When the executive director of Dignity USA, the LGBTQ Catholic support organization, emailed me not long ago to tell me transgender people and gay people in relationships had been effectively kicked out of the church in the entire upper peninsula of Michigan, I thought she must be exaggerating.
When I dug into the matter, I saw it was true. John Doerfler, the Bishop of Marquette, has issued “pastoral guidance” to all priests in the diocese ordering them to withhold sacraments, including blessings for the sick, from people like you and me. No communion, no last rites, no baptism if you were intending to convert the Catholic. No confirmation. No leadership roles in parishes. Nothing.
Catholic bishops in the United States are waging an intense war on LGBTQ people, which extends into the political arena.
The bishops here in my own home state of Michigan are spending big money, in tight coordination with the Republican Party, to deny civil rights like employment equality and public accommodation to transgender and gay people.
The bishops have kicked Dignity USA and another support group out of church property they had been using for four decades under four different archbishops of Detroit. This is after Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron fired a woman from her decades-long position as parish musical director, shortly before she was due to retire with a pension, because she committed the “crime” of marrying her partner, whom everyone in her parish and much of the diocese had known about for many years and never objected to. She did nothing illegal and nothing against the Church, yet Vigneron destroyed her life and grievously harmed her financially.
She deserved so much better.
Examples like this abound across the United States. The hierarchy of the Church hate us. They treat us like sub-human scum, even in supposedly liberal places like Brooklyn, where the friend of a friend of mine was fired a few weeks ago from his parish music job and his school teaching job — again for doing no more than marrying his longtime partner everyone at church and school had known about for many years. They attended church together faithfully as a couple!
To make matters worse, Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio (who has twice been credibly accused of sexually assaulting a child) offered him a $20,000.00 severance package, but only on condition he never tell anyone why he was fired from his jobs. He made the principled decision to turn down the bribe and go public so Catholics would know how cruelly the Church had treated him.
He says he deepest regret isn’t the money. It’s the loss of his beloved community that tears his heart out.
He deserved better. Sadly, the Church in the U.S. is led in large part by twisted, immoral bigots like Doerfler, Vigneron, and DiMarzio — who routinely exercise their institutional power to badly hurt us.
I’m very sorry your alma mater chose not to print your engagement announcement. That’s a stigmatizing injustice that must not stand. But the Church in the U.S. does far worse than that almost every day. Its leaders hate us so fiercely and treat us so viciously.
