Tag Archives: LGBT ministry

Indian Priests Directed to “Speak More Sensitively” on LGBT Issues

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In another important sign of how the tone of Catholic LGBT ministry is changing, Francis DeBenardo of New Ways Ministry reports on a notable development in India, where Cardinal Oswald Gracias has directed his priests to speak “more sensitively” on LGBT issues. Doctrine is unchanged, but the balance is clearly shifting.

In what is being described as another after-effect of Pope Francis’ seemingly more open approach to LGBT issues, the Archbishop of Mumbai (Bombay), India, directed his priests to “be more sensitive while referring to homosexuality during their sermons or in their public statements,” reports The Hindustan Times..

Cardinal Oswald Gracias

This directive from Cardinal Oswald Gracias was made in response to a letter by an LGBT equality organization, Queer Azaadi Mumbai (QAM) after they complained that a priest at St Thomas Church, Goregaon, gave a sermon opposing marriage equality in which he described homosexuality as “a great sin.”

In his response, Gracias stated:

“Going by the data in the letter, some of what the priest said is alright and some part is inappropriate. The Church does not accept gay marriage because the Bible teaches us that God willed marriage to be between man and woman. On the other hand, to say that those with other sexual orientations are sinners is wrong. I do think we must be sensitive in our homilies [sermons] and how we speak in public and I will so advise our priests.”

– continue reading at  Bondings 2.0.

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Rev. Mieke Vandersall: Learning To Tell My Gay, Christian Story

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I live in a context where it has sometimes been easier to come out as a lesbian than as a Christian. This is not a reality foreign to “progressives” who hold Christian faith; it is one, however, that I have been consistently working against throughout my close to 10 years of ordained ministry.

Rev. Mieke Vandersall

Rev. Mieke Vandersall

Once you are ordained this reality only heightens. Imagine secular gatherings, from airplanes to cocktail parties. The first thing out of people’s mouth is often: “What do you do?” to which I have found many creative responses, depending on my mood and how much I want to talk (or really listen). They range from “I am a pastor” to “I am an activist for LGBT people” and everywhere in between. Neither tells the whole story. However, both are true, both often shut down conversation, and both often elicit long stories from my interrogators about the value of LGBT people and religion both. Suffice it to say, in these conversations I am reminded again quite quickly of why I have been gun shy about my Christian identity for so long.

Therefore, much of my pastoring life has been on the defensive, justifying to others both inside and outside of the church, and at times to myself, how I can be a Christian, a pastor and a lesbian, and why these identities are inseparable for me. I work with people, many of whom are curious about what a life of faith might look like and attempt to put language on what faith has been for me and how Scripture can be a place of liberation, not death-dealing oppression as many of us have experienced. The most recent incarnation of this call has been in the new worshiping community I have begun called Not So Churchy.

At one cocktail party in the summer of 2012 I had the opportunity to meet British Director Amanda Bluglass. She was visiting for the week from rural Devon, England. She was electric with energy and creativity and I knew instantly I wanted to be her friend. But then invariably the question came: “What do you do?” I had the energy that night to go into it, and so I did: “I am a pastor to LGBTQ individuals who are pursuing ordained ministry. I work as a pastor to the church at large, committing myself to changing homophobic policies that the Presbyterian Church has held onto for many years. I marry same-sex couples as well as straight couples after month of premarital counseling, and I do this with joy. I do this against the policies of the Church that I am a member of and love, because the Gospel calls me to respond to my vows I took upon ordination in this way. I do all this because I believe that the Presbyterian Church, and the church at large can be a place of healing for the world and this is my little contribution towards that.”

-continue reading at  Rev. Mieke Vandersall: Huffington Post.

SMPC Chair, on the Future of “Soho Masses”

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FORUM: ‘Radically Christian attempt’ to meet the spiritual hunger of London’s LGBT Roman Catholics – but what’s really going on with the Soho Masses?

Published: 18 January, 2013

by JOE STANLEY

IT’S been an interesting fortnight – on January 2 the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols announced that the Soho Masses which,­ for the past six years have been the Roman Catholic Church in London’s official outreach to the LGBT Catholic community, were moving from a church in Warwick Street near Piccadilly.

They were asked to integrate into the parish of the Jesuit church in Farm Street; and the Soho Masses Pastoral Council, the group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Catholics who, elected by the congregation, organise the Masses, would no longer do that, but were asked to focus on pastoral care instead.

Ho hum, so far, so good – who could have imagined the torrent of bilge that this banal announcement would produce, both in the gay and the Catholic press?

The gay press, infuriated by the Archbishop’s recent criticism of the government’s process in deciding to legislate for equal marriage, presented it as yet another homophobic attack on the LGBT community.

The prurient end of the Catholic press, which titillates readers with salacious and entirely imaginary stories about a gay dating agency after Mass (anybody want to shack up with a lesbian granny?) decided to spin it as a Machiavellian move by the Archbishop. Conveniently forgetting that there already is a Cardinal alive and well in London, their conspiracy theory was that by “abolishing” the Masses, Archbishop Nichols would ingratiate himself with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Inquisition), and Archbishop Antonio Mennini, the Wimbledon-based Apostolic Nuncio (Papal ambassador) and ensure his own Cardinal’s hat.

Even the usually sensible Tablet opined that there was a danger of this – perhaps the most inclusive church-service in Europe – becoming a ghetto.

Strikingly, both sides were equally patronising, the gay press treating us as pawns of an evil organisation who collude in our own oppression, the prurient Catholic press as a mix of screaming queen and sexed-up, theologically illiterate, mental defective. Even more striking was that the gay press saw it had got it wrong, rang up to check the facts and published corrections, while the Catholic editors persisted in presenting wild imaginings. Proof yet again that it’s harder to be Catholic than L,G,B or T these days.

Most striking of all was the deluge of messages of support from straight and gay Catholics all over the world, many of them priests and nuns, as well as from other Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists and even anarchists.
The whole world is watching Westminster Diocese’s radically Christian attempt to meet the spiritual hunger of London’s LGBT Catholic community and by golly it approves.

So, here’s my take on the Soho Masses and what is happening to us. We started in 1999 when a small “grass-roots” group of LGBT Catholics met on the weekend of the Admiral Duncan pub bombing to celebrate Mass. It is the universal communal prayer of the Church, the act where we, as the very diverse body of Christ, come together to commune in a mindful way with each other and God. A lot of its power comes because it exists in the four major dimensions of space-time, having been celebrated for two millennia – the real reason why so many Catholics find it hard to leave the Church. For all its universality, however, individual instances of Mass vary and adapt to time and place. The group who organised that 1999 Mass aimed to celebrate it in a way that met the spiritual hunger, and confronted the challenges, which LGBT Catholics experience – mostly because Mass elsewhere just did not, and most parish clergy were unable to deal with their “issues”.

-more at  West End Extra.

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