LYING ABOUT PRIESTS
September 9, 2011
Catholic League president Bill Donohue notes recent lies about priests:
It has been said that Fr. Mychal Judge, the first of the First Responders to die on 9/11, was gay. Not everyone agrees. No matter, even those who allege that Judge was gay say he kept his sexual orientation private, disclosing it to only a few friends. Fr. Brian Jordan, for instance, said of his fellow Franciscan in 2002 that "I knew him for 25 years and I didn't know that he was gay until after he died." (The Catholic fantasy demands that 'good' gay priests never tell their truth in order to be considered 'good' straight priests.)
It really shouldn't matter whether Judge was gay or straight, but unfortunately some in gay circles, as well as in liberal quarters generally, are turning this issue into a national spectacle. Worse, some are lying. In the August 19 edition of a dissident Catholic newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter, it says, "Judge was a Catholic priest who publicly acknowledged that he was a celibate gay man." After reading this, I asked Jeff Field, our communications director, to e-mail Tom Fox, editor of the newspaper, asking him for the evidence that Judge publicly declared that he was gay. That was yesterday, and Fox has not replied. It is a lie. (Here's a big whopper of a lie from Battlin' Bill for whom Fr Mychal's orientation is a huge issue.)
SNAP Wisconsin, the Wisconsin branch of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, posted an article on September 7 about a Philadelphia priest who has never been convicted of anything, but will go on trial next year for allegedly covering up a crime. The title of the article reads, "The Crimes of Monsignor William J. Lynn." Field contacted the SNAP chapter yesterday asking them to correct the record. "You know very well that Monsignor Lynn has only been accused and hasn't been convicted of any crimes," Field said. There has been no response. (The Catholic fantasy allows for accusing women of the 'crime of abortion', which in this country is not a crime, but the same generous use of the word can not be extended to priests who are known to have moved predators around resulting in more children being abused. That is an actual crime, which God willing, the alleged criminal Lynn will find out.)
Lying is bad enough, but when it is done for political purposes, it is obscene. That priests are the primary victims these days is indisputable. (Except when your side is doing it, then it is righteous and holy.)
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For some reason, I just can't let this kind of garbage go unchallenged. And it is garbage. Fr. Mychal Judge did publicly acknowledge he was a gay priest, he just didn't do it to the faction of the Church Bill Donohue represents. Had Fr Mychal done so, especially when Cardinal O'Connor ran the show in New York, he would have ended his career as a priest. How truly emblematic this is about the true status of gay priests, in order to serve Truth you must not tell it about yourself. You must silently and secretly foster a false image to protect your priesthood from the Bill Donohues and the Cardinal O'Connors and Benedict XVIs of the Catholic world. I don't have a clue how anyone can possibly think this kind of 'false positive' enhances one's spirituality and connection with Truth. Fr Judge certainly didn't think so.
There is a widely quoted observation from Fr Judge about love:
"Is there so much love in the world that we can afford to discriminate against any kind of love?"The event of 9/11 itself stands as the stark answer to this question, and yet Donohue would have us believe the answer is yes, there is enough love in this world that Mychal Judge's kind of love is anathema. In Donohue's version of Catholicism, gay love means always having to say you're sorry, and if you don't get that, God will give you an eternity of reason to be sorry. Fr Judge came to see the self defeating fallacy of this particular Catholic delusion. If God is Love, then God is Love. If we can't see and feel that, then the problem is not with God, it's with us.
Fr Mychal Judge is a saint, and he is most definitely a gay saint. If this is an 'agenda' it was part of God's agenda for Mychal. Prophetic lives always challenge the status quo. Mychal's was one such life. Msgr Lynn on the other hand, will also turn out to be prophetic, and the prophetic message of Lynn's life will not go down well in Donohue's Catholic world either. The era of hierarchical non accountability is over. The carefully constructed clerical myth, based on the twin towers of heterosexual celibacy and ontological superiority are crashing just as surely as the Twin Towers did on 9/11. Fr Mychal's life stands as a prophetic witness for both events. Long live Saint Mychal Judge.
Mychal Judge was obviously a fine, loving, faithful follower of Christ.I have friends who became acquainted with him as a colleague of one of them when Judge was assigned to the Albany NY area. These "more Catholic than the Pope Catholics" admired and loved him for his personal traits and for his energetic and loving ministry to everyone. Finding out he was a gay man did not change this (and they are way not friendly to gays). The ridiculous and embarrassing Donahue should give it a rest.
