Jesuit Priest faces backlash after standing up for LGBT

[47of74]

A Jesuit Priest stood up for LGBTs feeling alienated from the Catholic Church and no good deed goes unpunished.

Quote

The Rev. James Martin knew his latest book – which urges a dialogue between the Catholic Church and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics who feel estranged from it – would be provocative. Even though the book was approved by his Jesuit superior as being in line with church teachings and was endorsed by several cardinals, he did not expect everyone to agree. That’s fine, he said. That’s why dialogue was needed.

His public position on this hot-button issue – most recently in the book, “Building a Bridge,” but also in speeches, articles and social media – has earned him the gratitude of parents of gay children or adults who feel unwelcome at church because of their sexual orientation. But his stance has also led to “joking” threats of violence and insults against him. Conservative Catholics have called him “effeminate,” a “homosexualist,” “pansified” and guilty of “leading young men to perdition.” In recent weeks, campaigns by people opposed to him have prompted three high-profile Catholic groups to disinvite him from events where he was to be the featured speaker.

But he has also been the victim of ad-hominem attacks, even from other Catholics who, he said, do not seem to remember Pope Francis’s remark that “who am I to judge” if a member of the clergy was gay. He tries to ignore the criticism, but when Catholic Vote, a conservative group, sent out a message – which it said was in jest - that Father Martin had been “beaten like a rented mule” by a Dominican priest, he filed a complaint with Twitter that resulted in the account being temporarily suspended.

That, in turn, prompted Austin Ruse, the president of the Center for Family and Human Rights, to call Father Martin’s reaction “pansified,” dubbing him “Father Snowflake” as well as a “perfidious priest.”

I think Austin ought to go perform an intimate act upon himself in traffic.

Conservative Catholics like the ones attacking Fr. Martin are a big reason why I'm no longer a Catholic.  If Jesus Christ came down and walked into their parish tomorrow these Catholic fundies would be calling for his excommunication.

[Cleopatra7]

The thing is that what Fr. Martin is saying isn't even that progressive. He's not suggesting that the RCC bless gay marriages. He's not saying that Catholic dogma on sexuality should be changed. Really, all he's saying is that Catholics should be nicer to LGBT people and even that's too much for the right wing Catholic inquisitors. For some reason, I thought Austin Ruse was my age (early 30s) but when I googled him earlier this week I saw that he was considerably older. I know that people like to compare cyber bullying to middle school mean girls, but it seems like the ones behaving the worst online are "mature adults" who should theoretically know better.

[47of74]

10 minutes ago, Cleopatra7 said:

For some reason, I thought Austin Ruse was my age (early 30s) but when I googled him earlier this week I saw that he was considerably older. I know that people like to compare cyber bullying to middle school mean girls, but it seems like the ones behaving the worst online are "mature adults" who should theoretically know better.

Yeah Austin is a real piece of work.

Quote

-- Contributor to conservative news outlets like Breitbart.com

-- Fired from contributing to AFA Radio after suggesting liberal professors should be "taken out and shot"

-- Changed his Facebook profile pic to a skewed version of the Human Rights Campaign's equality logo, saying his version meant "not equal"

-- Reportedly joked about "taking out" Hillary Clinton

 

[seraaa]

48 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

“Father Snowflake”

Sounds like a great superhero name

[sawasdee]

Some of these 'catholics' need to remember that the Jesuits are the intellectual wing of the church - in other words, he has probably studied scripture and doctrine in more depth and with more understanding than most of the laity can ever hope to do.

It behooves them, as supposedly devout members of the faith, to listen to those who are both more educated and more knowledgeable than they, and to beware of the sin of pride.

And as for those who disinvited him to speak - their minds and hearts are closed. If they cannot even hear a dissenting opinion from a learned elder of their faith, they are the opposite of loving christians - they are arrogant pharisees.

And it all just confirms why I, and many others, left the church.

[Seahorse Wrangler]

I was scrolling down and read the title as Judas Priest faces backlash and thought ...why now? After all Rob Halford's been out for years.

 

I guess I neeed new glasses.

[smittykins]

Glad I'm not the only one, @Seahorse Wrangler!

