An Open Letter to the American Bishops

An Open Letter to the American Bishops
on the Issue of Homosexuality


In 1974, the delegates of Dignity’s first national convention requested in a letter, that a dialogue be opened between the American bishops and the members of the Catholic gay and lesbian community. With very few exceptions that letter was ignored.

Now, nearly thirty years later, once again I call upon the American bishops to open that dialogue.

For over thirty years, I have ministered as priest and psychotherapist to lesbians and gays. I helped found Dignity New York to provide a safe and loving community within the Catholic Church for gay people. This June will mark the twenty-fifth year I have given retreats for lesbians and gays, at Kirkridge, an ecumenical retreat center.

I have written three books on gay spirituality: The Church and the Homosexual, Taking a Chance on God, and Freedom, Glorious Freedom. I also published an autobiography on my own spiritual journey as a gay priest. As a result of my experience, I have come to the conclusion that what is at stake at this point in time is not only the spiritual and psychological health of many gay and lesbian Catholics and other lesbian and gay Christians. What is at stake is your moral authority to teach on this issue.

In the past, when you undertook a listening process to hear what the Holy Spirit was saying through the People of God, you won our respect. We respected you when you made your statements on the economy, on nuclear warfare and, especially, your aborted effort to draw up a letter on the role of women in the Church. You listened carefully to what women had to say and, and drew up your statements responding to what you heard from women. These actions gave us gay and lesbians reason to hope that the Holy Spirit would lead you into a spirit of willingness to listen to us gay and lesbian Catholics.

What is at stake now is your own moral authority! Unless we gay and lesbian Catholics receive the message that you take us seriously and are willing to listen carefully to what the Holy Spirit is saying to you through our lives and our experience, your judgments on homosexuality will be, for the most part, ignored and you will lose what authority you have left to deserve to be listened to with respect on this issue.

I have never heard the same level of courage from the American Bishops in dealing with the Vatican as that shown by the Major Superiors of Religious Men in response to the egregious document issued by the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith, entitled, “Some Considerations Concerning Homosexual Persons.” [NOTE: It’s actually not clear to which document McNeill is referring. It could be either the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2003 document, Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons, or its 2005 document, Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with Regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in View of Their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders. Then again, McNeill may be referring to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops statement, Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination:
Guidelines for Pastoral Care.]

[The Major Superiors of Religious Men write:] “We view (this document) as a hindrance to the Church leaders of the United States in this most difficult and sensitive area of human living. . . . We are shocked that the statement calls for discrimination against gay men and lesbian women. We find the reasoning for supporting such discrimination to be strained, unconvincing and counterproductive to our statements and actions to support the pastoral needs and personal dignity of such persons. Far from a help to the Bishops and other religious leaders in the United States Catholic Church, the statement complicates our already complex ministry to all people.

“Moreover we find the arguments used to justify discrimination based on stereotypes and falsehoods that are out of touch with modern psychological and sociological understandings of human sexuality. We regret such actions by the CDF and we reaffirm our support for the human rights of all our brothers and sisters.”

As a gay Catholic theologian and psychotherapist, I am fully aware of the enormous destruction recent Vatican documents have caused in the psychic life of young Catholic gays, and of the violence they will provoke against all gay people. I find myself in a dilemma: what kind of faith and trust can I place in a teaching authority that I see clearly acts in an unloving, hateful and destructive way toward my gay family and is more interested in defending its institutional interest than it is in truth and justice?

In the name of the thousands of gay and lesbian Catholics and other Christians to whom it has been my God-given privilege to minister, I make this statement:

At this point, the ignorance and distortion of homosexuality, the use of stereotypes and falsehoods in official Church documents, forces us who are gay Catholics to issue the institutional Church a serious warning. Your ignorance of homosexuality can no longer be excused as inculpable; it has become of necessity a deliberate and malicious ignorance. In the name of Catholic gays and lesbians everywhere, we cry out “Enough!”