ReplyDeleteColleen, this is a wonderful posting. Thank you for taking on the shameless lies of Mr. Donohue. It's interesting that folks who are so intent to denounce secular culture as Godless and resistant to sanctity can't see conspicuous holiness staring them in the face, when it comes in a guise they don't want to accept.
ReplyDeleteI agree Mychal Judge is a saint & a martyr to the love of Christ. He died serving his Lord & deserves elevation to sainthood as much as any other martyr. But his cause will be set aside like that of Oscar Romero & Sr. Dorothy Stang.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Donohue is a ridiculous embarrassment. The television show Southpark got him so right.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately some people may seem him and think he speaks for the church. I wonder how many of the hundreds that have seen him on TV have been turned off to the church because of him.
Abp. Dolan of New York posted "Why we need the Catholic League", a glowing veneration of Bill Donohue on his blog on 12/16/10. A bit strangely, he quoted denouncements of Donohue by others such as “blowhard,” “a self-appointed censor,” “right wing publicity mill,” a “bully,” and “American Taliban” before getting to the "Keep at it, Bill! We need you!"
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.archny.org/?p=931
Commenters appear strongly split on whether the continuing Dolan-Donahue pairing is great or awful.
I'm not split jack, that pairing is downright awful. That a bishop of the Church would give Donohue that kind of credibility is also obscene--not to mention shamele$$.
ReplyDeletePoor Bill Donohue. He really does think that God is very narrow minded, doesn't know what He is doing and is embarrassingly stingy love-wise, just like him!!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great post Colleen. I appreciate all the comments here too.
Butterfly
Word verification is zinglect, quite possibly for the zing that is missing in action, dormant, fallow, or asleep in Bill Donohue's Vaticanized intellect. Otherwise known as neglect of what I'll call the zing factor which is the guidance from the Holy Spirit that teaches wisdom and discernment.
Bill Donahue sounds like he needs the zing factor real bad.
It may be butterfly, that poor Bill needs to experience a zing of some honest to God love. Which Fr Judge had more than the usual human share, but then Fr Judge spent a significant amount of time dealing with his personal demons that prevented his knowing the love of God.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that Donohue has the courage to walk Mychal Judge's path. Lots of Catholics don't.
Colleen, thank you for writing this and raising our awareness about Fr. Mychal Judge. Thank you for Enlightened Catholicism.
ReplyDeleteI want to affirm your statement that Fr. Mychal is a saint and a gay saint. It seems the perfect time to have Fr. Mychal as one of our heavenly heroes who is a priest and gay. Still, in our time as you say: “In order to serve Truth you must not tell it about yourself.” With the openness and growing acceptance of lesbian and gay persons in our society, it is still a struggle for many including priests how to emerge from that closet. Fr. Mychal Judge is an example for all those folks who struggle with that question. It is a struggle because there are people like Bill Donohoue who keep whipping up the hatred and lies about gay people.
I like the article you cite referencing the book by Michael Daly clearly stating Fr. Mychal Judge was gay. I particularly like Daly’s quote that Fr. Mychal did not have time for hate and that he led by example. Daly writes that in March Mychal would walk up Fifth Avenue in New York with the Irish and in June he would walk back down Fifth Avenue in the Gay Pride Parade.
It doesn’t take a pope to declare a saint. I will also add Fr. Mychal Judge to my personal canon of saints.
Colleen, thank you for writing this and raising our awareness about Fr. Mychal Judge. Thank you for Enlightened Catholicism.
ReplyDeleteI want to affirm your statement that Fr. Mychal is a saint and a gay saint. It seems the perfect time to have Fr. Mychal as one of our heavenly heroes who is a priest and gay. Still, in our time as you say: “In order to serve Truth you must not tell it about yourself.” With the openness and growing acceptance of lesbian and gay persons in our society, it is still a struggle for many including priests how to emerge from that closet. Fr. Mychal Judge is an example for all those folks who struggle with that question. It is a struggle because there are people like Bill Donohoue who keep whipping up the hatred and lies about gay people.
I like the article you cite referencing the book by Michael Daly clearly stating Fr. Mychal Judge was gay. I particularly like Daly’s quote that Fr. Mychal did not have time for hate and that he led by example. Daly writes that in March Mychal would walk up Fifth Avenue in New York with the Irish and in June he would walk back down Fifth Avenue in the Gay Pride Parade.
It doesn’t take a pope to declare a saint. I will also add Fr. Mychal Judge to my personal canon of saints.
