Ireland’s public television network has aired a new film about conversion therapy and the damage it causes people who undergo it. The film reveals the long shadow a history of LGBTQ persecution in a largely Catholic country casts despite legal advances for LGBTQ equality in recent years.
In a recent address, San Diego’s Bishop Robert McElroy sharply condemned judgementalism, particularly in the church, and warned of the damage such an attitude inflicts, particularly on the retention of young Catholics. But he stopped short of naming what is at the core of judgmentalism in the U.S. church today: LGBTQ-negative teachings and practices.
Community members are making their support known for a lesbian Catholic denied Communion over her same-gender marriage, including with an inclusive liturgy and one parishioner’s letter to the local bishop.
A new podcast on AIDS and the Catholic Church is being lauded for its honest, challenging engagement with a harrowing period for lesbian and gay Catholics in the 1980s and 1990s.
A diocese in Michigan is backing one of its priest’s decision to deny Communion to a longtime lesbian parishioner because of her same-gender marriage, part of an alleged pattern of Communion denials and LGBTQ church worker firings in the parish.
Sr. Jeannine Gramick, SL, co-founder of New Ways Ministry and longtime LGBTQ advocate, was Catholic Women Preach’s latest homilist, kicking off the liturgical year with her thoughts on the readings for the First Sunday of Advent (which can be found here).
Transgender and intersex Catholics have faced mixed results when requesting that church records be emended to reflect their actual names and gender identities. In Argentina, a transgender activist is suing a bishop who refused to change the activist’s church records, a case that could now be taken up by the nation’s Supreme Court. But in the Philippines, an intersex Catholic had their church records changed successfully.
A Catholic education official in Toronto is being called on to resign after comparing LGBTQ issues to cannibalism, pedophilia, and beastiality during a recent debate over whether school policies should be made more inclusive.
The U.S. bishops begin their fall assembly today during which they are set to approve anti-transgender work as a strategic priority. They will also likely vote in an LGBTQ-negative president and choose the chair of their religious liberty committee.
A gay Catholic priest from Ireland will be awarded the “Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad” later this month. The award will be given by Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins on November 21, 2019.