Dear Dad,
I read the letter on the pastoral care of homosexual persons as soon as Ratzinger published it, as well as the new document/instruction about gay seminarians and priests - I always read both sides. And I've read what the L'Observator Romano has had to say as well as listening to (one too many) homilies by right-wing priests and bishops. I've read all the Churches teaching about homosexuals and find it arrogant, ill informed, deliberately attempting to confuse homosexuals with pedophiles, and most disturbingly the deliberately unloving and un-Christ like alienation of an entire group of the Faithful in a most politically advantageous position for the Church. If the Inquisition's devices, teachings and motives had been defended by the teaching of infallibility they would just as easily have been horrifically defended by the Church (In fact if you 'Google" for 'Spanish Inquisition' these days you will find more neo-conservatives defending the Inquisition (much as neo-nazis defend the purity of the Third Reich) even denying that torture took place (just as some GOP senators say gays were not massacred by the Nazis and that it is an invention of the liberal left.
I suppose my error is to hope, when I feel particularly despondent about my Church abandoning me and my gay brothers and sisters to civil discrimination and abuse and weep at the tacit approval given by the Church leaders in their silence for the violence of both the tongue and the 'sword' (translate: ropes, pick-up bumpers, piles of burning tires, Wyoming fences, baseball bats, hangings, home evictions, job firings, refusal to end attacks on gay youth in our schools, pension and SS benefit refusals, hospital visitation refusals, inheritance refusals, job firings, associations with the destruction of the WTC to hurricanes in New Orleans and Florida, the destruction of the Sacrament of Marriage and the family (I find heterosexuals have been doing just fine on destroying marriage and the family quite on their own!) and all of the other absurd and revolting justifications given to the attempt to push us out of sight and deny us civil rights, even by desecrating our Constitution, and now no place in the Church even if you play by the Church's rules all very nauseating, vile, repulsive and very, very sinful. This Pope and this hierarchy will have a great deal to answer for before God. Silence equals death, and the Church's play at politics in the West against equality for us, (while, incidentally, denying equality for the poor in the third world and calling priests and religious there guilty of liberation theology and forbidding political activism) a severe case of 'having your cake and eating it too'.
Under this pope and under his influence during the last pope's papacy a shrill high cry of Hate masked as a holy song of Truth has filled the Basilica of St. Peter's and is reverberating throughout the world Church. John Paul the Second has undermined the work of John XXIII with Ratzinger at his side spewing forth venomous false piety from the side of his evil mouth.
St. Joan of Arc faced a corrupt Church as have many other great saints throughout the ages. Perhaps we will be sacrificed now as these saints have been, as the Jews were by the Church to Hitler, as so many innocents were upon the rack for four centuries in Europe. The pope lightly slaps the hand of Gorge Bush for an unjust war in Iraq while underwriting his re-election in the United States with pastoral letters on how to vote. Now the inquisition continues with a fancy renaming of the Office of the Inquisition and a new set of 'heretics' to martyr. I have been frightened and silenced by the Church too long and when I see evil at work must now speak out about it. Ratzinger has in his search for power in and of the world brought the money changers to the temple steps and I have every belief and hope that Jesus will overturn the tables and scatter the hate-mongers and their hypocrisy.
Until He does I will obey the teachings of not being able to receive Him in Holy Communion, of weekly Mass, of confession and all the beliefs I have been taught lovingly, most especially these two: that the Church is the People of God, (even us fags), and that God is Love, first and foremost. I pray for the pope that he may remember not the Nazi teachings of His youth nor continue to depend upon his mecurical need for a closed box of rules without love or compassion for ALL of Christ's (and therefore his) flock and that, perhaps even this Christmas remember Christ's admonition to those who would not work on the sabbath to save a man's life (the paraplegic): for his silence has justified our brutal murders worldwide. This pope forgets in his splendid halls and robes the struggle of those who must live under constant attack in the world, including even Mark and me in America - or should I say especially America as it is rewritten by Bush, his money grubbing cronies and the Saudi Royals - much less the millions in Africa, China and India dying of AIDS while condoms are condemned - or youths being hung, imprisoned and/or physically mutilated in the Middle and Far East for having been given by God the gift of their homosexuality.
America must be a democracy and in doing so must serve all faiths and all citizens - she cannot be a protestant Christian country any longer and fulfill the Constitution. Every judge is an 'activist' whether liberal or conservative. It is their job to be so and interpret the laws of our great country for the present society in which she finds herself.
The Catholic Church must remember Charity is her first concern and all else is secondary, for this is the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament, which REPLACES the Old Testament. When She returns to the humility of Francis of Assisi and abandons her new quest for influence and power in this world her flock will return, Those of us in the first world who benefit from education can no longer say the world is flat and the sun and planets revolve around us or that God is incapable of instituting evolution; nor can we say any group of men and women created by God are by their nature, given by God, "intrinsically disordered" or "morally evil" simply by this 'accident' of birth. If we do we might as well say again that slavery is justified because the black man is by nature inferior to the white. Homosexuality is my gift from God while it is my Cross, but like all Crosses this one is only a Cross because of other men's ignorance and fear.
