Gay Catholics in Washington and New York have announced plans to greet Pope Benedict XVI on his first visit to the United States next week with peaceful protests and public statements declaring their intention to remain in the church, despite official teachings calling homosexuality an “objective disorder.” Members of the national gay Catholic group Dignity said they hope the pope’s visit will draw attention to a phenomenon that often has gone unnoticed by the public and the media.
While the Catholic hierarchy in Rome continues to condemn homosexuality as contrary to church teachings, they point to a growing number of Catholic parishes, priests and lay leaders throughout the U.S. who are welcoming gay people into their fold.
“Many of us believe the real church is not just the pope and the hierarchy in the Vatican,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of Dignity USA. “More and more people are coming to believe the essence of the church is the people who make up the parishes, including the priests and the laity. They are the folks who come to know and understand everyone who worships together, including GLBT people.”
But Duddy-Burke and other gay Catholic activists acknowledge that the church hierarchy, especially Pope Benedict and the hard-line conservative cadre of cardinals appointed by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, play a powerful role in setting the tone and policies that touch directly upon the parishes, priests and rank-and-file Catholics everywhere.
Benedict himself has been credited with playing a pivotal role in strengthening the church’s opposition to homosexuality during his tenure since the early 1980s as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under his former name of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
It was during that period that Ratzinger pushed through a controversial October 1986 letter to Catholic bishops declaring homosexuality an “objective disorder” and describing sexual relations between gay people as an “intrinsic moral evil.”
The 1986 declaration retained an earlier Vatican policy that recognized a homosexual “inclination” as being “innate” and not a sin. However, theologians and gay Catholic activists said the new terms of “objective disorder” and “intrinsic moral evil” set the tone for harsher policies toward gays among bishops and cardinals in the U.S.
Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Mt. Rainier, Md. based group that advocates for reconciliation between gay Catholics and the church, noted that the 1986 declaration included additional language that prompted most U.S. bishops to ban Dignity from holding any of its activities, including its weekly Sunday Mass, in Catholic churches.
Although Dignity was not mentioned by name, church leaders immediately recognized that Ratzinger and Vatican officials were referring to Dignity and similar gay Catholic groups when they stated in the 1986 declaration, “All support should be withdrawn from any organizations which seek to undermine the teaching of the Church … Special attention should be given to the practice of scheduling religious services and the use of Church buildings by these groups.”
Prior to the declaration, many U.S. Catholic churches and religious institutions, including Georgetown University in Washington, allowed Dignity to hold religious services at their facilities. Under pressure from the Vatican, Georgetown officials forced Dignity to move. Since then, the group has held its weekly Mass at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church near Dupont Circle.
The 1986 Vatican edict and other church pronouncements critical of homosexuality, along with separate positions by the church opposing legal rights or recognition for same-sex couples, led many gay Catholics to question whether they should remain in the church, DeBernardo said.
Gay journalist Chuck Colbert, who has written for the National Catholic Reporter, a publication independent of the church, said many gays left the church, with some joining more gay-friendly Christian denominations like the Episcopal Church or the United Church of Christ.
Colbert and DeBernardo said many others, however, chose to remain with the Catholic Church, partially because their strong Catholic upbringing established the church as central to their identity.
Officials with Dignity and New Ways Ministry say the gay Catholics who remained in the church, along with their families and friends, appear to have started what some believe has been a quiet but steady change in the church at the parish level over the past 20 years.
New Ways Ministry has compiled a list of more than 200 gay-friendly Catholic parishes in the United States. Many of them have established official gay outreach ministries and allow gay parishioners and their friends and family members to hold meetings in the churches, which are announced in the official church bulletin.
In Washington, St. Matthew’s Cathedral and Holy Trinity and St. Aloysius Church are among those on the list of gay-friendly parishes.
Kara Speltz, a lesbian activist in California and a member of Soulforce, a group dedicated to ending anti-gay discrimination within all religions, has been critical of Benedict and the Catholic Church’s official positions on gay issues.
Yet Speltz said she remains a practicing Catholic and is an active member of Holy Spirit Parish in Berkeley, which has a large number of gay members, including same-sex couples.
According to Speltz, in the past two years, Holy Spirit has gone beyond just welcoming gay men, lesbians and transgender persons. To the amazement of some, the church invited same-sex couples with newborn babies to join straight couples in its annual Easter baptismal ceremonies, during which a priest baptized babies belonging to gay couples.
“I cried when I saw it,” she said.
Joe Pietrus, one of the organizers of Always Our Children, an officially sanctioned gay group at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, said the group recognizes that it must walk a fine line in its activities and positions.
“Everyone knows we can’t challenge official church teachings and policies,” he said.
Pietrus said the group initially formed as a support organization for members of St. Matthews who had gay children and who had been members of the local chapter of the national group Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). About two years ago, he said, Always Our Children expanded its membership to include gay church members.
Monsignor W. Ronald Jameson, rector of St. Matthews, has given his consent to the group. And about two years ago, the then head of the Washington Archdiocese, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, attended one of the group’s meetings and urged its members to “keep up the good work,” Pietrus said.
Archbishop Donald Wuerl, the new head of the Archdiocese of Washington, has yet to visit or speak publicly about Always Our Children, but Pietrus said he has given no indication that he plans to change the policies of acceptance of the group brought about by Jameson and McCarrick.
Pietrus said he recognizes what appears to be emerging as a dichotomy between the official Catholic Church position on homosexuality and the day-to-day participation of many gays in their local parishes and a growing acceptance of them by those parishes.
“What you hear coming out of Rome is supposed to be the ideal and this can apply to gays and any number of others,” he said.
“When you come to the individual church, your goal is to help people come closer to God. You look at who that person is and where they are coming from and you assess how best to bring them to God.”
Pietrus, who is not gay, and a number of gay Catholics, including Duddy-Burke of Dignity, said they believe the longstanding Catholic traditions of social justice and caring for the downtrodden are among the factors prompting local parishes to be more accepting of gays.
Duddy-Burke notes that while the Vatican continues to issue statements critical of gays, an August 2006 poll released by the Pew Research company found that 63 percent of American Catholics support either civil unions or civil marriages for same-sex couples.
“What we have found is Catholics make choices out of their own conscience,” Duddy-Burke said.
Colbert, the gay journalist, said his own conscience prevented him from staying in the Catholic Church several years ago, when he witnessed first hand, as a reporter, the Catholic Church’s strong support in Massachusetts for a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
“The church actually circulated the petitions to put the anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot,” he said.
As if that were not enough, Colbert said, church officials ordered the playing of an anti-gay video during Mass in many of the state’s Catholic churches, which he said distorted the positions of gay activists and implored parishioners to vote for the amendment as a condition to remain faithful Catholics.
“I did not wish to be in communion with any of that any more,” said Colbert, who converted to reform Judaism.
Speltz of Holy Spirit Parish in Berkeley said she and many of the other gay Catholics in her church have chosen to remain, with the aim of pushing for more changes that will eventually reach the Vatican. She seemed to sum up the view of many gay Catholics in her praise for her local parish church.
“I would not be still in the church were it not for my parish,” she said.
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