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Sharing the good news from New Ways Ministry. Read the full article here.
Bishop John Stowe, OFM, Conv., was honored with New Ways Ministry’s Bridge Building Award for his consistent and strong support of LGBTQ+ Catholics. Bishop Stowe (center) accepts the Bridge Building Award from Michael Sennett (left) and Fr. Peter Daly. (Bernadette Donlon/New Ways Ministry Photo) The ceremony honoring Bishop Stowe, who leads the Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky, was held last Friday at Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C., at which he offered remarks about the state of LGBTQ+ rights in both the Catholic Church and U.S. society. Stowe told attendees that “in this era of polarization, the need for bridges is all the more critical,” and even where relationships have been built, “Just like all the bridges in our national infrastructure, there is a constant need for maintenance and reinforcement for the good and the safety of all.” New Ways Ministry’s Co-Founder, Sister Jeannine Gramick, SL, introduced Bishop Stowe to the attendees, detailing some of his most exemplary pro-LGBTQ+ statements and actions. Her accolades for the bishop included praise for Bishop Stowe from Pope Francis. After Sister Jeannine wrote to the pope to tell him about the award for Stowe, the pontiff wrote back to her to say that the bishop’s “welcoming style does a lot of good.” Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry’s Executive Director, told the ceremony’s guests that the Bridge Building Award was established to raise up the work of exemplary leaders, people who took risks, and who imagined a new way of being church that was based in solid Catholic sensibilities that had too often been ignored. “It didn’t take us long to select Bishop John Stowe as Bridge Building Award recipient because he embodies all those virtues,” DeBernardo said. “While the number of supportive bishops in our church continues to increase—not to mention the Bishop of Rome—Bishop Stowe has truly stood out in the past decade for making bold and courageous statements in the service of justice and equality.” Two members of New Ways Ministry’s Advisory Board, Fr. Peter Daly and Michael Sennett, presented Bishop Stowe with the award. In the award proclamation, Sennett praised Stowe, stating: “As a bishop, you have used your role as teacher to help Catholics understand how their faith calls them to include LGBTQ+ people in the faith community. As a bishop, you have used your role as a defender of the faith to remind the church that respecting human dignity, honoring each person, and going to the margins are essential facets of Catholic tradition and identity. You model a way for Catholics to encounter and dialogue with new and emerging realities.” Following the presentation of the award, Stowe gave a talk about the state of LGBTQ+ issuess in the church and U.S. society. He began by acknowledging the many good works for LGBTQ+ Catholics done by previous recipients of the Bridge Building Award, listed at the end of the post. He recounted, too, how he first began engaging LGBTQ+ ministry more deeply, including an invitation from New Ways Ministry to speak at its 2017 national symposium. The bishop continued: “I had encounters with groups of Catholics who wanted a better understanding of key issues in their lives, who longed for spiritual nourishment and knew where to find it, but they were often young people wondering how their church could be engaged in such kind of discrimination against them, or their siblings and friends, faithful LGBTQ Catholics who could not and did not wish to change either their Catholicism or authentic identity. These folk were inviting me to speak to, listen to, reflect with and visit them and here we are; in my own diocese including in our Catholic high school and well beyond. The bridge had been constructed and I decided to use it, even when some people were trying to blow it up.” Stowe proceeded first by addressing the present moment in society, particularly after the presidential election. The bishop criticized Donald Trump, and also the U.S. population, for “normalizing of what is not and should not be normal” during Trump’s first term. Against this trend, Stowe sought a renewed commitment to Gospel living so as to not “forget who we are in the midst of the chaos and insanity.” He continued: “I am acutely aware of the renewed fear among immigrant and refugee communities, among people of color, among those on the front-lines working for justice, among LGBTQ persons and especially the transgender people who depend on the healthcare system for their wellbeing. It is up to people of faith to create inclusive communities, to resist calls for discrimination, and to challenge our own biases and prejudices so that we might create the alternative vision to ‘might makes right’, ‘pay to play’ and the hatred that seems to have been unleashed or brought out of hiding.” Then, Stowe turned to the church and this “new moment” Catholics are in, emphasizing in particular the path of synodality—and a pope who, in “the spirit of his namesake,” St. Francis of Assisi, is rebuilding the church “beginning with the margins and the peripheries.” On synodality, the bishop addressed disappointments many Catholic LGBTQ+ advocates have felt during the last two years of the synod process, and while validating them, offered points of hope: “At this moment, it has become obvious that