View Comments      Email Article       Printable Version

Published: July 23, 2009

Notes on an Exhibition – Part One

The DignityUSA Convention, San Francisco July 2-5, 2009

On the Fourth of July weekend the homosexual organization DignityUSA was welcomed by Mayor Newsom of San Francisco to Dignity’s 19th biennial convention at the Parc55 Hotel in San Francisco. At the busiest time of the convention, 370 members attended the event. The theme of the gathering, “Together We Will Reach the Promised Land,” was echoed by one of the two keynote speakers, journalist Richard Rodriguez, who, however, had reservations about the use of the name Dignity and questioned the civil rights thrust of many homosexuals.

Dignity enjoys acceptance at the San Francisco Catholic churches of Most Holy Redeemer (in the Castro district), St. Agnes (a Jesuit church in Haight-Ashbury) and St. John of God (in the Inner Sunset), although Dignity locates its services in the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian church, near St. John of God.

One of the principal clerical speakers at the convention, the San Francisco resident, English Jesuit Donal Godfrey said he was encouraged that San Francisco’s Archbishop Niederauer continues to allow homosexuals to use Catholic Charities as a conduit to adopt children, and regularly dines with an openly lesbian officer of Catholic Charities and her “partner.” Godfrey claimed that pastor Fr. Xavier Lavagetto at the city’s St. Dominic’s church is “open” to homosexuality and that, at one of his retreats at Most Holy Redeemer, Lavagetto was alleged to have said that he believes that Christ was bisexual. Lavagetto has stated from the altar in St. Dominic’s, that Our Lord, if He were on earth today, would welcome the opportunity to march in San Francisco’s “Gay Pride” parades.

The convention really got underway with an address “Faithful and Fabulous: Dignity on the Road at Forty” by Mary Hunt, in which she explored how DignityUSA has been faithful to its Catholic roots, to the needs of its Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, Queer community, and to other “justice movements,” like feminism and anti-racism.

Hunt’s address was followed by workshops, each attended by from fewer than 12 to up to 70 people. The publicized Children’s Workshop was canceled. Among those held were two by Victoria Rue, of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, “ordained” a lesbian “deacon” on the Danube in 2004 and a “woman priest” in 2005 on the St. Lawrence Seaway by “women bishops.” Two of these (out of seven who wanted to become “bishops”), she said, had been “ordained bishops by some brave, wonderful U.S. bishops in good communion with the Vatican,” whose condition for doing this had been that their identities would not be revealed until after their deaths. In her “Embodied Sexuality and Spirituality” and “Valid, but Illicit: Being a Roman Catholic Lesbian Priest” Rue mentioned that she was asked by Episcopalian Bishop Otis to set up a “Roman Catholic chapel “ at Trinity Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Rue “presides” over a house church in Santa Cruz. In her talk she said she used theater to explore the linkage between sexuality and spirituality. Rue also believes that there are Biblical texts that have been used to “bash” LGBT people like herself and traced her history of involvement with Womenpriests from 1988, when she participated in street theater “Masses” in New York. She now looks forward to the day that the congregation, rather than a bishop, will “ordain” women as priests in the Catholic Church. In May, 2009 RCWP received latae sententiae excommunication, an action that did not stop it continuing to carry out “ordinations.”

Another session, by the former Jesuit John McNeill, expelled from the order by Cardinal Ratzinger for refusing to give up his ministry to “gay” men and lesbians, explored the meaning of “gay marriage” as a providential restoration of the Christian understanding of human sexuality. In his workshop “Sex as God Intended” McNeill looked at Christian revelation, as he believed it came from Jesus, as “the most sex-positive and body-positive religions in the history of the world.” Using the Song of Songs, McNeill, like a number of others at the convention, explored the idea that God’s intention for human sexuality was that it should be a form of play, with absolutely nothing to do with procreation, or even love, which, in the accepted sense of the word, most would use to describe what two heterosexual people experience with one another in a marriage.

