Honoring the 20th Anniversary of the 1997 USCCB pastoral message “Always Our Children,” on October 7, 2017, Auxiliary Bishop John Dolan (pictured above) and Father Lucio Castillo of the Diocese of San Diego will celebrate a Mass for “families of the LGBT community” at St. John the Evangelist Church in Hillcrest (where Dolan previously served as Pastor). Laura Spencer-Martin, director of the Diocese’s Office for Family Life and Spirituality, said:
As a diocese we want to be with people, with everyone; especially when people have been hurt…I think he wants to send a message of love, compassion, listening and being with all the people.
According to City Commissioner Nicole Murray Ramirez, a longtime national LGBTQ-rights activist based in San Diego:
This is a truly historic Mass…When you remember that this is the same diocese that 12 years ago refused to give a funeral to John McCusker and just five or six years ago did the same thing again to SRO’s owner, John Sanfilippo, but now this bishop is welcoming LGBTs and our families to celebrate Mass…There are still people in the church who don’t want us there. I think it’s courageous.
John McCusker and John Sanfilippo both owned local gay bars in the San Diego area. Following public criticism regarding the denial of a Catholic funeral for each man, in both cases, the Archdiocese reversed its earlier decision and they received a Catholic funeral.
The pastoral associate and coordinator of LGBT ministry at St. John the Evangelist Church is Aaron Bianco. According to his profile on the website for the dissident group Call To Action, Mr. Bianco “will begin his work as Call To Action’s full-time Program Outreach Associate beginning June 1st [2015]. Aaron has served as Pastoral Associate at Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in San Diego since 2008 with experience in RCIA, liturgy, and music. Aaron has extensive experience with young adults through his coordination of the Cathedral’s young adult ministry group of over 600 young adults. Given Aaron’s engagement with grassroots organizing and comprehensive understanding of intergenerational dialogue we are excited to have Aaron offer support to CTA’s young adult program…”
Call To Action, in their official “Call for Reform in the Catholic Church,” asked for the following:
“We call upon the church to discard the medieval discipline of mandatory priestly celibacy, and to open the priesthood to women and married men…”
“We call for extensive consultation with the Catholic people in developing church teaching on human sexuality…”
“We claim our responsibility, as committed laity, religious and clergy, to participate in the selection of our local bishops…”
After the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, Jim FitzGerald, Executive Director of Call To Action, made the following statement:
Call To Action is elated with today’s Supreme Court outcome. Finally all loving and committed partners and families will be recognized fully and equally. Call To Action embraces a Church rooted in welcome, inclusivity, equality and justice for everyone. This decision reflects those Gospel values.
When asked about a 2015 statement from Archbishop Victor Fernández, who reportedly said:
The pope goes slow because he wants to be sure that the changes have a deep impact..The slow pace is necessary to ensure the effectiveness of the changes…
Bianco responded: “Yes, that’s true…But when the church does evolve – and I know it happens at a frustratingly slow pace – however, it doesn’t go backward.”
“Always Our Children” is often cited by pro-gay Catholics as an official proclamation that determined and or changed universal Catholic Church teachings with regard to homosexuality. For example, “In God’s Name” LGBT ministry from the Diocese of Metuchen, that sponsored their own Mass at the Cathedral in the Archdiocese of Newark, takes “as a guide the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 1997 pastoral, Always Our Children: A Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children and Suggestions for Pastoral Ministers.” In the Diocese of San Jose, the colorful brochure promoting their LGBT ministry – under the heading “Church Teaching,” they include an excerpt from “Always Our Children,” but curiously nothing from The Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The three main consultants for “Always Our Children” were the self-outed priests James Schexnayder, Robert Nugent, and Peter Liuzzi; Schexnayder is from the Diocese of Oakland and founded the dissident gay advocacy group the Catholic Association for Lesbian and Gay Ministry. In his 2011 book “Setting the Table: Preparing Catholic Parishes to Welcome Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender People and Their Families, Schexnayder stated that the use of the term “objective disorder” in the 1986 document on homosexuality from the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, should be merely “understood in a philosophical manner and not as a moral judgment.”
When “Always Our Children” was being prepared, Robert Nugent was under investigation as part of the same review that was looking into the ministry he cofounded with Sister Jeannine Gramick – like his cohort Sister Gramick, he was similarly “silenced” in 1999; according to the Vatican, both were “permanently prohibited from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons.” Liuzzi was for many years the head of the LA Archdiocese Ministry with Lesbian and Gay Persons, In his book “With Listening Hearts: Understanding the Voices of Lesbian and Gay Catholics,” Liuzzi wrote:
Many people cannot envision homosexuality as a possibility for authentic love because they regard it simply as a genital, sexual urge or drive. Such persons are misguided. One must remember that anyone’s sexual orientation does not simply consist of sexual desire but actually influences the way one thinks, the way one decides, the way one responds, the ways one relates to others – even to God – and the ways one structures his or her world. All those actions that make up each waking moment are shaped by one’s sexual orientation.
At the time of its publication, Bishop Fabian W. Bruskewitz said this about “Always Our Children:”
“Calamity and frightening disaster” are terms which are not too excessive to describe this document. It is my view that this document carries no weight or authority for Catholics, whom I would advise to ignore or oppose it.
