HOLY LETDOWN: Why Pope Francis is Failing the LGBT Community

HOLY LETDOWN: Why Pope Francis is Failing the LGBT Community
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Last year, the scandal free first-Jesuit pope Francis emerged from a meeting with Kentucky Court Clerk Kim Davis and others at the Vatican Embassy in the United States. The Vatican quickly drew up their talking points and convinced the world that the meeting was not an endorsement of anything. The Vatican suggested that the Pope had done more than enough for the gay community by meeting with his former student Mr. Yayo Grassi, a gay man who is in a same-sex relationship with his partner Iwan Bagus. To the Vatican that was the ‘real audience’, while the pope’s chance encounter with Kim Davis was just that, chance.

In the aftermath of the Orlando Gay Massacre Pope Francis did not call for a Mass for gays at the Vatican. Instead, the liberal-leaning Jesuit, Fr. James Martin issued a quick Jesuitical response: No Action. Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego is reported to have said, the murders are “ rooted in a counterfeit notion of religious faith.” Other prelates, like Chicago’s Archbishop Blase Cupich told the LGBT Community “I stand with you”. Still: NO ACTION.

Pope Francis has decried gender theory as being ideological colonization (sic indoctrination) and contrary to the dogma and teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. To Pope Francis, gender theory contradicts the natural law ordering of human relationship, which to the all-male hierarchy defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Still: NO ACTION.

Recently, Pope Francis, at some 40,000 miles up in the air, took more liberties to answer a reporters question about his experience ministering to the LGBT community. The Pope responded by telling reporters that he had, "accompanied people with homosexual tendencies and even homosexual activity. I accompanied them; I helped them draw closer to the Lord, although some couldn't. But I never abandoned them." Still: NO ACTION. Then the Pope chided those same reporters, "Please Don't say, 'The pope will bless transgender people,' OK?" What would Jesus say: I cannot bless you; confess your sins to me? No, that is not how he treated Mary Magdalene, Bartimaeus or the woman with the hemorrhage.

Pope Francis, a Jesuit, surely must know of the countless number of gay priests who marry heterosexual couples around the world. Surely, he must know that some gay Jesuits were doctoral students of current cardinals and bishops. Surely Pope Francis knows that a very powerful and influential closeted gay Jesuit threatened Bloomsbury Press over my memoir. Surely Pope Francis knows that the official teaching of the Church limits how far any priest can accompany LGBT people, especially the youth negatively affected by 2,000 years of anti-gay theology and rhetoric.

It has been several years since the Pope uttered his most famous rhetorical question, “Who am I to judge?” in reference to the ministry of closeted gay priests and seminarians. To the LGBT community, Pope Francis is just another HOLY LETDOWN.

Why? Because LGBT people are still fired from jobs at Roman Catholic churches, schools and social ministry agencies. Because LGBT people cannot receive the Eucharist, they cannot marry, they cannot preach, they cannot teach in high schools (unless they are run by Jesuits) they cannot bring communion to the sick or lead choirs or other ministries. LGBT couples are discouraged from adopting children, or marrying civilly. The homes of LGBT people cannot be blessed. It is uncertain whether or not married LGBT people can receive official Christian burial services. The Church does not support the rights of LGBT to donate life saving blood to blood banks and hospitals.

LGBT people who steward the church with their time and treasure and talent, who, for example, helped rebuild and renovate Saint Francis Xavier Church, in New York City, are persona non grata.

No, the Church has never appreciated or thanked LGBT people for their positive contribution to local parishes, to Catholic universities, to academic journals or to shaping or forming the Christian life of infants and youth. LGBT people are “officially” dissuaded from becoming godparents. Even Fr. Mychal Judge a martyr and saint, who died on 9/11, is not remembered as a patron of the LGBT community.

Pope Francis has never sought reconciliation from the LGBT community; he has never offered to say Mass at the Vatican for LGBT people and their families. He has never called gay priests to come out of the closet, to offer them his full support. How many closeted gay priests could still run their universities, or high schools, or interview on CNN or be quoted by the New York Times if they came out, or far worse were “Outed” because parishioners saw them at gay bars, or they hit on fellow classmates in graduate school or who threatened lawsuits under the veil of power and influence. How many of these closeted gay priests were confused with sexual predators and did nothing to give dignity and life to their own community. No, instead they went to psychological consultation centers, like the Saint Louis Consultation Center for treatment on addiction and behavior modification. They were effectively told: you are intrinsically disordered.

