NEWS NOTES: Bishops Recognize TDOR; Catholics Join Anti-Criminalization Work; and More
Here are some news items that you may find of interest:
1. The Catholic Bishops of England and Wales made public their support for the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), which occurred on November 20th. In a tweet, the bishops said:
“Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance and we pray for all people who are ill at ease with their gender, seek to change it, suffer for it and have been persecuted, and also killed. All people are loved by God and valued in their inherent God-given dignity. #TDOR”
2. Religious leaders published an open letter to government officials in the nine Caribbean nations which still criminalize homosexuality. Signers, who represented several former British Commonwealth nations and the United States, were mostly Anglican leaders. Two Roman Catholics, Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry and Sr. Jeannine Gramick of the National Coalition of American Nuns, also signed.
3. A Faithful America petition in support of fired church worker Keith Kozak has gained nearly 10,000 signatures. The petition asks the Diocese of Cleveland to reinstate Kozak, who was fired after administrators at the school where he was campus minister found out via social media that he had attended a friend’s same-gender wedding. To add your name, click here.
4. The Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn in Australia has drafted a document about the future of the Catholic Church which calls for LGBT inclusion, saying, “God’s love is inclusive. The church has spent too much time excluding rather than including.” The document, developed ahead of the country’s Plenary Council planned for 2020, emerged out of a series of “listening and dialogue” sessions carried out by Archbishop Christopher Prowse.
5. Singapore’s Ministry of Education intervened abruptly to bar an LGBT activist from speaking at a TEDtalk session hosted by the nation’s oldest Catholic school. Rachel Yeo with the Inter-University LGBT Network had planned to speak about activism generally rather than an LGBT-specific talk.
—Robert Shine, New Ways Ministry, November 23, 2018
As a ‘non Roman Catholic’ Catholic, may I ask that Advocate, or any other news agency, when speaking of a specific denomination you be just that, specific. If an article is about the Latin Rite – the Roman Catholic part of the Church – then that should be stated. In Australia, and world-wide, there are free and indepedent Catholics who have for decades been inclusive and very supportive of the LGBTIQ community, ordaining gay and lesbian people, and exhorting the rest of the Church to do likewise. It is very encouraging to see bishops – sadly so few – of the Latin Rite following the example of their Pope.