19 November 2006: A new document calls on churches to welcome gays and lesbians into the Catholic community, but gay advocates say the Church still shows no support for homosexuals.

(Photo: A tainted window at the Oratoire St Joseph in Montreal. March 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

By ISABELLE ROUGHOL
Columbia Missourian

As a teenager, Don Dressel stood in the back of the church during Mass. No one told him to, but he felt it was his place.

Dressel had known he was gay since he was 12, but he was confused. He only knew that in his St. Louis church, homosexuality was considered sinful. Others in the parish referred to gays and lesbians the same way they talked about sexual perverts and rapists, he said. The realization that others thought he was deviant was painful. Dressel decided then and there that he would never act on his feelings.

“It was the most horrible time of my life because I was going through a great struggle trying to fight and change my sexual orientation,” Dressel said.

Dressel ostracized himself from his parish, as he felt unworthy to participate. He never opened up to a priest; he was too ashamed and convinced that the church would have no words of comfort for him.

Eventually, denial turned into anger, and Dressel left the Roman Catholic Church in his late teens. “I made the decision that it wasn’t a good place for me,” he said. “It wasn’t a safe place for me.”

Dressel is one of many gays and lesbians raised Catholic who feel rejected and excluded by the church because of their sexual orientation. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has recognized the issue and, on Tuesday, approved with an overwhelming majority a 23-page document that offers clergy guidelines for “ministry to persons with a homosexual inclination.” The document calls on Catholic communities to welcome gays and lesbians, and it condemns violence or discrimination against them.

“On the one hand, it is compassionate, maybe more so than people expect,” said the Rev. Thomas Weinandy, the conference’s executive director for the secretariat of doctrine and pastoral practices, who helped draft the document. “At the same time, it’s still very clear that homosexual activity is still considered wrong and sinful.”

According to Catholic doctrine, human sexuality serves two purposes within the bonds of marriage: procreation and the expression of marital love. Therefore, the church condemns homosexual acts as contrary to natural law.

The document distinguishes between “engaging in homosexual acts and having a homosexual inclination.” It states that there is no sin in being attracted to a person of the same sex, but only in acting on that attraction. The prohibition is similar to the church’s position on premarital sex.

Despite these changes, Dressel still feels he is being persecuted for something he has no control over.

“I’m denied the right to marry,” he said, “therefore I’m denied, in their eyes, the right to express marital love.”

Indeed, the Catholic Church urges gays and lesbians to live a chaste and celibate life. Only then, the document states, can they fully participate in parish life.

The Courage Apostolate is a New York-based ministry seeking to help gays and lesbians who have decided to live in accordance with the Catholic doctrine. The Rev. James Lloyd, a licensed psychologist and a priest, leads an anonymous support group of about 15 men. While some men in Courage support groups have eventually married a woman, Lloyd said that changing sexual orientation is not the purpose of the ministry. Rather, chastity — a virtue for all Catholics, he said — is the goal. For those he calls “same-sex attracted” men, that means renouncing their sex lives.

Lloyd said he prefers the term “same-sex attracted people” because, in his view, homosexuality is simply a tendency, not an essential part of a person’s identity.

“It would be very degrading to define people in term of their sexuality,” he said. “There cannot be an equation where a person says, ‘I am gay.’ We think it’s ridiculous.”

Advocates for gay and lesbian Catholics disagree.

“They continue to call it ‘homosexual inclination,’” said Jenny Truax, a member of the Catholic Action Network, a St. Louis-based group that seeks to expand the Catholic Church’s acceptance of gays and lesbians. “What they’re getting at here is that it’s not a permanent state, and you can control it.”

However, the conference’s document clearly states that gays and lesbians are not required to undergo therapy in an effort to change their sexual orientation. Weinandy said that because therapy has helped some men and women, but not others, “we didn’t want to put anyone under moral obligation when the results were too ambiguous to judge at this point.”

