Open Letter to Pope Francis: A Father Disciplines

Dear Pope Francis,

I just returned from a Living Waters group where Jesus is healing broken lives aspiring to chastity. My co-teacher Dana, a woman Jesus rescued from years of same-sex unions (in part through our help), accompanies many like her returning to Jesus in this one Body. Glory to God. Homosexuality doesn’t need to divide the Church; same-sex strugglers who have turned back to Him are healing Her.

When your sons, Pope Francis, fight for the ‘the right’ for Christian persons to be ‘gay’ or any LGBTQ+ identification, they block this healing and stumble persons in route to chastity. These good men with bad ideas need you to discipline them.

I thank you, Pope Francis, for evidence of your discipline, especially toward abusers. Censuring the ordained is thorny territory! We pray for you all the time. Thanks for waking up daily and putting your hand to an unwieldy plow. Your ‘yes’ to the impossible inspires our little ‘yes.’

The dignity of people demands a father’s discipline, especially from you. Easy to talk ‘dignity’: synodal ‘star’ Cardinal McElroy insists that the inherent ‘dignity’ of LGBTQ+ persons should govern our pastoral care of them. How about repentance unto the healing that activates our dignity? Yes, the light of the Imago Dei lights up all persons and yes, the down drag of sin and death shrouds that light in us all.

Your son McElroy, who as an amplified synodal voice, champions ‘radical inclusion’ of the rainbow set in the Church without qualifications. He refuses to recognize the indignities LGBTQ+ persons inflict on themselves and others.

That includes assuming identities based on disordered desires (and insisting we do the same or be considered ‘haters’), wrecking same-sex friendships by sexualizing them (and insisting on marriage rights), mimicking the opposite sex in drag (always exaggerated and usually degrading takes on women), and efforts ‘to become’ the other through hormonal and surgical procedures.

Indignities, degradation to all, beginning with those trapped under the rainbow. McElroy wants to keep the sexually disintegrated bound on the ground that that is who they are. Another son of yours, Father James Martin wants to do the same. Martin exhorts us to ‘reverence’ same-sex marriage as a ‘loving act,’ while encouraging us all to ‘name ourselves’ as we see fit, invoking God renaming Abram as Abraham (Building a Bridge, pp. 115-117.)

I appreciate how both McElroy and Martin refuse to scapegoat the sexually disintegrated by elevating the ‘exotic’ over traditional sins like racism and misogyny. But freedom from hypocrisy cannot justify freedom for undermining chastity and establishing a new ‘ethic’ of degradation for the most vulnerable.

Let me be clear. Chastity involves integration of our bodies as God designed them, and aligning our desires to build others up according to how God made them. Embracing one’s LGBTQ+ status violates both. Catholic leaders who lead others to do so advocate for moral disintegration. Period.

McElroy and Maritn dignify LGBTQ+ indignities. They trample the moral and anthropological guidelines that the Church upholds as leading every person to life.

We the Bride must not seek ‘to enlarge the space of her tent’ by dignifying what degrades people. The Worldwide Anglican Communion did that through blessing same-sex unions. German Catholics just did the same.

What say you, Pope Francis? I trust the Germans roused you. What about Father McElroy? You made him a Cardinal last year. Father James Martin has visited you twice in Rome and smoothly communicated to the world your approval of how he ‘loves’ the LGBTQ+ set.

God spoke through the prophet Samuel who warned ‘father’ Eli that his failure to discipline his two sons would lead to disaster (1 Samuel 3:13). Through St. John, God warned the Church at Thyatira that ‘tolerating Jezebel, who misled the servants of God into sexual immorality’ (Rev. 2:20) invited destruction.

Cardinal McElroy and Father Martin mislead Jesus’ servants; your two sons ‘change the grace of God into a license for immorality’ (Jude 4). Saying nothing encourages unchastity. Speak out, good Pope. The world needs your discipline of false teachers and the clarion call for us all to realize our original dignity.