[His Reverence and His Excellency are not on the same wavelength on more than this issue]
Baltimore priest preaches on his support for same-sex marriage
CWN – October 30, 2012
A priest who has served as pastor the same Baltimore parish since 1973 has preached in favor of same-sex marriage, gaining a standing ovation from his parishioners.
“I will continue to stand in genuine awe of all those couples — straight, gay and lesbian — whose day-to-day, year-to-year, and decade-to-decade faithfulness to each other is to me a sacrament, a believable embodied sign, of the absolute faithfulness of God to us all,” said Father Richard T. Lawrence, pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Church, after reading a letter by Archbishop William Lori urging Catholics to vote against an amendment that would permit same-sex marriage in Maryland.
“We could come to recognize the total, exclusive and permanent union of gay and lesbian couples as part of the sacrament of matrimony,” he continued. “Even if we do not believe that gay marriage ever could or should be allowed in the Church, we could live with a provision that allows civil marriage of gay and lesbian couples.”
“Personally, however, I would go farther than that,” he said. “I personally believe that this is a possible line of future development in theology and perhaps eventually even in Church teaching. And if this is even a possibility, could we not judge that civil marriage for gay and lesbian couples ought to be allowed by the state at this time?”
“Could not civil law be allowed to progress where Church law cannot go, at least not yet?” Father Lawrence added. “Personally, I believe that it can and that it should.”
“So there you have it: the official teaching of the Church and my personal reflections.”
Additional sources for this story: See www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=16085
Ironically the Archdiocesan newspaper in a 2008 article called the pastor and his parish “a perfect fit” ( catholicreview.org/article/life/a-parish-and-its-pastor-a-perfect-fit ).
“So there ‘you’ have it: the official teaching of the Church, and ‘my personal’ opinion”
Ain’t that the point? If we all make an idol of ‘my personal’ opinion we’re not
practicing Christians any more. We’re nominal-qristians-practicing-anti-christs.
God have mercy on poor deceived people who believe that ‘gay’ somehow could have disappeared untold years of human understanding that was in no way obscure about marriage. Seek, knock, ask and it’s evident that when it comes to the world, pretty quickly redefiniton and revisionism = father of lies.
What the priest above is describing is at best a faithful friendship which is the ideal of all chaste Christian relationships; it won’t ever be a marriage.
withhope says:
That’s the Fr. Richard McBrien of Notre Dame style of preaching/teaching. See his best-selling textbook, Catholicism, used in fundamental or basic theology courses in many “Catholic” colleges and universities. It does not have a Nihil Obstat or Imprimatur and is so bad that the USCCB “disapproved” it on the grounds that many of its statements are “inaccurate or misleading,” that it exaggerates “plurality” within the Catholic theological tradition, and that it overemphasizes “change and development” in the history of Catholic doctrine ( www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=541&CFID=121743&CFTOKEN=22026492 ).
Why has this priest(?) not been defrocked and laicized by now. It is a scandal that wounds the hearts and minds of faithful catholics to hear this sort of nonsense. But, then, this is the “new springtime” don’t you know. Egads the wolves are guarding the hen-house. Lord have mercy on us.
Blimey. I have ‘catholicism’ in a pulp paper brick. I’ve had it for probably ten years. I’ve perused a few bits but it reminded me too much of some courses I did during my BA where rock turns to putty and people are reduced.
Even more decades ago I went to a ‘free’ evening that sold ‘blessed’ water and sundry other items while a guru looking fellow sat in the lotispose and for an hour keep mumbling and exclaiming “evezigisvevsevezigisvez” over and over. My friend and I kept turning to each other going ‘what bb is he saying?’. We laughed out loud, figuring out by the time we left that he was saying, ‘everything is waeeeves’.
My point being that when truth is presented as mutable, can’t help but, God bless, remember, ‘evezigisvevs’.
A Case for Defrocking: Preaching in Support of Same-Sex Marriage
By Dr. Jeff Mirus | October 30, 2012
www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otc.cfm?id=1025
It was very sad to see the news that a long-time Catholic pastor in Baltimore took the occasion of his bishop’s condemnation of same-sex marriage to preach vigorously in favor of it. Fr. Richard Lawrence of St. Vincent de Paul Church in the Diocese of Baltimore not only publicly defied Archbishop William Lori but actually asserted that Catholic doctrine can and should be developed to include same-sex matrimony.
The mind boggles not only at the directness of this defiance but at the absurdity of its alleged theological justification. Anyone who understands the Catholic doctrine of marriage knows that no such “development” could possibly be authentic. Consider these fundamentals:
1.The doctrine of marriage is rooted in the social and familial nature of the human person, by which one man and one woman make a deep and exclusive commitment to each other in order to become two in one flesh so that they might bear children and nurture them in a stable environment of life and love;
2.It is also rooted in the way in which God created us, in that through their union male and female persons more perfectly mirror the God in whose image each is made;
3.The Sacrament of Matrimony is closed to those who are incapable of performing the marital act, which actually provides the consummation of the sacrament;
4.Since a pair of same-sex persons can neither perform the marital act nor procreate, even if they are perfectly healthy, the very idea of same-sex marriage is both contrary to nature and contrary to the Divine plan;
5.The Sacrament of Matrimony, by joining the couple in this fruitful intimacy, provides a powerful means for them to grow in holiness and attain salvation in a marital vocation which has been given to them by God, a vocation which cannot by its very nature be given to persons of the same sex.
6.This sacrament serves further as a type or figure of the fruitful relationship of Christ and his spouse, the Church.
So the mind boggles at Fr. Lawrence’s theology, but the mind does not boggle at the standing ovation he received from those attending the Mass at which he preached his defiance. Overall, most Catholics who attend Mass regularly understand that same-sex marriage is contrary to both right reason and Divine law, but where the tendentious ministry of a bad pastor goes unchecked for an extended period of time, that parish becomes a haven for “Catholics” who have lost much of their faith but still wish to be part of a religious community (very likely primarily to feel spiritually validated). A Modernist pastor gradually cements a following as sound parishioners go elsewhere, and the unsound are drawn like iron filings to a magnet. In a similar way, it will take several years of hard and very courageous work for a new pastor to come into this kind of situation and turn things around.
Note that there have been plenty of secularized and heretical Modernist priests who have served in various positions in the Church in the United States over the past fifty years, but their number has been in steep decline since younger “JPII” priests have emerged, older men have left the ministry, the American Church has begun to rely more heavily on missionaries from abroad, and the authentic work of renewal has begun. Nonetheless, I will be very interested to see whether Archbishop Lori moves promptly to discipline Fr. Lawrence. If, as I have frequently argued in the recent past, our hierarchy is gradually getting significantly healthier, we would be very right to hope some action will be taken—and very right to be disappointed if it is not.
These things often take some time to work themselves out, but let me be frank here: What Fr. Richard T. Lawrence has done merits his prompt removal from ministry in the Diocese of Baltimore. I recommend prayer for Archbishop Lori, Fr. Lawrence and his parishioners. I also recommend that you stay tuned.