Wisconsin

Twenty-one years ago, Scott Anderson had a choice. He could continue to serve as a Presbyterian minister but hide his identity as a gay man. Or he could leave the ministry and live, as he says, “with a sense of integrity” about who he is.

Anderson left the ministry in 1990, believing that door would never open to him again. Now it has.

On Saturday, Anderson, of Madison, will become the first openly gay minister ordained by the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. since the denomination amended its constitution this year to allow it.

Hundreds of friends and supporters, and possibly some protesters, are expected to turn out at Covenant Presbyterian Church for what is being called a watershed moment in the life of the denomination. It is also the culmination of one man’s deeply personal spiritual journey.

“I have felt a call from God to serve as a parish pastor since I was a sophomore in high school,” said Anderson, 56, a near-lifelong Presbyterian who has spent the last eight years as executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches.

“When I came out and left the ministry, I never thought in my lifetime this day would come,” he said. “This has been 20 years of God surprising me, really.”

Anderson will be ordained this time by the John Knox Presbytery, a group of 60 congregations in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. Sunday’s service follows decades of rancorous debate in the mainline Christian denomination over the inclusion of gay and lesbian people, and a yearlong legal challenge by a Portage-area congregation that sought to block the ordination.

Supporters say Anderson is profoundly qualified, describing him as a compassionate and deeply spiritual man, a gifted preacher, well-versed in theology.

“Scott’s gifts for ministry were so abundant and clear,” said the Rev. Nancy Enderle, who headed the presbytery committee that oversaw Anderson’s three-year ordination process and recommended him unanimously. She now serves as executive director of Covenant Network, a Presbyterian organization devoted to inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

“He has this tremendous intellect, but also an air of humility and grace,” she said.

Despite the committee’s unanimous recommendation, the broader church and even the John Knox Presbytery remain deeply divided over the issue of gay and lesbian clergy.

“We want leaders to uphold the highest levels of conduct within the denomination,” said Forrest Norman, chairman of the North Carolina-based Presbyterian Lay Committee, which opposes the ordination of gay and lesbian pastors, saying it is inconsistent with Biblical teaching.

“We want people to live in the way God called them to live.”

Gay and lesbian advocates also point to the Bible to support their views.

“The kinds of covenanted, faithful same-sex partnerships we have today simply didn’t exist in the times when the Bible was written,” said the Rev. Mark Achtemeier, who served with Anderson on a national panel charged with helping the church find some consensus around the issue.

“What the Bible writers were condemning were the exploitative, violent, idolatrous behaviors that were going on in the pagan societies all around them,” said Achtemeier, a conservative Christian who now supports the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy and will deliver the sermon at Anderson’s ordination.
Eight years as a pastor

Anderson grew up near Sacramento, Calif., in a conservative Christian family that joined the Presbyterian Church when he was a teenager. He attended Princeton Theological Seminary, where he realized he was gay, and spent eight years pastoring churches in California until he was outed by a couple in his congregation in 1990.

Anderson calls the meeting where he told church members the truth about who he is “the best and worst moment of my life.”

The congregation responded with tears and a standing ovation, he said, and weeks later: a check that would cover two years of graduate school.

Anderson picked up a master’s in public policy, assuming he’d end up in the vast California state government bureaucracy. But a part-time post with the California Council of Churches set him on a career path that would bring him to Wisconsin – with his partner of now 20 years – in 2003.

Along the way, he remained active in the Presbyterian church, including working to overturn the church’s 1978 prohibition against ordaining gays and lesbians.

“I think part of my call from God was to stay,” said Anderson, who’s had offers to leave for other denominations.

He was the only openly gay member of the national task force that unanimously recommended, among other things, a way for presbyteries to ordain gays and lesbians.

In 2006, the church resurrected a 200-year-old practice known as “scrupling,” which allowed a candidate to state his objection to a particular church teaching, and the presbytery to decide whether that objection was enough to bar ordination.
Finally a chance again

That was the crack in the door for Anderson to begin the three-year ordination process. The John Knox Presbytery approved him 81-25, but a dissenting congregation filed a complaint to block it in the church’s legal system.

By the time the high court took it up this summer, it was moot. The national church had voted in 2010 to change its constitution to allow gay and lesbian clergy, and it was ratified by a majority of presbyteries in July.

The door was now fully open to Anderson.

At his ordination, Anderson will receive the pastor’s stole he wore at his last church in California. He had given it to the Shower of Stoles project, a commemoration of the gifts lost to the church by the barring of gay and lesbian clergy.

For now, he’ll stay at the Council of Churches, which serves as a resource and advocacy arm for Christian congregations around a host of social and economic justice issues.

But his hope is to one day return to the parish ministry.

“I have probably 10, 12 more years of ministry left,” he said. “And whether that’s here or in a local parish, I’ll have to wait and see what God has in store for me.”

