NJ Cardinal Offers Historic Welcome to LGBTQ Community

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It’s good to see outreach to the LGBT community by the Catholic Church. I think that’s a good start to helping them feel welcome.

Thanks for the link.

Mary.
 
Yeah, right.

Any mention to these “LGBT ETC” people that they have the right to be treated with dignity, and that God loves them, and that they should be welcomed…but that God wills that they leave a life of grave sin, with hell as the destination if they don’t repent?

Much the same goes for those who encourage them to live in a state of grave sin.
Spiritual blindness.

True charity means explaining to them in a charitable manner that they can’t remain the way they are.
“Love the sinner, but hate the sin.”
 
Pope Francis ushered in a new era of welcoming gays when he uttered that famous rhetorical question, “Who am I to judge?”* And laity, religious, deacons, priests, bishops, and now even cardinals, and are taking it to a new level of acceptance
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This quote perfectly represents the language issues which are now going on around the “LGBT catholic” question. “Tolerance” will no longer be accepted; that the Church welcomes Catholics with these attractions without condoning them acting on those inclinations. Instead the language is now moving towards “acceptance” that nothing is wrong in these actions.

The Church and LGBT people really are talking past each other on these points. The Church talks to individuals who have these attractions (e.g. “a person, who happens to have certain attractions”), and the LGBT movement sees itself as a cultural identity (e.g. a “gay person”). The difference between the two is the internalisation of the attraction to the point at which it becomes the accepted frame of reference for the individual’s self-identification.

Frankly, I don’t believe the good Cardinal appreciates the difference between the two perspectives, or at least isn’t prepared to comment on it publicly. Nonetheless he has thrown the authority of his office behind the latter perspective in offering this response.
 
DaddyGirl said:
Wow, that is a hopeful, heartwarming story.

I imagine Jesus of Nazareth would be proud.
A great example of love and compassion.

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Jesus would actually smile and say , “Go and sin no more”

If these guys would accept that all would be well, but they will misinterpret is as total permissiveness as they have been doing all along.
 
Stat_Crux said:
This quote perfectly represents the language issues which are now going on around the “LGBT catholic” question. “Tolerance” will no longer be accepted; that the Church welcomes Catholics with these attractions without condoning them acting on those inclinations. Instead the language is now moving towards “acceptance” that nothing is wrong in these actions.

The Church and LGBT people really are talking past each other on these points. The Church talks to individuals who have these attractions (e.g. “a person, who happens to have certain attractions”), and the LGBT movement sees itself as a cultural identity (e.g. a “gay person”). The difference between the two is the internalisation of the attraction to the point at which it becomes the accepted frame of reference for the individual’s self-identification.

Frankly, I don’t believe the good Cardinal appreciates the difference between the two perspectives, or at least isn’t prepared to comment on it publicly. Nonetheless he has thrown the authority of his office behind the latter perspective in offering this response.
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👍

Sums it up exactly. Did they not do this way back with words by Pope Francis. then turn on him when he clarified it?
 
Rosebud77 said:
👍

Sums it up exactly. Did they not do this way back with words by Pope Francis. then turn on him when he clarified it?
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The question is who is “they”. The article was written by a priest…
 
In short, [Cardinal Tobin] is just the kind of leader Pope Francis is elevating to realign the church in the United States with his priorities.

As the pope has made clear over the past three years, fancy lifestyles, formality and regal titles like Prince of the Church are out of style for cardinals. So is an emphasis on the divisive issues of abortion and same-sex marriage, even though the church’s underlying position on those issues has not changed.

Instead, in the pope’s view, the church should emphasize humility and service to the poor. It should be multicultural, welcoming different styles of worship. It should reach out to other faiths and stand up for immigrants, refugees and nuns…

Cardinal Tobin’s appointment in October as one of the nation’s 18 cardinals came as a surprise to many, including the man himself. But perhaps it should not have. For what his unassuming bearing does not reveal is that he is no stranger to the corridors of power in the church. He is a friend of Pope Francis. And under Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, he had helped lead the Vatican office that oversees the roughly one million men and women in religious orders around the world.

