— I post on Facebook in support during pride month and all year long
Where would this world be without the gifted and talented members of the LGBTQ community who bring such beautiful gifts to our lives?
By Rev. Richard Ryan, Sellersburg, Indiana.
I frequently get comments asking me how and why I support PRIDE as a retired clergy and person of deep faith.
I share for my children, some whom identify as LGBTQ-plus, and I love them deeply. I post my support on social media for my LGBTQ niece, multiple cousins and my close personal friends. I post for the child in the pew who is horrified and filled with terror the first time they hear the pastor say they’re going to burn hell for something they can’t change. I share for the many talented church musicians I’ve known whose God given gifts were tossed aside when it was found that they loved someone of the same sex. I share for my friend’s son who was told after years of serving, that could no longer work with with the youth at church because he was gay. For the youth (and adults) of the church I served in Corydon, Indiana who were gay and two who were transgender, who suffered in silence.
I post for the woman who left my sales team because of my LGBTQ support, who shared that reason with the company president, not knowing the company president had a gay son. I post for my LGBTQ team leaders at work who are without a doubt the kindest and best of the best. I post for my LGBTQ church family who worship God along side me each Sunday at Highland Baptist. And I post for my dear friend and talented singer who died way to early because he couldn’t tell his church family that he was gay for fear of their rejection.
I post hoping to make a difference. I post hoping that the love of GOD breaks through hardened hearts and we realize that we are all God’s children, diverse and proud of who God created us to be. Where would this world be without the gifted and talented members of the LGBTQ community who bring such beautiful gifts to our lives?
Many have a deep faith in the same God as you do. We all want to be loved just as we are, without having to hide who we are and who God made us to be.
And, I post for the parents of LGBTQ-plus who fear their children will be abused in this world.
Yes, I post proudly for PRIDE and will throughout the year for all these children of God.
I believe God is big enough and generous enough to share the rainbow and celebrate the diversity of his children.
Pope Francis formally signed off on allowing Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples in December 2023.
But decades before the pope’s historic announcement, a New York City church has embraced the LGBTQ+ community and provided a safe space for worship.
The Church of St. Francis Xavier, in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, provided services for AIDS patients while others refused, including being one of the first to bury a person who died of the virus during the epidemic of the 1980s. More recently, the church became the new home for a decadeslong memorial for people who died from AIDS-related complications when the original host parish was closed as part of the Archdiocese of New York’s reorganization plans.
“We came and we never left,” Roe Sauerzopf told ABC News Live, recalling the first time she and her wife, Paula Acuti, had attended Sunday Mass at St. Francis, and how they immediately felt “safe” to be themselves.
“It’s been a struggle to be a lesbian, and to be a Catholic lesbian has been even more of a struggle,” Acuti, a New York resident, shared with a room full of women who attend a Catholic Lesbian group at the church and can relate to her experience, all nodding in agreement, while eating cheese and crackers and sipping wine on a Friday night.
“I had left the Catholic Church because of the attitude toward gay people,” Sauerzopf added.
“It was on Pride Sunday and the priest said that everybody there should pray for all the sinners who were marching in the city. And I think that’s the last time that we went into a church for a long time,” Acuti told ABC News Live.
It was at least 15 years before the couple found their way back to the Catholic Church. When attending a friend’s wedding in the early 2000s, they shared with a straight couple that they had felt unaccepted to be themselves within their religion.
“We were complaining to them about how there really is no accepting Catholic churches and they were like ‘oh no, there is one,’” Acuti said.
That’s when Acuti and Sauerzopf found St. Francis Xavier.
They soon became involved in the parish’s Catholic Lesbian group, which was founded in 1995, and now has more than 300 participating members.
Pastor Kenneth Boller, who leads the LGBTQ+ friendly groups at the church, said the parish has been welcoming of all people for “many, many years.”
“It’s important for everybody to find groups of people who are ‘like’ instead of ‘other.’ So you can develop friendships, you can share experiences,” Boller said. “What’s important is that people find a place to pray.”
The Catholic Lesbians group meets monthly to pray together and share their own faith experiences. With a wide range of ages, the youngest member is 18 years old and the oldest members are in their 80s.