Kevin Buckley, who gave the least well-attended workshops, i.e. fewer than a dozen people, in his “Christian Perspectives on Work and Working and Catholic Social Justice Tradition” identified several sources of reflection on work and working from a Christian perspective, using Scripture as a teaching tool. Buckley traced the major concerns of the Catholic social justice tradition, influenced he thought by Scripture, theological and philosophical reflection, historical consciousness, and the social and physical sciences.

Francis DeBernardo has worked extensively with Sister Jeannine Gramick and Reverend Robert Nugent (both prhibited by John Paul 11 from pastoral work with homosexuals and lesbians) as the executive director of their New Ways Ministry. In his “And Yet: Past, Present, and Future of GLBT Catholic Pastoral Ministry” DeBernardo spoke on the “glorious and still-evolving history of Dignity” since its founding in 1969 and said he looked forward to: “how the Church can have a more just and liberating future for all.”

Ramon Rodriguez, a marketer of consumer products to Hispanics, presented strategies and tactics to attract new Hispanic members to DignityUSA chapters.

Rosemary Ananis (a “bishop” in the American Catholic Church of New England) and Dignity and Defenders’ “partners” Bob Butts and Dick Young (an ordained priest and Dignity chaplain) led the workshop Small Faith Communities: Can they Really Revitalize the People of God? in which they illustrated characteristics they have learned that can lead to successful growth of small faith communities.

In “Bishops, Bombs, and Big Tents: Power and the Gospel,” Jeannine Gramick, a founder of the Washington, DC, Baltimore and Philadelphia chapters of Dignity, whose books the Vatican judged erroneous, discussed ways to move the Church nonviolently to the “Big Tent” of Apostolic Christianity.”

Casey and Mary Ellen Lopata, co-founders of Fortunate Families (a support group for Catholic parents of LGBT children) focused on how parents, .working with allies in the Church, can build a more affirming and just Church. and Spirituals for the LGBT Journey were discussed by Ann Marie Szpakowska.

At the forum with past DignityUSA presidents, led by Dignity’s executive director Marianne Duddy-Burke, the major concerns raised were the lack of enthusiasm that local chapters had for the national organization and Dignity’s almost constant restructuring and reorganization.

The second keynote speaker, Richard Rodriguez (who described himself as a “morose, rather than a gay writer who, like the whore, wants always to be the outsider”) spoke, as a self-described son of Abraham, on the topic of reaching the “Promised Land” of “The Freedom to Love.” Such freedom, he believed, is denied homosexuals, “whole armies of whom (including, priests, nuns, teachers, policemen, etc.) have kept quiet and never declaimed their ‘love’ for other men.” He was particularly incensed that he and his current “partner” were denied the use of the same bed when they visited Jerusalem. Rodriguez questioned the use of the name Dignity because he thought that humiliation (“we have to say we are one thing, and be another”) was a more appropriate word in the context of what he has encountered since he discovered at 11 at his Catholic school in Sacramento that he was a homosexual. This unbeknown to his devout Mexican mother, who thought the manifestation of his attraction to another boy was “just boys being boys.” Rodriguez objected, as do a large number of his friends and associates who are African-Americans, whose company he has frequented since he was 16, to the many homosexuals who liken their “struggle for civil rights” to that undertaken by his Black friends, and attempt to analogize (homo)sexual discrimination to racial discrimination.

Rodriguez said he preferred to compare what homosexuals were doing now to gain acceptance by the wider public for their actions to the 19th century women’s suffragette movement, with one of his modern feminist heroines being the mother of Obama, whom her son described as “reckless.” The Church’s admonition that “Thou Shall Not Love Same Gender Persons” hit a raw nerve for this self-identified parishioner at St. Dominic’s in San Francisco (not, as has been reported, Most Holy Redeemer), where his confessor said to him; “I don’t want you to confess you are ‘gay.’ I envy you that you can say to another man: ’I love you.’” Since his dismissal by PBS as an essayist on its flagship news program “News Hour,” Rodriguez has written monthly for the British Catholic journal The Tablet and is editor of San Francisco’s New America Media.

Part two of this report to appear in tomorrow’s California Catholic Daily.

© California Catholic Daily 2009. All Rights Reserved.