Pontifical Household Announces Pope Not Having Official Meeting With Gay Group Today

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The Pontifical Household announced that the Pope isn’t having a meeting with a ‘c’atholic pro-Gay group today after Mass to screen a video.

Vatican City, Mar 16, 2015 / 05:35 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A Vatican official says there will be no papal endorsement for an LGBT activist video whose backers want it to reach Pope Francis.

Father Gil Martinez, C.S.P., a member of the development team for the video “LGBT Catholics: Owning our Faith,” intended to present the video to Pope Francis in a private audience after morning Mass on March 17, according to the website of the St. Philip Neri Parish and Northwest Paulist Center in the Portland, Ore.

The video contains the personal reflections from self-identified LGBT Catholics, several of whom reject Church teaching.

An official with the Holy See Press Office told CNA March 16 that the Prefecture of the Pontifical Household had not announced any public events for Pope Francis on March 17. This means that “no public or official meetings are scheduled.”

“The Pope can, however, meet whomever he wants, but this cannot mean in any sense an official endorsement, since every audience is intended to be kept private,” the official said. Such meetings are made public “only if some of the people involved speak out about it.”

Well, we can anticipate that someone just might speak out then.  It happens quite a bit these days.

The press release for the video said it is dedicated to “achieving the full acceptance of LGBT persons in the Catholic Church.” It said that the video evokes “the need for change” and will “reach thousands, including Pope Francis, many bishops and other prominent Vatican clergy.”

The St. Philip Neri Parish website said that Fr. Mark-David Janus, C.S.P., would also present Cardinal Walter Kasper’s newest book from Paulist Press, “Pope Francis’ Revolution of Tenderness and Love.”

The “Owning our Faith” video is produced and directed by Michael Tomae, a parishioner of New York City’s St. Paul the Apostle Church. Fr. Martinez is pastor of the parish, which shares a mailing address with the “Owning our Faith” project. Tomae is part of the parish’s Out@StPaul LGBT ministry, which is promoting the video on its website.

The “Owning our Faith” video includes interviewees who reject Catholic teaching on sexual morality and marriage.

Matt Putorti, a lawyer from New York City, criticized Catholic teaching in the video, claiming that the Church is telling gay people that “they need to be celibate” and “cannot live fully.”

Putorti said it is “inherently” discriminatory to say, “You can be gay, but you can’t live that life.”

Interviewee Matt Vidal, a lawyer from New York City in a same-sex civil marriage, said that leaving the Church would mean that “it’s never going to change.”

“So we have to continue living here, being an example and encouraging other people to be that example because that’s what’s going to change the Church.”

Another interviewee, Matteo Williamson, co-chairs the transgender caucus of the dissenting Catholic group Dignity USA, which aims to change Catholic teaching on homosexuality.

The “Owning Our Faith” website recommends a list of parishes on the website of New Ways Ministry, another Catholic dissenting group. In 2011, the U.S. Catholic bishops reiterated that the organization is not allowed to identify as Catholic and said that it puts forward positions that do not conform to Catholic teaching.

‘c’atholic group, Dignity USA just invited the vile, pornographic, and decidedly undignified Dan Savage as a speaker.  Why are these groups having non-meetings with Pope Francis to promote gay sex?

 

Al Gore Evangelized at the Periphery

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Al Gore was in the news again Friday at the South by Southwest Conference pushing the cause for which he’s become synonymous: mankind is killing the weather.

“We need to put a price on carbon to accelerate these market trends,” Gore said, referring to a proposed federal cap-and-trade system that would penalize companies that exceeded their carbon-emission limits. “And in order to do that, we need to put a price on denial in politics.”

The Climate Change movement is only about one thing; force.  It’s a worldwide protection racket and the new FrancisVatican is 100% in compliance.  What’s more edifying than the most trusted name in religion selling an Al Gore-sized scam?

I’ll never forget the 2000 election.  Gore got all pumped up with muscles, then leaned all over George Bush during the debates, huffing and puffing and making quite the oaf of himself.  He couldn’t stand at the podium and be silent like a gentleman while his opponent responded.  He didn’t have it in him.

Next he threw a nationwide fit over the inability to inject quite enough fraud into the election to grab it.

Gore, who has made climate change an overriding theme since he lost to George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election, made no mention of his political future. He took several questions from Twitter after his talk. None asked whether he was considering another run for the White House.

He said he hoped his third SXSW appearance would help promote the fight against climate change and to help put pressure on those who say it’s not a problem.

“We have this denial industry cranked up constantly,” Gore said. “In addition to 99 percent of the scientists and all the professional scientific organizations, now Mother Nature is weighing in.”

It’s really quite astounding how ever more preposterous things become doctrine in our television era.  Gay people are parents, gender is chosen, ISIS isn’t Islamic, climate change causes a crisis of inequality…and now it also causes terrorism.

He led a presentation on major weather events that he said could be attributed to human activity. He linked troubles in the Middle East at least partially to climate change, saying that drought drove more than a million Syrian refugees into cities already crowded with refugees from the Iraq war.

At one point, Gore’s presentation showed a slide of Pope Francis. “How about this Pope?” Gore said.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, a Vatican official who helped draft the Pope’s anticipated encyclical on the environment, said recently that the planet was getting warmer and that Christians needed to address the problem. Gore said he looks forward to release of the Pope’s document, expected in June or July.

