Washington D.C., Jun 7, 2018 / 05:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- While the month of June is marked by LGBT pride events, some Catholic critics have voiced wariness and concern that the events draw people away from God’s plan for humankind.
“Pride Month fills me with sadness, for gay pride parades are events that ultimately show how much man has forgotten God and how much he loves us, as a loving Father who created us in his image, solely as male and female,” Daniel Mattson, author of the book “Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay,” told CNA.
“Gay Pride Parades are masquerades that obscure man’s dignity, rather than honor it,” he said.
Mattson voiced gratitude for the opening words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s section on Life in Christ, a passage from a sermon of St. Leo the Great, which says “Christian, recognize your dignity.” Mattson also voiced gratitude that the Church “points the path away from pride in what are ultimately socially constructed identities to the truth of our nature.”
Mattson suggested that parade marchers will find true happiness only through “humility before God, their creator, recognizing the inherent dignity he gave them, as his sons and daughters, created male and female.”
LGBT pride parades and other observances are held in June to commemorate the June 1969 riots and protests against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn bar in New York City. This month’s events range from low-key events, marches and advocacy, major corporate-backed events, and events that include public nudity and immorality.
Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island has also commented on the observances.
“Catholics should be very wary of events in the June LGBTQ month. It’s not a fun-filled, family-friendly celebration of respect,” Tobin said in a June 1 Twitter post. “It promotes a lifestyle and agenda that, in the extreme, is morally offensive.”
Mattson said he was grateful for Bishop Tobin’s “clarity and warning” about attending the events.
“I pray that many will heed his words of caution,” he said.
Pride events also drew comment from Father James Martin, S.J., editor-at-large of America Magazine. In several June 2 Twitter posts that seemed to counter Bishop Tobin’s remarks, Father Martin said: “Catholics need not be wary of June’s Pride Month. It’s a way for LGBT people to be proud that they are beloved children of God, they have families who love them as they are, and they have a right to be treated with ‘respect, compassion and sensitivity’ after years of persecution.”
Father Martin received an award from the dissenting Catholic group New Ways Ministry and his speech to the group became the basis for his 2017 book “Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity.” The book drew praise from Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, as well as Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark.
However, the Guinean-born Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, criticized the book in a September 2017 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, saying that Catholic outreach to LGBT individuals must always include the truth about Catholic teaching and chastity.
“As a mother, the Church seeks to protect her children from the harm of sin, as an expression of her pastoral charity,” the cardinal said.
Mattson, who did not comment on Martin’s tweets specifically, suggested that the Church’s message for those who self-identify as LGBT should be “Recognize your dignity and reject the limiting reductionist sexual labels of the world.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that those who experience same-sex attraction “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity,” while explaining that LGBT individuals, like all Catholics, are called to the virtue of chastity with regard to the sexual expression.
“You were called into being by God the Father who knit you in the womb, made male and female, in His likeness. Claim your true nature, in humility, recognizing that you are a creature, made by God,” Mattson said. “Humility, not pride, is the only path to peace and true human freedom.”
He suggested another appropriate response to pride parades is “sorrow, bowed heads, and prayers for all those who march around the world.” These prayers should be “guided by the confident hope that through the grace of God, they might one day come to know the Father’s love for them, and in his tender gaze, finally understand who they truly are.”
“Such has been the gift the Church has given to me,” Mattson told CNA.
[…]
““As a founding principle of our country, we have always welcomed immigrant and refugee populations, and through the social services and good works of the Church, we have accompanied our brothers and sisters in integrating to daily American life,” Bishop Mario Dorsonville, auxiliary bishop of Washington and chair of the US bishops’ Comittee on Migration, said Jan. 2.”
Someone needs to take a remedial US history class.
SOL,
Which part of US history did you think they need a remedial class on?
Who are most Americans originally if not immigrants?
I’d agree it’s not correct to say that we have always, at all times welcomed immigrants and refugees but we certainly have done that selectively. And Catholics have for the greater part been among the groups of immigrants not warmly welcomed.
We need immigration to counteract the current birth dearth but we don’t have to have open borders or risk our national security. There should be a reasonable and humane approach to immigration.
Has it occurred to you that mass immigration is a cause of the drop in birthrates? By driving up the cost of living (housing, heath care, taxes, etc.), while depressing wages, it makes family formation so much more difficult.
