Women Religious Host Pride Prayer Service; And More Pride Month Updates

Catholics’ celebrations of and positive commentaries about Pride Month continue to increase each year, making it difficult for Bondings 2.0 staff to keep up with them all!  It’s a happy problem to have! Today’s post features some final updates about this year’s Pride Month.

1. The U.S. Federation of the Sisters of Joseph held a virtual “Pride Month Prayer Service” for a second year, co-sponsored by the IHM Sisters of Monroe. A Facebook post described the event as a time of “time of prayer designed by, for, and with vowed women religious communities and our partners in mission,” which centers LGBTQ+ people’s voices and lived experiences. The prayer services included readings from Scripture, welcoming music, and a “prayer to celebrate Pride in its joy and sacredness, honoring its historical context.”

2. Out at St. Paul, the LGBTQ+ ministry of New York City’s Saint Paul the Apostle Church, again held a Pride Mass at the Stonewall National Monument commemorating the 1969 riots which escalated the LGBTQ+ movement significantly. Planned to coincide with the city’s official Pride celebrations, nearly 200 people attended the Mass, the altar for which was decorated with a rainbow flag. Saint Paul the Apostle is included on New Ways Ministry’s list of LGBTQ-friendly parishes and faith communities. If you are seeking a welcoming church, the list is available here.

3. Each year, LGBTQ Nation publishes a “Pride in Pictures” series where readers are asked to send their photo and a story in about how Pride is being celebrated for them. Elsie Carlson-Holt, a writer, sent a picture of New York City’s 2023 Dyke March and explained the significance of it as her first dyke march. Carlson-Holt was raised in a conservative Catholic family, which restricted her even from seeing gay couples on television and a priest who harshly condemned homosexuality as the author was discovering her lesbian identity. Carlson-Holt wrote, in part:

“This picture, thousands of people, going on for blocks and blocks, who may look and dress and identify differently than I do but still feel a connection to being a dyke, means the world to me. It was there that I talked to elderly lesbian couples for the first time and saw genderqueer families with their children.

“It is profoundly inspiring to know that although I didn’t know about it, Dyke March was there all along: my fellow dykes filling the streets, chanting and drumming and pushing each other in wheelchairs and dancing and holding hands or signs or both.

“This picture, and Dyke March in general, reminds me that I am a part of something bigger than myself, and though I felt like it for a very long time, I was never alone.”

3. Emma Cieslik, director of “Queer and Catholic: A CLGS Oral History Project,” wrote in the National Catholic Reporter about the need for Catholics to celebrate the Queer Youth of Faith Day and National Day of Prayer for LGBTQ+ Youth, which were marked on June 30th. Cieslik highlighted the work of Beloved Arise, which focuses on religious LGBTQ+ youth, as a driving force behind such ministry. The paired days, which began in 2021 and 2023 respectively, are meant to “to empower queer young people, religious leaders and allies to pray for a future where queer young people are free to be themselves, talk about themselves and their families, and envision their futures, regardless of their faith.” They also can help curtail the high rates of suicidality and suicide that LGBTQ+ youth experience, often as a result of non-affirming families and faith communities.

4. America published a list of nine movies to watch for Pride Month. John Dougherty, director of mission and ministry at St. Joseph’s Prep, Philadelphia, included movies that he finds “meaningful and believe resonate with our faith,” especially those that “are more than just struggle narratives” but “encompass the full, vibrant diversity of the human experience” (emphasis in the original). Among the movies listed are Moonlight, Paris is Burning, Milk, and The Birdcage. Dougherty wrote an additional essay about this last movie, which touches on often-controversial “family values” and instead “challenges us to look past outward appearances to what’s going on beneath the surface. That’s where our true values are revealed.”

—Robert Shine (he/him), New Ways Ministry, July 2, 2024