A pastoral letter to the archbishop

BY ED FELIEN

Dear Archbishop Nienstedt:

I was saddened to read your Pastoral Letter to parishes in your Archdiocese denying the blessing of love and joy to God’s creatures who do not conform to your strict definition of marriage. Most people now agree that gay people do not choose to be gay. It is not a vocational choice. The affectional preference of gay people is something they were born with. It is a gift from God. What right does anyone have to judge God’s gift as something sinful and forbidden? Why cannot gay couples have “faith-filled, holy marriages and holy families”? Why is “the union of one man and one woman in a lifelong, exclusive relationship of loving trust, compassion, and generosity, open to the conception of children” the only possible plan of a loving and generous God?

And, as long as I’ve got your attention, Archbishop, there’s one more thing I’d like to bring up. My great-grandfather James Devitt built the St. Paul Cathedral, the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, the College of St. Thomas and the St. Paul Seminary. He didn’t build them alone. He and the other Irish workers on the Great Northern Railway and the Chinese working from the other direction built the empire of James J. Hill, an empire worth $2.5 billion (in 2007 dollars) when he died in 1916. Hill was a Methodist, but he recognized a good business proposition, and in exchange for a passive work force he was happy to be a generous benefactor to Archbishop John Ireland’s building programs. Those buildings were possible because Hill was able to squeeze enormous profits from his railroads, and he did that because he was able to exploit his workers, and he was able to do that because Archbishop John Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church were complicit in that exploitation by convincing Irish Catholic workers to accept the sufferings of this world in exchange for the promise of paradise.
Is that your understanding of the lesson of Jesus Christ?

Did Jesus tell us to accept our sufferings and not to challenge authority?
Mathew, Mark, Luke and John agree that Jesus taught for three years in the countryside and on the eve of Passover marched with his disciples into Jerusalem. The people greeted him as their redeemer. They spread palms before him on his triumphal entry. He and his disciples marched up to the Temple and drove out the money-changers. That was the culmination of his work. That was the point of his teaching. And it was for that crime against Rome that he was crucified.

Jesus stood with the 99%. Archbishop John Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church have all too often stood with the 1% against the interests of their own parishioners.

In asking your parishioners to vote for the so-called “Defense of Marriage” amendment you are using the power of the Catholic Church to influence public policy. You understand the laws of this country regarding separation of church and state, and you appreciate how fine the line can be drawn. You are not “directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” You “engage in a limited amount of lobbying (including ballot measures) and advocate for or against issues that are in the political arena.” It’s a neat distinction. The letter of the law allows you to work politically for a ballot initiative to limit the tax advantages and civil privileges associated with marriage to heterosexual couples. But, in the spirit of the law separating church and state, shouldn’t you respect the rights of others to think differently from the archbishop in St. Paul? No one is saying you can’t conduct your church in a manner you see fit. I don’t think any gay couple is asking to be married in the St. Paul Cathedral, but, in the spirit of fairness, aren’t same sex couples entitled to the same tax advantages and shouldn’t they have the same rights to care for each other as heterosexual couples?

Your actions engender fear and hatred, and you diminish the spirit of Christian charity:

Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. There now abideth faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.