By Bishop José Munilla said a new bill that would ban so-called conversion therapy is nothing less than a form of persecution and vowed to resist it.
Bishop José Ignacio Munilla of Orihuela-Alicante, Spain, denounced the “persecution” of Catholics with homosexual inclinations who seek help to live chastely, following the lower house’s passage of a reform to the penal code in Spain that bans so-called “conversion therapies.”
During his program “Sexto Continente” (“Sixth Continent”) on Radio María Spain, the bishop commented on the Congress of Deputies’ passage of the amendment that penalizes activities grouped under that term, a term the prelate also rejects.
“So-called conversion therapy doesn’t exist,” he stated, asserting that it’s “an ideological construct of an anti-Christian lobby in an attempt to prevent pastoral accompaniment for individuals with homosexual inclinations who in conscience want to live chastely and are seeking help.”
The legislative proposal, which has yet to be sent to the Senate, stipulates that programs providing support to those with homosexual inclinations who wish to live in chastity and in accordance with the Catholic faith be classified as a criminal offense under Title VII, which deals with “torture and other crimes against moral integrity.”
The amended penal code would provide for prison sentences ranging from six months to two years and fines imposed for a period of eight to 24 months for anyone who “applies or carries out upon a person, even with their consent or that of their legal representative, acts, methods, programs, techniques, or procedures of aversion or conversion whether psychological, physical, pharmacological, or of any other nature intended to modify, suppress, eliminate, or deny their sexual orientation, sexual identity, or gender expression, resulting in harm to their bodily integrity or physical or mental health, or seriously impairing their moral integrity.”
Additionally, a person conducting the prohibited activities could be disqualified from practicing his or her profession or trade for up to five years.
‘It’s religious persecution’
Munilla argued that the result of this addition to the penal code is “that a homosexual cannot be Catholic, or if he is Catholic, he must be a Catholic who dissents from the teachings of the Church.”
“He has to be a dissident Catholic. He is persecuted so that he cannot be a faithful Catholic. Because, if he wants to live chastely and asks for help to live chastely, he is persecuted. We’re crazy,” he emphasized.
“Deep down it’s religious persecution,” he asserted, and “an obvious demonstration that they don’t believe in the freedom they boast about so much.”
“We must obey God rather than men,” he added. “We will not stop accompanying homosexual persons who seek the Church’s accompaniment in order to live chastely.”
Infiltration of the Church by the LGBT lobby
Munilla said his greatest concern is that “within the Church we have unity and communion around faith and morals.”
“The LGBT lobby has infiltrated many sectors of the Church, and that is what should concern us,” he said.
“The worst thing is that within the Church there are many areas where we are afraid, we dodge the issue or even explicitly deny the Catholic faith with respect to the experience of sexuality,” he continued.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
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Romans 1:26-27
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11:
9 Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men[a]
10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
The excellent site Catholic Answers has posted numerous examples of the early Christian thinkers on the subject of homosexual relations, in answer to the modern Catholic Church claim that “loving” homosexual relations, and not just “lustful” relations are OK and can be blessed by priests. Here are a few, which today’s popes and cardinals and bishops and priests act against and probably would label as “hate speech”: https://www.catholic.com/tract/early-teachings-on-homosexuality
SAINT EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA
“[H]aving forbidden all unlawful marriage, and all unseemly practice, and the union of women with women and men with men, he [God] adds: ‘Do not defile yourselves with any of these things; for in all these things the nations were defiled, which I will drive out before you. And the land was polluted, and I have recompensed [their] iniquity upon it, and the land is grieved with them that dwell upon it’ [Lev. 18:24–25]” (Proof of the Gospel 4:10 [A.D. 319]).
SAINT CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
“All honor to that king of the Scythians, whoever Anacharsis was, who shot with an arrow one of his subjects who imitated among the Scythians the mystery of the mother of the gods . . . condemning him as having become effeminate among the Greeks, and a teacher of the disease of effeminacy to the rest of the Scythians” (Exhortation to the Greeks 2 [A.D. 190]).
SAINT BASI THE GREAT
“He who is guilty of unseemliness with males will be under discipline for the same time as adulterers” (Letters 217:62 [A.D. 367]).
SAINT JOHN CHRYSOSTOM
“[Certain men in church] come in gazing about at the beauty of women; others curious about the blooming youth of boys. After this, do you not marvel that [lightning] bolts are not launched [from heaven], and all these things are not plucked up from their foundations? For worthy both of thunderbolts and hell are the things that are done; but God, who is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forbears awhile his wrath, calling you to repentance and amendment” (Homilies on Matthew 3:3 [A.D. 391]).
“All of these affections [in Rom. 1:26–27] . . . were vile, but chiefly the mad lust after males; for the soul is more the sufferer in sins, and more dishonored than the body in diseases” (Homilies on Romans 4 [A.D. 391]).
“[The men] have done an insult to nature itself. And a yet more disgraceful thing than these is it, when even the women seek after these intercourses, who ought to have more shame than men” (ibid.).
SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
“[T]hose shameful acts against nature, such as were committed in Sodom, ought everywhere and always to be detested and punished. If all nations were to do such things, they would be held guilty of the same crime by the law of God, which has not made men so that they should use one another in this way” (Confessions 3:8:15 [A.D. 400]).
TERTULLIAN
“[A]ll other frenzies of the lusts which exceed the laws of nature, and are impious toward both [human] bodies and the sexes, we banish, not only from the threshold but also from all shelter of the Church, for they are not sins so much as monstrosities” (Modesty 4 [A.D. 220]).
SAINT JUSTIN MARTYR (the first recognized philosopher of the Christian era)
“[W]e have been taught that to expose newly-born children is the part of wicked men; and this we have been taught lest we should do anyone harm and lest we should sin against God, first, because we see that almost all so exposed (not only the girls, but also the males) are brought up to prostitution. And for this pollution a multitude of females and hermaphrodites, and those who commit unmentionable iniquities, are found in every nation. And you receive the hire of these, and duty and taxes from them, whom you ought to exterminate from your realm. . . . And there are some who prostitute even their own children and wives, and some are openly mutilated for the purpose of sodomy; and they refer these mysteries to the mother of the gods” (First Apology 27 [A.D. 151]).
THE DIDACHE
“You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill one that has been born” (Didache 2:2 [A.D. 70]
McElroy would tell you none of the people that wrote those passages were Hahhvahd men like him.