Sadder still, how many of these closeted gay priests marry heterosexual couples, instructing the on marriage, while they return to their room to weep and pray for the day LGBT people are full members of their communion. The Church is out of touch with Millennials. Starbucks is becoming more and more the site of the Eucharist and table fellowship.

For a Pope who knows image matters, such images do not go away. Furthermore, while the Pope and Mr. Grassi have been friends for 19 years, he did not tell the world that he endorsed Mr. Grassi and his partner Iwan Bagus attendance at mass, their reception of the Eucharist or act to defend or bless their same-sex union. The Pope did not offer to marry them. His accompaniment ends at the point of discovery: they are gay men who act on their love.

The hug Pope Francis offered his friend and his friend’s lover was quickly settled at the Synod on the Family. The Synod, part 2 of an earlier meeting of the world’s bishops in 2014, examined the theme of “The vocation and mission of the family in the Church and the modern world.” From October 4 to 25 the bishops met to discuss a range of theological issues confronting human beings, their families and their sexual relationships and love. This is something Pope Francis has been unwilling to do, instead he has written about the environment, faith, and the joy of the Gospel.

During the Synod, the all-male Bishops questioned the merit of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the Eucharist. The Synod’s bishops contemplated the dignity and worth (sic integration) of gays and lesbians, not bisexual, pansexual or transgender persons, along with whether or not gays and lesbians could form children and adults spiritually. The Bishops changed nothing, claiming only to desire a “more integrated Christian community,” while “avoiding every occasion of scandal.” They reinforced the known Catholic doctrine that all sex acts must be open to life.

The Synod’s spokesperson Cardinal George Pell, who is the head of the Vatican’s economy secretariat, commented that there were “no doctrinal developments, no doctrinal surprises, no doctrinal back flips. No changes in [practice] or discipline [instead it offered a] beautiful commendation of large families and of the witness of happily [heterosexual] married spouses and their children as agents of evangelization.”

What does this say about legacy of Pope Francis right now: his papacy is marked by a HOLY LETDOWN.

While the Pope takes on discernment, the environment and gender theory, he and his Church remain confused about pressing social issues facing human relationships and human families. To me, a gay ex-Jesuit, the Pope is especially confused about gay people.

Gay people want more than integration into their families of origin and family of faith. Gay people want the Church to treat them as ends in themselves, to acknowledge their time, talents and treasure, to allow them access to the Eucharist without having to confess their sin of loving (intimately) their partner or spouse to a priest.

At the end of the Synod on the Family it’s a maybe for divorced and remarried Catholics and a shut door on gays. Nothing the Synod did is ambiguous, as the Jesuit priest Thomas Reese suggests in the National Catholic Reporter. To suggest that the door is opening, and that billions of Catholics settle for this reminds me that the United States Supreme Court continues to challenge the Vatican as to who will be (not become) the standard bearer of morality and ethics in the 21st Century.

It would be great to see Pope Francis translate more of the mind and spirit of one of his favorite American mystics, Thomas Merton, into his future papal encyclicals, bulls or exhortations. Merton, a Trappist monk with his own storied history, writes in No Man is an Island (1955) that, “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” How would Merton influence the Church’s teaching on divorce, homosexuality or the reception of Holy Communion by divorced, remarried and gay Catholics! I believe he would support accept those whom the church has rejected.

Even with Pope Francis most Catholic families must choose between the demands of Catholic faith over the familial obligations of love of brother. There is no evidence to suggest that parishes accept LGBT people more, or that more gay or lesbian priests and religious have come out of the closet. What will happen when Pope Francis’ papacy comes to an end?

This is just it, the future of the Church is her present, and Pope Francis is acting as if he’s already left the papacy. Pope Francis is staying on the surface of the pressing social issues facing human families and human individuals. It’s as if he’s looking down at his phone (some 40,000 miles high) and texting a friend when the people around him desire deep relationships, not encounters, not calls for integration, not statements made in vein, e.g., Archbishop Cupich’s “I stand with you.” What does that even mean when LGBT people cannot receive Jesus’ body and blood from their priest or bishop, or worse yet, from their friends who serve as Eucharistic ministers?

Until Pope Francis changes the doctrine, dogma and tradition of the church with his pen, he contributes to “creating more deserts,” deserts that continue to tell gay couples and gay people generally that they are “intrinsically disordered” and not part of “God’s design for matrimony and family.” Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope, who shook the world with his gentleness and humility, is becoming a holy letdown for the most marginalized and the least in the Roman Catholic faith. LGBT men, women and children deserve more. That more would be Magis, the Jesuit term for exercising deep human relationships, and a term that describes the experience of finding God in all things (aka human flourishing).

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot