The McLellan Commission was created in 2014 to investigate how the Scottish Church handled abuse cases
Bishop apologizes for anti-gay speech
The Bishop of Chur, Vitus Huonder, has apologized to gay people after citing controversial Bible passages in a speech he gave at a Catholic forum in Germany at the end of July.
The bishop, well known for his ultra-conservative views, kicked up a storm when he quoted passages from the Old Testament saying that homosexual behaviour was an “abomination” and should be punished by death.
In a three-page letter sent to 800 of his colleagues, including priests and employees, on Wednesday night, Huonder apologized “to everyone who felt injured by my speech, in particular those of homosexual persuasion”, reported Swiss news agency ATS on Thursday.
The 73-year-old said it was a “mistake” to write his speech purely “on a theological and academic level”.
He also regretted writing it during the summer holidays when there was no one around to read it over for him, reported ATS.
“My colleagues would have drawn my attention to the danger,” he said.
On Monday Swiss Gay Federation Pink Cross filed a criminal complaint against the bishop for his comments, saying that he was indirectly “inciting people to crimes” with his remarks.
A private individual from St Gallen has also filed a complaint.
If the bishop is found guilty he risks up to three years in prison.
Contrary to politicians and judges, bishops are not immune from prosecution.
Complete Article HERE!
Catholic priest: I have a family member who is gay
By
At a national conference in Plymouth, Catholic leaders spoke out Wednesday against same-gender sexual relations, claiming it’s harmful and unnatural, but added that the Catholic Church must reach out to those with same-sex attractions.
At the conference, a popular Catholic priest in metro Detroit, the Rev. John Riccardo of Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Plymouth, told about how a family member of his wrestles with how to deal with a gay child.
The three-day conference, titled “Welcoming and Accompanying Our Brothers and Sisters with Same-Sex Attraction,” concluded with a mass led by Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron, the religious leader of 1.3 million Catholics in metro Detroit. In his homily to about 400 participants at the conference, Vigneron strongly defended the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality.
Other speakers gave explicit talks about sexuality, saying that gay sex is destructive. The conference was criticized by liberal Catholics, including several protesters who gathered Tuesday outside the conference to criticize its message.
“It’s not being a bigot” to say that people should not have sexual relations with people of the same gender, Vigneron told people inside the chapel during mass Wednesday at the Inn at St. John’s, a former seminary, in Plymouth.
He praised the Catholic clergy and lay people who attended the conference, saying they are helping people with same-sex attraction learn “how to grow in chaste continence … share in the chastity of Jesus Christ. That’s the goal.”
“Some people think we’re a bunch of Queen Victorians … prissy,” Vigneron said. “A bunch of blue-stockings. No.”
Rather, Catholics are bringing the “good news” of the gospel and Jesus Christ, he said. He compared leading gays out of same-sex relations to Moses leading people out of slavery in Egypt.
Catholic Priest: We Can Reach Out to Gay People by Comparing Gay Sex to Shoving a Bagel in Your Ear
by Dan Savage
Isn’t it cute when Catholic priests pretend to know nothing—nothing at all—about gay sex?
At a national conference in Plymouth, Catholic leaders spoke out Wednesday against same-gender sexual relations, claiming it’s harmful and unnatural, but added that the Catholic Church must reach out to those with same-sex attractions. At the conference, a popular Catholic priest in metro Detroit, the Rev. John Riccardo of Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Plymouth, told about how a family member of his wrestles with how to deal with a gay child…. In his talk to fellow clergy and others, Riccardo discussed how to talk about gay issues. He said the issue comes up when he meets with young people. “This is the question which is asked by junior-high kids: Why does God hate gays?” Riccardo said. Riccardo said he responds in terms that can relate to younger folks without being too explicit. “Here’s the image that I use,” Riccardo said. He said he tells the students, what if ‘I just rip open a bagel, I take it, and I cram it in my ear. What would you say?’
He said, the kids respond: “That doesn’t go there.”
“I say, ‘Exactly.’”
Father Riccardo goes on to talk about, you guessed it, having oodles of gay friends and even some gay family members. (Of course he has gay friends: He’s a priest.) One of his own family members, a Catholic woman, has a gay daughter who’s in a gay relationship and this good Catholic woman accepts and loves her gay daughter—she even welcomes her gay daughter and her gay daughter’s gay partner into her good Catholic home. She “doesn’t exclude them,” says Father Riccardo, because that isn’t what Jesus would do. But there’s one thing this accepting Catholic mom will never accept: her gay daughter rubbing her big gay bagel against her gay partner’s big gay bagel while they’re in her home: “She tells her child, ‘When you are here, you will not sleep together [with your gay partner]… because I think that’s harmful and here are the reasons why.'” No doubt that gay kid feels very loved.
Why are anti-gay priests like Father Riccardo, “well known in the archdiocese for his speaking and charisma,” reaching out to gays and lesbians with messages of nope (you can’t put a bagel in your ear!) and hope (Jesus loves you too… but only if your ear is bagel-free?). Detroit Free Press:
Riccardo said it’s important to reach out to gays, because “if we don’t find a way to do that, then we’re going to have a ghetto and put walls around us and no one is going to come in.”