Full Article HERE!

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Pope disappoints hopes of Catholics and Protestants

Pope Benedict’s visit to his German homeland was bound to provoke harsh words from his critics. The surprise of the event was how bluntly he took his own Church to task and disappointed Protestants ready to work with him.

Despite his frail physique and soft-spoken style, the 84-year-old pontiff delivered a vigorous defense of his conservative views and brusquely rejected calls for reforms, some of which even had cautious support from some bishops.

At the end of his four-day visit on Sunday, Benedict predicted “small communities of believers” would spread Catholicism in future — and not, he seemed to say, the rich German Church, which he hinted had more bureaucracy than belief.

Some Church leaders fear they may end up with only small communities if they don’t consider reforms. Record numbers of the faithful have officially quit the Church in recent years, often in protest against clerical sex abuse scandals.

“The pope was demanding, almost hard — not in his manner, but in the essence of his words,” Berlin’s Tagesspiegel daily commented. “Nobody should be fooled by his fragility.”

“The pope sees the signs of the times, but interprets them not as a demand to courageously open up the Catholic Church but, on the contrary, to close its ranks.”

Breaking down faith barriers is a major issue in the land of the Protestant Reformation. Christians are equally divided between Catholics and Protestants in Germany and intermarriage and ecumenical cooperation make both sides ask why old divisions still exist.

Politicians from President Christian Wulff down publicly told the pope they hoped his visit would help to bring the churches closer. One suggestion was to allow Protestant spouses of Catholics to take communion when they attend Catholic mass.

“ECUMENICAL DISASTER”

Benedict made a historic gesture for interchurch unity by presiding over a prayer service with a Protestant bishop in the Erfurt monastery where the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther lived as a monk before he split with Rome.

But in his speech to Protestant leaders there, he bluntly told them they were mistaken to expect him to come bearing gifts, like a political leader coming to negotiate a treaty.

His hosts, who would have been happy with vague words about the need to look into some problems, instead heard a short lecture about how Christian faith could not be negotiated.

Benedict’s Protestant host in Erfurt, Bishop Nikolaus Schneider, stressed the bright side of the meeting — the pope’s positive words about Luther’s deep faith — and added: “Our heart burns for more, and that was clear today.”

German media were less diplomatic. “An ecumenical disaster,” wrote the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, blasting Benedict’s treatment of Protestant leaders as “spectacularly half-hearted, patronizing and callous.”

The lay Catholic group We Are Church said the faithful should stop hoping for help from Rome. The churches in Germany should simply “declare the unspeakable 500-year-old split in Christianity to be ended,” it said in a statement.

“Let’s do what unites us,” it declared.

Catholics weren’t spared either. Another reform proposal was to allow Catholics who divorce and remarry to receive communion at mass, something now barred to them because the Church upholds the sanctity of the first marriage.

Even Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of the German Bishops’ Conference, said before the visit he hoped to see some change in coming years to prevent the rising number of divorced Catholics feeling excluded from the Church.

Benedict passed over that idea in silence.

PRAY AND OBEY

By contrast, Benedict was loud and clear in criticizing the German Church as too bureaucratic and focused on organizational changes rather than on the zeal of true faith, which he said was the key to confronting its problems.

He told this to the lay Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), some of whose members have called for moderate reforms such as allowing women deacons to help at mass or ordaining older married men to counter the shortage of priests.

If a stranger from a far country visited Germany, he told them, he would find it materially rich and religiously poor.

“The real crisis of the Church in the Western world is a crisis of belief,” Benedict said. “If we don’t find a way to really renew the faith, all structural reform will remain ineffective.”

The next day, he repeated this message to a wide range of lay Catholics working with and for the Church. He said they could only face the challenges ahead if they closed ranks with their bishops and with the Vatican.

“It is not a question here of finding a new strategy to relaunch the Church,” he said, but of putting strategy aside and “living the faith fully, here and now.”

ZdK president Alois Glueck was not convinced. “It’s not a question of either promoting introspection and prayer or changing Church structures,” he said. “We have to link both these things.”

Munich’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the most influential daily in the pope’s native Bavaria, summed up the trip with the headline: “He came, he spoke and he disappointed.”

Full Article HERE!

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Tasmanian gay marriage vote disappoints Archbishop

The Archbishop of Hobart, Adrian Doyle, has expressed his disappointment with the vote on the floor of the Tasmanian Parliament, supporting marriage equality for gays and lesbians, the archdiocese said in a statement.

A motion backing same-sex marriage was passed by the Tasmanian House of Assembly, the first time an Australian parliament has voted for marriage equality for gays and lesbians, reports The Mercury.

The Greens’ motion calls on the Federal Government to change the Marriage Act.

“The opposition of the Catholic Church in Tasmania isn’t about being anti-gay, as we acknowledge and accept the current arrangement with civil unions but the real debate relates to the broader issue of marriage and equality in Australian society,” Archbishop Doyle said in his statement.