That position did not end so well. It was an open secret that Cardinal Tobin was sent to Indiana as a kind of exile most likely because he questioned an inquiry by his office into supposed doctrinal lapses among the roughly 50,000 nuns in the United States. As he got to know the faithful in the chancery of Indianapolis, he would joke with them about it.

“I was kicked out and I’m grateful for it,” the chancellor of the archdiocese, Annette Lentz, recalled his saying about how he turned up on her doorstep. And she would tell him, “Their loss is our gain…"

The office he had been tapped to administer was investigating American nuns for supposedly adopting a “secular mentality” and straying from Catholic orthodoxy. In other words, the nuns were accused of being too liberal, and Cardinal Tobin was to oversee the inquiry. But he had an “extremely positive” view of the nuns, he told The National Catholic Reporter at the time, and he wanted to explain their good works…

Someone else took note of his dismissal: Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who would become Pope Francis.

The two men met in 2005 during a synod of bishops in Rome, and they bonded over a shared view of the church.

There were conservative bishops in their group who wanted, for example, to ban girls from being altar servers. “I have eight sisters, and at the time, I had nieces who were serving at the altar, and I didn’t see the justification for it,” Cardinal Tobin said. “Bergoglio was on the same page. There are more important things to talk about…"

What happened next was a kind of rehabilitation. Francis appointed him to the oversight committee of the same Vatican office he had been removed from. Then, in October, came the announcement: The pope was naming him a cardinal. He would be the youngest one in the United States.

nytimes.com/2016/12/22/nyregion/cardinal-joseph-w-tobin-archdiocese-newark.html
 
Newark Cardinal Joseph Tobin, made a cardinal by Pope Francis, endorsed the book: “In too many parts of our church LGBT people have been made to feel unwelcome, excluded, and even shamed. Father Martin’s brave, prophetic, and inspiring new book marks an essential step in inviting church leaders to minister with more compassion, and in reminding LGBT Catholics that they are as much a part of our church as any other Catholic.”

Tobin has criticized the four cardinals who asked Pope Francis for moral clarity on Amoris Laetitia as “troublesome” and “at best naive.”

lifesitenews.com/news/francis-appointed-cardinals-back-jesuits-pro-lgbt-book

religionnews.com/2017/04/07/top-vatican-and-us-church-officials-back-new-gay-friendly-book

cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2017/04/09/top-vatican-u-s-church-officials-back-new-gay-friendly-book
 
New light, thank you. I was thinking his words were the same as when Pope Francis made
welcome then had to reaffrim Church teaching and was attacked over that.
 
Given the shadowy and increasing presence of Muslims around the globe, Christians should welcome all brothers and sisters in Christ.

The Church is not and will not condone homosexuality but she does welcome all in Christ. The Church has never and will never throw homosexuals off high buildings or stone to the death.
 
Reading that article one could easily get the impression that Church teaching that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and that Under no circumstances can they be approved, is no longer in effect.
 
Seamus_L said:
Reading that article one could easily get the impression that Church teaching that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and that Under no circumstances can they be approved, is no longer in effect.
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That would just be the logical application of the “liberal” interpretation of Amoris Laetitia and its supposed “innovative teaching” on conscience and culpability. Their culpability is reduced because they’re subject to an addiction, or because adopted children are involved and to split up would harm them, or because of whatever other justification can be thought up to arrive at the desired conclusion.
 
Seamus_L said:
Reading that article one could easily get the impression that Church teaching that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and that Under no circumstances can they be approved, is no longer in effect.
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Out of all of the Bishops of England and Wales, we must remember that St John Fisher was the only one to give witness to Christ’s teaching on the dignity and indissolubility of the Sacrament of Marriage in the face of Henry VIII’s threats; paying with his life in the process.

Who now remembers the names of any of the majority of bishops who sided with Henry VIII?
 
Most practising SSA sufferers don’t want to be forgiven because they kid themselves that their acts are OK…and they expect everyone else to confirm them in their sin.
“Naughty, but nice.”

