From the stream of high-profile cases in the news, I have to say there appears to be a coordinated effort by American cardinals to pick fights over any softening of the church’s most hard-core stances. Glad to see them “heightening the contradictions,” because it just brings things closer to the day when American Catholics split from Rome:
A day before Easter, the head of New York’s Roman Catholic archdiocese faced a challenge to his stance on gay rights: the resignation of a church charity board member who says he’s “had enough” of the cardinal’s attitude. Joseph Amodeo told The Associated Press on Saturday that he quit the junior board of the city’s Catholic Charities after Cardinal Timothy Dolan failed to respond to a “call for help” for homeless youths who are not heterosexual.
“As someone who believes in the message of love enshrined in the teachings of Christ, I find it disheartening that a man of God would refuse to extend a pastoral arm” to such youths, Amodeo said in his letter to the charitable organization last Tuesday.
Phone and email requests from the AP for comment from the archdiocese were not immediately answered on Saturday.
The conflict started with a letter to Dolan from Carl Siciliano, founder of the nonprofit Ali Forney Center that offers emergency services to homeless gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender young people. He said the cardinal’s “loud and strident voice against the acceptance of LGBT people” creates “a climate where parents turn on their own children.”
“As youths find the courage and integrity to be honest about who they are at younger ages, hundreds of thousands are being turned out of their homes and forced to survive alone on the streets by parents who cannot accept having a gay child,” Siciliano wrote in his letter, sent last week.
Siciliano, who is Catholic, said parents who are strongly religious are much more likely to reject children who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. Of the nation’s homeless youths, as many as 40 percent are LGBT, studies show.
The catchphrase in the Gospel of John, ‘The disciple whom Jesus loved’ for John himself, has never been more adequately explained than it was by Chrostopher Marlowe: That Jesus was homosexual, like Marlowe himself (“who loves not boys and tobacco is but a fool…”).
That’s an interesting angle on The Nazz’s personal life.