Category: Who Is The Church

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Bishop Geoffrey Robinson: 12 Elements Of Reform Needed To Deal With The Culture Of Abuse

Australian Bishop Geoffrey Robinson’s talk on the twelve areas with in Roman Catholicism which need reform, or as he might say, attending to. It’s a very comprehensive list. The following is a list of the Robinson’s 12 points and Brian’s short description. The video (below) is just over 26 minutes and well worth watching.

  1. The Angry God: This image the institution projects of a God of Wrath and Anger needs to be challenged. It is wrong, and bad theology. It’s also really bad psychology.
  2. The Male Church: Women have been marginalized and treated as second class by the institution for far too long.
  3. The Culture of Celibacy: Not so much celibacy per se but mandatory celibacy has to take a major part of the blame as a contributing cause of this crisis.
  4. Moral Immaturity: The seminary system and training of priests and religious has not encouraged moral and spiritual maturity. That needs to be changed.
  5. Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy: Bishop Robinson argues there has been far too much emphasis on Orthodoxy (right belief) and far too little on Orthopraxy (right action).
  6. Sexual Teaching: He argues there needs to be “a profound change in all of sexual morality” within the institution.
  7. The Mystique of Priesthood: Priests have been placed on a pedestal of perfection for far too long. It’s dangerous to them and it’s dangerous to the people they are meant to be serving. Priests are not God — they struggle with all the challenges that any human beings struggle with in their lives. Often because of the positions on these pedestals they have been placed on they find it difficult to find support in their lives. The laity also have a huge part to play in keeping priests on those pedestals.
  8. Professionalism: There has been a rise in professional standards across almost all professions — ethical codes, structures that protect and foster professional integrity but the priesthood has largely been excluded. He argues much more needs to be done to lift professional standards of those in ministry with the Church.
  9. A Pope who can’t make mistakes: He argues that the way the pontiff has been placed on a pedestal and immune from criticism has been especially damaging to the institution. Creeping infallibility is a huge problem not only for some at the top who would seem to believe they have divine perfection already but also for many at the lowest rungs of the Church. This culture needs to be changed.
  10. The Loyalty of Bishops to the Pope: Their oath of allegiance is to the Pope — not to God, or the Church. He argues significant blame has to be placed at the feet of the late John Paul II for his inadequate responses to the growing sexual abuse crisis.
  11. A Culture of Secrecy: Bishop Robinson argues that the culture of secrecy in the Church has been a major cause of the problems. Bishops need to present themselves in the best light all the time and the culture of secrecy runs with that. It has been deeply damaging to the institution and needs to be changed.
  12. The Sensus Fidelium: He argues the institutional leadership need to be listening far more to the thinking of the broad body of the faithful not just to the small sectors that crave authority figures and founts of certitude.

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Toledo woman attempts to heed call to be priest

Beverly Bingle is on a mission impossible.

A “cradle Catholic” who retired from the Toledo Catholic Diocese after serving as a pastoral associate at Blessed Sacrament Parish, Ms. Bingle feels that God is calling her to be a priest — a Roman Catholic priest.

She knows the rules, of course, stated clearly and concisely in Canon Law 1024: “Only a baptized male validly receives sacred ordination.”

And she knows church tradition.

But the deeply spiritual Toledoan with a doctorate in ministry from Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit has been unable to shake the feeling that God wants her to be a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, to which she has belonged for all of her 68 years.

A no-frills type who shuns makeup, Ms. Bingle lives in a scruffy part of North Toledo where she plants a huge garden in her backyard and gives the harvest away to anyone in need.

Her calling to the priesthood is something she has wrestled with for years, she said, but the feeling began to intensify about a year ago when she “stumbled across” a group called Roman Catholic Womenpriests.

Members consider the group a renewal movement that is fully and legitimately part of the Roman Catholic Church. Their motto is “a new model of ministry in a renewed church.”