Acuti and Sauerzopf, who have been together for 45 years, got married at St. Francis Xavier in 2004, when same-sex marriage was still illegal in the United States.
Sauerzopf said the ceremony was for their 25th anniversary, and the priest at the time told them to invite their family and friends.
“He did a whole Mass, he blessed our rings, he just couldn’t sign the papers.”
It was a day the couple said they’d never forget. Wanting other same-sex couples to feel the acceptance they had received, they helped plan a surprise ceremony at a recent Catholic Lesbian retreat for a newlywed couple who joined the group during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They’re just the most welcoming group we found,” McKenna Coyle, who is in her 20s, said, describing the group as “family.”
It was the last day of the retreat when Coyle and her wife, who were celebrating their one-year anniversary, walked into a room with music playing, a cake and photos from their wedding day displayed.
“They blessed us to celebrate our wedding since we can’t get married in the Catholic Church,” Coyle said.
“It’s a blessing on persons because everyone, every person, is entitled to be blessed. It’s not a blessing or endorsement of their living situation, but a realization that these are people of goodwill,” Boller said, in describing the Vatican policy change.
“The Pope says all are welcome. But then he kind of backtracks a little,” Sauerzopf said. “But this church doesn’t do the backtrack. They keep it up.”
In addition to advocating for equality within the Catholic Church, Sauerzopf also said she would like to see more women in leadership roles within the church. The Church of St. Francis Xavier allows women to perform the homily during Mass, Sauerzopf said, which is rare within the Catholic religion.
“We shouldn’t be the oasis. We should be what it’s all like,” she said, while sitting in a church pew.
— Most Catholics have little sense of the liberal archbishop behind the Vatican’s pronouncements. But critics of the pope see Víctor Manuel Fernández as Enemy No. 2.
Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández visits the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace after his appointment in September.
When Pope Francis first asked if he would be willing to take one of the loftiest jobs at the Vatican, heading the office that sets the policies of the Roman Catholic Church, Víctor Manuel Fernández said no. The liberal Argentine archbishop worried hisappointment might make things worse for a pope facing historic internal dissent.
“I knew that there were groups that did not love me, some willing to do anything — judging by the expressions they used on social networks and even in messages they wrote on my Facebook page — and I was afraid of causing problems for Francis,” Fernández said in an interview with The Washington Post.
When the pope called again last June, from a hospital where he’d just undergone intestinal surgery, Fernández relented. He moved to Vatican City, was named a cardinal and became the pope’s right-hand man, helping to translate the changes in tone and style Francis brought to the papacy into concrete new guidelines for 1.4 billion Catholics.
“Fernández’s appointment was the most consequential of [Francis’s] pontificate,” said Massimo Faggioli, a Catholic theologian at Villanova University. “After one year of Fernández, we’ve witnessed a series … of frequent, specific, out-of-the-ordinary actions the likes of which have never been observed. And this from a prefect who knows full well that he’s Francis’s own alter ego and enjoys the pope’s complete trust.”
Most Catholics have little sense of the man behind the Vatican’s recent major pronouncements, including blessings for people in same-sex relationships. But the church conservatives opposed to Francis see Fernández as Enemy No. 2. Within the walls of Vatican City, the machinations against the 61-year old cardinal have risen to the level of high palace intrigue, complete with photos snapped surreptitiously in the night and in the night and private threats to “destroy” him.
A new era for an old office
Fernández’s arrival marked the end of an era of conservative leadership in the Vatican department known as the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith. The office is most famous for the tribunals of the Roman Inquisition in the 16th century. In more recent decades, it has managed — critics say mismanaged — cases of clerical abuse; reinforced the “immorality” of premarital sex, abortion and euthanasia; and disciplined bishops, priests and nuns for not toeing the Vatican line.
Through Fernández,Pope Francis set out to reinvent the office.
“The dicastery that you will preside over in other epochs came to use immoral methods,” he wrote in a letter to Fernández in July. “Those were times when more than promoting theological knowledge they chased after possible doctrinal errors. What I expect from you is something without doubt much different.”
