James Martin’s Vatican appointment will only embolden LGBT activists
Fr. James Martin, SJ, editor-at-large for the Jesuit magazine America, has made the headlines twice this past week.
First, top Vatican and US church officials backed his forthcoming gay-friendly book, Building A Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity.
Then in an unforeseen move, the Vatican named Fr. Martin as a communications consultant to the Holy See’s Secretariat for Communications.
Several months preceding all this, Fr. Martin received an award from the LGBT group, New Ways Ministry, a group previously condemned for representing itself as a Catholic organization. His acceptance speech became the broad outline for his new book. In fact, the name of the award he received is, New Ways Ministry’s Bridge Building Award.
Catholic dissident, Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder of New Ways Ministry, leant her endorsement: “Father Martin shows how the Rosary and the rainbow flag can peacefully meet each other.”
And therein lay a visible, palpable sign of the disconnect, the contradiction, and perhaps the self-indictment for Fr. Martin’s type of bridge-building efforts. These two cannot peacefully meet together because they are antithetical, standing in stark opposition.
In July 2015, writing for America Magazine, Fr. Martin penned a short commentary, Satanic Group Playing with Fire, directed at a Detroit Satanic group that erected a statue of “‘Baphomet,’ a goat-headed god that has become a kind of stand-in for Satan.” In it, he said:
These people have no clue what kind of forces they are dealing with. In my life as a Jesuit priest, and especially as a spiritual director, I have seen people struggling with real-life evil. In the Spiritual Exercises, his classic manual on prayer, St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, calls this force either the “evil spirit” or “the enemy of human nature.” Sophisticated readers may smile at this, but this is a real force, as real as the force that draws one to God.
While Fr. Martin’s words are directed at a Satanic group’s unveiling of a statue meant to inspire “religious” followers of the Devil, his words apply equally to those who seek to raise high the rainbow and ‘marriage equality’ banners within the church. They could also easily apply to his attempt to build a bridge which leads not to the freedom of new life through the good news of the Gospel for the same-sex attracted, but to continued imprisonment in a way of life which is already difficult enough for many from which to extract themselves.
The Big Picture
The ruler of this world is making giant inroads into popular culture wherever he can, and he derives special delight in infiltrating Churches.
The rainbow flag is more than a benign symbol of LGBT solidarity. Its existence is a condemnation of natural law, and an aggressive assertion of an anti-complementary, anti-conjugal ideology, foreign to the Gospel. More recently it has become a sign of persecution against Christians who fail to bend their knees to its demands of fealty and obeisance. Just ask certain florists, bakers and county clerks -- they’ll tell you.
The symbols of genderless marriage equality have no place in the church or among Christians, for by inviting their presence, we play with fire: Their presence in churches across the country and around the world is a brazen statement of Satan’s contempt for Christ and His Bride, the Church.
Pope Francis famously said, “There are forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family. They are not born of dreams, of prayers, of closeness to God or the mission which God gave us; they come from without.”
Echoing Fr. Martin’s own words: Sophisticates and the worldly-wise outside and within the Church might be compelled to smile and roll their eyes, but Fr. Martin’s efforts may in fact be rolling out the red carpet for increased ideological colonization of the church in the United States, and now, with his appointment to the Vatican’s communication office, to the entire world.
