Cardinal hopes to extend gay care

A WESTMINSTER diocesan initiative to extend a special welcome to lesbian and gay Catholics at a regular Mass has proved so successful that Cardinal Vincent Nichols would like it to be rolled out nationwide, his lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) liaison priest has said.

The Masses, at the Jesuit Farm Street Church in central London, replaced the more controversial, so-called “gay Masses” that were designated for LGBT Catholics at Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory in Soho until 2013. Key to the transition was that the Farm Street Masses are an extension of the diocese’s pastoral care for gay people. LGBT Catholics join the regular congregation at the 6.15 p.m. Mass on Sunday evenings twice a month and meet afterwards for a social gathering in the parish hall.

Fr Keith Barltrop, who was appointed chaplain to the LGBT community by Vincent Nichols earlier this year, said that the cardinal would like to see the Farm Street Masses as a model for other parishes in his archdiocese. He added that the idea could be taken up by parishes in other dioceses.
The Farm Street Masses are similar to those said for the LGBT community in Chicago and Los Angeles. Martin Pendergast of the LGBT Catholics Westminster Pastoral Council said that any move to expand the model would be dependent on interested parishioners taking the lead. 

Looking ahead to the October synod on the family in Rome, Mr Pendergast said his group was currently drawing up a briefing paper which it hoped Cardinal Nichols and Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton, the delegates to the synod from England and Wales, would take with them and feed into the debate. 

A major line of argument in the paper, he said, would be a move to encourage the Vatican to undertake a “serious review” of the vocabulary it used in relation to homosexuality. “Two terms which have been used by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in regard to homosexuality are ‘objective disorder’ and ‘intrinsic moral disorder’,” he said. “But these are inaccurate and theo­logically quite inappropriate – and the people who are most hurt by this sort of language are the parents of children who come out as gay. What does it mean to them to hear their children described in those terms?” he added.

Meanwhile, Fr Barltrop was this week embroiled in a row with traditionalist Catholics over the issue of the Church’s stance on transgenderism, after he was accused of claiming that the Church has no official position on the subject during an interview with the website Gay Star News.

The Catholic website Church Militant said that Fr Barltrop’s comments were misguided, and supported this with quotes from various church bodies and documents. But Fr Barltrop said that the suggestion that the catechism forbids sex reassignment surgery referred to a condemnation of Nazi torture methods, and that other evidence that suggested the Vatican had pronounced against it was limited to private directives to papal nuncios. Church teaching, he pointed out, could not be contained in private directives: being public was a prerequisite.

Fr Barltrop hit back at the traditionalist website, which he said was “the RC equivalent of Islamic fundamentalism”.

In a separate development, plans are being made for a pilgrimage of transgender people from Assisi to Rome ahead of the family synod. October will also see the launch of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, an international network of LGBT Catholic groups, which will hold a conference entitled “LGBT Voices to the Synod” from 1-4 October in Rome.