Like Francis, Fernández — known widely by his nickname “Tucho” — has ushered in a change in tone. In news conferences, his extended digressions and elaborate anecdotes can feel like falling “into a short story by Borges,” a writer for the Catholic Herald assessed. In one session, he uttered a mild profanity. “Tucho, the cardinal prefect with a sinful penchant for swear words,” a scandalized Italian news outlet declared.
Last month, he released a new ruling that took some of the magic out of the Catholic Church, removing a bishop’s right to declare unexplained phenomena — such as claimed apparitions of the Virgin Mary — as “supernatural” events. And last week his office took its most decisive action yet against the pope’s critics, launching a trial of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on charges of fomenting schism and denying the pope’s legitimacy.
Senior church critics insist it is no coincidence that Francis waited to place Fernández in the rulemaking post until after the death of Benedict XVI, the traditionalist pope emeritus.
“I think Pope Francis felt himself now freer to realize his ideas,” said Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, an ally of Benedict who ran the dicastery from 2012 to 2017. “And therefore, he asked [Cardinal] Fernández to come [to] his side, and to promote this program, this agenda.”
Not all of Fernández’s work has come off as “liberal.” LGBTQ+ activists were taken aback in April when he unveiled a document, also signed by the pope, that said “sex-change intervention” threatened “human dignity.” Fernández told The Post that a version drafted before his arrival had focused more heavily on gender identity, and part of his contribution had been to bring its contents in line with the pope’s broadly inclusive message toward migrants, the poor and others. The final document, he noted, also explicitly denounced persecution based on sexual orientation.
The mission of inclusion led by Francis and Fernández took a hit as a result of the pope’s repeated use of a slur in closed-door discussions about upholding the ban on openly gay men studying for the priesthood.
“Certainly it has done damage to the relationship that was created with the LGBTQ+ community,” Faggioli said.
Fernández argued that in clerical circles, the word the pope used — “frociaggine,” or “faggotness” — is not “a synonym for homosexuality” but refers to “some groups in seminaries and in priestly environments that lobby in search of power” and “see all heterosexuals as potential enemies.”
“It is true that it would be advisable to find another word to express that reality, because it can seem homophobic,” Fernández said. “But I have seen gays themselves use similar expressions.”
He also left open the door to a recasting of official church teaching — or catechism — that states homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”
“All subjects can be refined,” he said. “And the language we use can always be much better. In this way there is a chance of greater clarity.”
Pushback and threats
The changes brought about by Fernández and the pope have deepened rifts within the church. The ruling on same-sex blessings prompted a rebellion by Catholic bishops and cardinals in Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. There was grumbling inside the Vatican, too.
Fernández declined to comment on specific threats and intrigues. But in January, he told the Italian outlet La Stampa that “three times I received threats [saying], ‘we shall destroy you.’”
In one previously undisclosed incident, Fernández went to the pope over concerns he was being surveilled, according to a person familiar with the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential Vatican matters.
Those concerns were based on a photograph published in November by a conservative Spanish-language Catholic blog. In that nighttime photo, which accompanied an article critical of Fernández, he is seen talking on the phone at a distance through a window of his home on restricted Vatican grounds. The photo identifies the location of his private quarters, and Fernández took that as both an invasion of privacy and a veiled threat, the person said.
Opponents have additionally unearthed and circulated two esoteric tomes — “Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing” and “Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality” — that Fernández wrote in the 1990s, and in which he mused in detail on the spiritual aspects of sexual orgasms and recounted a sensual encounter with Jesus as imagined by a 16-year-old girl.
Decrying them as “scandalous books of an erotic nature which border on pornography,” one arch-conservative Catholic group — the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and Family — has demanded Fernández’s resignation.
In retrospect, Fernández said, the books reflected less maturity than he would have liked, but he maintained the topics should not be off-limits in spiritual discourse: “I don’t have any shame of the subjects,” he said. “If I had to write them today, they would be richer and more complete.”