The female priests and supporters assert that the women’s ordination was in proper Apostolic Succession because the movement started when a male Roman Catholic bishop ordained seven female priests on the Danube River in Germany in 2002. A year later, the same bishop ordained two women as bishops.

Members and supporters of Roman Catholic Womenpriests believe Canon Law 1024 is in error, and like other unjust laws in history, including slavery, will be changed — eventually. But they refuse to sit idly by, awaiting what would be a seismic shift in church law and tradition.

About 90 women in the United States have been ordained thus far in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement, and five women have been ordained bishops. There are other female priests and bishops around the globe.

Female priests serve their flocks in different settings, including hospitals and nursing homes, with many presiding at weekly liturgies in rented or donated Protestant spaces.

Ms. Bingle has applied and has been accepted into the organization’s priestly formation program and is on track to be ordained sometime in 2013.

Three other women in the Toledo area are studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood, according to Ms. Bingle, but they are not ready to go public. Two are likely to be “catacomb priests” who never go public, and a third now works for the Toledo Diocese and fears she could lose her job and retirement benefits if the church finds out, Ms. Bingle said.

Taking a risk

Anyone who openly defies church law takes risk, including punishment from the church and harassment from traditional-minded Roman Catholics.

The Vatican has forbidden discussion of women’s ordination and has ruled that anyone who takes part in the ordination of female priests is automatically excommunicated by that action.

Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, in a statement explaining the church’s ban on female priests, cited Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, which said unequivocally that women cannot be ordained.

“The church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and … this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church’s faithful,” Bishop Blair said in quoting the pope’s letter.

Anyone who attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman, and any woman who attempts to receive a sacred order, incurs “excommunication immediately,” the measures necessary “to protect the nature and validity of the Sacrament of Holy Orders,” Bishop Blair said.

“The ordination of women is not possible, not because women are somehow unfit to carry out the functions of a priest, but because on the level of sacramental signs it is not the choice that the Lord has made.”

Pope John Paul’s 1994 letter effectively closed the debate on female priests because the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith deemed it to have “definitive” status.

Some theologians question the Vatican’s finding, however, saying the late pontiff’s letter would be more appropriately defined as “authoritative” — a critical distinction in the church world that would give the document less weight.

Female priests and their supporters say they are not concerned by threats or acts of excommunication, the Catholic Church’s harshest penalty that deprives a person of all participation in church society.

“They probably would excommunicate me already because I’m attempting to be ordained,” Ms. Bingle said. “But they can’t put you in jail anymore. And they can’t burn you at the stake.”

And in Ms. Bingle’s view, she would reject excommunication because she believes it is based on an unjust law.

“I would not consider myself excommunicated. In my opinion, my conscience tells me I am still a good practicing Catholic in good standing,” she said.

‘Badges of honor’

Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan of Sarasota, Fla., said she has received several letters of excommunication.

She said she considers them “badges of honor” because Pope Benedict XVI has canonized two excommunicated nuns, Mother Theodore Guerin and Mary MacKillop. “He is making excommunication the fast track to sainthood,” Bishop Meehan said in an interview.

Sydney Condray, 72, a Toledo author who has a doctorate in education administration, is weighing whether to seek ordination as a priest.

A widow, Ms. Condray said she feels “a call to a leadership role, and the priesthood is a call to leadership within a community.”

She believes Canon Law 1024 is “based on wrong assumptions; therefore their conclusions are wrong. I am not under any obligation to agree with things that make no sense to me. We have women who are leaders of countries, leaders of corporations, doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs.”

“It is an anachronism to require that only people of the male gender can be priests. Why, because they have exterior plumbing? Yes, Jesus was a man. But he was a man of Aramaic descent. Why not limit the priesthood to males of Aramaic descent? It can get that ridiculous,” Ms. Condray said.