“I’m not a Catholic,” Gore said, “but I could be persuaded to become one.”

Great.  That must be the New Evangelization.  Talk about hitting a periphery!

Now let’s see if it can get him to bend and kneel for something that’s not money.

 

Take My Advice, Tony

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The prolific Fr. Longenecker has jumped to the defense of Pope Francis in the wake of the Boston Globe story about the relationship between the Pope and the late Protestant ‘Bishop’ Tony Palmer, who died in a motorcycle accident in England recently. According to the account, Mr. Palmer’s family was Catholic while he remained Protestant.

After years of working with the Cd. Bergoglio Palmer wanted to become Catholic too, but was urged to remain outside the Church by the Pope ‘for the sake of the mission.’ This is a discouraging but not ‘out of the blue’ story and Father’s response is distracting.

My comments in red:

Can you disagree with the Pope? Sure. Last week I posted about some traditionalist Catholics who do nothing but correct the Pope. These extremists correct Pope Francis, Pope Benedict, Pope St John Paul II, Pope Paul VI and Pope St John XXIII. When I said they resemble the liberal cafeteria Catholics they so dislike I also pointed out that there is nothing wrong with questioning or challenging a pope’s personal choices. Extremists? This borrows language from the enemies of the Church. Didn’t he just say that correcting a Pope was ok – Sure, but?

The underlying question is “Do you have a basic trust in the Holy Spirit working through the Body of Christ the Church? Do you have a rock solid belief that the Pope is working for the best of the church and the promulgation of the Catholic faith? Can you listen to him and obey him as your shepherd and as the Vicar of Christ?” Is this our Faith that everything every Pope says must be taken as the work of the Holy Spirit?

If “yes” then criticisms of the pope’s style, his personal choices, his taste and his decisions in pastoral matters are just talking points. It’s like having a good marriage but you can’t stand your wife’s new hairstyle. It’s like loving your husband but you wish he’d give up bringing fish home and gutting them on the kitchen table. It’s like loving your wife but cringing when her mother comes over. (Fr. Longenecker is a married priest. It’s good to remember, and to appreciate the tremendous gift of celibate priests.)

With this in mind, I read with consternation Austen Ivereigh’s article for the Boston Globe which gives more detail about Pope Francis’ relationship with freelance Anglican Bishop Tony Palmer. For those who don’t remember, Palmer met the Pope when he was working in Argentina as a Protestant missionary. Tony Palmer, a South African, was married to an Italian Catholic, and the question of his converting to the Catholic church arose in his conversations with the then Archbishop Bergoglio.

Palmer and Bergoglio had intense discussions about Christian separation, using the analogy of apartheid in South Africa. They found common ground in believing that institutional separation breeds fear and misunderstanding. Bergoglio, whom Palmer called “Father Mario,” acted as a spiritual father to the Protestant cleric, calming him (“he wanted to make me a reformer, not a rebel,” Palmer told me) and encouraging him in his mission to Christian unity. A reformer, rather than rebel is good. Christian unity is good if that means unity with the Church.

At one point, when Palmer was tired of living on the frontier and wanted to become Catholic, Bergoglio advised him against conversion for the sake of the mission.

“We need to have bridge-builders”, the cardinal told him. This is, on its face, not Catholic and not charity.

Should the then Cardinal Bergoglio have advised Tony Palmer to convert to Catholicism? In fact, the more we learn about Tony Palmer, the more interesting the question becomes. He was very involved in joint Catholic-Charismatic renewal and evangelization ministries.  Wouldn’t that ministry have been undermined if he became Catholic? Was Cardinal Bergoglio, in this instance, correct in advising him to stay put? This is where Father begins his rationalization.

The doctrinaire would say, “The Catholic Church is the one, true Church. Everyone outside it is going to hell and therefore it was wrong to tell Tony Palmer not to convert!” Unfortunately it’s not always that easy. Sometimes it is better, for all sorts of reasons, for a person to stay where they are. That is a terrible thing to say. ‘Doctrinaire’ means cruel and unbending. Someone who follows the doctrines of the Church is neither. They are called saints. Those of us who work with converts–especially clergy converts–(and I get about two or three emails a month from clergy thinking of converting) realize that for family, faith and financial reasons immediate conversion is not always the answer. If a person is moving towards the Catholic faith we meet the person where they are and walk with them on that journey. It took me twenty years to finally take the step to become a Catholic. Maybe someone should have told Father to wait even longer? Still, the circumstances, background, and timing of this story could certainly be different than the Globe’s account.

Therefore one can’t judge Cardinal Bergoglio’s call with Tony Palmer. This is the essence of Fr. Longenecker’s point. We don’t know the actual situation, so we should not be rash.

However, what about that bit about ‘the sake of the mission?’ It’s the stated reason for the Pope’s direction to Palmer. Is that a reason? Is there ever a reason to refrain from union with the Church of Christ, with the saving Sacraments, and with Heaven? No. There’s not.

Father goes on to make a strong faithful defense of his conversion and those of countless others who have helped the Church with their love, but these facts are not really relevant to the troubling story that appeared in the Boston Globe this weekend about Pope Francis and his late friend, Tony Palmer.