A long history with Francis
The campaign against Fernández, and by default, against the pope, has also revived old claims that the Argentine cardinal long served as Francis’s secret “ghost writer” on important papal documents. In his office just south of the colonnades of St. Peter’s Square, Fernández declined to discuss the topic. But there is no question that he is a longtime friend of Francis.
In 2007, Francis — then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires — invited Fernández to a major Latin American Episcopal conference and ended up having him work on the gathering’s concluding document. They sat together on the flight home and engaged in deep conversation, Fernández said.
“We all know that the pope is a very austere man in his personal life,” said Alberto Bochatey, an auxiliary bishop in Fernández’s former diocese of La Plata, Argentina. “In Buenos Aires, he cooked for himself, washed his dishes and had a Tupperware with his vegetables. In that sense, [Fernández] is very similar, and there may have been a human as well as a theological affinity.”
In 2009, the future pope asked Fernández to be rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. Fernández has publicly recounted how his detractors sought to undermine him by resurfacing magazine pieces he’d written. In one, he tried to explain the church’s stance against same-sex marriage while offering no moral condemnation.
After his local critics sent those pieces to the Vatican, the dicastery opened a file on him, Fernández has said. He felt as if he were wandering “among the wolves,” he recalled to reporters in April. But Francis had inspired him to stay and fight.
That seems his approach now, too.
The pope’s defender
Fernández has been criticized as a choice for his role by survivors of clerical abuse, who point to instances in Argentina where he allegedly sought to protect accused priests. Fernández has admitted to mistakes, and in a Facebook post last year, said his initial reluctance to accept the Vatican job was also based on the fact that he “felt unqualified” to manage the sensitive cases of clerical abuse within the dicastery. The pope was so bent on hiring Fernández, however, that he navigated that issue by ring-fencing the dicastery’s work on abuse cases under autonomous investigators.
More than anything, Fernández has emerged as the pope’s chief defender, repeatedly reminding the pontiff’s Catholic critics of their obligation to papal fealty.
“Religious assent of mind and will must be shown,” Fernández said during one news conference in which he read aloud from a page of canon law.
>No, he told senior church figures who were in revolt, the pope’s pronouncement on blessings for same-sex couples was not “heretical” or “blasphemous.”
He has expressed an understanding of cultural differences on gender and sexuality in various countries but pushed back against critics of Francis’s LGBTQ+ outreach.
“What they want [the church] to say is that homosexuals are going to hell, they have to convert, if they don’t, they can’t come to church less have a blessing. This is what they want,” Fernández said.
Hello. I am so sorry that I cannot be with you today. I have such happy memories of the time when I was on the rota to celebrate Mass for our LGBT+ brothers and sisters in Soho before the Mass moved to the care of the Jesuits in Farm Street.
I have been asked to say something about the place of LBGT Catholics in a Synodal Church. I am sorry that my talk will be so short. I have just returned from a lecture tour in Italy and France and I am off in a couple of days to Israel, to be with the Dominicans in Jerusalem at the Ecole Biblique so, to be honest, I feel rather rushed off my feet.
A few days ago, the Vatican asked me to do something which was unimaginable a few years ago. I was asked to write a foreword for the English translation of a book by a young Italian, Luigi Testa. It is called Via Crucis di un Ragazzo Gay (The Way of the Cross of a Gay Lad). The Italian preface, which is marvellous, was written by an Italian bishop, the vice-president of the Italian Bishops’ conference. We follow Luigi’s sufferings as young gay person as he walks the way of the Cross, accompanied by Jesus. It is deeply moving. The book is part of a series promoted by the Vatican, of theology from the peripheries. It is a sign of the profound conversion which is taking place at the centre of the Church, as she reaches out to people who have been marginalised and rejected, and says ‘This is your home. We are incomplete without you.’
Before the Synod, Pope Francis frequently stressed that all are welcome. Last August in Portugal, he underlined this at the World Youth Day. ‘All, all, all; todos, todos, todos!’ The divorced and remarried, gay people, transgender people. He wrote earlier ‘The Church is called on to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open … where there is a place for everyone, with all their problems and to move towards those who feel the need to take up again their path of faith.’