Enough! Enough of your distortions of Scripture. You continue to claim that a loving homosexual act in a committed relationship is condemned in Scripture, when competent scholars are nearly unanimous in acknowledging that nowhere in Scripture is the problem of sexual acts between two gay men or lesbian women who love each other, ever dealt with, never mind condemned. You must listen to biblical scholars to find out what Scripture truly has to say about homosexual relationships.

Enough! Enough of your efforts to reduce all homosexual acts to expressions of lust, and your refusal to see them as possible expressions of a deep and genuine human love. The second group you must listen to are competent professional psychiatrists and psychotherapists from whom you can learn about the healthy and positive nature of mature gay and lesbian relationships. They will assure you that homosexual orientation is both unchosen and unchangeable and that any ministry promising to change that orientation is a fraud.

Enough! Enough of your efforts through groups like Courage and other exgay ministries to lead young gays to internalize self-hatred with the result that they are able to relate to God only as a God of fear, shame and guilt and lose all hope in a God of mercy and love. What is bad psychology has to be bad theology!

Enough! Enough again, of your efforts to foster hatred, violence, discrimination and rejection of us in the human community. We gay and lesbian Catholics pray daily that the Holy Spirit will lead you into a spirit of repentance. You must publicly accept your share of the blame for gay murders and bashing and so many suicides of young gays and ask forgiveness from God and from the gay community.

Enough, also, of driving us from the home of our mother, the Church, and attempting to deny us the fullness of human intimacy and sexual love. You frequently base that denial by an appeal to the dead letter of the “natural law.” Another group to whom you must listen are the moral theologians who, as a majority, argue that natural law is no longer an adequate basis for dealing with sexual questions. They must be dealt with within the context of interpersonal human relationships.

Above all else, you must enter into dialogue with the gay and lesbian members of the Catholic community. We are the ones living out the human experience of a gay orientation, so we alone can discern directly in our experience what God’s spirit is saying to us.

And for the first time in history you have gay and lesbian Catholic communities of worship and prayer who are seeking individually and collectively to hear what the Spirit is saying to them in their gay experience - what experiences lead to the peace and joy of oneness with the Spirit of God and what experiences lead away from that peace and joy!

God gave you the commission of discerning the truth. But there is no mandate from Jesus Christ to “create” the truth. We pray daily that the Holy Spirit will lead you to search humbly for the truth concerning homosexuality through dialogue with your lesbian sisters and gay brothers.

The only consolation I can offer gay and lesbian Catholics in the meantime is the profound hope that the very absurdity and hateful spirit of recent Vatican documents will lead gay Catholics to refuse them and recognize the contradiction of their message and that of Jesus who never once spoke a negative word concerning homosexuals.

I work, hope and pray that lesbian and gay Catholics and other gay Christians will exercise their legitimate freedom of conscience, discerning what God is saying to them directly through their gay experience. I hope, too, that they will be able to de-fang the poisons of pathologically homophobic religion, accepting the good news that God loves them and accepts them as gays and lesbians and refusing to be caught in the vortex of self-hatred vis-à-vis a God of fear.

I believe that we are at the moment of a special “kairos” in this matter. The Holy Spirit is “doing something new.” I was recently the guest at a gay ecumenical community that established homes for adult retarded people in the city of Basel in Switzerland. The extraordinary spirit of love and compassion that permeated that community was a foretaste of what lies in the future. I believe there is a vast reservoir of human and divine love that has remained until now untapped because of prejudice and homophobia. The Spirit is calling on you to help release that vast potential of human and divine love through your action sat this national conference.

Please be assured that the actions of Soulforce and Dignity at your national conference are based in profound respect and love. We pray and hope that the same Holy Spirit who has graciously liberated us who are gay to self-respect and self-love will liberate in you, our Catholic leaders, a profound love for your gay brothers and lesbian sisters and melt away all prejudice and judgmentalism in your hearts. May you make us welcome as full members in your family in Christ.

