A Christmas Eve Call To Catholic Action

Will you please consider sending this call to Catholic action to all your Catholic friends and relatives?

from Father Tony of the Farmboyz:

Did you know that the mistreatment of women, married men and gay men by the Catholic bishops is really the same issue?

I began to realize this while thinking about why the struggle for gay equality in America seems to be failing.


Recent losses in California, Maine and New York have left gay activist leaders arguing about what exactly went wrong. Those battles have, however, made clear the identity of an aggressive enemy of the gay community, the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church.

To please the Pope, the American Catholic bishops have pooled financial resources to overcome marriage equality. They have threatened the cessation of social services and have bound their flock to the belief that God demands that marriage be exclusively between one man and one woman. They have mandated the taking up of collections to support their battle against marriage equality.

These bishops also believe that women are not good enough in the eyes of God to be ordained priests. These bishops also believe that married men are not good enough in the eyes of God to be ordained priests. These bishops also believe that gay men are not good enough to be ordained priests (a particularly curious belief given the huge gay portion of their own ranks).


Now is the time for Catholic women, married men, gay men, and all their Catholic friends and relatives to band together and to end this nonsense. You have the ability to gain your rights if you will realize that these bishops no longer speak for God in this matter. They have gone astray and are misleading you. In your hearts you know this to be true.

You can rectify this situation by holding back your financial support until women, married men and gay men all have equal access to the Catholic priesthood. Do you understand how critically important your financial support is to the life of the Roman Catholic Church in America? Do you understand what would happen if, as a group, you turned off the financial faucet? There would be a panic among those bishops and soon they would find a way to announce that the Holy Spirit has revealed a new truth; that women and married men and gay men deserve equal places in the church and are all worthy of the priesthood. The threat of bankruptcy can be a fast route to holy wisdom.


I am suggesting that on Christmas Eve, all Roman Catholics in America refrain from giving money when the collection basket is passed, and that you continue that restraint until your God-given rights are granted.

I am also suggesting that you consider placing a small pebble in the collection basket as a clear message to your bishops. Your priests who are torn between believing in your equality and their sworn obedience to the bishops might send those pebbles to those bishops just as they do a good portion of the money you routinely give them. And remember, those bishops have already cast the first stone. All you would be doing is politely returning it to them.

The Roman Catholic Church in America is at a crossroads. There will soon be either a healthy enlightenment or a rapid withering. Catholic women, married men and gay men who understand that their bishops are speaking for the Pope rather than for Jesus Christ in this matter will save their Church if they act together. Christmas Eve is the perfect time to start.

I am urging you to refrain from financial support as an act of love for your church. I do not want to see the Catholic Church destroyed by a generation of bishops who are confused and in need of your intervention. They will someday thank you for doing what they could not do.

Will you please consider forwarding this call to Catholic action to all your Catholic friends and relatives?

Surprising Data on Same-Sex Marriage

There was lots of chatter in the religion-politics blogosphere this week about blogger Mark Silk's examination of data showing that the more Catholic a state's population, the more likely its residents are to support same-sex marriage.


By combining a new study that ranks states according to public support for same-sex marriage and civil unions with the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, Silk finds that six of the eight states where 50 percent or more of the public supports same-sex marriage are the states with the highest proportion of Catholics.

"In other words, support for same-sex marriage is directly related to the proportion of Catholics in a given state. Way to go, bishops!" said Silk, who directs the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College.

Perhaps It Is The Catholic Church That Is "Objectively Disordered"

Ex-Archbishop Speaks About Catholic Church and Homosexuality

By Laurie Goodstein for the NY Times:

In spring 2002, as the scandal over sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests was escalating, the long career of Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, one of the church’s most venerable voices for change, went up in flames one May morning.


On the ABC program “Good Morning America,” the archbishop watched a man he had fallen in love with 23 years earlier say in an interview that the Milwaukee archdiocese had paid him $450,000 years before to keep quiet about his affair with the archbishop — an affair the man was now calling date rape.

The next day, the Vatican accepted Archbishop Weakland’s retirement.

Archbishop Weakland, who had been the intellectual touchstone for church reformers, has said little publicly since then. But now, in an interview and in a memoir scheduled for release next month, he is speaking out about how internal church politics affected his response to the fallout from his affair; how bishops and the Vatican cared more about the rights of abusive priests than about their victims; and why Catholic teaching on homosexuality is wrong.

“If we say our God is an all-loving god,” he said, “how do you explain that at any given time probably 400 million living on the planet at one time would be gay? Are the religions of the world, as does Catholicism, saying to those hundreds of millions of people, you have to pass your whole life without any physical, genital expression of that love?”