Love,
Donnie
I read the letter on the pastoral care of homosexual persons as soon as Ratzinger published it, as well as the new document/instruction about gay seminarians and priests - I always read both sides. And I've read what the L'Observator Romano has had to say as well as listening to (one too many) homilies by right-wing priests and bishops. I've read all the Churches teaching about homosexuals and find it arrogant, ill informed, deliberately attempting to confuse homosexuals with pedophiles, and most disturbingly the deliberately unloving and un-Christ like alienation of an entire group of the Faithful in a most politically advantageous position for the Church. If the Inquisition's devices, teachings and motives had been defended by the teaching of infallibility they would just as easily have been horrifically defended by the Church (In fact if you 'Google" for 'Spanish Inquisition' these days you will find more neo-conservatives defending the Inquisition (much as neo-nazis defend the purity of the Third Reich) even denying that torture took place (just as some GOP senators say gays were not massacred by the Nazis and that it is an invention of the liberal left.
I suppose my error is to hope, when I feel particularly despondent about my Church abandoning me and my gay brothers and sisters to civil discrimination and abuse and weep at the tacit approval given by the Church leaders in their silence for the violence of both the tongue and the 'sword' (translate: ropes, pick-up bumpers, piles of burning tires, Wyoming fences, baseball bats, hangings, home evictions, job firings, refusal to end attacks on gay youth in our schools, pension and SS benefit refusals, hospital visitation refusals, inheritance refusals, job firings, associations with the destruction of the WTC to hurricanes in New Orleans and Florida, the destruction of the Sacrament of Marriage and the family (I find heterosexuals have been doing just fine on destroying marriage and the family quite on their own!) and all of the other absurd and revolting justifications given to the attempt to push us out of sight and deny us civil rights, even by desecrating our Constitution, and now no place in the Church even if you play by the Church's rules all very nauseating, vile, repulsive and very, very sinful. This Pope and this hierarchy will have a great deal to answer for before God. Silence equals death, and the Church's play at politics in the West against equality for us, (while, incidentally, denying equality for the poor in the third world and calling priests and religious there guilty of liberation theology and forbidding political activism) a severe case of 'having your cake and eating it too'.
Under this pope and under his influence during the last pope's papacy a shrill high cry of Hate masked as a holy song of Truth has filled the Basilica of St. Peter's and is reverberating throughout the world Church. John Paul the Second has undermined the work of John XXIII with Ratzinger at his side spewing forth venomous false piety from the side of his evil mouth.
St. Joan of Arc faced a corrupt Church as have many other great saints throughout the ages. Perhaps we will be sacrificed now as these saints have been, as the Jews were by the Church to Hitler, as so many innocents were upon the rack for four centuries in Europe. The pope lightly slaps the hand of Gorge Bush for an unjust war in Iraq while underwriting his re-election in the United States with pastoral letters on how to vote. Now the inquisition continues with a fancy renaming of the Office of the Inquisition and a new set of 'heretics' to martyr. I have been frightened and silenced by the Church too long and when I see evil at work must now speak out about it. Ratzinger has in his search for power in and of the world brought the money changers to the temple steps and I have every belief and hope that Jesus will overturn the tables and scatter the hate-mongers and their hypocrisy.
Until He does I will obey the teachings of not being able to receive Him in Holy Communion, of weekly Mass, of confession and all the beliefs I have been taught lovingly, most especially these two: that the Church is the People of God, (even us fags), and that God is Love, first and foremost. I pray for the pope that he may remember not the Nazi teachings of His youth nor continue to depend upon his mecurical need for a closed box of rules without love or compassion for ALL of Christ's (and therefore his) flock and that, perhaps even this Christmas remember Christ's admonition to those who would not work on the sabbath to save a man's life (the paraplegic): for his silence has justified our brutal murders worldwide. This pope forgets in his splendid halls and robes the struggle of those who must live under constant attack in the world, including even Mark and me in America - or should I say especially America as it is rewritten by Bush, his money grubbing cronies and the Saudi Royals - much less the millions in Africa, China and India dying of AIDS while condoms are condemned - or youths being hung, imprisoned and/or physically mutilated in the Middle and Far East for having been given by God the gift of their homosexuality.
America must be a democracy and in doing so must serve all faiths and all citizens - she cannot be a protestant Christian country any longer and fulfill the Constitution. Every judge is an 'activist' whether liberal or conservative. It is their job to be so and interpret the laws of our great country for the present society in which she finds herself.
The Catholic Church must remember Charity is her first concern and all else is secondary, for this is the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament, which REPLACES the Old Testament. When She returns to the humility of Francis of Assisi and abandons her new quest for influence and power in this world her flock will return, Those of us in the first world who benefit from education can no longer say the world is flat and the sun and planets revolve around us or that God is incapable of instituting evolution; nor can we say any group of men and women created by God are by their nature, given by God, "intrinsically disordered" or "morally evil" simply by this 'accident' of birth. If we do we might as well say again that slavery is justified because the black man is by nature inferior to the white. Homosexuality is my gift from God while it is my Cross, but like all Crosses this one is only a Cross because of other men's ignorance and fear.
Love,
Donnie
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