synodality has not come as a full-throated revolution, but rather like the gentle breath of the Spirit calling us to community, participation, and mission. Believe me when I say that I share your frustration that things do not move faster in our church, that the LGBTQ language, used by Rome and still not yet employed by US bishops, did not find its way into documents despite being there in earlier drafts, that there have been no discernible developments in our outdated theological language to describe homosexual orientation or relationships, or in the role of women, or the understanding of the reality of gender dysphoria—and each of us has a longer list of what remains unaddressed. But I would ask you to consider that the vision of a synodal church and its seeds have been planted, watered, and are sprouting even if they have not yet produced a harvest.” The first “sprout” Stowe identified is a church that listens: “We have volumes of answers for questions no one is asking, and now we dress it up in antique clothing, gestures, and language so that it appears to be more authoritative when it lacks the authority of authenticity and connection to human experience. We might have had it in our tradition to take human experience seriously as a locus for theology all along, but I don’t think it has ever been so forthrightly presented as a necessity. Should it really surprise us that in our age of polarization, alternative facts, and opinions without data, that we have needed to learn how to listen all over again? . . . “Has it not long been the desire of the LGBTQ community to be listened to and taken seriously? Is not one of the biggest harms perpetrated on transgender persons the reluctance to take their lived experience seriously? The synod is teaching us the importance of listening to each other. Unsurprisingly in a world of sound bites and superficial knowledge, this has not been easy to put into practice.” The second sprout is the inclusivity at the synod assemblies. Of this, he said: “Although it seems awfully little and awfully late, laypeople, including women, were voting delegates at the last two synod assemblies. In those assemblies, the pope and bishops of every rank sat at round tables with all the other participants, addressed each other by first names, and discussed the meaty topics presented from the synod discussions around the world. For the pragmatists that wanted proposals and plans of action to emerge immediately, there was bound to be disappointment. But again, the synod participants were learning how to listen to each other to create new opportunities for community, participation and mission. The pope has stated his own principle of inclusivity over and over again; the church is for all, todos, todos, todos. For everyone who has even been made to feel that you don’t belong or to question whether or not you belong, we have the answer from the top—and it’s an unconditional yes.” Ecclesial discernment as a force in the church is Stowe’s third sprout from the synod process, framed as “the primary alternative to clericalism.” Of this, he explained: “When discernment, seeking the will of God as expressed in the experiences and lives of God’s people, becomes the normative way of making decisions in the church, I don’t see how there could be room for language like ‘disordered’ when referring to people or orientations, nor the condescending attitudes of those who know what is best for everyone else. Discernment is slow, there are no shortcuts to the steps, but the outcome is much more likely to be ‘what seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us,’ as the apostles in Acts 15 were able to say after the Council of Jerusalem.” For the fourth and final sprout, Stowe said the synodal path was moving the church to be less self-referential, which is good news for LGBTQ+ people. He concluded: “Vatican II taught us that we became part of the church’s mission at baptism; synodality is trying to awaken us to that reality. We are supposed to be about proclaiming good news to all after the manner and example of Jesus, whose words were accompanied by healing and the expulsion of evil spirits. How much good could that emphasis do us today? And isn’t the LGBTQ community just asking the whole church that they not be identified with evil, but be allowed through their own loving encounters with Jesus and their own expression of human love, to be a part of the healing force unleashed on a suffering world. “Every time I have ventured out on this bridge or invested some effort in its maintenance and upkeep, I have been richly rewarded. I have encountered faith much more profound than my own among LGBTQ persons; I have encountered perseverance and zeal for the faith in admirable quantities; above all, I have encountered members of the beloved community that Christ laid down his life for and that the Risen Christ has empowered with a share in his mission.” The Bridge Building Award honors those individuals who by their scholarship, leadership, or witness have promoted discussion, understanding, and reconciliation between the LGBTQ+ community and the Catholic Church. Past recipients have been Father Charles Curran (1992); Bishop Thomas Gumbleton (1995); Sister Margaret Farley, RSM (2002); Mary Ellen and Casey Lopata (2005); John J. McNeill (2009); an Father James Martin, SJ (2016). --Robert Shine (he/him), New Ways Ministry, November 18, 2024 Comments are closed.
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