But this isn’t an outlier. It’s very normal for the U.S. Church. Catholic bishops in the U.S. treat LGBTQ Catholics like dirt. They treat LGBTQ people in general like dirt. Just over a year ago, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops tried to stop bipartisan federal legislation establishing a national suicide hotline — solely on the grounds that the hotline would include specific resources to help LGBTQ people.
Further south in Michigan, the Bishop of Detroit fired a lesbian parish music director shortly before she was due to retire, solely because she married a woman, in a relationship her parish priest, congregation and much of the4 diocese had known about and approved of for many years. The same bishop banned Dignity USA, which I mention in my story, from using Church property to meet and worship, something they’d been doing without controversy for decades.
A little over a month ago, the Bishop of Brooklyn fired a gay teacher and music director solely because he was gay and then offered him $20,000 to never tell anyone he was fired for being gay.
I could go on. The Catholic Church in the U.S. is routinely and unceasingly cruel and hostile to LGBTQ people. The bishops are growing more hostile to us rather than less hostile.
Oh, and here’s an interesting fact: Pope Francis appointed the Bishop of Marquette even though he already had a history of denying sacraments to gay people. So, you know, that’s just one reason why when people hold up Francis as a paragon of LGBTQ acceptance, lots of queer people all over the world snort in derision. He’s proven over and over that in many ways he stands for excluding and stigmatizing us.
