eucharist

I have a new defense for all those self-proclaimed orthodox bloggers who might criticize Saint Anthony Shrine for being welcoming of gay and lesbian Catholics:

At least we don’t have a Buddha.

It seems that down in Australia, a bishop there has issued a warning to a “renegade” parish “where women can preach, homosexual couples can be blessed and social justice is championed.” It seems the church is “operating outside practices and policies acceptable to the Roman Catholic Church.” (God forbid the Church should champion social justice.) The bishop concluded that whatever good the parish might be doing, it is decidedly not Catholic. (The crisis was, of course, precipitated by a person not a member of the parish who came in and took surreptitious photographs – yet another Catholic snitch on a self-appointed crusade to purify the Church. If you’re worried about impurities, my friends, try Lysol.)

Originally posted at Talk to Action.

Two seemingly unrelated recent events have something important in common. The dust-up between the University of Minnesota's P.Z. Myers and the Catholic League's Bill Donohue and the terrible shooting at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee each surface the dangers of highly charged rhetoric.

First, the Myers-Donohue flap.

Last year, a lesbian couple in Wyoming, married in Canada, and mothers of three, got a surprise in the mail. At the request of their bishop (David Ricken), their pastor informed them by letter that they were no longer welcome to take Communion.

Their sin, the pastor made clear, was not their lesbianism per se. In fact, they regularly attended Mass and their family picture had appeared in the parish directory. What brought them down was the Smudge. On Ash Wednesday, they appeared (complete with forehead ashes) in an article in which they protested an anti-gay marriage amendment then pending in the Wyoming legislature. This exposure culminated in their being refused communion.