The conference of bishops’ document is in keeping with official Catholic Church teachings and previous statements from the Vatican. The document is similar to a “letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the pastoral care of homosexual persons” published in 1986 by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. The letter states the unchanging nature of the church’s position, which the letter says is rooted in Old Testament texts and the teachings of St. Paul.

But there again, gay and lesbian rights advocates disagree. “There’s no reason that it can’t be changed,” Truax said. “Jesus didn’t say anything about homosexuality.”

Truax wishes the church would use modern theologists and science.

“The church used to teach that slavery was fine,” she said, “that the sun revolved around the earth. Things change. It just usually takes the church longer to realize that.”

But at the heart of Catholic doctrine lies a principle that makes that change improbable. The church teaches that morality has an objective basis. Moral norms are not, in the Catholic view, just a cultural phenomenon that changes as society changes, but rather something grounded “in the natural order established by the Creator.” It is therefore unlikely that Catholic dogma will change the way the secular society’s position on homosexuality has changed.

In addition to reaffirming the Catholic position, the document provides guidelines for the day-to-day involvement of gays and lesbians in parish life. For instance, it discourages public announcements of one’s homosexuality outside of family and close friends. This secrecy can be harmful, said Joe Kort, a Michigan psychotherapist who specializes in gay and lesbian issues.

“They’re humiliating these people,” Kort said. “The message is really to gays and lesbians, ‘You have something we don’t want to hear about.’ They’re forcing out good parishioners. I call it spiritual abuse.”

While the Catholic Church says it welcomes gays and lesbians, even if they have homosexual relations, and it agrees to baptize children of homosexual couples, gay and lesbian advocacy groups have few kind words for the conference’s document. They say the church is still singling out and excluding certain parishioners — even as its reputation as a sacred institution suffers as a result of scandals involving sexual abuse by priests.

“They might throw in a token statement about heterosexuals having to live a good chaste life, but there’s never any consequences if they don’t,” Truax said. “There’s no pastoral guidelines on what (to do) when a couple uses birth control.”

When Dressel gave up Catholicism, he had already stopped praying and taking the Eucharist. While his anger toward organized religion has subsided, he still refuses to go to Mass. Spirituality is the core of his life now, he said. Dressel does not exclude the possibility of joining the Catholic faith again, but for now he feels the church misunderstands him.

“The problem is, people think it just comes down to sex,” he said. “As long as the church keeps framing that in terms of sex, they will keep missing the boat.”

(Photo: The altar of the church of Notre Dame in Montreal, Canada. March 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

This is a two-part story. Read part 1 here.

By ISABELLE ROUGHOL
Columbia Missourian

The Rev. Thomas Saucier, O.P., does not simply stand at the altar when delivering his Sunday homily at Columbia’s St. Thomas More Newman Center. Instead, he walks up and down the chapel’s aisles, addresses his parishioners and makes them laugh while teaching a lesson on God’s generosity.

“His sermons are definitely very different,” said Amanda Gramlich, a junior at MU and a parishioner of two years. “I find myself paying more attention.”

Saucier’s love of teaching is a common characteristic of Dominican friars. He is one of four such friars who started their ministry on July 1 as priests at the Newman Center and Sacred Heart Catholic Church. The Dominicans replaced three diocesan priests — the Rev. Charles Pardee, the Rev. Mark Smith and the Rev. Edwin Cole — who were transferred to other parishes in mid-Missouri.

The Rev. Joachim Culotta, O.P., explained that the initials placed after his name stand for “Order of Preachers.” To him, the initials are as important as the title of reverend.

The friars are Dominicans who happen to be priests. Many Dominican friars are never ordained as priests and are only brothers.

“Priesthood is a vocation; being a Dominican is a life,” Saucier said. “You’re embracing more than a profession. From the time I get up until the time I go to bed, I live my Dominican life.”

The Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, was founded by St. Dominic de Guzman, a canon from Spanish nobility, in the 13th century. While traveling in the south of France, St. Dominic witnessed the influence of the Albigenses, a Christian sect whose teachings he believed were a heresy.

