As I was looking at the front page of the New York Times, I found another obituary which I think deserves the attention of the community. Robert Nugent died from the effects of lung cancer on New Year's Day, and this, from the first paragraph of the obituary provided my "diary me" moment:
a Roman Catholic priest who spent more than 30 years counseling gay and lesbian Catholics and their families until the Vatican silenced him in 1999, died on Jan. 1 in Milwaukee. He was 76.
Counseling gay and lesbian Catholics? Silenced by the Vatican? This is a piece of LGBT history that we should not overlook or forget.
Elizabeth Malby/The Baltimore Sun
Charles Robert Nugent was born in 1937 and ordained in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in 1965. Sister Jeannine Gramick was running a counseling project for gay and lesbian Catholics at Villanova, and Father Nugent, who was studying for a master''s degree in library science there, began helping out. As Paul Vitello writes, they started
New Ways Ministry, a group advocating full acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the church and in society[, in a storefront in Mount Rainier, Maryland].
Before his censure — in a ruling written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI six years later — Father Nugent had walked a fine line between obedience to church doctrine and what he said was a calling to minister to a group at the margins of orthodox Catholic faith.
A fine line. Yes. In the early 1970s the Vatican warned Nugent about teaching "ambiguous" information. In 1978, they stripped him of his sacramental duties within the Ministry. Then they stripped him AND Sister Gramick of their leadership roles in the organization they founded, even though (possibly because?) the ministry didn't focus on the issues of morally approved or unapproved sex.
Finally, Cardinal Ratzinger, who, you will remember, was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (correct me if I'm wrong here, but it strikes me that this office is the descendent of the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages) before his colleagues elected him to become Benedict XVI, barred the organization's founders from further involvement in the organization in 1999:
By questioning “the definitive and unchangeable nature of Catholic doctrine in this area,” he said, Father Nugent and Sister Gramick had “caused confusion among the Catholic people.” By soft-pedaling the church’s position on homosexuality, he added, they had also failed to provide people “struggling with homosexuality” with the benefits of the church’s “true teaching.”
Father Nugent ended his career as a parish priest in New Freedom, Pennsylvania, south of York on the Maryland border, a post from which he retired last year. He died in a church hospice, and Sister Gramick visited him often there.
As the obituary observes:
Pope Benedict’s successor, Francis, has expressed a more welcoming view, though the doctrine remains the same. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Pope Francis said in July. The remark gave Father Nugent “great consolation,” Sister Gramick said.
That's good. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I'm hopeful that it won't.
Requiescat in pace, Father Nugent, and thank you for your efforts.