On Wednesday, June 27, the United States Supreme Court handed down two decisions—on Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Amendment –that eviscerated legal marriage in the United States. The following Sunday thus offered Catholic priests a matchless opportunity to articulate the Church’s definition of what marriage is, and what it is not. Indeed, since the decisions had such civilizational import, such articulation was less an opportunity than an absolute obligation.
One priest did choose to address the issue. At San Francisco’s St. Ignatius Church, the 9:30 AM Mass on Sunday, June 30 was celebrated by the church’s pastor, Fr. Gregory R. Bonfiglio, SJ. But rather than presenting Church teaching to his audience, rather than, for instance, stating the simple truth that properly ordered sexuality leads to the creation of new life, while sodomitical relations lead, as San Franciscans know all too well, to physical death and to spiritual death, Fr. Bonfiglio chose to read a letter written by Fr. John D. Whitney, SJ, of St. Joseph’s Church in Seattle. In the letter, which is titled “Why Am I In The Parade?” and which runs to 1,098 words, Fr. Whitney justified his presence in Seattle’s “Gay Pride” parade. The letter was published in St. Joseph’s June 23, 2013 parish bulletin. Given the content of the letter (Fr. Whitney absurdly equated Church teaching on homosexuality with Old Testament dietary restrictions, and ignorantly repeats the long-debunked assertion that the word “faggot” derives from “faggots” of wood), and the timing of Fr. Bonfiglio’s homily, the Sunday immediately after the legalization of counterfeit “marriage,” the homily can be seen as nothing less than support of homosexual “marriage.”
During Fr. Bonfiglio’s reading of the letter, the Church was eerily quiet. At least one parishioner was seen leaving the church in tears. When queried she said “It’s not his church! It’s the Catholic church! I should be able to just go to Church! I want to go to a Catholic Church!”
Via the California Catholic Daily and A Shepherd’s Voice
This is a such a sad lament. Unfortunately not that rare of a lament.
That it is in support of so-called “gay pride” also reflects that such a homily is also driven totally by pride. The arrogance of pride where the revisionist decides what is Church teaching and takes it on themselves to correct the Church.
A rejection of the teaching authority of the Church the Magisterium. Instead we get the “Me-gisterium” and the effect common in Protestantism to decide on your own apart from any authority. You would think that those who exercise the office of the “Me-gisterium” would realize the individualist relativism this implies. That is you might think this if you had not observed reality and that those who dissent from the Church are very upset if you dissent from them. The vanity of the “Me-gisterium” is that they are prophetic and are correcting the Church. They consider themselves brave to be going with the secular flow, despite the fact that the true prophets always went against it. <insert mandatory quote from Chesterton “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” > For the members of the “Me-gisterium” repentance is not really required, but it is the hierarchy of the Church that needs to repent. Sola Scriptura the error of Protestants has been one-upped by the revisionists and reduced to just “Sola” – oneself. When appeals to Sacred Tradition or Sacred Scripture are made they are not to explain, but to explain away. Whether the topic is homosexual acts, abortion, contraception, women’s ordination – it all has the common root of an arrogance filled pride.
Want to learn what the Church teaches? Well don’t pick up a Catechism but instead listen to a self-appointed member of the “Me-gisterium.” Yeah that’s the ticket – or at least a toll pass on that infamous highway to warmer climes.
Still the lament of this women tears at me:
“It’s not his church! It’s the Catholic church! I should be able to just go to Church! I want to go to a Catholic Church!”
May the revisionists and members of the “Me-gisterium” hear her cry and the call to repentance.
4 comments
Ok, it’s one thing to sit thru a bad homily….we’ve all done that….(Lord, how long!?) But to sit thru HERESY, DISSENTION, DISOBEDIENCE?
No. What’s to stop someone from standing up and denouncing the priest? Ok, he stands literally ‘in the person of Christ’ but at that point what is going on? I would have a seriously hard time not asking for clarification. Storming out would be the MINIMUM….am I wrong here? Is there a theologian who could answer the deeper question posed….ok, the priest is changed at an ontological level, I get that. But to profess heresy? That is not Christ standing up there at that point.
25 years ago, I directed a choir at St. Ignatius, and got to sit through a couple year’s worth of Jesuit homilies. This surprises me very little, except insofar as it was coherent enough to offend. (The deep-seated need for the Jebbies at USF to show off how smart they are tended strongly to making their homilies incomprehensible to mortal man.)
Poor Archbishop Cordeleone! A good man in the lion’s den.
[…] Here’s a link to a post at the Curt Jester wherein a woman who attended Mass at St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco left weeping when the inevitable Jesuit homily in *support of* gay marriage came thundering down over the PA. She said: […]
Why aren’t Fr. Bonfiglio and Fr. Whitney publicly de-frocked and excommunicated? What did St. Paul do to that sex pervert living with his father’s wife in 1st Corinthians chapter 5? What did Jesus promise Jezebel at the Church in Thyatira in Revelation 2:20-23? What did St. Peter do about Ananias and Sapphira in Acts chapter 5? What did St. Paul say about Hymenaeus and Alexander in 1st Timothy 1:19-20?
There is one and only one way to deal with these apostates and heretics, and it is to its doom that the Roman jurisdiction in these United States fails to implement the precedence already set in Sacred Scripture and already mandated in the Church’s Code of Canon Law.