on losing more than Bishop Gumbleton

First they came for the homosexuals, and they threw them out of the seminaries. No gays need apply. Got a complaint? Go get in line over there with all those women who want to become priests. And I wondered how I could remain Catholic in the face of such bigotry.

Then they came for the heterosexuals, but just the ones using birth control, which would be most of them under the age of 50, including me. And they said, stay out of the communion line. Just sit quietly in the pew with your gay friends, because Jesus’ body and blood is only for people having unprotected straight sex or no sex at all. It says so in the Bible, or at least in some document we recently made up.

And by the way, they said, if you disagree with us on any of the big doctrinal stuff, you know, like ordaining women, or homosexuals in the priesthood, or how to reduce the abortion rate, then once again, the communion table is closed to you. We invite you to shut up and go sit down with the gays and the selfish birth control users and re-think your position. Don't make us come back there and excommunicate you.

And as bad as I felt, as mad as I felt, I also felt relieved because at MY dear little open-hearted Catholic parish, I knew that my homosexual brothers and sisters felt welcome. I knew that no one there would be checking my purse for Trojans or worrying that I had been thinking for myself again. What I knew I would find at the front of the communion line was my pastor, Bishop Gumbleton, smiling at me as if he were seeing Jesus himself, and calling me by name: “Suzanne, the body of Christ.“ Amen. I knew that I would hear from my pastor the same message that he preached every week: that we are called by Jesus to transform our lives in order to bring about God’s kingdom on earth,--a kingdom where all of God's children live through peace and in peace, where all are treated justly and with dignity, and where no one wants for the basic necessities of life. That kind of vision can keep a person in the Catholic Church.

And then they came for my pastor. The official Church told him to get out of our parish. They kicked him out of the little room he lived in at the church too. Problem? They said? What problem? Just normal procedure. You’re just too old, nearly as old as the pope. Thanks for your fifty years of service. Good luck finding an apartment, and, uh, we’ll certainly call you if we ever need a priest who talks about serving the poor and stopping war and healing the victims of sexual abuse. It’s a good shtick, really, but it’s so, um, Vatican II, so forty years ago, so Oscar Romero, so expensive.

And now there is nowhere left to go, nowhere to hide from the reality of what the Catholic Church is becoming. Bishop Gumbleton says that we (including we homosexuals, we married people using birth control, we victims of sexual abuse, we women who want full participation), WE are the living body of Christ. He says that we need to remember this now more than ever. He doesn’t say to leave the Church. He doesn’t say, get a clue, can’t you see how unwelcome you are, how they keep trying to push you out? He says that the hierarchy is not the Church. He says that all of us are the Church. At least that’s what he said the last time he was allowed to stand in front of us and preach the good news of Jesus.

We lost so much when we lost Bishop Gumbleton at St. Leo’s Parish in Detroit. We lost any remaining trust we had in the compassion of the church hierarchy. We may lose the beloved community that has formed over the years around Bishop’s message of peace and justice. We lost a wise and caring guide on the path of Jesus. I pray that we do not lose the soup kitchen we run in our poor neighborhood. Like Bishop Gumbleton, we have lost our home. For some of us, St. Leo’s was the only place left to go, the only place where we could worship and grow as progressive Catholics, where we felt accepted the way that God made us, where we could pray for an end to all war and be challenged to stand with the poor as Jesus did. There may be other places like St. Leo’s, and there may be other pastors like Bishop Gumbleton, but the message from the official Church is clear: They do not want our kind.

They didn't even give us a replacement pastor. They gave us a part-time administrator priest with another full-time job. The whole thing was probably an ugly surprise to him too. For the next two months, we will have a parade of visiting priests to say Mass. I thought that the church leaders would be content to crush Bishop Gumbleton, but it appears that the archdiocese wants to quietly destroy our parish as well. Those of us in the pews may indeed be the real Church, but at St. Leo’s, we are a hurting, broken church with an uncertain future. For some of us, it got a lot harder to be Catholic last week, to be the Church we feel called to be, and it was already pretty hard.