The weekend after New Ways Ministry’s Eighth National Symposium, “Justice and Mercy Shall Kiss:  LGBT Catholics in the Age of Pope Francis,”  I was reading an op-ed essay in the New York Times,  and my mind reeled back to that meeting held in Chicago on the last weekend of April.

I was surprised that the essay would conjure up a memory of the symposium, since, on the surface, the text had nothing to do with Catholic or LGBT issues.  Yet, on another level, I saw the essay was, in fact, speaking to the core of the Catholic LGBT conversation–or, perhaps, I should say lack of conversation.

The op-ed essay in question was entitled “How Censorship Works,” and it was written by a Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist, whose name had recently been removed from several of his works by government officials at exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai.  The essay is an insightful analysis of the ways that censorship operates in a contemporary culture which seems to prize and valorize free expression.

Source: The Open Closet and Self-Censorship – Bondings 2.0