[EmiGirl]

21 hours ago, Seahorse Wrangler said:

I was scrolling down and read the title as Judas Priest faces backlash and thought ...why now? After all Rob Halford's been out for years.

 

I guess I neeed new glasses.

I did the same thing.

[December]

On 9/16/2017 at 9:18 AM, Cleopatra7 said:

Really, all he's saying is that Catholics should be nicer to LGBT people and even that's too much for the right wing Catholic inquisitors.

Yeah, I would understand the attention being given to this if it were some high-ranking member of the Church advocating for same sex marriage or something... but it sounds like this guy is just advocating for tolerance and decent treatment of other human beings. 

On 9/16/2017 at 10:19 AM, sawasdee said:

Some of these 'catholics' need to remember that the Jesuits are the intellectual wing of the church - in other words, he has probably studied scripture and doctrine in more depth and with more understanding than most of the laity can ever hope to do.

Great point. Though for plenty of people that is obviously a negative, a sign of elitism, etc.

[Cleopatra7]

On 9/16/2017 at 1:19 PM, sawasdee said:

Some of these 'catholics' need to remember that the Jesuits are the intellectual wing of the church - in other words, he has probably studied scripture and doctrine in more depth and with more understanding than most of the laity can ever hope to do.

Conservative and traditionalist Catholics don't like the Jesuits, because they think the order has gone soft since Vatican II; prior to the Council, the Jesuits were considered the pope's private shock troops to the point where Protestant fundies were convinced of "Jesuit plots" under every bush, and then afterwards they became more focused on social justice issues to the chagrin of conservatives and traditionalists. You may recall that our now flounced traditionalist poster avemaria offended some by trashing Jesuits and Jesuit educational institutions. For a while, a lot of conservatives pinned their hopes that the Legion of Christ would become the new Jesuits, but the scandals surrounding the order's founder Marcel Maciel have tainted the group in the eyes of many. The Jesuits are still the largest men's order in the RCC by a huge margin, so I don't think they're going away anytime soon.

[sawasdee]

@Cleopatra7 I've always had a soft spot for Jesuits - my brother went to the Jesuit school in North London, and got a superlative education. (Alumni included Alfred Hitchcock and my favourite Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, John Heenan).

In my adult life, I've met quite a few, and found most to be not only well educated, but often with an evil sense of humour!

[louisa05]

3 hours ago, Cleopatra7 said:

The Jesuits are still the largest men's order in the RCC by a huge margin, so I don't think they're going away anytime soon.

And the pope is a Jesuit which has not made the right wingers happy at all. 

[47of74]

18 hours ago, sawasdee said:

@Cleopatra7 I've always had a soft spot for Jesuits - my brother went to the Jesuit school in North London, and got a superlative education. (Alumni included Alfred Hitchcock and my favourite Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, John Heenan).

In my adult life, I've met quite a few, and found most to be not only well educated, but often with an evil sense of humour!

Especially about themselves.

I remember one time back in my Catholic days we had a Jesuit priest fill in at church and he told us the joke about a barber never charged clergy for haircuts.  A Dominican arranged for a dozen boxes of caramels to be shipped to his shop.  A few days later a Fransiscan  got his hair cut for free, and arranged for a dozen loaves of the finest bread to be sent to the shop the next day.  Then a Jesuit came by and got his hair cut for free.  The next day there were a dozen other Jesuits waiting at the shop when the barber arrived. 

[47of74]

More ugh from the Catholic church.

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It’s 2017, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and other religious leaders from various sects thought it would be a good idea to sign an open letter that attempts to delegitimize the identities of transgender people, calling their existence a “false idea” that “goes against reason.”

“A person’s discomfort with his or her sex, or the desire to be identified as the other sex, is a complicated reality that needs to be addressed with sensitivity and truth,” the letter states. The letter’s signatories made sure to add the disclaimer that trans people deserve “to be heard and treated with respect” when they are “wrestling with this challenge.”

The letter, titled “Created Male and Female,” actually encourages parents to reject their kids who identify as transgender. In addition to the Catholic bishops, the letter was also signed by leaders from the Anglican Church in North America, the North American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, among others.