The Order of Preachers was thus created to advocate and educate people about the Catholic faith. Only a few years after creating the order, St. Dominic sent his friars to study and preach in Europe’s leading universities.

Today, Dominican friars are still erudite, and their main occupation is teaching.

“The Dominicans have a long tradition of study and involvement in the intellectual life,” said the Very Rev. Michael Mascari, prior provincial for the Province of St. Albert the Great, which covers the Central U.S. “We, as priests, feel we have something we can contribute to university life.”

Two years ago, Mascari sent offers to several bishops to take over Newman Centers in their dioceses, in an effort to refocus the order’s mission on campus ministry.

The Diocese of Jefferson City was interested in the offer, because it freed up three priests to serve in other parishes, said the Rev. Greg Higley, vicar general of the diocese.

“We knew we were going to get experienced priests who were used to being around college students and also families,” Higley said. “It just seemed like a good fit.”

The Dominicans also took over Sacred Heart and gave the parish a second priest. The Rev. Steve Kuhlmann, O.P., is assisted by the Rev. Thomas Paulsen, O.P.

The four priests live together in a house adjacent to Sacred Heart and established a religious community named St. Raymond of Peñaforte.

Culotta, the oldest, is its religious superior.

“As Dominican priests, we live a community life,” Culotta said. “We are a family.”

The friars’ common life can serve as a model of Catholic living for parishioners, he said. The priests pray together every day after the 7.30 a.m. Mass and are sometimes joined by parishioners.

The priests said they hoped the parishioners might someday form a Dominican laity chapter, but they don’t have immediate plans to create one.

“Once they get to know us a little more, they’ll form it themselves,” Saucier said.

The Dominican friars are hard to miss. Their dress consists of a white habit of their order.

“It’s a way of showing that there’s a difference here,” Saucier said. “The habit can be an important symbol, especially in the classroom, when Father walks in with his rosary beads and his white habit. You’ll be seeing that a lot, initially anyway.”

But the habit isn’t worn everywhere and doesn’t prevent individuality from showing either: Under its long sleeves, Saucier, an avid bicyclist, also wears a yellow “live strong” bracelet.

But the most important function of the habit is to simply show that Saucier, Culotta, Kuhlmann and Paulsen are not only priests, they’re Dominicans.

A Dominican life is a search for the truth, which can be found in science, physics, literature, art and other studies, Saucier said.

“The essence of what God is comes through in all those things,” he said.

One particular study awaiting Kuhlmann and Paulsen is the Spanish language.

Sacred Heart’s weekly Spanish Mass is attended by about 90 people; even though it is not the greatest number of parishioners, it is the only such Mass in the area and is growing quickly.

Every Sunday at 1 p.m., Kuhlmann reads off a Spanish church book, with a distinct American accent. His last Spanish class was in the spring of 1981, when he was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

At his first Spanish Mass, Kuhlmann introduced himself in Spanish and then asked parishioners to have patience with his language skills. By the fifth Mass, he was getting compliments on his progress.

“They’re also very gracious,” Kuhlmann said. “It’ll take time, but I’ll get there.”

At the Newman Center, the priests now prepare for the return of students.

Culotta had to adjust his sleeping habits to be present at the 9 p.m. Sunday Mass, mostly attended by students. The first college Mass will be held Aug. 20 on MU’s South Quad, following a barbecue.

Another challenge for the priests will be to serve both the Newman Center’s students and regular parishioners. Saucier said he hopes he can grab students’ attention at the beginning of the semester, before the demands and distractions of college life take over. He would also like to plug students into the daily life of the parish as much as possible.

“If it’s two separate communities, I’m sort of doomed from the beginning,” he said.

As the school year progresses, Saucier would like to see more intellectual and ethical discussions among the Newman Center, the university community and churches outside the Catholic faith.

“This is where we believe, as Dominicans, we belong,” Culotta said.

(Photo: Devotion to the Agnus Dei in the church of Notre Dame in Montreal, Canada. March 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

This is a two-part story. Read part 2 here.