Both Robert McElroy, Bishop of San Diego and Cardinal Joseph Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, endorsed James Martin’s book “Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity.”
During a recent conversation at Fordham University, Martin said this about a male friend who has been in a long-term homosexual relationship:
I do not understand how a person could say the following things: This is not love, this is a lesser love, they should be apart, they should have never met, they should never be together.
Are they allowed to receive communion? Isn’t sodomy a sin? Isn’t sex fri outlet pleasure a sin? Read 1 Corinthians. Paul had to deal with sexua sins in his time. Have we forgotten that God’s word with never change. The 10 commandments don’t change with the culture. Christ lived sinners, but he did not say follow me & continue to sin. He said take up your cross & follow me. The cross is same see attraction & the cross is taken up by not acting in this attraction, just as married people are not it act on attractions to those outside their marriage.
The San Diego Union Tribune just ran a story about the long-term consequences of the sex abuse problems in the diocese and the consequences. They even quoted Bishop McElroy, who said, “”We have to maintain vigilance. I use the word vigilance advisedly. That’s an active stance and we can’t become complacent.”
Yet how can a bishop credibly claim to be vigilant when he gives a wink and a nod to the gay agenda? Bishop McElroy, an Ivy League grad, is not stupid. He knows darned well that the John Jay Report found that the overwhelming majority of abuse cases involved male victims and most were adolescent or older. THAT IS HOMOSEXUALITY, plain and simple. He can’t have it both ways–push the gay agenda and be “vigilant” about sex abuse that is, for the most part, gay in nature. Disordered thinking to approve of disordered behaviors seems to be the order of the day and it isn’t going to get better anytime soon.
I agree with you Marie! God even expects MARRIED people to live ‘chastely’. Artificial Birth Control is a sin against God and against the love for each other that God ORDAINED for married heterosexual people. And so are sexual acts between married heterosexual people that are NOT OPEN TO LIFE. They are also ‘disordered’. Paul Vl in his encyclical ‘Humanae Vitae’ foretold of the immorality that would cascade if artificial birth control were to be condoned and widely used in the Church and world wide. We are now LIVING that total decent into moral, sexual depravity. He rightly prophesied the consequences of using ‘sex’ as anything other than procreating and the love and unity of each other. Take one or the other of these two equations that were ‘God ordained’ away from the sexual act, and society quickly slides into sexual depravity, which we are now witnessing in living technicolor. . We were warned, and NOW, we see that there has been set up a ‘secret’ commission under the direction of Pope Francis to ‘study’ Humanae Vitae. I can’t help but to be skeptical of this ‘commission’ that has been made up of very ‘liberal’ members. Are we going in the same direction as his latest encyclical A.L. has led? Are they looking to ‘condone’ artificial birth control and open the flood gates entirely on ‘free, disordered sex’?? PRAY, PRAY, PRAY!!!!
Oh and thank you Joseph for your faithful and courageous witness to the truth of Christ in His Church!! God has BLESSED you immensely!! And…….be expecting ever increasing resistance as Satan will fight you and all of us who speak out in defense of Jesus and His Church!! May God protect you and the Blessed Mother guide you!!
I thank God daily for hood Roman Catholic parents who did their best to bring me and my sisters in the fear and love of God. I have in my posession The Daily Missal in the old Rite. The Catechism of St Pius XII, and the strict Catechesis provided by dedicated teching sisters both in elementary and in High school. Thete is nothing Catholic about the Novus Ordo Mass. Our Churches have become social halls without a trace of reverence. We have lost the sense of holiness. As one Cardinal Prince of the church ssid. ” we are no longer about smells and bells. Now we have decided to accompany the sinners all the way into their occasions of sin and are dense enough to think we are brighter than Lucifer himself. Of sorry, I forgot he was part of the frippery we dispensed with. The nearest Church with the old Rite is,40 miles,away and we all know thst if the Diocese finds too many of the Faithful there they will order the priest to stop. Then his next assignment will be out in the boondocks with the other good priests.
I’m a former San Diego parishioner ( now live out of State). I was on my Parish council. I was in charge of Adult Faith Formation Classes. So I was involved. One of our former priests- encouraged me to read : Gays and Greys about San Francisco’s parish LBGT experiences. At a Pastoral Council meeting both this priest and Bishop McElroy referred to their Seminary years together and Formation in Oakland. They were formed in post-Vatican 2 left-leaning social/political/theological mindset. I do not see a conflict between asking HARD celibacy for all. Even in marriage there are always times of non-sexual times. And building hedges within loving friendships. Why are we so reluctant to ask MORE- not less of the Baptized? Why do those of us with older Catholic instruction have to fight our own Pastors on the subject of sexuality from a Catholic-not secular- worldview?
“As a diocese we want to be with people, with everyone; especially when people have been hurt”
Ah, the victim mentality when in reality the only people “hurt” are themselves and the people they try to convince that sodomy and destructive lives are perfectly normal. People who promote sodomy are the ones who are doing the hurting…this is psychological projection 101 and total emotionalism.
God bless~