I hate what Bill Donohue is doing to the Church. Last week, even NPR mentioned the Catholic League as being opposed to an iman being on the altar at an Ecumenical event commemorating 911. They did not mention that the Catholic League does not speak for the Church nor did they identify them as an ultra-conservative group. I suppose that the casual listener would chalk it up as another example of xenophobia in Catholics.
ReplyDeleteWho is funding Bill Donahue? Who is hiding behind his outrageous discourse? Who is using him for cover?
ReplyDeleteTo Mychal Judge I would say: may you live forever, and happy feast day on 9/11!
ReplyDeleteMy best friend forever was Father Robert. He was ordained as a non-Roman Catholic priest. He could not be ordained in the Roman church because he refused to base his priesthood on a lie and he was gay, gay, gay! Get it? Gay!
He also died in 2001 after a long and painful illness. A few days before his death, he suffered a devastating fall and head wound. He bled all over his notebooks. I still have them, carefully preserved, although I still can't bring myself to look at those terrible stains.
To Bill Donohue, I'd say, I have a first class relic in my house. Try and top that, you creep!
Bill Donohue’s comments are a case of “don’t bother me with FACTS I don’t want to believe” -- especially if the FACTS demonstrate that a man can be holy, heroic, and unashamedly homosexual.
ReplyDeleteThe evidence that Father Mychal Judge joyfully self-identified as gay is irrefutable, and includes his own handwritten journal entries.
Over the past week, we’ve seen Roman fundamentalists and hierarchy take various stances toward Fr. Mychal's gay self-identity. A few still deny that he was gay. Others, unable to credibly deny the conclusive evidence, just ignore or downplay it.
But some are now claiming that Mychal's chaste celibacy stemmed from his "agreement" with official church doctrine on homosexuality; they claim that Mychal's celibacy is a model for gays to resist "same sex attraction".
See especially p.2 of this piece at Catholic.org:
http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=42759&page=2
These statements are absolutely false, but expect to hear them repeated in debates about Mychal Judge.
For the record, these are the facts: Mychal chose celibacy to honor his priestly vows and to not distract from his ministry. But he still openly disagreed with official church teaching, and he blessed and supported committed gay relationships. All this is well documented in the Daly and Ford biographies, in the Saint of 9/11 film, and in these definitive articles on the Saint Mychal Judge website: A Gay Saint in fact, & Mychal embraced his homosexuality as a gift of God at:
http://SaintMychalJudge.blogspot.com/2007/03/reserved-4.html
The increasing nastiness and outright lies of fundamentalists is in direct reaction to the fact that they are losing the war on homosexuality. Two-thirds of Catholics in the pews support marriage equality or civil unions, according to every survey. Rome does not speak for the Church, the Ecclesia, on this issue. Remember, "The darkest hour is just before the dawn."
"It's wonderful! Look at who we are as gay people as this moment in history, as being a gift for the church, to be agents of change both in church and society." +Mychal Judge
Saint Mychal, pray for us.
“They ask me to bless them,” Judge said. “But the truth is I feel blessed by them.”
ReplyDeleteThat is such a great thing to say; it's very moving, because IMO it tells a lot about him.
"Fr Mychal Judge is a saint, and he is most definitely a gay saint."
And his gayness is significant - what it is not, is an obstacle to his being recognised as a Saint. The reason for that is, that God's grace takes us we are, and works through as we are - which in the case of some of us, means working through those who are gay men or lesbians, as the gays and lesbians we are. If as a gay man he responded to Christ's grace, then it is arguably a doctrinal error - see the CCC 2359 - to suggest he cannot be a Saint. And if a Saint was gay, why should that be ignored ? St. Paul says what needs saying, in 2 Corinthians 12 -
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Corinthians%2012.%207-10&version=NIV
If there is any error in that - what are the errors ?
Jmkelley and ratbiter, thanks for these comments. They are truth.
ReplyDeleteHere's a true story. I'm sitting around a campfire at a Sundance, and I have the opportunity to ask the Sundance leader what is his understanding of 'two spirited'. He's silent for awhile, not unusual for Natives, and finally says: "you in the white western world call them homosexuals. As if sex was all this was about. Now in our world that has become 'winkte' and it's sort of our expression for your 'fag' word. In the old days, before the whiteman and his Christianity, we saw 'two spirited' as a bridge between worlds. Not just men and women, which they are, but also between dimensions." At this point this elder looks at me very seriously, "Why do you think there are so many gay Catholic priests? It's not just because a celibate male culture is easy for them to hide in, it's because they sense their true calling. You white people are so stupid sometimes. You don't understand sex and spirituality at all and you make legal contracts out of relationships."