By ISABELLE ROUGHOL

The Rev. Edwin Cole strolls through the church’s aisles greeting parishioners as he has done for the last 10 years.

But for Cole, the Rev. Charles Pardee and the Rev. Mark Smith, all priests, it will be their last Sunday Mass in Columbia.

“I’ve been telling myself all morning to keep taking deep breaths,” Cole tells the Sacred Heart Catholic Church congregation as he begins his early morning Mass. “I’m still taking deep breaths.”

Three blocks away, Pardee and Smith say goodbye to their parishioners at St. Thomas More Newman Center.

The three departing priests were relocated to other parishes by the diocese of Jefferson City and will be replaced by four friars from the Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominicans.

The changing of the guard reflects a national trend in which the Catholic Church finds recruiting new priests more difficult.

Since 1965, the ratio of Catholics to priests has risen from 778 followers to one priest to 1,513 followers to one priest, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

The reshuffling came after the Very Rev. Michael Mascari, the superior of the order’s Province of St. Albert the Great, offered his order’s help in staffing to the bishops of several dioceses.

Parishioners welcome the new friars but are sad to see the priests leave.

Cole’s homily ended in a standing ovation and the Mass with tears from several parishioners.

“I just think he’s a really good person, and that came through in his ministry to each and every member of this parish,” said Joe Camille, a parishioner of six years . “If you had a model of what a priest should be like, he’s it.”

Cole started his ministry at Sacred Heart in 1996 and spent 17 years in Columbia. He has also been ministering to patients in Columbia hospitals.

Cole said he will miss the aliveness of the Sacred Heart community, but he is looking forward to the slower pace of his new parish of 400 families in Laurie, by the Lake of the Ozarks.

Cole said he has worn a hospital pager five days a week, 24 hours a day for 15 years.

“I turned it off this morning,” he said. “The slower pace will give me more time to practice music.”

Saying goodbye was difficult at the Newman Center , too. Pardee and Smith’s last Sunday in town was celebrated with a barbecue that saw about 200 people take over the center’s parking lot.

“It just shows how much they’re loved, how many people showed up,” said Rebecca Rone, a recent MU graduate. “I don’t think you can put into words how much they’ve affected the students here on campus.”

Pardee arrived at the Newman Center in 1998 and was joined by Smith in 2000. Their assignment was relatively short compared to that of the Rev. Mike Quinn, who spent 21 years at the Newman Center.

“I would be happy to stay another eight or fifteen years, but I can’t be greedy, I’ve had my time here,” Pardee said.

Pardee will serve the Catholic communities in Loose Creek and Bonnots Mill in Osage County, and Smith will minister in Martinsburg and Wellsville, on both sides of the Audrain-Montgomery county line.

Pardee and Smith are credited with getting the Newman Center out of crippling debt.

“Father Charlie brought the community together, and it helps that he’s a very sharp business person,” said Dick Otto, a parishioner of 35 years.

Replacing Pardee and Smith will be two Dominican friars; the Rev. Thomas Saucier will serve as the new pastor, and the Rev. Joachim Culotta will serve as an associate pastor.

The Rev. Steven Kuhlmann and the Rev. Thomas Paulsen were introduced to the Sacred Heart community Sunday as their new pastor and associate pastor, respectively.

Cole said he is glad that Sacred Heart, a parish of 700 families, will now have two priests instead of one.

“I very much support the move,” Cole said. “The Dominicans are a great addition” to the diocese.

Founded in the 13th century, the Dominican order’s mission is to preach in universities, and it has sought to re-establish that ministry in recent years, Mascari said.

The four Dominican friars will add to the diocese’s 70 priests, who serve in 95 parishes and 15 missions, said the Rev. Greg Higley, vicar general of the diocese of Jefferson City

“We’re not as bad off as other dioceses are, but we are in no way near capacity,” Higley said. “We will ordain two priests this year, one in July and one in December, but after that we will have some lean years.”

LaRue Diehl contributed to this report.