The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest from Louisiana who belongs to the Maryknoll Missionary order, is one of the only Roman Catholic priests in the United States who has publicly supported women’s ordination. He told The Blade in an interview that he feels he has no choice but to speak out because church law is wrong.

“In Catholicism, we all learn about the primacy of conscience. My conscience compelled me to break my silence on this issue, on this teaching,” Father Bourgeois said. “Silence is the voice of complicity. Now, when I broke my silence, I of course got in big trouble with the Vatican. However, I have refused to recant my belief in support of the ordination of women. I believe that our church teaching defies faith and reason and simply cannot stand up to scrutiny.”

Father Bourgeois got involved in a showdown with church authorities after he gave the homily at the ordination of Janice Sevre-Duszynska in Lexington, Ky., on Aug. 9, 2008. The priest has been threatened with dismissal and excommunication but as of this writing, Father Bourgeois remains a Roman Catholic priest in good standing.

Shortly after participating in Ms. Sevre-Duszynska’s ordination, “I received a very serious letter from the Vatican stating that I would be excommunicated automatically if I did not recant my support of women’s ordination as priests,” Father Bourgeois said. “I responded by saying that I cannot recant. Sexism, like racism, is a sin, and no matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination against women it is not the way of God but of men in their quest for power.”

He has not heard further from Rome, he said. His Maryknoll superiors, meanwhile, sent him two warning letters last year demanding that he recant, which he has refused to do. The order took a vote earlier this year to dismiss him, Father Bourgeois said, but the motion did not have enough votes to pass.

‘A grave injustice’

For Father Bourgeois, 73, a Roman Catholic priest for 40 years, the ban on women’s ordination is “a grave injustice.”

“The question I had to ask myself and my fellow priests is an all-important question that they refuse to answer, and it’s who are we, as men, to say that our call from God is authentic but your call as women is not. Who are we to reject God’s call of women to the priesthood?

“What I discovered after a lot of study and reflection is that the root of our church’s teaching is sexism. A grave injustice is being done against women and against God, who I believe without any doubt calls both men and women to the priesthood.”

Bishop Joan Houk of Pittsburgh, who heads the Great Waters Region of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, which includes Ohio, was a Roman pastoral director and pastoral associate in Kentucky, where for 5½ years she ran two Roman Catholic parishes that had no pastors.

“I preached. I did funerals that did not have Eucharistic liturgies. I took my turn doing hospital chaplaincy, but I was not able to use holy oils. I was not able to hear confessions or preside at Eucharist. I did a couple of baptisms, but I could not do weddings.”

Bishop Houk, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a master of divinity degree, said the ministry restrictions placed on her because of her gender became increasingly difficult to bear.

“It was extremely painful,” Bishop Houk, 71, said. “I never realized that it would be that painful. … I thought, ‘If I was ordained I could give them the sacraments.'”

In March, 2005, she was inspired to pursue ordination after hearing Bishop Patricia Fresen, a bishop and a native of South Africa, talk about apartheid.

“I had believed that someday the Catholic Church would ordain women,” Bishop Houk said. “I had been waiting, and then I saw that things were getting more rigid against any possibility of us getting ordained. And then I heard Patricia say that when you try everything and it doesn’t work, then sometimes what you have to do is break the law. It became very clear to me right then that that was something I needed to do. I needed to break the law.”

Opening the door

Roman Catholic Womenpriests reject several other Roman Catholic teachings. They allow priests to be married, and they ordain homosexuals, for example.

Several married men have been ordained in the movement.

“The only thing that matters is that they are called by God to the priesthood,” Bishop Houk said.

She is a Roman Catholic Womanpriest for a small community in the Pittsburgh area.

“When I see what the sacraments can do for these people through me, it’s very rewarding,” Bishop Houk said. “Now when I see what I can do for other people, I cannot worry about the Vatican and whether they will someday validate women’s ordinations. I can’t worry about their theological arguments. What I am concerned about is what I can do for people today. And I am doing it and I am at peace with that.”