So Father Riccardo is reaching out to the gays—and tormenting gay kids in Catholic schools with tortured, carb-heavy, sex-negative metaphors—because he doesn’t want to wind up in a walled ghetto.
Riccardo probably doesn’t believe—at least I hope he doesn’t believe—that anti-gay Catholics are going to be rounded up and locked in walled ghettos. (But Catholics locked Jews in walled ghettos for centuries, so it would be poetic justice to see Father Riccardo and Bill Donohue and Brian Brown locked up in a walled ghetto.) What Riccardo fears is Catholics winding up in a metaphorical ghetto, walled off from the rest of the culture and ignored by people who’ve realized that the Catholic Church got gay sex wrong just like it got straight sex wrong. (Contraception is not a sin; anal sex—gay or straight—is nothing like shoving a bagel in your ear.) In his speech, Father Riccardo also condemned pornography and oral sex… and I’m pretty sure that straight people are laughing that off just like gay people all over the world are laughing off Father Riccardo’s anal bagels.
Complete Article HERE!
Sister Monica’s secret ministry to transgender people
By Renee K. Gadoua
Sister Monica lives alone in a small house at the edge of a Roman Catholic college run by a community of nuns.
She doesn’t want to reveal the name of the town where she lives, the name of her Catholic order, or her real name.
Sister Monica lives in hiding, so that others may live in plain sight.
Now in her early 70s and semiretired because of health problems, she remains committed to her singular calling for the past 16 years: ministering to transgender people and helping them come out of the shadows.
“Many transgender people have been told there’s something wrong with them,” she said. “They have come to believe that they cannot be true to themselves and be true to God. But there is no way we can pray, or be in communion with God, except in the truth of who we are.”
She spends her days shuttling between e-mail and Skype, phone calls and visits. Since 1999, she has ministered to more than 200 people, many of whom have come to rely on her unflinching love and support.
Although the Catholic Church has issued no clear teaching on transgender people, Church teaching that homosexual relations are a sin suggests a similar view of transgender people. A Vatican document in 2000 said gender reassignment surgery does not change a person’s gender in the eyes of the Church. In 2008, Pope Benedict urged Catholics to defend “the nature of man against its manipulation.”
“The church speaks of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this order is respected,” Benedict said.
Though Pope Francis is credited with a more compassionate and pastoral tone to gays, Sister Monica fears that the Catholic hierarchy would punish her or her community if her work with transgender people became public.
Despite this, she is as committed to her calling as when she gave her life to Jesus straight out of high school.
“I have great love and fidelity for my community, my call to religious life, and obedience to my prioress,” she said.
That calling, as she defines it, is working with people on the margins. To her, transgender people are a part of that margin, and therefore part and parcel of her calling.
Sister Monica began working with gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in 1998 after finishing a term as her congregation’s vocations director.
She had long been pained at how her gay friends and relatives had been treated, she said. The call to minister to them came from God, she said.
Early in her ministry, she met a transgender woman, and her work shifted to helping people find peace with bodies that do not match how they see themselves.
“Here’s what they heard from priests: ‘Look between your legs. What you see is who you are. God will tell you who you are. Do you want to be damned to eternal hell?’” she said, her voice rising.
That attitude only reinforces the scorn and rejection many transgender people experience in the Church, she said.
Early on, she fought this emerging calling.
“I told God so many times: You gave this ministry to the wrong person. I’m not the right person to swim upstream and carry the banner for the cause.”
But these days, she is much clearer about her focus.
“She has a wonderful way of pinning you down and looking at you and reminding you … practically channeling her spirituality that you are a child of God and you are authentic and there is nothing wrong with you,” said James Pignatella, an Arizona-based engineer who transitioned from female to male.
Over the years, Sister Monica says she has received “quiet support” from two bishops and several priests. The end of two Vatican investigations that questioned American nuns’ loyalty to church teaching has also relieved some pressure on her ministry secret.
Still, experience tells her she cannot be completely open about what she does.
She has a quick answer to people who say “God made them man and woman,” quoting the Book of Genesis.
“God made day and night. There was also dusk and dawn and twilight. There’s no light switch,” she said. “There are 2,000 kinds of ants and there can’t be more than two kinds of people?”
Stephanie Battaglino, who met Sister Monica at a 2008 conference for transgender people, said the elderly nun helped her during a painful part of her life.
“I sensed a connection right away,” said Battaglino, a corporate vice president at a large financial institution and a consultant on transgender inclusion. “I knew right there she was kind of like my angel.”
The nun remains her spiritual director seven years later.
“She helped me realize I do not walk this journey by myself,” said Battaglino. “God is with me.”
And that is the heart of Sister Monica’s ministry: pushing her friends to be honest about themselves and their relationships.
“We cannot have a relationship with God if we are hiding from ourselves or God,” said the nun.
The irony is not lost on Battaglino. While she has come out of the closet, Sister Monica lives in the shadows.
But that’s a tension the nun said she can live with because participating in her friends’ suffering is its own reward. Indeed, she said, it is “a gift from God.”
“I love well and I am loved well. What they need, more than anything, is to be well-loved.”
Complete Article HERE!