MÖNCHENGLADBACH, Germany (ChurchMilitant.com) – Scores of LGBTIQ+ clergy and employees of the German Catholic Church are defying magisterial teaching on homosexuality, insisting that “such statements are no longer acceptable or even debatable” following new insights in theology and science.
Lesbian nuns Monika Schmelter (left) and Marie Kortenbusch
In what is being billed as the biggest revolt of pansexual Catholics so far, 125 priests, nuns, religious, catechists, administrators, church musicians, religion teachers, pastoral workers and medics are staging a doctrinal insurgency under the banner #OutInChurch.
“Our identities include lesbian, gay, bi, trans, inter, queer and non-binary,” the rebels declare in a manifesto published Monday. “LGBTIQ+ persons must have free access to all pastoral vocations.”
Demanding blessings for same-sex couples, #OutInChurch calls for the Church to “express in its rites and celebrations the fact that LGBTIQ+ persons, whether living alone or in relationship, are blessed by God and that their love bears manifold fruits.”
“We demand a correction of misanthropic doctrinal statements,” citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teaching, which pronounces homosexual activity to be “objectively disordered” and thus “cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God.”
“Defamatory and outdated statements of Church doctrine on sexuality and gender needs to be revised on the basis of theological and human-scientific findings,” a separate list of seven “demands to the Roman Catholic Church” states. Such statements “defame queer love, orientation, gender and sexuality and devalue our personhood.”
Souls Lost to ‘Synodal Way’?
In comments to Church Militant, reformed sodomite Milo Yiannopoulos said he “quakes for those lost souls in Germany looking to their pastors for deliverance and instead discovering collaboration with the diabolical.”
The Church Militant contributor, who plans to open a conversion therapy center in Florida in 2022, elaborated:
At my most sinful, at my most unrepentant, at my most wretched, I never dreamed of disputing the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. What kind of person demands that the Bride of Christ throw away her hard truths to lie to them in hopes they will feel a bit better about themselves? And what kind of worthless Church would entertain such a demand? Holy Mother Church was founded on a rock and a Cross — not a hug.
The truth often hurts. Indeed, we are invited every day to consider the agonies of a Man on a Cross as the key to understanding the nature of reality and our place in it. Disordered and damaged homosexuals need tough love by the truckload, as I know personally. The responsibility of German clerics is to endure their torments and help others through them, not refashion the world to excuse them.
But Aachen Bp. Helmut Dieser welcomed the initiative on behalf of the German Bishops’ Conference and in the light of the Synodal Way “as a sign that we are working to ensure that such a climate of freedom from fear must prevail and arise in our Church.”
“No one, he said, should be discriminated against, devalued or criminalized because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” Dieser said. “We have an image of man that tells us that the person is unconditionally loved by God.”
Pro-Gay Propaganda
The #OutInChurch dissidents discuss their demands in an hour-long German ARD television documentary titled How God Created Us with Bp. Dieser maintaining that “homosexuality is a basic orientation that belongs to human beings.”
Blessing sodomy: Helmut Dieser, bishop of Aachen
Among the priests is Jesuit Ralf Klein, who says his first “coming out” in Berlin in front of 200 Catholics at a diocesan meeting was met with thunderous applause.
Two former nuns, Monika Schmelter and Marie Kortenbusch, reveal how they met and fell in love in the convent and have been together for 40 years. To hide their relationship, they had to work far from where they lived, Schmelter admits.
“I traveled 130 km a day there and back. My working life was conditioned by the fact that I always had to control myself. And this makes life, even working life, a huge burden,” recounts Schmelter, a theologian. Kortenbusch works as a religion teacher.
The pansexual activists are also demanding a change to the Church’s employment rules and canon law, stating: “An open life according to one’s sexual orientation and gender identity, even in a partnership or civil marriage, must never be considered a breach of loyalty or a reason for dismissal.”
‘Born This Way’ Debunked
However, the proposition that sexual orientation is genetically determined is coming under fire from LGBTIQ+ activists who argue against the “Born This Way” hypothesis popularized by singer Lady Gaga in her 2011 gay-acceptance anthem.
“It is only in the last two decades that the notion that homosexuals are ‘born this way’ has gained widespread public acceptance in the United States, including (and especially) among lesbians and gay men,” writes sociologist Jane Ward in her book Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men.
ARD documentary: How God Created Us
It was “only by the 1990s a consensus was built among gay activists that homosexuality, like race and sex, is congenital and unchangeable,” Ward observes.
In a 2012 interview with the New York Times Magazine, actress Cynthia Nixon of Sex and The City said that she had chosen to be a lesbian: “I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.”
“I am gay, but I wasn’t born this way,” writer Brandon Ambrosino maintains, arguing that many gay activists think the public will only accept and affirm homosexuals if they think they were born gay.
“I would like to state for the record that I was not born this way,” writes queer columnist Lindsay Miller. “I get frustrated with the veiled condescension of straight people who believe that queers ‘can’t help it,’ and thus should be treated with tolerance and pity.”
“Make no mistake — it’s a life I chose,” Miller states. “Being gay can actually be fantastic.”
Francis Targeting CDF?
In May, 2,600 German priests protested under the hashtag “#LiebeGewinnt” (“love wins”). The clerics offered blessings for same-sex couples, disobeying March 15 orders from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith telling clergy they “cannot bless sin.”
Francis endorses gay couple (above), Sr. Gramick (below)
Sources said that Pope Francis was “hurt” by the Vatican’s declaration affirming Catholic teachings on marriage and human sexuality — despite having endorsed the declaration.
Earlier this month, Francis banished secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Abp. Giacomo Morandi to the bishopric of the diocese of Reggio Emilia. Morandi was responsible for issuing the CDF’s ban on same-sex blessings; his demotion is being seen as a punishment by the pontiff.
Francis, who is sympathetic to “homosexual inclusion,” is poised to promote notorious pro-LGBTQ+ archbishop of Malta Charles Scicluna as the doctrinal czar of the CDF, Church Militant reported.
Pontiff’s ‘Support’
In December, Francis wrote to lesbian nun and cofounder of pro-LGBTQ+ New Ways Ministry Sr. Jeannine Gramick, thanking her for her 50 years of ministry to LGBTQ Catholics more than two decades after the Vatican censured her for her pansexual activism.
The pontiff endorsed sodomite couple Andrea Rubera and Dario De Gregorio in the Rome parish of Trinità a Villa Chigi even though they violated Church teaching and Italian law by hiring a lesbian surrogate to have three children by artificial insemination, a Church Militant report revealed.
“Germany has money and technology, but since the calamities of the two world wars has been dedicated to dismantling itself and taking a chunk of Western civilization with it,” Yiannopoulos warned. “We can’t let them get away with it. There are too many souls at stake.”