New Ways Ministry was founded in 1977 in the Archdiocese of Washington by Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father Robert Nugent, who were the subject of a notification by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1999.
The notification, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, said that their positions “regarding the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts and the objective disorder of the homosexual inclination are doctrinally unacceptable because they do not faithfully convey the clear and constant teaching of the Catholic Church in this area.”
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The Age of Francis keeps bearing strange fruit. From Catholic News Agency:
In a reversal of an earlier decision, the Synod of Bishops has restored a link to a video by New Ways Ministry on its resources webpage. An employee at the General Secretariat also apologized to the LGBT outreach group after the link was removed last week.
According to a Dec. 13 statement on the New Ways Ministry website, Thierry Bonaventura, communications manager of the General Secretariat, had apologized “for removing from their website a link to our video encouraging LGBTQ people to participate in synod consultations.”
Bonaventura told CNA on Dec. 7 that the link had been taken down after he was made aware that the U.S. bishops’ conference expressed its disapproval of the LGBT outreach ministry in 2010.
As of Dec. 13, the link is again visible on the synodresources.org website.
New Ways Ministry is pro-LGBT, meaning it advocates things contrary to Catholic teaching. This meant that in the Before Times, the Church did not approve of them:
In 2010, Cardinal Francis George, then president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement emphasizing that New Ways Ministry “has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church and that they cannot speak on behalf of the Catholic faithful in the United States.”
But the Synod restored the New Ways video after it was revealed that earlier in 2021, Pope Francis had corresponded warmly with the ministry’s founders, and wrote approvingly of its work.
Here is a link to the New Ways webinar from October.
Notice this graphic from the presentation showing how the Church was run in the Bad Old Days (according to New Ways), versus how it is run now under Pope Francis:
This is radical stuff! It’s totally democratizing Catholic Church policymaking. How is this even Catholic?! Mind you, this is something that is claimed by a Fordham theologian, in his address to fellow LGBT Catholics. I don’t know to what extent it reflects reality within the Catholic institution. But the video where this appeared was restored to the resources page of the Synod. Make of that what you will.
I saw this news story on Twitter. This was one of the first comments:
That rang true to me. I recall the early 1990s, when I was getting serious about God, one of the biggest draws for me to Catholicism was the total confidence I had that Rome would not budge, and surrender to the Zeitgeist. I literally could not have imagined a figure like Pope Francis. I would like to hear in the comments from you readers who have become Catholic under this pontificate, or are interested in it. How do you deal with the fact that under Francis, so much that looked to have been set in stone is turning to Jell-O? I’m not trolling here; I genuinely want to know. To my Orthodox eyes, it looks like the Rome of Pope Bergoglio is throwing away one of the most attractive things about Catholicism, for the sake of embracing the modern world.
A sign of the times, for sure. Don’t think that your church will be able to avoid this conflict. It is here now, and will ultimately come for us all.
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