“Children especially are harmed when they are told that they can ‘change’ their sex or, further, given hormones that will affect their development and possibly render them infertile as adults,” the religious leaders wrote. “Parents deserve better guidance on these important decisions, and we urge our medical institutions to honor the basic medical principle of ‘first, do no harm.’ Gender ideology harms individuals and societies by sowing confusion and self-doubt. The state itself has a compelling interest, therefore, in maintaining policies that uphold the scientific fact of human biology and supporting the social institutions and norms that surround it.”

 

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

I guess they would rather that trans kids grow up and end up suicidal, like my sibling was before they came out? Morons. 'First do no harm?' Yeah, just let them stay miserable until they die. Fuckheads.

[JesusCampSongs]

As a Degreed Mental Health Professional, they need to stay in their fucking lane. This kind of ham-fisted, ignorant interference in things that they know literally nothing about that do not impact them in any real way is a big part of why the church is becoming increasingly irrelevant and driving younger people away. People think millennials are a bunch of heathens? Just wait til igeneration (born 2000-2020ish) start hitting adulthood. The church has only itself to blame for the inevitable fallout of this ongoing bigotry, but of course they won’t see it that way. 

[Howl]

9 hours ago, 47of74 said:

given hormones that will affect their development and possibly render them infertile as adults

Well we know who was sure to add that in.  And when did the damn Lutherans get into this. Or maybe it's like some Presbyterians who have gone off the rails.  Infuriating.

[SusanAtTheLastBattle]

6 minutes ago, Howl said:

Well we know who was sure to add that in.  And when did the damn Lutherans get into this. Or maybe it's like some Presbyterians who have gone off the rails.  Infuriating.

Missouri Synod is a very conservative Lutheran Group, not part of the mainstream Evangelical Lutheran Church  in America. I’m sure the other two Protestant groups are similar.

[Fun Undies]

19 minutes ago, Howl said:

Well we know who was sure to add that in.  And when did the damn Lutherans get into this. Or maybe it's like some Presbyterians who have gone off the rails.  Infuriating.

I can't speak for all Lutherans, but my step-mother in law is a Lutheran minister, and genuinely believes in "welcoming all". 
Her church flies a rainbow flag proudly, and last year when she was here, she rented a book to read to our kids about the importance of accepting a boy who liked to wear dresses in his school (the children's book name escapes me now), but I applauded her none the less.  We had a wonderful discussion about how accepting all, is the best way to be the hands and feet of Jesus. 

And really, WHY the hell people focus so much on gender, when (if you believe in Christian doctrine), there's not supposed to be gender in Heaven anyways.  The angels are androgynous.  And even Jesus wore a long tunic.  So it's like, can we PLEASE focus on how to bring a Kingdom of Peace on Earth for ALL people, instead of using the excuse of religion to push our own uncomfortability?

Sweet Jesus.

 

[47of74]

Missouri Synod is a very conservative Lutheran Group, not part of the mainstream Evangelical Lutheran Church  in America. I’m sure the other two Protestant groups are similar.

The Anglican Church in North America split off from the Episcopal Church after the mainstream church decided to treat gays and women as human beings and allow them equal standing in the church. The ACNA is not recognized by Canterbury but some of the homophobic member churches of the Anglican Communion do. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that they’d sign this open letter.

[Cleopatra7]

While the Protestant signers would probably just claim that their beliefs are based on "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" or some other supposedly "Biblical" justification, the Catholic bishops' opposition to transgender existence is based on natural law theory and Aristotelian scientific notions that haven't been relevant in four hundred years but are still lurking behind Catholic dogma. Natural law theory originated with late antique Stoics and was incorporated by the early Church fathers, although it wouldn't reach its full flower until Thomas Aquinas came on the scene in the Middle Ages. Aquinas's thought was essentially a grand medieval string theory that incorporated the thought of previous Christian theologians, medieval scholasticism, and the then new philosophy of Aristotelianism. Part of this synthesis involved the use of Aristotle's scientific findings about biology, physics, and astronomy. The Thomistic project is very ambitious and beautiful, but it's also fundamentally wrong, because it's built upon erroneous ideas about how the world works. The most obvious example is the geocentric cosmological model that became an issue during the Galileo affair. Most people see that event as being about the position of the sun and the earth (it wasn't; Galileo's model was wrong from a modern c), when it was really about the entire epistemological model upon which the Catholic Church had hitched its cart. 

