Cardinal Francis George harshly rejected a call
from high-profile Chicago-area Catholics to restore church funding to a
group of community organizations supporting same-sex marriage.
“It is intellectually and morally dishonest to use
the witness of the Church’s teaching on the nature of marriage,”
Cardinal George wrote in “An Open Response to an Open Letter,” posted
late Monday on the Archdiocese’s web site.
Cardinal
George’s response comes after the Sun-Times reported on the letter,
signed by several high-profile politicians protesting a threatened
cutoff of money from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development to an
immigrant rights coalition. The letter ran as newspaper ad, too, in the
Chicago Tribune.
“They accused the Church of turning her back on the
poor,” the cardinal wrote. “This accusation follows a decision by the
Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to include support
for ‘same-sex marriage’ as part of their political agenda. The CCHD
cannot fund groups that support this goal.”
Cardinal George noted that the signers of the
protest letter “proclaimed their adherence to the Catholic faith even as
they cynically called upon others to reject the Church’s bishops.”
The cardinal went on to write that the Church is
the “Body of Christ,” and that because “the signers of the letters are
Catholic, they know that in a few years, like each of us, they will
stand before this same Christ to give an account of their stewardship.
Jesus is merciful, but he is not stupid; he knows the difference between
right and wrong.”
Cardinal George’s hard-line response followed Pope
Francis’ conciliatory remarks on the subject of gay priests in which he
said, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to
judge him?”
Cardinal George addressed the Pope’s comments in a
separate letter, stating that the Pope also “reaffirmed the teaching of
the Catholic faith and other religions that homosexual genital relations
are morally wrong.”