NEW YORK (ChurchMilitant.com) – A prestigious Manhattan church, notorious for pushing pro-LGBT propaganda, has divided parishioners after it displayed a “God Is Trans” exhibit next to the high altar.
Fr. Rick Walsh
In defiance of the Vatican’s rulings against gender ideology, the parish of St. Paul the Apostle is showcasing Adah Unachukwu’s blasphemous exhibit titled “God Is Trans: A Queer Spiritual Journey,” the New York Post reported Sunday.
The high-profile parish in the archdiocese of New York is the mother church of the Paulist Fathers — the first order of Catholic priests founded in the United States. The church advertises a gay-friendly 5 p.m. Sunday Mass and an “Out at St. Paul” LGBT ministry.
The “God Is Trans” installation “maps the queer spiritual journey by three significant points: sacrifice, identity and communion,” a description for Unachukwu’s artwork reads.
“In sacrifice, parishioners are asked to ‘shed an old life and personhood in order to be able to focus on your spiritual need,” it adds.
“There is no devil, just past selves,” Unachukwu explains.
“Identity is the most impactful part of the exhibition,” the display states. “What does holiness look like? What does your god look like? Are those two portrayals that can be merged?”
Communion “rounds out the spiritual journey, by placing God and the mortal on the same plane to speak to one another. This part of the installation is about a spiritual home and the ways we can achieve this home in our everyday lives,” the description concludes.
“You can’t put this out on the altar and then hide,” an angry parishioner told the New York Post. “Also, when a friend asked a priest about this, they didn’t answer. I pray for all people, but enough is enough.”
“I understand there are transgender people,” but “the church should not be promoting this,” the parishioner said. “It seems like they are trying to force the agenda on others. That’s what gets the church in trouble.”
But 80-year-old Cherri Ghosh defended the display: “I don’t understand the art, but this church is very liberal, which is why I love this church.”
In July 2020, the parish’s pastor, Fr. Rick Walsh, preached that Christ is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer — and that all Christians are LGBT in Christ, Church Militant reported.
Walsh, who promotes the writings of homosexualist Jesuit Fr. James Martin, reflected:
Are they not aware … Christ is a woman … Christ is Black. In Christ, I am also Black. Once you belong to Christ, you belong to all others who belong to Christ as well. Some say that those of us who are LGBTQ members of Christ’s body do not belong to the body of Christ, totally denying our baptism.
Are they not aware that we who are LGBTQ are also living now in Christ — that we are Christ. Christ is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer? In Christ, I am lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer. Once you belong to Christ, you belong to all others who belong to Christ as well.
In April, the parish celebrated International Lesbian Visibility Day by announcing this on the Facebook page of Out at St. Paul: “As an inclusive, joyful and beloved community, full of people who empower and support one another, we strive to live out this mission. To our lesbian siblings, please join us!”
Church of St. Paul the Apostle, Manhattan, N.Y.
In March, the parish marked the International Transgender Day of Visibility, declaring, “To the transgender community, we see you, we stand with you and we demand that you be treated with dignity and respect.”
A spokesman for the archdiocese of New York declined to comment, telling the New York Post that he was not aware of the exhibition.
New York’s Cdl. Timothy Dolan, a pro-LGBT advocate, welcomed the move to permit homosexuals and lesbians to march under their own banner in the 2015 St. Patrick’s Day parade. Dolan served as grand marshal in the march.
While Pope Francis has met regularly with individuals who identify as transgender, the pontiff condemned gender ideology as “ideological colonization” on several occasions, most recently during his trip to Hungary in April.
In 2019, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education condemned transgenderism in a document titled “Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education.”
The document dismissed transgenderism as a “fictitious construct” which “has the effect of obscuring the fact that a person’s sex is a structural determinant of male or female identity.”