A religious freedom attorney warns that if a recent federal judge’s decision against the Diocese of Charlotte holds, religious institutions could face “massive financial penalties” for simply forming communities around their shared beliefs and practices.
Pope Francis told a group of parents of LGBT children Sept.16 that God loves them as they are, and that the Church loves them because they are “children of God.” The pontiff’s words came during a short, private encounter with some 40 Italian mothers and fathers of LGBT children that took place following his Sept.16 general audience.
The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said he is “deeply concerned” that by ruling federal law protects LGBT workers from discrimination, the U.S. Supreme Court “has effectively redefined the legal meaning of ‘sex’ in our nation’s civil rights law.”
Father James Martin, S.J., editor-at-large at the Jesuit-run, Manhattan-based America Magazine, met with Pope Francis on Sept. 30 in a private audience at the Vatican.
On Monday, Pope Francis met with Jesuit Father James Martin, an American priest who has dedicated most of the past three years to ministering to LGBT Catholics, whom he describes as the “most marginalized group” in the Catholic Church.
One day after Pope Francis kicked off this month’s Vatican summit on young people by warning against a temptation to focus on “abstract ideologies” detached from the realities of young people, concrete topics ranging from sex abuse, LGBT issues, migration and technology took center stage.
Since the summit of families in Dublin, originally designed to promote Pope Francis’s document on the family “Amoris Laetitia”, has been overtaken by the shadow of serious charges of sexual abuse and cover-up, it would appear that it’s not the time to shine for the LGBT constituency.
Dear Editor: Your article on the disgraceful decision to remove almost 200 religious icons and statues from a Catholic school in California didn’t cover the bankrupt explanations the school’s administration gave for justifying its religious spinelessness and condescending dismissal of parental concern with the standby cliché that “they are afraid of change.”
