One has to believe that pro-LGBT forces within the Catholic Church have little idea how vicious they sound when attacking Catholic traditionalists.
This viciousness reared its unholy head this past week in a flap involving singer-song writer Dan Schutte. Schutte, a former Jesuit priest, was scheduled to perform at Visitation Church in Kansas City, the wealthiest parish in the diocese.
Traditionalists objected for a variety of reasons. Most prominently Schutte appears to have been living in a gay relationship since leaving the priesthood.
According to friends of the LGBT movement, Schutte’s song “Here I am, Lord” is the “unofficial motto” for the LGBT ministry.
When Bishop James V. Johnston Jr. made the decision to cancel the concert, the liberal voices within the church attributed the most hateful of motives to those who presumably pressured him to do so.
The Kansas City Star’s Mary Sanchez, for instance, denounced traditional activists who led the campaign against Schutte as “homophobic Catholic trolls.”
Like so many in the media, Sanchez works under the assumption that anyone who has not “moved beyond” Christian tradition is borderline evil. She quotes approvingly a pro-homosexual Jesuit who calls the bishop’s decision to cancel the concert “another triumph of hatred and homophobia in the Catholic Church.”
Sanchez quotes Pope Francis as saying, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” This is all well and good, but what Francis cannot do and will not do is say that the homosexual act is something other than sinful. To do so would be to refute two millennia of Christian doctrine and hundreds of years of Jewish tradition before that.
Politicians and pundits may “evolve” under pressure from the left, but churches that “evolve” often evolve into irrelevancy or non-existence or even scandal.
The sex scandals within the Church developed precisely because the church was tolerant of homosexuals in the ranks of the priesthood. The media, however, still refuse to concede the obvious, namely that putting grown men with homosexual tendencies in close contact with vulnerable adolescent boys was an open invitation to scandal.
All that said, the bishop’s decision had little to do with Schutte’s sexuality. Schutte failed to provide the diocese with a letter of suitability from his home diocese as is required of anyone who presents at a Catholic Church.
More troubling, Visitation was charging $20 admission to come hear Schutte in the church. Given His history with money changers in the temple, Jesus himself would likely have objected to this as did the bishop. Charging admission is apparently not permitted at a church event.
Most troubling of all for those who value tradition or have an aesthetic sense, Schutte is credited with introducing “folk, pop and rock music to the liturgy in the United States.”
For some, that is reason enough to ban him.
