FrancisChurch Normalizes the LGBT Ethos
Call it the Church of Capitulation.
The other day I received a call from someone asking me if I knew that the press spokesman for the Paulist Fathers is in a gay marriage. I checked it out and sure enough the caller was right. Paul Snatchko has served as director of marketing and communications for the Paulist Fathers for over four years. In 2013, Snatchko entered into a gay marriage. He spoke to the press about it, telling the Observer-Reporter that the “way same-sex marriage is happening is very healthy. It’s happening state-by-state. People are having conversations in their communities and with their families.” (Snatchko did not return my call.)
That the Paulist Fathers hired as their spokesman someone in a gay marriage would have once been a major scandal. But in the Church of Pope Francis, it barely elicits a shrug. In ways big and small, FrancisChurch has been normalizing the LGBT ethos. Not a week passes without some churchman mouthing PC pieties to it.
In early February, Jesuit Father James Martin, the leading proponent of LGBT causes in the Church, was asked by the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities to speak to Catholic educators about incorporating LGBT causes into their schools. Martin, according to the Washington Post, urged the Catholic presidents to promote “inclusion, such as allowing students to pick their pronouns and holding up openly gay staff as role models.”
Almost all of the bishops around Pope Francis subscribe to this agenda. Many of them have invited Martin into their dioceses to spread his propaganda.
This ecclesiastical climate has empowered heretics within the Church to demand the reshaping of Catholic institutions. Take the recent controversy in Seattle, where its archbishop, Paul Etienne, put a high school principal on leave of absence after he fired two teachers for entering into gay marriages. Etienne wrote a mollifying letter about the controversy. “It is abundantly clear to me that our Catholic schools are serving a much broader community than in the past,” he wrote timidly. He has told pro-LGBT parents that he will study how to apply “universal church teaching locally.”
In FrancisChurch, churchmen rise in proportion to their openness to all things LGBT. The German Catholic Church recently made the president of its conference an open supporter of gay relationships, Bishop George Batzing, reports LifeSiteNews:
Last year, Bätzing had asked Catholics to discuss the question of blessing homosexual unions. A diocesan official wrote in a letter, “Bishop Georg Bätzing asks that this important question [of a blessing for couples who cannot marry in the Catholic Church] be discussed in the diocese of Limburg in an open and uncontroversial manner. He has established a process group in order to accompany and structure this discourse.”
In America, LGBT-friendly bishops have been appointed left and right. Pope Francis recently elevated Michael Saporito to auxiliary bishop of Newark. Saporito is responsible for starting up an LGBT group called Open Arms Ministry. He will serve under Newark Cardinal Joseph Tobin, who is a notorious supporter of LGBT subversion within the Church. Tobin has openly called for a change in Church teaching, what he calls a “rethinking of the mystery of human sexuality.”
Pope Francis set the tone for this LGBT-friendly shift in the Church with the phrase, “Who am I to judge?” — a comment he made in the context of elevating an openly scandalous homosexual, Monsignor Battista Ricca, to a top position within the Vatican bank.
Pope Francis has surrounded himself with homosexual prelates, some of whom, such as his protégé Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta, are in legal trouble. It was Pope Francis who rehabilitated the most notorious homosexual predator in Church history, Theodore McCarrick. One would have thought such scandals might have sobered Pope Francis up. But they haven’t. He remains loyal to the Gay Mafia that elected him.
“I want to have an audience with you,” Pope Francis said to Fr. James Martin last year. Martin bragged after his one-on-one meeting with the pope that it had given him new currency in the Church. Having received that papal pat on the head makes it very difficult for orthodox bishops to block his ministry, Martin said last year to a group called “Out at St. Paul.” The group meets at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on the Upper West Side of New York City. It is run by the Paulist Fathers.
Were St. Paul alive today, he would condemn all of this as a celebration of sin. But the Paulist Fathers have left St. Paul in the dust, employing a gay-married press spokesman who tells Catholics that LGBT ministry is simply a matter of “inclusion.”