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Published: November 30, 2007

“You don’t harass them”

Pastor who had pro-life parishioner arrested takes different approach when it comes to homosexuals

Q: What do pro-life activist Ross Foti and the homosexual-friendly Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco have in common?

A: Fr. Anthony E. McGuire.

McGuire is the pastor at St. Matthew’s parish in San Mateo who told Foti to cover signs of aborted babies he displayed on his truck and who recently had Foti arrested when he attended Mass at St. Matthew’s. (McGuire had banned him from the parish.) But McGuire was also the pastor who, according to a recent book, made Most Holy Redeemer parish in the Castro gay friendly in the early ‘80s.

In his short biography as director of the United States Bishops Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees, McGuire wrote that as a priest of the San Francisco archdiocese, “I pastored a parish with a large gay community and helped the community respond to an AIDS crisis in a resourceful, creative and spiritual way.” This parish was Most Holy Redeemer, which, led by the Rev. Anthony McGuire, said the Sept. 17, 1987 New York Times, “raised funds for and rented space at low cost to the Coming Home Hospice, which houses 15 AIDS patients,” among other things.

According to the recently published Gays and Grays: The Story of the Inclusion of the Gay Community at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Parish by Jesuit Fr. Donal Godfrey, San Francisco’s former archbishop, John Quinn, sent McGuire to Most Holy Redeemer in 1982 to minister to the area’s homosexuals. Quinn “chose a man who turned out to be especially suited to the new sociological profile of the parish. Under Father Anthony McGuire -- ‘Fr. Tony’ -- the parish was reborn.” (Godfrey’s quotes are from excerpts published in an Aug. 28 posting on the web site “A Shepherd’s Voice.”)

Godfrey notes how the Rev. Jim Mitsulki of the homosexual Metropolitan Community Church said that, during McGuire’s time at the parish, there was “a certain revolving-door factor operating between their respective congregations. Some attended services at both churches… Sometimes parishioners from Most Holy Redeemer went to MCC for same-sex weddings they could not hold at MHR.”

Regarding these “married” homosexual couples, Godfrey quotes McGuire: “Well the question in my mind was, the people who make a conscientious decision to live together as a gay couple, and then they come to communion, just like people who make a similar decision on birth control, you don’t harass them. You respect their decision. The next step was, ‘Can a clearly gay couple take on open ministries in the church?’ Like if a gay couple apply for ordination, that would clearly be an obex [obex is Latin term meaning “hindrance”]. What about Eucharistic Ministers? I thought maybe I should consult [Archbishop Quinn], but then we already had them!”

Godfrey notes McGuire’s “marvelous sense of humor” – as when in the homily at his final Mass of Thanksgiving in the parish, McGuire “deadpanned that when he first arrived in the parish, he just thought ‘Hail Holy Queen’ was a good entrance hymn!”

Then there was the AA Halloween party in the church hall, where everyone (unannounced to McGuire) was in “either in drag or wearing practically nothing!” Godfrey writes that the next day, a woman who, “in [McGuire’s] words, was ‘the second most uptight parishioner,’ called and was furious. She berated him over the impropriety of such goings-on on church property. ‘It was like Sodom and Gomorrah!’ she thundered. To which McGuire answered meekly, with his mischievous humor, ‘Well, maybe Sodom’.”

McGuire told California Catholic Daily that he does not think “anything our church teaches says we should be anti-homosexuals. We take each person on their journey to God and help them along the way.” When asked whether he agreed that homosexual acts are sinful, McGuire replied, “I accept the teaching of the Church, but I also accept individual people who are trying to come closer to the Lord, to help them along the way.”

Asked whether, in accepting the teaching of the Church, he affirmed that homosexual acts are sinful, McGuire said, “I accept the fact that, yeah, homosexual acts are essentially disordered, is the way that the Church explains it.”

© California Catholic Daily 2007. All Rights Reserved.