Bishop Meehan, 64, of Sarasota, Fla., was one of the first eight women ordained in the United States, in a July, 2006, ceremony on a boat at the confluence of three rivers in Pittsburgh. She was ordained a bishop three years later.

She grew up in Ireland in a devout Catholic family, where “faith was woven into everything you are, and everything you were about,” Bishop Meehan said. “It was part of your whole being.”

After years of struggling with a calling to the priesthood, she saw a door open when nine women were ordained Roman Catholic priests in 2002 in a ceremony on the Danube River. Among them was Dagmar Celeste, a former first lady of Ohio.

“We don’t have to wait for permission anymore, Bishop Meehan said. “We’re not putting up with second-class citizenship. We are refusing to sit in the back of the bus. We are taking our rightful role. We are not leaving the church. No, we are leading the church.”

Complete Article HERE!

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The Case for Gay Acceptance in the Catholic Church

The death penalty no longer applies to people who divorce or sleep with women during their periods, as described in the Bible. So why can’t attitudes on homosexuality change as well?

COMMENTARY
On St. Patrick’s Day I had the pleasure of speaking to about 350 Catholics who gathered together to attend a conference put on by New Ways Ministry, which is an effort to support the LGBT community in the Catholic Church. The women and men I spoke to included nuns and priests, children who had come out and parents who wanted to be supportive. Two female priests gave me special blessing and I left the meeting inspired by the devotion of those who attended.

New Ways Ministry has a critical mission, since changing the Church will help those who suffer from ill treatment not only here in the United States but around the world, where the Church has so much clout. The Church has millions of members in Africa and South America, where being gay or lesbian can lead to a death sentence.

Worse, the Church’s own teaching encourages bigotry and harm. Just last year, my father’s memorial, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, gave its human rights award to Frank Mugisha, a gay activist in Uganda whose good friend had just been brutally killed in his own home. American missionaries have encouraged the discrimination Mugisha suffers. Refuting their religious arguments is critical, and so is making a moral and religious case for gays. What we need is a transformation of hearts and minds, not merely a change of laws.

The Catholic Church’s attitude towards homosexuality is at odds with its tradition of tolerance and understanding. The actual practice of the Church is true to this tradition. What other institution separates men and women and encourages them to live together in monasteries and convents where they can develop deep relationships with those who share their kind of love?

The fight for the dignity of the LGBT community is a fight for the soul of today’s Church. Some conservatives see the hierarchy’s current, traditional teaching on sex as the Church’s defining position. They don’t really like to talk about, or even be reminded of, the Church’s teachings on immigration, or protection of the environment, or the greed that produces financial meltdowns, all of which they would find distastefully liberal.

For them there is only one issue — sex, or pelvic politics as some call it. The Pope himself pointed this out on in visit to Mexico, where he said that “not a few Catholics have a certain schizophrenia with regard to individual and public morality…. In public life they follow paths that don’t respond to the great values necessary for the foundation of a just society.”

If we wish to change the Church, we must first convey our views in language, images, and theology that reach people where they are. And secondly, we should make it clear that disagreement with the hierarchy is a critical part of our history.

The fact that so many Americans see themselves as religious, as God-loving church goers, means we have a better chance of reaching them if we use a language, a book, and symbols they understand. Polls find that 85 percent say that they believe in God and 50 percent claim that they go to church every Sunday. The fact that only 25 percent do just goes to show that you can’t trust everybody’s self-reporting.

In The Good Book: The Bible’s Place in Our Lives, the recently deceased Peter Gomes describes interviews with 400 people who had been jailed for hate crimes against gays. None felt remorse. They thought gays were the devil, so fighting them was cause for pride, not shame or regret. Laws are important, but the moral case can be even more compelling.