“There are other groups in Australian society who have different cultural and religious beliefs towards marriage and want their position also adopted under the Marriage Act. Therefore, my question is that should we, as a society, continue to dilute our institutions to accommodate select groups based on social, cultural or religious beliefs?”

“We have seen this occur over the past years, particularly in the lead-up to the 2007 election, when the Islamic community spoke about Australian marriage laws being changed to include polygymous marriages and actively lobbied the Rudd Government to change the Marriage Act.”

“While polygamous marriage is accepted across the Islamic community, the practice is not acceptable under Australian law and nor would arranged marriages as practiced in other cultures.”

“Both the State and Federal Governments are reluctant to enter the broader debate. Hence the vote in the Tasmanian Parliament was relevant to one section of society and therefore could not really be labelled as equal.”

“Our position on maintaining the current meaning of marriage is well known and the Church will continue to lobby both State and Federal politicians to ensure the Act is not changed.”

The Mercury reports Greens leader Nick McKim saying the motion provided hope.

“By voting in support of marriage equality, Tasmania has written itself into this country’s history books, as a national leader in advocating a compassionate and progressive society,” he said. “It is now time for the Federal Government to act to remove legally entrenched discrimination.”

Mr McKim said that if the Federal Government did not reform marriage laws by the end of the year, he would push on with plans for state legislation.

Premier Lara Giddings said the vote was a great day for the state.

“Tasmania has come a long way since 1997 when we rectified the terrible situation of having homosexual relationships considered illegal in this state,” she said. “We’ve come a long way to show we are in fact a tolerant and compassionate community.”

Full Article HERE!

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Priesthood should be open to male, female, married or celibate – Fr Sean McDonagh

The call by the retired Bishop for Derry for the Church to change its position on mandatory celibacy for priests does not go far enough, according to Association of Catholic Priests co-founder, Fr Sean McDonagh.

The Columban priest was responding to comments made on the Church’s policy on celibacy by Dr Edward Daly in his memoirs A Troubled See: Memoirs of a Derry Bishop.

Dr Daly, who was Bishop of Derry between 1974 and 1993, describes celibacy in his book as, “an obligation that has caused many wonderful potential candidates to turn away from a vocation, and other fine men to resign their priesthood at great loss to the church.” Elsewhere Dr Daly writes, “If things continue as they are, a lot of parish communities will not have a priest in a few years’ time, and those that they have will be older, weary and greatly overworked.”

He asks why celibacy should be “the great sacred and unyielding arbiter, the paradigm of diocesan priesthood?”

In his memoirs, Dr Edward Daly said he hoped, “that senior members of the clergy and laity make their views more forcefully known” on the issue of celibacy and he said these were views that were often expressed privately but seldom publicly.

Responding, Fr Sean McDonagh called on the Irish hierarchy to support the retired Bishop’s call rather than going “down the cul de sac” of a married diaconate, which, he warned, would “clericalise laity” instead of looking to a “different kind of priesthood.”

Speaking to UK Catholic weekly, The Tablet, Fr Sean McDonagh commented, “I would go further than that – it should be open to male, female, married or celibate.”

He told ciNews that he was not the first voice in the Church to call for women priests, and referred to Cardinal Martini of Milan’s writings, and biblical scholar, Professor Jerome Murphy O’Connor.

Fr McDonagh also called on the bishops to conduct a survey among the laity to assess people’s level of satisfaction with the new translation of the Roman missal, which he said had been “imposed” by Rome. The Columban missionary told ciNews that a number of women in his congregation last Sunday had voiced their opposition to the new translation and particularly to the use of non-inclusive language.

Fr McDonagh, who is a linguist, urged anyone who is unhappy with the new translation to write to the bishops and outline their difficulties. He added, “The anecdotal line is that everyone is happy with it.” But he said, “People should tell the truth about what has happened. People were not consulted on it.”

“I would like to see, within a year or a year and a half at the most, a really good survey done to find out what people really think of it.” The survey, he said, needed to include all age groups.

Referring to Vatican II, the ACP co-founder said its basic insight had been that the liturgy is for everyone and that the Church should be facilitating participation. “If you are starting to use archaic language, you are not facilitating partnership and participation for a lot of people – why do that?” he asked.

Referring to the fact that just 200 students out of 55,000 who sat the Leaving Certificate studied Latin, Fr McDonagh asked, “What has Latin got to offer?” and he suggested to ciNews that the proponents of the new translation are “operating out of a world that doesn’t exist.”

He queried whether they were intent on returning to pre Vatican II approach “when the laity were basically an audience and could not participate because they did not understand or speak Latin?”

Fr McDonagh said the new translation demonstrated “incompetence” in the decision to follow a literalist translation rather than use dynamic equivalence.

Full Article HERE!