He said he had been aware of his homosexual orientation since he was a teenager and suppressed it until he became archbishop, when he had relationships with several men because of “loneliness that became very strong.”

Archbishop Weakland, 82, said he was probably the first bishop to come out of the closet voluntarily. He said he was doing so not to excuse his actions but to give an honest account of why it happened and to raise questions about the church’s teaching that homosexuality is “objectively disordered.”

“Those are bad words because they are pejorative,” he said.

Archbishop Weakland’s autobiography, “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church” (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), covers his hardscrabble youth in Pennsylvania, his election as the worldwide leader of the Benedictine Order and his appointment by Pope Paul VI to the archbishop’s seat in Milwaukee, where he served for 25 years.

“He was one of the most gifted leaders in the post-Vatican II church in America,” said the Rev. Jim Martin, a Jesuit priest and associate editor of America, a Catholic magazine, “and certainly beloved by the left, and sadly that gave his critics more ammunition.”

In an interview at the Archbishop Weakland Center, which houses the archdiocesan cathedral offices in downtown Milwaukee, Archbishop Weakland said the church opened itself to change in the 1960s and ’70s after the Second Vatican Council but became increasingly centralized and doctrinally rigid under Pope John Paul II.

Archbishop Weakland was among those who publicly questioned the need for a male-only celibate priesthood. He also led American bishops in a two-year process of writing a pastoral letter on economic justice, holding hearings on the subject across the country.

A later effort by the American bishops to issue a pastoral letter on women was quashed by the Vatican, he said, because the Vatican did not want to give the national bishops conferences the authority to issue sweeping teaching documents.

The archbishop said it was partly because of his strained relations with Pope John Paul II that he did not tell Vatican officials in 1997 when he was threatened with a lawsuit by Paul J. Marcoux, the man with whom he had a relationship nearly 20 years before and who had appeared on “Good Morning America.”

Mr. Marcoux said then that he had been deprived of income from marketing a project he called “Christodrama” because of Archbishop Weakland’s interference. Archbishop Weakland said he probably should have gone to Rome and explained that he had had a relationship with Mr. Marcoux, that he had ended it by writing an emotional letter that Mr. Marcoux still had and that the archbishop’s lawyers regarded Mr. Marcoux’s threats as blackmail.

But, the archbishop said, a highly placed friend in Rome advised him that church officials preferred that such things be hushed up, which is “the Roman way.”

“I suppose, also, being frank, I wouldn’t have wanted to be labeled in Rome at that point as gay,” Archbishop Weakland said. “Rome is a little village.”

Asked if he had regrets about the $450,000 payment to Mr. Marcoux, he said, “I certainly worry about the sum.”

The morning in 2002 that Mr. Marcoux surfaced on national television, Archbishop Weakland said he phoned the pope’s representative, or apostolic nuncio, in Washington — Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo — who, he said, told him, “Of course you are going to deny it.”

Archbishop Weakland said he told the nuncio that while he could deny emphatically that it was date rape, “I can’t deny that something happened between us.” (Archbishop Montalvo died in 2006.)

Archbishop Weakland is still pained that his scandal, involving a man in his 30s, became intertwined with the larger church scandal over child sexual abuse.

But at the time, many Catholics in Milwaukee said they were angrier about the secret settlement with Mr. Marcoux than with the sexual liaison.

Archbishop Weakland and the Milwaukee archdiocese are also the target of several lawsuits accusing them of failing to remove abusive priests, allowing more minors to be victimized.

In the interview, he blamed psychologists for advising bishops that perpetrators could be treated and returned to work, and he blamed the Vatican’s tribunals for spending years debating whether to remove abusers from the priesthood. In one case, he said, the Vatican courts took so long deciding whether to defrock a priest who had abused dozens of deaf students that the priest died before a decision was reached.

“The concern was more about the priests than about the victims,” Archbishop Weakland said.

In Milwaukee, Peter Isely, the Midwest director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said Archbishop Weakland ultimately failed his people.

Mr. Isely pointed out that while Archbishop Weakland was waiting for the Vatican courts to defrock abusive priests, he allowed them to continue working in ministry without informing parishioners of their past. And he said the $450,000 payment was particularly galling to victims because many received “no compensation whatsoever.”

In June, Archbishop Weakland, who has been living in a Catholic retirement community since his resignation, is moving to St. Mary’s Abbey in Morristown, N.J., where he said he would be closer to his family in Pennsylvania and grow old in the care of a community of Benedictine monks.