When the Synod opened in October, many of the participants shared Pope Francis’ eagerness to affirm that the Church really is for us all! It is where we should all be at ease. It was this message of hope and love which led to the foundation of those Masses in Soho twenty-five years ago.
At the Synod, this message was repeated, but it was evident that many people were nervous of it. Some participants felt uneasy at even sitting next to Father James Martin SJ, who has been for many years a brave champion of the warm inclusion of gay people in the Church. One person even refused to sit next to him. Others of us too felt the chill as I did. During the Synod, Pope Francis again signalled his welcome by publicly inviting to lunch Sister Jeanine Gramick and Francis DeBernardo, founders of the New Ways Ministry. I had lunch with them the next day and they felt enormously affirmed.
But in the document produced at the end of this first session, the Synthesis, the term LGBT+ was dropped although it has been used in other Vatican documents and by the Pope. So there seemed to be a certain retreat from the openness we had hoped for. Still the Assembly did vote almost unanimously for this proposition: ‘In different ways, people who feel marginalized or excluded from the Church because of their marriage status, identity or sexuality also ask to be heard and accompanied. There was a deep sense of love, mercy and compassion felt in the Assembly for those who are or feel hurt or neglected by the Church, who want a place to call “home” where they can feel safe, be heard and respected, without fear of feeling judged. Listening is a prerequisite for walking together in search of God’s will. The Assembly reiterates that Christians must always show respect for the dignity of every person.’ (Synthesis, 16. h)
Given that in so many countries, homosexuality is still criminalised and despised, this was encouraging. But here the Church faces a challenge to which I hope that you will be able to help us respond. The Church is called to be open to all people, whatever they love and live, and to all cultures. What if some cultures are not open to gay people? How can we embrace in the universal Church cultures which exclude people?
This issue exploded last year. On December 18th, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a document called Fiducia Supplicans. I confess that, to my shame, I have not studied the text closely. It gives permission for priests in specific situations to bless people in what are usually called “irregular situations”, the divorced and remarried, gay couples. Pope Francis stressed that we all need to be blessed as we seek to find our way forward in love.
Every attempt was made to play down the crisis. The Pope accepted the document. Cardinal Ambongo maintained that the African exceptionalism was a good example of Synodality. Unity does not mean uniformity. The gospel is inculturated differently in different parts of the world.
But it is more complex than that. After the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man arguing that we had entered a new era, the triumph of Western liberal democracy. Every nation seemed destined to ‘evolve’ into our way of life. Some countries, especially in the global South, just had to catch up. If they did not agree with us on, for example, the welcome of LGBT people, they would surely do so eventually.
We were wrong. We have not the time and nor I have the expertise to analyse where we are now, but we seem to be entering a multipolar world, with the rise of Russia, China and India, and all of the BRICS countries. Many people in the Global South think of the West as having a morally decadent culture, doomed to collapse. Cardinal Ambongo of Kinshasa said a couple of months ago:
Cardinal Ambongo of Kinshasa, President of the organisation which represents all of the Catholic bishops of Africa, came to Rome to present their firm rejection of the proposal. He recognised that it was not the intention of the document to change Church teaching on sex but, he said, ‘The episcopal conferences across Africa… believe that the extra-liturgical blessings proposed in the declaration Fiducia Supplicans cannot be carried out in Africa without exposing themselves to scandal… The language of Fiducia Supplicans remains too subtle for simple people to understand.’ Never before have almost all the bishops of a continent rejected a Vatican document.
[the Westerners] will disappear. I wish them a good demise’ Putin is weaponizing the gay issue as emblematic of all that traditional culture opposes, as he seeks to spread Russian influence in other parts of the world, along with the Wagner militia. Putin is always showing his virility, taking off his shirts. He has been described as the most topless leader in the world! But this issue is also being used by Islamicist
“Little by little, they groups with Middle Eastern money, by Evangelical groups with American money “and so on.
As I said, I am no expert on this cultural battle which is being fought out everywhere, whether in the USA or Africa. I just wish, ever so briefly, to signal that the Synod faces this double challenge, of a proper gospel openness to all with an openness to all cultures. How are we to live both? This will be a major challenge for the next session of the Synod. It is not about how does our side win. That is the game of competitive politics. It is how can the Church fulfil her vocation to be the place in which all of humanity finds home and joy. Here, as St Paul says, ‘there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3.28).
