Bishop Turns Back on Gay Catholics - No Surprise There…

In today’s Phoenix paper there is an article about a local Catholic priest who took a leave of absence in January. The article discusses a letter that Reverend Chris Carpenter wrote to local newspapers stating that:

(Phoenix) Bishop Thomas Olmsted has turned his back on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Catholics.

The article continues:

"I refuse to serve as a priest in a church environment that is increasingly sending a false and destructive message that my LGBT brothers and sisters and I are little more than immature, defective sex addicts," said the Rev. Chris Carpenter, former pastor of Christ the King parish in Mesa.

Carpenter was one of nine priests who signed an ecumenical statement of support for gay people in January 2003. Seventeen months later, Olmsted required the signers to revoke their support.

Ok, no disrespect intended, but I just have to ask Father Carpenter what on earth took him so long to see the light? The Catholic Church is kind of like the Republican Party, there is NO room for people like him. The church’s message to gays: You are not welcome, you have never been welcome, and you are only convenient to our Catholic hierarchy as a scapegoat for the horrific pedophile debacle we now find ourselves in. You are objectively disordered and intrinsically evil. And that comes directly from our most holy one in Rome so it is as good as coming straight out of the mouth of God. We just want you to get out. In fact, you can just go to Hell (after all you are going there eventually anyway).

Now the bigger question I have is why would anyone who is gay, priest or not, remain in the Catholic Church? In fact I wonder how anyone (gay or straight) can reconcile within themselves the great hypocrisy that hangs over the Catholic Church like a cloud of putrid toxic smoke. I know I can no longer walk through the doors of an institution that for decades allowed and facilitated the sexual abuse of its most vulnerable, but still thinks it holds enough moral high ground to tell us that gays are evil.

And Father Carpenter, it isn’t going to do a whole lot of good to go after Bishop Olmsted. He is just an unthinking, unfeeling robot following orders. You gotta go to the top like I did. But unfortunately, it probably won’t do you any more good than it did me. You see, we are just fallible little peons who happen to believe that Jesus loved everyone and excluded no one. There is no place in an institution for people, gay or straight, who believe just the opposite.