Tony,
Birthrates are plummeting globally with or without immigration. Even government incentives to have a replacement level birthrate have failed.
Hungary is offering tax incentives for families and hopefully they’ll have some success.
Mrscracker,
The founding American people were not immigrants but colonists/settlers. They didn’t enter into a pre-existing polity and receive citizenship or some other form of membership from another people. The whole “America is a land of immigrants” myth was created by leftist subversives even if used by 20th ce nationalists for their own purposes after the fact, more than 3 centuries after the first British colonists started settling this country. Many of the founding fathers after the revolution even explicitly wrote on the question of whether anyone non-British should be allowed to immigrate to the US.
This original Anglo-American (and Protestant Christian) heritage and identity is what the left is trying to erase and unfortunately too many Catholic bishops are assisting in this, even if the bishops seek to replace it with some vague “Catholic” identity.
This system is currently in a stage of collapse, and continued immigration will further destabilization and increase the likelihood of wide-scale violence, regardless of how necessary believers in infinite economic growth say immigrants are for that.
SOL,
Good morning!
My daddy’s side of the family has been here for 400 years. I went to the UK a few years ago and visited the parish church of a 17th century colonial ancestor. In his memorial he’s referred to as “Henry the Immigrant” because he migrated to the American Colonies.
🙂
You know, the longer your ancestors have lived in North America the more likely you are to find non Anglo Saxon ancestry or ancestors who came as convicts. The American colonies were a dumping ground for thousands of British convicts until the Revolutionary War. After that, the British had to turn to Australia and Tasmania to dump their unwanted.
Beyond chattel slavery, folks of African ancestry have been here for 400 plus years. Many were free people of color and many intermarried with white colonists.
And of course, our American Indians have their own perspectives on immigration.
History is complicated and the more you look at it, the more humble you feel. Most of us have very modest beginnings and sometimes, we find very surprising narratives along the way.
Your argument seems to be that, since we are all the descendants of immigrants (in the broadest sense of the word), there is no justification for this nation (or really, any nation) to have a restrictive immigration policy. Apparently, this Ellis Island sentimentalism must override all other political, social, cultural and economic considerations. Does a country have a right to try to maintain its ethnic and cultural balance by limiting who is allowed in?
More mindless, liberal rubbish from bishops who seem utterly incapable of, not to mention unwilling to, speak in anything other than left wing cliches. Will they ever declare solidarity with the American people?
Looked up the bishop in question.
Wikipedia: Mario Eduardo Dorsonville-Rodríguez (born October 31, 1960) is a Colombian-born bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Like Jose Gomez, another immigrant who is presumptuous enough to lecture Americans about American history and identity.
Thanks for the information. I suppose the good bishop has admonished the elites in Colombia on the need to clean up the corruption and to improve the nation’s economy that has apparently created such intolerable conditions.
Wish the bishops (and the nuns!!) would show a little solidarity with the dyslexic/dyscalculaic/etc community.
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Just because dyslexics frequently have high intelligence does not mean they all go to MIT and walk out with $75,000 starting income.
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Many suffer socially as well as educationally and the job situation upon adulthood can look bleak. As many prisoners are dyslexic, I think it is a good bet if it was caught early in school, we’d have fewer children in trouble and fewer adults in prison.
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I mean no ill will toward those looking for a better life, but we have plenty of hurting children/adults who were born here. Don’t they deserve the same concern?
Tony,
North Americans, with the exception of those descended from our Indian tribes, are all the product of quite diverse immigrant populations from the past 400-500 years. I dislike the term “diverse ” because it’s become a cliche, but it really does describe our immigrant history.
I don’t think race or ethnicity should even enter into a Catholic conversation regarding what to conserve in America. Color and ethnicity simply don’t signify but culture does.
A Judeo Christian culture is what conservative Christians and others should be concerned about preserving. Not Anglo Saxonism. Culture, not color is what’s critical.
And yes, I strongly believe that sovereign nations have a right to secure their borders and enforce immigration laws. And preserve their unique cultures. But you have to have enough population to ensure a functioning society to pass that culture down to. Societies that are ageing and not reproducing themselves won’t be capable of that and will eventually be replaced.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Immigrants – they are ambassadors of the Good News.
All of them? How so? In what way?