My favourite image is of St Peter in John 21. They have fished all night without catching anything. Then they see a stranger on the shore who tells them to cast the net on the other side, and the net is full almost to bursting. Peter hauls the net to the shore and it contains 153 fish. This probably represents all of the nations of the world. The net is not broken. Jesus said before his death, ‘When I am lifted up, I shall draw all people to myself.’ Peter helps in this with his drawing the net to the shore to present it to Jesus.
So how are we to haul in the net without it being broken? The Church is just at the beginning of thinking about this and I hope that you will help us. A starting point is a fascinating lecture by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope. He gave it in Hong Kong in 1993 on what he called Interculturality. He argues that every culture is potentially open to the fullness of the truth. When cultures encounter each other, ideally they should be able to correct each other’s biases and share the truths they embody. So when
African and Western cultures meet, ideally both should be challenged and enriched. In one of his lectures, Albert Nolan, OP of South Africa remarked: “Our question about the impact of Christianity upon Africa will always be incomplete unless we also ask `what is the impact of Africa upon Christianity?”‘
It has been argued that if Western cultures bring a deep sense of the dignity and freedom of the individual, African cultures bring a sense of how being human is rooted in our relationships: Ubuntu. I am because we are. Asian Catholics invite us to learn the value of harmony as Latin American cultures invite us to hear the voice of the poor.
Every culture offers gifts and is challenged. The gospel is to be inculturated in every culture but it challenges every culture. So some people, like Cardinal Ambongo, will argue that homosexuality is foreign to African cultures and so cannot be welcomed. I would say that here the gospel offers a challenge.
So the encounter of cultures is at the heart of many debates in the Synod, and above all the embrace of gay people. And we have to be aware that the encounter of cultures is never just innocent. Other cultures come to Africa, for example, with guns and money. Power dynamics are at work. African bishops shared with us how deeply they feel the humiliation of aid being tied to the acceptance of Western values. Multinationals corrupt and destroy local cultures. Foreign powers do so too. Just as the hunger for gold, led to the destruction of Caribbean cultures in the sixteenth century, so does the search for rare earths and diamonds today. Remember, the strange who stood on the beach had been executed by the Imperial power of his day.
So working for a Church which truly has open doors is inseparable from addressing the ways in which countries in the Global South face unjust economic exploitation, ecological devastation and cultural destruction. No wonder we of the North are thought of as decadent. We all advance on the path to liberation together or not at all.
Forgive this short and superficial presentation. I do so wish that I could have been with you to hear what you think on these complex issues. May you have a wonderful joyful day. And pray that the Synod may open all of our hearts minds and challenge all of our prejudices.
CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell asked Pope Francis on Sunday about the blessings for same-sex unions he seemed to sanctify last year.
In his latest explanation, the Pope said the church can only bless individual homosexuals. In other words, there is now and never was a blessing for same-sex unions!
Norah O’Donnell posed a straightforward question the the Catholic leader.
“Last year, you decided to allow Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples,” O’Donnell That’s a big change. Why?”
“No, what I allowed was not to bless the union. That cannot be done because that is not the sacrament. I cannot. The Lord made it that way. But to bless each person, yes. The blessing is for everyone. To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the Church’s law. But to bless each person, why not? The blessing is for all.”
Why the subject ever arose then, who knows?
There was a widespread belief at the time that Francis supported the blessings of same-sex unions. The statement prompted celebration among same-sex Catholics at what they perceived as progress in the church. Meanwhile, conservative Catholics attacked the Pope openly for his perceived support of same-sex unions.
Responses to questions about blessings and same-sex unions have been ambiguous in the months since.
Francis continually criticizes conservative bishops, recently, for example, calling conservatism a suicidal attitude.
But he also regularly reminds everyone that same-sex unions go against Church law.
Which is the bit in the Bible that says, “Thou shalt have thy cake and eat it too?”
