Burning Bridge
Jesuit priest James Martin—close friend of Pope Francis and the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communication—is bright and just and merciful.
He is also committed to normalizing LGBT realities in the Catholic Church.
Martin was chosen as the featured Catholic to address LGBT issues at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin last month and contributed to the Youth Synod document that Bishops from around the world will study together next month. That document employs LGBT language, a first for the Catholic Church.
Martin artfully wrote a book–‘Building a Bridge’ between the Church and LGBT community—in which he pretends to be within the lines of the Catechism by emphasizing ‘respect, compassion and sensitivity’, all duly noted in #2358 as attitudes that should guide our treatment of persons with same-sex attraction.
Martin quietly oversteps the bonds of orthodoxy by expanding #2358 to include the LGBT spectrum, which spawns fresh configurations constantly. Is Martin really advocating for the tendency of a generation to find social traction by creating new and varied gender selves? What used to be an inner struggle rooted in unfinished emotional business has now become a dance card for kids in search of ‘selves.’
Martin insists that respecting LGBT persons means embracing their ‘coming out’ and honoring their new names and (I presume) gender impersonations. It’s wacky. Here’s a brilliant guy who wants to reach a generation by celebrating their delusion. And employing Scripture to reinforce it. He emphasizes the importance of ‘naming’ and new names in which Abram becomes Abraham, God becomes ‘I Am’ to Moses, and Judy becomes Jimmy (pp. 115-8). Good Father Martin unites good with evil by using the Bible to reinforce self-created gender identities.
More seriously, Martin takes aim at the Catechism, especially its reference to ‘objectively disordered’ desire, applied both to same-sex tendencies (#2358) and behavior (#2357). He finds those words cruel and unusual for young people. He goes so far as to imply that such a harsh description may cause Jimmy ‘to destroy himself’ (p. 75). If ‘disorder’ provokes anyone to hate or self-hate, Martin has a point.
How much better to awaken to the fact that same-sex aspirations (or any along the LGBT continuum) are disordered because they ‘close the sexual act to the gift of life’ and do not ‘proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity’ (#2357)? Simply put: you cannot create your own gender self and be happy! The whole of the Catholic moral life? Human freedom=lining up with what the Creator wills for His creature.
In truth, a generation fueled by more disordered desire than ever before needs clarity. How good and right and true for the Church to marry its understanding of human freedom with empowered compassion, to accompany persons under the sway of deception into true human freedom.
Martin stops short of authentic compassion because he fails to reveal the One whose love opens the horizon. Jesus names us afresh as He invites us out of disorder into holy order. Martin resists that truth and settles for a worldly one—‘be LGBT just as you are and want to be’; his bridge burns the most vulnerable. Please pray for Catholics who become the bridge over which weak ones cross from disorder to true happiness.
We’ll be starting our prayer/ fasting time on October 10th for anyone who wants to join. If you’d like to pray along with us, let us know and we can send you a book or you can get it through kindle here: https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Good-News-Andrew-Comiskey-ebook/dp/B07F95JKP5!
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