May God bless your efforts!

Sincerely in Christ
John J. McNeill

The Vatican Support of Hatred and Laws to Imprison and Kill GLBT People Continues in the name of Jesus Christ

Today, December 10 the United Nations celebrates the 60th anniversary of Human Rights Day and for the first time in its history the UN General Assembly will consider, this week or next, the issue of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights.
There are 86 countries in the world (nearly half the countries on earth) that still have a total ban on gay men and a smaller number also have a ban on same sex between women, the penalty for being gay in these 86 countries range from a few years to life imprisonment. In a least seven of these counties the sentence is death.
The Vatican, while not able to vote, is very influential at the United nations and they have vehemently opposed the Declaration calling for the global decriminalization of homosexuality being presented by the French and fully endorsed by the 27 nations of European Union.
The Vatican is using a convoluted argument to justify its opposition to this declaration. Archbishop Migliore while referring to the Catechism’s passage on “unjust discrimination” also suggests that outlawing discrimination through a United Nations declaration would pressure states which do not recognize same-gender marriage to change their laws.
The Director of Vatican radio, Father Frederico Lombardi defended the archbishop’s remarks saying “no one wants the death penalty or jail or fines for homosexuals”. Really?
It has been suggested to me that the Catholic Church is against Capital Punishment under any circumstances but that is not totally true. Referring to the same Catechism, paragraph 2266 and in a later revision paragraph 2267, the Church “does not exclude recourse to the death penalty”
In other words, in order to protect society from “behavior harmful to people’s rights and to the basic rules of civil society” the Vatican can safely, in accordance with its rule book, defend its opposition to this proposed UN declaration and thus endorse the laws which deny basic Human Rights to a group of people that it feels is harmful to civil society, that being gay men and women who want to live peacefully and legally with their chosen life partners.
I know of no person who would act to deny any church or church leader the right to lead their flock in accordance with its rules. However it is a sad commentary that instead of supporting this UN declaration that would enhance the dignity of millions of people worldwide, the Vatican instead chose to stand on the side of tyranny.

Catholic Priests Should be Outed

The post election statement by the Catholic Bishops regarding their victory stated that their support for amendment 2 “was not motivated by discrimination or animosity towards gays and lesbians. Contrary to what may have been stated in the media, this amendment does not change existing laws or ordinances. It does not prevent cities or counties from passing ordinances allowing people in other living arrangements to obtain health or other benefits”. Indeed, it does not change existing laws but it opens those laws to be unconstitutional in the State of Florida

Well, I am a patient and generous person when it comes to viewing the other perspective, at least most of the time, in this case the Catholic Bishops simply lied. They knew what happened in Michigan when a similar amendment was approved by the voters of that state. That information was made available to them via media statements, editorials, commentaries and pleading letters to the editors, yet they, the Catholic Bishops, vehemently dismissed this information. Domestic partner benefits were taken away in Michigan, people lost their health care benefits and there is now besides all the psychological pain and suffering Catholic Bishops have imposed by their pedophile priests, real blood on their hands.

So now it begins, David Caton, the homophobe extraordinaire from Brandon has begun his Crusade to deny our community hard fought basic Civil Rights. He could have chosen a law suit, which was the downfall of domestic partner benefits in Michigan but he decided to go the route of “petitioning the people”, the same people who the Catholic Bishops convinced, their “sheep”, via their pulpits to continue this agenda of hate. Trust me, the Catholic Bishops and their gay priests will be on board for this, there is nothing worse than a homophobic homophobe. I am thinking it is probably a good time to start announcing those names. After all, this is a war, a cultural war and all is fair.

I can think of no greater insult to the cause of Jesus Christ than those who think they have moral leadership while diminishing the lives of many millions of humans who have already come to full life. The hottest place in Hell is preserved for those who promote ignorance and participate in spiritual violence.

