LGBTQ+ Issues Are Top Religion Stories of 2024; and More News

Here are some items you might find of interest:

1) The National Catholic Reporter’s list of ten most read stories of 2024, was an open letter to Pope Francis endorsed by dozens of students, theologians, and church ministers opposing the treatment of transgender people in the Vatican’s April document, Dignitas Infinita.  In part the statement declared: “We love this church, we love our Catholic faith, . . . [but are] personally, professionally and ministerially, we are concerned with Dignitas Infinita‘s statements on gender theory and sex change. We implore you to hear the cries of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people. As a church, we cannot love who we do not truly know.”

2)Claire Giangravé, the Vatican correspondent for Religion News Service, listed the five top Pope Francis stories of 2024, and LGBTQ+ issues were mentioned explicitly in three of them:  1) the continued use of the term “gender theory” as a main influence on transgender people, particularly in Dignitas Infinita; 2) the pope’s use of a gay slur in a closed-door meeting with Italian bishops; 3) the end of the Synod on Synodality, whose final report ignored the raising of LGBTQ+ issues called for by the faithful in the preceding years.

Msgr. Tomáš Halík

3)Commonweal’s Zechariah Mickel recently interviewed Msgr. Tomáš Halík, a Czech sociologist at Charles University, Prague. Halík, who was ordained in the underground Church during the nation’s Communist regime, offered an understanding of God which requires the church to change its sexual and political ethics, employing new information from the sciences. He stated:

“At the center of the Christian understanding of God is the Trinity—God as a relationship. God created man in his image: our human ‘nature’ is, therefore, to live in relationships, being with and for others; our mission is to share and communicate on a common path. The shift from thinking in terms of static, unchanging natures to an emphasis on the quality of relationships involves a renewal of ecclesiology, of the understanding of the Church, and of Christian ethics, including sexual ethics and political ethics. In making this shift, we cannot ignore the findings of the natural and social sciences.”

4)Two participants in Germany’s “#OutInChurch” initiative, a project suppoting LGBTQ+ Catholic    Church workers, recenty discussed “How to navigate being religious and queer” with GCN.ie, an LGBTQ+ publication in Ireland. Junia, one of the people interviewed, explained why she stays connected to a religious institution by comparison with a sports team:

“There are good and bad players on the field. The management needs to be exchanged completely. But the fanbase is fantastic and why do I go to matches? Mostly to see all the people who are standing in the stands with me, my community. They are more important than the players on the field and even more important than the management.”

–Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry, January 4, 2025