When my father visited South Africa in 1966, he spoke with students in Cape Town about apartheid. They defended the abhorrent practice by pointing to Biblical passages that suggested that discrimination was fine. In an effort to reach them, my father asked, “Suppose you die, and you go up to heaven, and you enter the pearly gates, and suppose, just suppose when you get there, you find that God is black.” Today we can ask, “Suppose God is gay.”

My father grasped, as did John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, that in America the leader who wishes to enlarge freedom’s sphere must appeal to an audience’s religious beliefs as well as to their understanding of American liberty. This is what I wrote about in my book, Failing America’s Faithful. While researching it, I gained many insights into the Church and its history of both prejudice and tolerance.

The Great Awakening of the 1740s gave people the idea that they could find God within themselves and need not trust preachers. As one perceptive British writer pointed out, if they don’t need rectors, soon they won’t need British rulers. Sure enough, once Americans got used to trusting themselves, they did rebel. Then the Second Great Awakening, in the 1850, instilled in Americans the idea that not only did the divine reside within them, it also resided in women and slaves. The Abolitionist movement grew from that religious revival, as did the suffragettes.

A few years ago, I read the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, and to me the biggest revelation was how misogynistic it was. That made me realize that the Catholic Church was on to something when it allowed only educated priests to read the Bible. My mother’s generation was prohibited from reading the Bible, and when I told my grandmother that my father used to read the Bible to us, she was shocked, “Catholics don’t read the Bible,” she said. The Church figured that people could take passages out of context and come to unwarranted conclusions. This changed after Vatican II and now Catholic parishes offer Bible study classes.

But those outrageous passages did not deter either the abolitionists or the suffragettes. They boldly rejected them as cultural detritus. Instead, they asserted that the primary message was that all people were made in God’s image. Thus we are born to be free.

Unfortunately, a century later, in the 1970s, feminists and gay rights activists did not adopt the same strategy and tactics. I think this happened because their movement grew out of the non-religious part of the civil rights movement. Recall that the civil rights movement was split between the followers of Reverend Martin Luther King on the one hand and Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers on the other. The latter group felt that religion was weak. Why turn the other cheek? Why not fight back? This secular strain also attracted many intellectuals who were, to put it bluntly, uncomfortable with religion.

Happily, that has now changed. Women have entered schools of theology and can now show that Jesus was one of the first great feminists. Mary Magdalene is no longer thought of as a prostitute but as the “apostle to the apostles.” Gays, though, are still excluded.

Progressive Christian and Jewish believers have accepted gay rights. Theologians now argue that verses in Leviticus that call for the killing of men who sleep with men apply only to a particular historical moment. The death penalty no longer applies to people who divorce, curse their parents, or sleep with women during their period — rules that are also in Leviticus.

Obviously, some people continue to read scripture simply to sustain their preexisting prejudice against homosexuality and homosexuals. But theologians now point out that the word “homosexual” didn’t even exist until the 19th century, and it wasn’t included in the Bible until 1946.

Choose your passage. King David talks about sleeping with his friend Nathan as “better than sleeping with a woman.” The Ten Commandments don’t mention homosexuality. Nor does Jesus. In fact, our Lord teaches us that love of God and love of our fellow human being are the two most important commandments. He doesn’t exclude the love that one man can have for another, or one woman for another.

The 2000-year-old passages favored by Church authorities don’t hold up as being anti-gay. Not only is the hierarchy — the Church’s cardinals and bishops — imposing its own interpretations, its views are harmful to many men and women. I would hope that the lens through which one reads scripture would be one of love and openness to others, not fear and anger and meanness.

Contrary to conservative propaganda, though, the Vatican is not immovable. It has a long history of changing position to follow new understandings of society and morality. Usury is no longer a sin. Women are no longer considered “the devil’s gateway.” Railroads are no longer cursed as the work of the devil, and teaching that there is such a doctrine as “freedom of conscience” does not merit censure, as it did for John Courtney Murray in the 1950s: In fact, Vatican II now recognizes “freedom of conscience.” Pope John Paul II apologized for the Church’s treatment of women and its persecution of Galileo. Sex between husband and a wife is no longer just for procreation but has value in itself.