The Final Screwing of America - George W. You Could Have Used Some Lubricant

One would have thought that George W. Bush would have made some last minute attempt to save the image that he tried to create for Middle America. You know, the folks who thought him to be a God while all the time he was screwing them into poverty. The Middle, Middle Class who work hard every day at jobs which offer little reward other than a salary, health benefits and a small pension. Tedious jobs that go nowhere, have no personal reward other than providing shelter, place food on the table and fund the education of children.

Now G.W. and his Senate friends, friends who supported the bail out of their rich Wall Street comrades, are refusing to support an initiative to support the US Automobile Industry. Why? Very simple, they want to break the Unions, in this case the UAW.

I love it when College Professors complain that a UAW worker without a College education makes more money than they do. One complaint suggests that Auto Workers make 148,000 a year and college professors make 78,000 plus 27% in benefits. He doesn’t break down the benefit part of the UAW worker but he extracts that from the College Professor’s. He also says nothing about the paid Sabbatical time that College Professors get nor the fact that College Professors are doing something that they want to do, not something they have to do in order to secure their families. Keep in mind, a college graduate, or Professor, could always apply for a job building cars if their object was simply to make money. No one asked them to choose to be a College Professor, that was their choice.

But I digress, I was talking about G.W. Bush and how he screwed America. Do you remember Enron? Ken Lay was a big G.W. supporter. The fall of Enron should have alerted all American’s to the coming disaster. Enron was a company that had no production; it created nothing but speculation and caused a major energy problem in California. To be sure America, from Ronald Regan, Bill Clinton and G.W. we have persisted in selling off our manufacturing capabilities in the name of “Globalization”. That theory works for everyone except the soon to be gone American Middle Class.

The American Middle Class has become a victim of Capitalism. Capitalism as it is practiced in America today will reduce the American people to third World status.
George W. Bush has succeeded where Ronald Regan had failed, he has destroyed the American Dream.

African Americans Vote to Enshrine Discrimination

The results of this election are certainly full of mixed emotions and my personal nightmare came true. Barack Obama motivated the African American Community to the polls and in the meantime the African American Pastors motivated their flock to vote Yes on 2 in Florida and Yes on Prop 8 in California. For sure, and by the numbers, they were not the only ones, but they are the ones who can most identify with discrimination in this country. They voted overwhelmingly for Yes on 2 and Prop 8. For the GLBT Community it was a Win/Lose election. Most of us wanted Obama, but some of us knew that “Gay Marriage” as it was identified in Amendment 2, was not going to go over well in the African American Community. I don’t quite get it especially knowing that over the decades that I have been living, many in the GLBT Community have worked so hard to promote equality of the races and have worked hard to ensure African American Civil Rights. It concerns me that we are moving into a new model of hatred, a model, once again promoted by religious fanaticism.

The passage of Amendment 2 in Florida is an example of a majority terrorizing a minority, discrimination, pure and simple, what happened in California with the passage of Propositin 8 is simply inhuman.

I know the President Elect may think that he has a lot more on his mind than the Civil Rights of the GLBT Community. However, nothing is more important in this country than the Civil Rights of all citizens, without that we are just another “Banana Republic”. So, I would urge President Elect Obama to continue thinking forward and stand by his word to secure equality for all Americans.

We need to put our heads together and think about how we can make change. We have to reach out to those who do not understand us, we have to change minds.

