Posted on 03/07/2018 11:38:13 AM PST by ebb tide
David OConnell speaking in the original version of a video promoting the World Meeting of Families 2018.
Words of welcome from a bishop for gay people raising children and people in second marriages have been removed from a video promoting the World Meeting of Families 2018. The meeting takes place in Dublin in August and will probably include a visit by Pope Francis.
In the video,entitled Parish Conversations Session 1, David OConnell, a Cork man and auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, had said: Pope Francis, he gets it. Today there are all sorts of configurations of families mum and dad; mum or dad on their own; gay couple raising children; people in second marriages.
However, a spokeswoman for the meeting has now said: The wrong version of the video for Parish Session 1 was inadvertently uploaded for a short time but the correct version is now in place. She said she was looking into how this mistake happened.
The video is part of the six-session Parish Conversations programme on the amoris.ie website, in which participants are assisted in reflecting on and sharing experiences of family life and their response to Pope Franciss reflections in his 2016 encyclical Amoris laetitia (The Joy of Love).
The spokeswoman pointed to a video entitled Parish Conversations Session 5, where she said the themes raised by Bishop OConnell are dealt with more fully.
The spokeswoman said: It was the view of the programme producers that addressing these themes on the fifth night of the programme was more appropriate than on a first night for a parish group.
She said that in the Session 5 video we hear from a young gay woman; a mother of a gay son, and Bishop OConnell talking about the [Catholic] Churchs approach to people in all of these situations, including people in second unions.
There was no other reason for making this change than to deal with the important issues raised by Bishop OConnell later in the programme in a fuller way.
However, the words of Bishop OConnell removed from the Session 1 video are not repeated by him in Session 5.
The spokeswoman noted how, in Amoris laetitia, Pope Francis specifically stresses that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration . . . as is repeated throughout the parish programme.
The meeting has always been understood as a meeting open to all. This remains the position of the World Meeting of Families in Dublin.
Meanwhile, a US-based fundamentalist Catholic website has said the Session 5 video promotes the sin of homosexuality.
An article on Church Militants website headed Sodomy Supporters Hijack World Meeting of Families claims the video normalises homosexuality.
The pro-gay propaganda in the video, it says, begins with a young gay woman who talks about coming out to her parents.
Church Militant is more critical of another woman in the video, Gemma, who talks about her gay son and how really upset she and other parents of gay children were at the Catholic Churchs use of words like intrinsically evil and disordered to describe their childrens sexuality.
In the video, she says every child thats born into this world comes with a God-given dignity and that nobody has the right to take that dignity from them.
Church Militant said Gemma was subtly endorsing homosexuality. The word dignity is a buzzword for the LGBTQ community; in fact, Dignity is also the name of a dissident Catholic pro-gay organisation.
It also noted how in the same video Bishop OConnell said he tells families at Masses during the Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter periods that he wants them to know no matter what your situation is if youre divorced and remarried, if your familys falling apart, if youre alone trying to raise your children, if youre [in] a second marriage that Christmas is for you; above all others, Jesus came for you.
Thanks for the “heads up”.
I think it’s probably right for the church to welcome all, and the church, and the Bible, is against homosexuality, so, don’t know how to specifically welcome homosexuals, without welcoming their sin.
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