Advertisement on Our Lady of Grace and St. Joseph’s website. Posted on 07/01/2020 11:29:57 AM PDT by ebb tide
HOBOKEN, New Jersey, June 29, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Despite gay “Pride” events being canceled from coast to coast due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cardinal Joseph Tobin has permitted an LGBT “Pride Mass” to be conducted in his archdiocese.
For the third year in a row, the “Annual Pride Mass in support of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters” was held on Sunday at the merged parishes of Our Lady of Grace and St. Joseph in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The Mass, which was livestreamed on YouTube, seems to show sparse attendance. Rainbow-colored banners lined the sanctuary.
The Archdiocese of Newark resumed Sunday Masses on June 21 after three months of suppression due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The current “Phase Three” directives require churches to restrict their attendance to 25 percent of capacity or fifty people, whichever is lower, with all who enter the churches required to wear face coverings among other mandatory “social distancing” dictates.
Previously, the archdiocese had suppressed not only the Mass, but also baptisms, funerals, confessions, and last rites.
Pastor Fr. Alexander Santora delivered an overtly political homily, condemning Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump for allowing “their personal prejudices or political needs to override their oath of office to protect the people they serve” — i.e., gay, lesbian, and transgender-identifying individuals. Advertisement on Our Lady of Grace and St. Joseph’s website.
Santora was quick to link the death of George Floyd and the protests and riots it has spawned to what he sees as ongoing discrimination within the Church against LGBT-identifying Catholics. The priest seeks nothing less than the normalization of homosexual and trangender identity and relationships.
“LGBT individuals are welcome and need to share their stories so stereotypes die and human beings emerge who desire what anyone in life wants: to love and be loved and accepted as they are,” insisted Santora.
“This is a nascent movement, and there are many in the Church opposed to gay accommodation,” he asserted. “More pastoral outreach and discussion are needed to break down walls. There is a need to minister together and to see each other as brothers and sisters without any labels in places around the world, though repression is still strong.”
“There is no new life without casting aside the old,” said Santora. “This is happening in the Church as we listen to our LGBT brothers and sisters and make our churches hospitable to all, especially those who have been on the margins not by their own choice.”
“Just as with the reforms of political systems will be ongoing, so will the church's mission and ministry to the LGBT members, but with the difference,” he said, again attempting to draw a connection to the African-American struggle for civil rights.
“In the 1960s under the leadership of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., blacks led the march for freedom and equality,” said Santora. “We let go of any racist tendencies. So too with LGBT rights and concerns.”
“We jettison the old prejudice and celebrate pride in our LGBT community because we then become better people and better Catholics,” he concluded.
During his homily as well as in an opinion piece he penned for NJ.com published the same day, Santora praised “Outreach 2020: Catholic Leaders Speak with the LGBTQ Community,” a 43-minute video hosted by Fr. James Martin, S.J., produced after a conference by the same name to have taken place at Fordham University this month had to be postponed due to the pandemic.
The video includes messages from Santa Fe archbishop John C. Wester; Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv.; Fr. Bryan Massingale; and Sister Jeannine Gramick, S.L.; all of whom have notoriously departed from Church teaching to push for the normalization of homosexuality and trangenderism within Catholicism.
Concerning Gramick, a co-founder of the dissident “New Ways Ministry” in Maryland, Santora wrote, “She has been threatened and badgered by the Vatican for her pioneering ministry and hasn’t given up.”
“Gay discrimination lives in the Catholic church,” said Santora, who seemed surprised that the Archdiocese of Detroit had recently “told a parish group formed to support families of LGBTQ Catholics and any Dignity groups that they could not hold events on church property.” He seemed to question the bishop’s characterization of Fortunate Families as offering “a competing vision” of Church teaching.
In May 2017, Cardinal Joseph Tobin personally received a group of individuals identifying as LGBT at Newark’s Cathedral-Basilica of the Sacred Heart in conjunction with an inaugural “LGBT Pilgrimage” to the cathedral. Tobin had said he was delighted to welcome the LGBT group and personally approved their flyer for the event.
When asked at the time by the New York Times if he should have taken the opportunity at the event to call the “LGBT pilgrims” out of sin, he responded, “That sounds a little backhanded to me.”
Tobin, a 2016 Pope Francis appointee to the cardinalate, is among a handful of Church leaders to endorse LGBT-affirming Father James Martin’s controversial Building a Bridge book.
In 2018, following six priests having anonymously reported a homosexual subculture in the Newark archdiocese, the cardinal sent the priests of his archdiocese a letter encouraging them to remain silent if the media were to try to contact them. He also denied that anyone “has ever spoken to me about a ‘gay sub-culture’ in the Archdiocese of Newark.”
The Archdiocese of Newark is one of the New Jersey dioceses that paid settlements to former priest victims of disgraced ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of Tobin’s predecessors. Questions remain about who in the U.S. Church hierarchy knew about McCarrick’s predation of boys and men.
The Catholic Church holds that same-sex attraction is disordered and that homosexual acts are sinful. Church teaching states that “homosexual persons are called to chastity” (CCC 2359), which is also what its teaching says about all people, since sexual relations are reserved for marriage, which is between a man and woman (CCC 2360).
To respectfully express concern about the pride Mass:
Church of Our Lady of Grace
400 Willow Ave.
Hoboken, NJ 07030
201-659-0369
Email olgrace@optonline.net
Archdiocese of Newark
171 Clifton Avenue
P.O. BOX 9500
Newark, NJ 07104
(973) 497-4000
Accommodating sin.....Annnd they want to drag others into their hell....
Santora was quick to link the death of George Floyd and the protests and riots it has spawned to what he sees as ongoing discrimination within the Church against LGBT-identifying Catholics. The priest seeks nothing less than the normalization of homosexual and trangender identity and relationships.
APOSTATE!!!
Double barf-alert.
Isn’t the word “abomination”?
His boss in The Vatican agrees with him, only a matter of time before he makes it official.
Accommodating homosexuality?
Sound like a pain in the rear.
POPE is an APOSTATE on the MAJORITY of issues.
The Catholic Church exists only in my mind now.
The institution is dead to me.
So reading between the lines and playing with the claim, is this bozo stating simply that ‘catholics make the best homos’? What a tool.
If they have not been disciplined or removed they are speaking fornthe Roman Church
Let him tell that to all the victims of these perverted old scumbags. It doesn’t matter how many children they hurt as long as the church leaders could say we practice diversity. Each priest who allowed this to happen in their church should be bent over the alter and have a rolling pin stuck up his ass several times without any oil or grease on it. He deserves every inch of his pain.
Galatians 5:12.
Why does someone even need to be Catholic while celebrating Godlessness?
Fits they been pushing such for so long given the utter amount of homosexuality that takes place within the Catholic priests/priesthood.....just saying.
What happened to ‘observe perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’?
Yeah, okie dokie.
Do these antichrist clowns ever read the Bible?
The institution is dead.
The Catholic Church only exists in the minds of Catholics who refuse to see the evil it has become.
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