Bart
Nill illigitimi carborundum

Catholic Bishops - Misinformed or Just Plain Liars

I would like to respond to Frank J. Dewane’s , the Roman Catholic Bishop of Venice and his staff on their recent comments in a number of publications throughout Florida. The title of an article in Ft. Myers was “It isn’t discrimination, its tradition”. To be honest “tradition” should never trump reality. It was tradition to think that the world was flat and for centuries by Bishop Dewane’s Church. They, the Roman Bishops forced that theory on all humankind at the time. It is also certain that Bishop Dewane’s community of Bishops took it upon themselves to hide illegal abuse of children. I know they, the Bishops, want to forget their collusion and slide it under the rug but it is not going to happen as long as he and his Community of Bishops insist on perpetrating discrimination and crimes against innocent taxpaying US Citizens. The Roman Bishop pronounces that no one will lose any benefits by the passage of Amendment 2. The Bishop is either naive or a liar. The truth is that those promoting this initiative, when and if passed, will immediately pursue the elimination of domestic partner benefits. They did that in Michigan and Kentucky and when they can free up enough money from their Crusade in California they will do the same in every other State where these amendments have been passed. Bishop Dewane apparently has no real dog in this fight, as a bishop of the Catholic Church his Health Care insurance is fully covered, he will have a nice cushy place to rest his head every night in a Catholic Palace. I know that priests who want to speak out against discrimination are stuck in the reality of their circumstances and are fearful of being homeless should they speak truth to power. In the meantime people are struggling in this country, retirees are losing their nest eggs, people are losing their jobs, more and more people are becoming homeless and the only thing the Bishop of Venice seems to be worried about is diminishing the lives of same gender couples. I think the Bishop needs to stop taking his orders from a fax from the Vatican and start being a Pastor.

Venice Florida - Roman Catholic Bishop is a Liar

Venice Florida - Catholic Bishop is a Liar

I was born and raised in Philadelphia, the Cradle of Liberty. When I was twelve years old my Club and I, the Eagles, would hop a trolley car and carry our flag to downtown Philadelphia and have a Club meeting in either Independence Hall or Carpenter’s Hall. Back in those days Philadelphia did not recognize the importance of the “Tourist Trade” so the keepers of those National Treasures let us kids have our meetings in those hallowed halls.
Even then, we kids understood the importance and the meaning of Democratic Republic theory. Sadly, most Americans and some Religious Communities who take their orders from other nations don’t understand the meaning of Democratic Republic. Our forefathers were very thoughtful in allowing most religions free to practice without harm or prejudice.
All Americans should be grateful that the men who met in Philadelphia in 1776 were so forethoughtful that they established our Nation’s government in a way that the majority would not be in a position to subjugate any minority. They created a Constitution that would allow all minorities to protest their subjugation to majority rule. They also protected religious communities from government control by ensuring that the State would not establish a religion. In other words, practice your religion as you see fit, but keep it to yourself. Impose your religious beliefs on your flock, those who choose to live under your rules, don’t break any of our laws, leave the kids alone, and let other American’s live as they believe. That is the American Way.
We kids, way back then, having our meetings at Independence Hall in Philadelphia understood, as our forefathers understood, that there would be times when the minority would be overwhelmed by a wealthy majority. But we also understood that people of good conscience would prevail.
The Catholic Diocese of Venice is playing fair in promoting its religious beliefs by supporting Amendment 2 in its Parish Bulletins this past Sunday. While I won’t dispute their right to promote bigotry and hatred I do dispute their premise that Amendment 2 is about “Gay marriage”. First of all “Gay Marriage” is illegal in Florida. Beyond that I am sure that the Catholic Church has absolutely no reason to fear that any gay person will be knocking on their doors asking them to perform a “gay marriage”. It just ain’t going to happen, so relax and don’t soil your cassocks.
Amendment two is truly about hate and ignorance, something the Catholic Church has promoted for centuries and probably one of the better reason it should just go away and just be part of mankinds terrible history.
While amendment 2 is indeed an attack on GLBT Marriage it’s affects on the non gay community are overwhelming. It will take away domestic partnerships rights that are currently available in Broward, Dade Counties, Tampa City, Sarasota City, Orland City in Florida and a few others.
We know this to be true, we have seen this happen in Michigan and we know they are working to make this happen in Florida.
When the Catholic Bishop of Venice says that this amendment will have no impact on people's health care, hospital rights, legal and financial rights, Social Security rights, pension rights, he is either totally misinformed probably by choice or just a plain liar. But then again we know that Catholic Bishops are below the truth.