That history can continue with its position on gays — and the laity has a critical role to play in pushing for these changes. As Cardinal John Henry Newman, the foremost 19th-century Catholic theologian asserted, bishops have at times “failed in their confession of the faith.” There can be instances of “misguidance, delusion, hallucination.” He said that the body of the faithful has the “instinct for truth.”

Already, I have witnessed that instinct for truth in the argument over contraception. Despite the hierarchy’s position, 98 percent of Catholic women in the United States use contraception. I believe that Human Vitae was the Holy Ghost’s way to teach us that we must use our conscience, and not lazily rely on the hierarchy when it is in error.

At this time, when the hierarchy does not want to recognize that we are all made in the image and likeness of God, and that the one of the two most critical commandments is to love one another, it is critical to assert that God loves the LGBT community equally. Sometimes the Church moves slowly, sometimes quickly. The point is to make sure the voices of dissent are not quiet and the Holy Spirit can be heard.

Complete Article HERE!

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Lapsed Catholics explain why they leave church

As part of a survey to understand why they have stopped attending Mass, a few hundred Catholics were asked what issues they would raise if they could speak to the bishop for five minutes.

The bishop would have gotten an earful.

Their reasons ranged from the personal (”the pastor who crowned himself king and looks down on all”) to the political (”eliminate the extreme conservative haranguing”) to the doctrinal (”don’t spend so much time on issues like homosexuality and birth control”).

In addition, they said, they didn’t like the church’s handling of the clergy sex abuse scandal and were upset that divorced and remarried Catholics are unwelcome at Mass.

The findings, based on responses to a survey in the Diocese of Trenton, N.J., are included in a report presented March 22 at the “Lapsed Catholics” conference at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Conducted by Villanova University’s Center for the Study of Church Management, the survey, called “Empty Pews,” asked Catholics in the Trenton Diocese a series of questions about church doctrine and parish life to better understand why they are staying home.

While the study was restricted to one diocese, chances are the responses could come from just about anywhere in the U.S., where a 2007 report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found one-third of Americans were raised Catholic but one-third of those had left the church.

Or, as Villanova’s Charles Zech put it, “These are issues that affect the whole church.”

The responses can be divided into two categories, said Zech, who co-authored the study and is director of the Villanova center. In one category are “the things that can’t change but that we can do a better job explaining.” The other category, he said “are some things that aren’t difficult to fix.”

Zech and the Rev. William Byron, professor of business and society at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, conducted the survey of 298 parishioners who have stopped attending Mass.

Almost two-thirds of the respondents were female, and the median age was 53, two facts that Zech finds troubling. “That’s a critical demographic. If we’re losing the 53-year-old women, we risk losing their children and their grandchildren,” he said.

About a quarter of the respondents said they still consider themselves Catholic despite not attending Mass. About half offered negative comments about their parish priests, whom they described as “arrogant,” ‘’distant” and “insensitive.”

“One respondent said, ‘Ask a question and you get a rule, you don’t get a “let’s sit down and talk about it” response,’” Zech said. “They feel no one is willing to explain things to them.”

Respondents also said they were troubled by the church’s views of gays, same-sex marriage, women priests and the handling of the sex abuse crisis.

Criticism of the sex scandal was predictable, Zech said. “That doesn’t surprise anybody. They did not manage that well, and they are still not managing it well,” Zech said. “It hasn’t gone away.”

The respondents also called for better homilies, better music and more accountability of the church staff.

Trenton Bishop David O’Connell, a former president of Catholic University, declined to be interviewed about the survey’s results, saying through a spokeswoman that he “needed to spend time with the findings and develop his own analysis of them.”

Though the project was undertaken to learn more about why church attendance continues to decline in the Trenton Diocese, it’s findings have broader implications, Zech said. “These are issues that affect the whole church,” he said.