Far too often, the Scripture saying: “Judge not, lest you also be judged.” is quoted out of context. It’s used as a tactic to muzzle those who object to grave sin, which in more honest/straight-shooting times was called “MORTAL SIN”.
 
May 4
Mary is the “Virgo Prædicanda,” the Virgin who is to be Proclaimed
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MARY is the Virgo Prædicanda, that is, the Virgin who to be proclaimed, to be heralded, literally, to be preached.
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We are accustomed to preach abroad that which is wonderful, strange, rare, novel, important. Thus, when our Lord was coming, St. John the Baptist preached Him; then, the Apostles went into the wide world, and preached Christ. What is the highest, the rarest, the choicest prerogative of Mary? It is that she was without sin. When a woman in the crowd cried out to our Lord, “Blessed is the womb that bare Thee!” He answered, “More blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.” Those words were fulfilled in Mary. She was filled with grace in order to be the Mother of God. But it was a higher gift than her maternity to be thus sanctified and thus pure. Our Lord indeed would not have become her son unless He had first sanctified her; but still, the greater blessedness was to have that perfect sanctification. This then is why she is the Virgo Prædicanda; she is deserving to be preached abroad because she never committed any sin, even the least; because sin had no part in her; because, through the fulness of God’s grace, she never thought a thought, or spoke a word, or did an action, which was displeasing, which was not most pleasing, to Almighty God; because in her was displayed the greatest triumph over the enemy of souls. Wherefore, when all seemed lost, in order to show what He could do for us all by dying for us; in order to show what human nature, His work, was capable of becoming; to show how utterly He could bring to naught the utmost efforts, the most concentrated malice of the foe, and reverse all the consequences of the Fall, our Lord began, even before His coming, to do His most wonderful act of redemption, in the person of her who was to be His Mother. By the merit of that Blood which was to be shed, He interposed to hinder her incurring the sin of Adam, before He had made on the Cross atonement for it. And therefore it is that we preach her who is the subject of this wonderful grace.
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But she was the Virgo Prædicanda for another reason. When, why, what things do we preach? We preach what is not known, that it may become known. And hence the Apostles are said in Scripture to “preach Christ.” To whom? To those who knew Him not—to the heathen world. Not to those who knew Him, but to those who did not know Him. Preaching is a gradual work: first one lesson, then another. Thus were the heathen brought into the Church gradually. And in like manner, the preaching of Mary to the children of the Church, and the devotion paid to her by them, has grown, grown gradually, with successive ages. Not so much preached about her in early times as in later. First she was preached as the Virgin of Virgins—then as the Mother of God—then as glorious in her Assumption—then as the Advocate of sinners—then as Immaculate in her Conception. And this last has been the special preaching of the present century; and thus that which was earliest in her own history is the latest in the Church’s recognition of her.
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From Blessed Art Thou Among Women - Devotion to Mary, Mother of God by John Henry Cardinal Newman

Preaching is a gradual work. LGBTQ only recently stepped ‘outside the closet’ and into the spotlight. In the same way LGBTQ appeared in a flash…the Church must fling open the doors and usher them in to sit down and hear the Good News. The Church must make haste and do this. The invitation to love could pass quickly.
 
How extremely fortunate the Church in the United States is to have both Cardinal Tobin and Cardinal Cupich.
 
Agreed. I don’t think anyone is suggesting the “hammer” approach. One does not have to resort to condemnation of the individual when discussing the dangers of the action.

We don’t throw smokers in jail or those who drink alcohol but governments give public health warnings about cigarettes and alcohol being dangerous to our temporal health. In the same way we shouldn’t abandon our Christian duty to warn of the spiritual risks in certain behaviour. Christ commissioned us to be the salt in the world. In but apart from, not part of the world.

It is not mercy to see a brother or sister in danger and leave them in that situation. It’s a very delicate balance to strike in how the subject is approached with the individual (which many get wrong) and needs to be done with sensitivity, mercy and charity but the central issue is whether or not we have the courage to help in the first place, or whether we turn a blind eye because of our own imperfect faith in Christ’s redemptive power or our own lack of courage to give a Christian witness.
 
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