The Catholic Church’s reliance on Aristotelian science becomes particularly apparent when one looks at its position on gender, sex, and sexuality. Aristotle posited that all things aspire to be perfect. The most perfect thing is the free adult Greek male subject. The female body, being physically and intellectually weaker than that of its male counterpart, is obviously a body that tried to be perfect by being male, but failed, perhaps due to a failure of being exposed to enough “heat” in utero or a exposure to an ill wind. Hence, females are “misbegotten males” that can’t mirror the glory of the perfect masculine form. There’s no room in this scheme for anything other than two genders, since there’s only the male default and the defective female “other.” Aquinas took this idea and applied it to the question of whether women can be priests. The answer was no, since women, due to their misbegotten nature, are unable to properly become “other Christs” during the mass. Obviously, the bishops can’t say publicly that women are “misbegotten males” but neither can they just chuck out Thomism. Instead, they just say that “we say so” and hope that that will end the conversation, and of course it doesn’t.

Natural law theory basically says that there’s a natural order to the universe and there is a natural morality that all humans share based on their species membership. This sounds rather commonsensical, but the underlying assumption behind Catholic notions of natural law is that humans need the Magisterium to interpret it for them. The useful thing about natural law theory is that it provides an ostensibly secular justification for opposition to same-sex marriage (which is why more Protestants are becoming interested in it), but when you think about it closely it doesn't wash with current knowledge in the natural or social sciences and often just defaults to "that's the way things have always been."

Now, the interesting thing about the Catholic Church’s position on transgender issues is that from the mid-sixteenth century until the late 19th century, all of the singing duties in the Papal States had been done by castrati, biologically male singers who had been castrated as children:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrato

The perceived need for castrati came from the Pauline injunction against women speaking in church, which for many centuries also meant no singing in church. This meant that if you wanted soprano and alto voices you had to either use boys (whose careers had a limited shelf life and lacked the lung power of adults) or male falsettists, whose voices produced an inferior sound. With castrati, you combined the natural beauty of young boy’s voice with the lung power of an adult. The problem is that you had to castrate a young child, leaving him maimed for life, assuming he didn’t die from the crude surgery. The castrati essentially made up a third gender in Catholic Europe, since they weren’t women, but weren’t seen as “full men” either (they could sing in church, but not take holy orders for this reason). Changing tastes in music and a growing sense that castrati were barbaric and “unnatural” meant that by the nineteenth century, the Papal States were the only place in Europe that still used them. Some churches within the Papal States quietly phased out the castrati, while the Sistine Chapel obstinately kept the practice up, believing that criticism of the castrati was just backdoor anti-Catholicism. It wasn’t until the forcible annexation of the Papal States into the Kingdom of Italy that the practice of castrating boys for church musical uses ended, although the last of the castrati would not leave the Sistine Chapel choir until the late 1890s. All of this is a long way of asking why the Catholic Church thinks it was okay for parents to forcibly alter the genitals of their minor sons so they could sing in the Sistine Chapel choir in the past, but it’s not okay for minor children to contemplate altering their own genitals today if they have gender dysphoria.

[PennySycamore]

@Cleopatra7, thank you for your enlightening post about Thomism and it's continued influence on the Church.  This post really should have had multiple reactions: thanks!, love, and WHAT.THE.FUCK

[2manyKidzzz]

I am just not surprised. At all. 

[anniebgood]

12 hours ago, Howl said:

Well we know who was sure to add that in.  And when did the damn Lutherans get into this. Or maybe it's like some Presbyterians who have gone off the rails.  Infuriating.

The Mo Synod, Wisconsin Synod and The NALC are about as conservative as they come. No women in leadership, no women pastors, and let's stay in the 1950's where we all belong. The ELCA has had gay and lesbian leadership and embraces diversity. Of course we are looked upon as the red haired stepchildren of the Lutherans. 

[Briefly]

@Cleopatra7 that was very interesting to read.  You did a lot of research and I feel like I learned a lot.  Thanks,