Although it was an anonymous survey, about one in eight respondents said they welcomed a call from a church official and provided their names and contact information for that purpose. Many more indicated they were pleased to be asked for their input.

“The fact that they took the time to respond gives us a chance,” Zech said. “If some things change, or we do a better job of representing the church’s position, we might woo some of them back.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Catholic Church Historical Reversal: Backed Civil Unions In New Hampshire

For the first time ever, the Roman Catholic church is endorsing civil unions, announcing its second historic reversal in only two weeks.

The Roman Catholic church of New Hampshire suddenly endorsed civil unions on March 19, just 48 hours before a state legislature vote that has been pending for two years. In an equally surprising move, on March 4, the Roman Catholic church of Maine ceased all external opposition to this year’s full marriage equality ballot campaign in Maine.

Historically, Roman Catholic officials have opposed virtually every regulation, policy, and law proposed to protect LGBT people nationwide, including all proposals for civil unions. However, faced with the choice of either retaining New Hampshire’s full marriage law which was signed on 3 June 2009, or else repealing it and replacing it with civil unions instead, church officials decided – for the first time ever – to endorse civil unions for LGBT people.

In a statement issued on March 19, church officials claimed that they are endorsing civil unions only in an attempt to repeal full marriage for same-gender couples. They called the replacement of full marriage with the inferior civil unions an “incremental improvement.”

In lockstep, the National Organization for Marriage, a Roman Catholic church affiliate, also issued a companion surprise announcement the same day, also endorsing civil unions in New Hampshire for similar reasons. NOM was founded by Catholics, is staffed by Catholics, and appears to be mostly funded by Catholic laity and church officials. NOM’s membership rolls and finances are secret, some of its government filings are incomplete or contradictory, and it violates campaign finance disclosure regulations in every state where it opposes marriage equality.

Monday’s reversal in New Hampshire is just as profound as the decision by church officials two weeks ago to withdraw from this year’s public marriage battle in Maine. Neither decision was made independently, and both had to be coordinated with higher church officials. The Manchester Diocese, which is what the Roman Catholic church in New Hampshire calls itself, is a corporation sole and is subordinate to the Ecclesiastical Province of Boston, Massachusetts, which oversees Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Among New Hampshire’s 1,315,809 residents, only 24% (309,987) are Catholic. Consequently, this sudden, last-minute switch by religious leaders only hours before the deadline may not have much impact upon the legislative votes being taken tomorrow. Four recent polls indicate that about 63% of all New Hampshire voters favor retaining the current full marriage law.

In addition to local impacts in Maine and New Hampshire, both of the Catholic church’s recent historic reversals may also help this year’s marriage equality efforts in 18 other states, especially New Jersey, North Carolina, and Minnesota. In New Jersey, advocates need just 15 more votes from the 120-member legislature to override the governor’s recent veto of a law which could upgrade civil unions to full marriage. In Minnesota and North Carolina, the church has been lobbying to ban marriage for all same-gender couples by amending those states’ constitutions so that marriage equality laws can’t even be considered. New Hampshire Bishop Peter Libasci gave no indication of when, whether, or how his church’s endorsement of civil unions in New Hampshire will affect church campaigns in other states.

Within its own religious ranks, Roman Catholic officials are continuing to reinforce Pope Benedict XVI’s formal view of bisexual, lesbian, and gay sexuality as “an intrinsic moral evil,” “intrinsically disordered,” and “inherently evil.” Moreover, the church still promotes the widely discredited “ex-gay” reparative therapy, which they claim cures patients of the sexual orientation that they are born with using a mixture of firm hope, additional prayer, new apparel, and/or life-long celibacy. Such reparative therapies have been discredited and denounced by every major mental/medical health professional organization as ineffective, painful, and dangerous to patients because of higher death rates from suicide.

Complete Article HERE!