Apparently to the liberal website the Daily Beast, it's patently "unjust" when a religious institution makes personnel decisions grounded in the exercise of its religious tenets.
In a July 10 post, "When Will the Catholic Church Stop Firing Gays?" writer Ben Brenkert -- an openly gay man and former Jesuit -- used the recent firing of a lesbian Catholic-school teacher as his hook to argue that the Catholic Church believes that gays and lesbians simply "cannot under any circumstances contribute to the spiritual or intellectual formation of children" and that they must change this stance to well, get with the spirit of the age.
He explained:
In spite of her eight years on the faculty, and countless enhancing contributions to the living/learning environment, [teacher Margie] Winters is considered (by official Church teaching) to be intrinsically disordered and morally culpable for not following the directive to be chaste; therefore, she lives in mortal sin, a graceless state that the Church teaches separates her from God; thus, to return to a relationship with God she must confess her sins to a priest and receive his absolution.
Second, the Church applies a syllogism attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, one that is interpreted through a narrow lens of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.
The argument is: any sexual act must lead to life—such a specious claim demonstrates the Church’s war on culture, not nature.
As to the Church’s Aristotelian argument that sex must lead to life, well, it certainly doesn’t apply to men and woman beyond the child bearing age.
Their lovemaking is exactly that: they make love just as gay men and women do. Any reasonable person understands that love always leads to life no matter whether or not a child is conceived, for after love, each person has a taste of Christ’s “life more abundant.” Yes, it is quite clear to people of reason that the Roman Catholic Church is out of step with modern society.
Of course, the Church teaches that it is entrusted with eternal truths that are not always tolerated, let alone embraced, by sinful human beings who want to live their lives their own way rather than in conformity with God's law. Faced with that choice, Brenkert elected to choose the former, and now the Episcopal convert wishes to reshape the Catholic church and the Christian faith in an image acceptable to him:
As the world embraces science and reason, the Church’s stand (its last stand?) on homosexuality becomes weaker and weaker in an ethics that is becoming for many inconvenient and insensitive, for some incongruent and for me incoherent.
Such is a Church that emphasizes diplomacy over and above the needs of the spiritually poor, those LGBTQ Christians who want more than to be near our Lord’s table, receiving human dignity, but want a seat next to Christ, and the Pope who represents Him on Earth.
Remember: the beloved disciple, John, was the only disciple, male or female, to be recorded as placing his head on Jesus’ breast. Is not the world moved by this icon of love?
I’ve watched this discrimination play out across America in cities like Seattle, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Fridley, Moorhead, Bensalem, Glendora and now Philadelphia.
A Jesuit parish in Kansas City fired Colleen Simon because she is a married lesbian; the Jesuit parish in Oceanside, New York, fired Nicholas Coppola because he is a married gay man. Other dioceses are planning to implement new, stricter, more personhood denying contracts for employees of Roman Catholic Institutions.
The bishops who run these dioceses think like Ireland’s Bishop Kevin Doran. The latter believes homosexuality is still not a part of God’s plan, as if he were privy to God’s plans.
When he was a Cardinal in Argentina, Pope Francis I once told listeners that our Church has at times become too insular, leading to spiritual sickness, that we must avoid a “Church [that] remains closed in on itself, self-referential, [one that] gets old.”
Isn’t that what is happening in the Church, in America, in the West where LGBTQ are finding Christ in the secular world and the free market, but not at the Lord’s table on Sunday?
Christ said, “Love one another.” Love means acceptance. The Church must learn this. Christ said, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” The Church must follow this.
At the bottom of the article lies a plug for Brenkert's forthcoming memoir:
Ben Brenkert’s A Catechism of the Heart: Memoir of a Gay Jesuit will be published by Bloomsbury in Spring 2016
By publishing his screed, the Daily Beast may have succeeded in preaching to the choir and in piquing some interest in Brenkert's forthcoming book, but it comes off rather lacking as a serious engagement on a theological dispute, especially with the utterly predictable ripping Jesus out of context on the passage regarding self-righteously judging others.
