“Your statement contradicted the teaching of the Catholic Church and has brought scandal to your parish community as well as the whole Church.” – Fresno Bishop John T. Steinbock in a letter to Reverend Father Geoffrey Farrow, who last week came out as a gay man and against Proposition 8. Steinbock has since removed Farrow from his post. [LA Times]
(Ungodly) Words…
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ajax
Honesty and courage in his convictions – scandalous, indeed!
Eminent Victorian
Why, exactly, are people Catholics?
bobito
Good for Father Geoffrey Farrow! It is ironic how the honesty of one human being is enough to bring scandal to the whole Catholic Church. Apparently honesty and human decency really does “contradict the teaching of the Catholic Church”. Who knew?
DairyQueen
The Catholic Cult is such a joke! I guess it not a scandal that millions of children were molested for decades but one priest come out against a civil right issue that the church is against is? Any self respecting GBLT or family needs to leave that cult. There are other cults out there that will accept you for eho you are.
JJ
The good father has apparently also been cut off financially. I hope he does not wind up repenting…that would be so sad, but a typical Catholic prodigal son story.
Maybe Ellen DeGeneres could lend him a few dollars till he can get on his feet. lol
kevin
Is there anything more pathetic than a gay person pleading for the acceptance of the Catholic church?
Throbert McGee
I’d give him credit for “honesty,” but maybe not so much for the “courage of his convictions” part — the story says that he literally packed up and left town within a few hours after the sermon, rather than standing his ground and taking his lumps.
And I don’t think much of the gays-as-victims tone of his sermon, either:
“How is marriage protected by intimidating gay and lesbian people into loveless and lonely lives?” he asked parishioners of the St. Paul Newman Center.
Note that he could’ve said, “How is marriage protected by telling gay and lesbian people that their love relationships aren’t worthy of legal recognition,” or something to that effect.
Charles J. Mueller
>Why, exactly, are people Catholics?
So they can lie, cheat and steal your money while they promote hatred, bigotry and discrimination and be blessed by the heavenly father for it.
Oh…and build more churches and acquire more real estate holdings world-wide. Anyone have an idea exactly what the R.C. Church is worth? The information is available on the Internet with a simple Google search.
These people are self-serving…and treacherous. My mother was a devout Catholic all of her life, although I never understood why? I saw through their hocus-pocus bs at a very early age and refused to attend any more church services from that time on. I became the black sheep of my mother’s side of the family as a result of my unwillingness to let anyone pull the wool over my eyes.
During her entire life, my mom tithed ten per-cent of her salary to the Saint Joan of Arc R.C. Church in Queens, NY, where she lived, plus putting money on the plate each time it was passed around during Sunday Mass. She never missed a service, even when illness would have surely excused her from doing so.
At age 70, my mother developed ovarian cancer. The financial, physical and mental stress this must have placed on her, I can only imagine. In need of spiritual support and guidance to help her through this difficult time of her life, she turned to the father of her church for spiritual and emotional support.
After giving my mother an audience of approximately ten minutes (in exchange for ten percent of all the money she ever earned in her lifetime), the father told her that her needs would be better served by obtaining professional, paid, psychiatric assistance and thanked her for ‘sharing’and explained that he had other church members waiting to see him, as he escorted her to the door of the refectory and bid her good luck.
Needless to say, my mother never set foot in that church again to the day she died some three years later and she damned the church the to hell roundly before she passed on. The realization that she had been ‘taken for a ride’, was almost more than she could bear. My heart bled for her sense of betrayal, while at the same, feeling angered that an otherwise very intelligent woman had let herself be so bamboozled by a flock of swkirt-wearing perverts who molested altar boys on the sneak.
Hurrah for her. I just wish she could have realized the truth about these people, without the need for a life-threatening ailment to make her see the facts as they really were…not as she wanted to see them.
Pick up a paperback copy of “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris. It’ll be the most enlightening $11.00 bucks you ever spent.
Charles J. Mueller
As an adjunct to the above, had my mother put that ten percent of her salary into the stock market with the same fervor and frequency that she ‘invested’ in her salvation’, she would would have would up a millionaire several times over and been able to afford adequate medical insurance, which she denied herself because of her devotion to the Church, and would not have had to pray that she would receive the mercy and care of the Church and the “heavenly father’ in her hour of need.
She probably would not have avoided the cancer, but she certainly would have died a much happier and fulfilled person instead of the dissalusioned and biter person she became toward the end.
Not only did the Catholic Church rob her money, they also robbed her of her happiness and dignity.
It must be killing her that she was buried in Calvary Cemetery. Pun intended.
Chris
I was just thinking this morning: if people actually believe in what Jesus preached, then how difficult is it to include everyone? It’s the very definition of hypocrisy, as being gay doesn’t violate Jesus’ big two commandments: love God above all things and love your neighbor as yourself. It really irks me.