Posted in April, 2009
Tony Blair has challenged the “entrenched” attitudes of the Pope on homosexuality, and argued it is time for him to “rethink” his views.
During an April 8, 2009 interview with the U.K.’s leading gay magazine, Attitude, the former Prime Minister said: “Organised religions face the same dilemma as political parties when faced with changing circumstances.” 
“You can either A: hold on to your core vote, basically, say ‘Look let’s not break out because if we break out we might lose what we’ve got, and at least we’ve got what we’ve got, so let’s keep it.’ Or B: you say, “Let’s accept that the world is changing and let us work out how we can lead that change and actually reach out.’”
Asked about the Pope’s stance, Mr. Blair blamed generational differences and said: “We need an attitude of mind where rethinking and the concept of evolving attitudes becomes part of the discipline with which you approach your religious faith.”
“There are many good and great things the Catholic Church does, and there are many fantastic things this Pope stands for, but I think what is interesting is that if you went into any Catholic Church, particularly a well attended one, on any Sunday here and did a poll of the congregation, you’d be surprised how liberal-minded people were. The faith of ordinary Catholics is rarely found “in those types of entrenched attitudes,” he said.
Not all British Catholics applauded with his remarks.
On March 29, 2009, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, was received into the Catholic Church. He has not said publicly why he converted, but his third wife, Callista Bisek, is Catholic. Mr. Gingrich had been a Baptist.
But a comment he recently made may contain a hint: “Over the course of the last decade, attending the basilica…reading the literature, there was a peace in my soul and a sense of well-being in the Catholic church.”
Mr. Gingrich, a conservative Republican who has not run for elective office since he was forced out of Congress in 1999, has toyed with running for president in the past and is much-rumored to be considering a 2012 bid. It is not clear how his Catholicism might affect his political future, but in a recent Twitter post Gingrich commented President Obama has “anti Catholic values.” 
“It is sad to see,” he texted, “notre dame invite president obama to give the commencement address Since his policies are so anti catholic values”
Based on his sexual infidelities and multiple marriages, some U.S. Catholics question Rep. Gingrich’s self-promotion as a spokesman for authentic ”Catholic values.”
On April 15, 2009 Archbishop Timothy Dolan became the 13th leader of the Catholic church in New York since the Vatican appointed the first bishop here in 1808. A vast territory, the archdiocese includes Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven northern counties, stretching from the border of the city to the Catskill Mountains.
This stretch of territory is the home of the toughest, crankiest, most argumentative and nit-picky baseball fans in the country–Mets and Yankees fans. It’s a great place when you’re on the back page of the Daily News – it’s a tough town when you’ve blown the save. 
“You are what your record says you are,” said Bill Parcells, the revered former head coach of the New York Giants and Jets football teams and another Catholic sports guy.
There are a lot of Catholic players and piles of Catholic fans spread out among the different NY teams. One of the reasons I’m back at church today is that I spotted a man in a Mets jacket heading for the door of my neighborhood church. I followed him in. As it turned out, that person happened to be the pastor, Fr. Danny. Here was somebody, I thought, like me.
Archbishop Dolan, 59, appears to be a very genial, down-to-earth, outgoing kind of guy. He likes to be with people. He laughs and smiles a lot. He’s a big baseball fan. He has gone from rooting for his hometown St. Louis Cardinals and Milwaukee Brewers to wind up at a NY Mets game at Citi Field his first weekend in New York.
One of his first stops as the new Archbishop of New York was the West Bronx Community Center in Highbridge. The teams of workers there give out free nutritious meals across the borough each year through a partnership between Catholic Charities and the Rusty Staub Foundation, a “I’m happy, happy,” said a delighted Anna Rodriquez, 76, after she got to give the archbishop a big bear hug. “He is so friendly.”
Rusty Staub, a former Mets baseball star, was on hand with the archbishop at the food pantry. Staub said he was honored that that Dolan chose to spend his first morning of face-to-face duties with the organization. “He obviously has a tremendous amount of energy,” Staub said, “I think that’s going to be a blessing.” “(I want) to learn, to listen, to shake hands, to meet people, to hear them dream,” Dolan said. “That’s a greater lesson than reading briefing reports, or reading histories.”
“I aim to be a happy bishop, sharing joys and laughs with you. So you will see me at the St. Patrick’s parade, and at the new Yankee Stadium, and at processions and feast days and barbecues across our almost 400 parishes. Being Catholic is not a heavy burden, snuffing out the joy of life; rather our faith in Jesus and His Church gives meaning, purpose and a joy to life. I love being Catholic. I love being a priest, and I fully intend to love being archbishop of New York while loving all of you in the Church in New York.”
“Loving the Church here means supporting her indispensable work for caring for the poor, the immigrants, the sick and elderly, the lonely, the unborn and the abandoned. It means working hard for her Catholic schools, in many ways the pride of the archdiocese. It means ensuring that our parishes are places where people encounter the Lord Jesus in the Mass, the sacraments and in an authentically Catholic community.”
“It means speaking from America’s most famous pulpit for justice and peace, for religious liberty and the sanctity of all human life. It means teaching the Catholic faith in season and out of season, as a good shepard must.”
Archbishop Dolan chose as his motto “Ad Quem Ibimus,” which means ”To Whom Shall We Go?”
For Catholics who love their Church, this is the crux of the matter. When Jesus asked the disciples if they, too, would leave him, St. Peter replied, “Lord, to whom should we go? You have the words of everlasting life.”
Let’s start from there. Not polemics and threats about Communion.
One team.
“There are a lot of skeletons in Martina’s closet. It is more like a storage facility full of them, and I know them all,” said Toni Layton, 50ish, who left her computer salesman husband, Jeffrey Lambert, for the nine-time Wimbleton champion in 2001. Layton claims she helped nurture and enrich Martina’s career during their time together and is seeking a substantial financial settlement.
Or else.
This long-time lover of Martina Navatilova is threatening to air the tennis great’s dirty laundry if she doesn’t receive a settlement to her liking based on their eight years together. For the last twelve months she has attempted to negotiate a payment with no success. She was offered $200,000 which she refuses to accept.
“The offer was an insult. Navratilova is using Florida’s failure to recognize gay marriage to her advantage. We are standing up for gay rights in this case,” said Layton’s attorney. “Toni Layton has the right to obtain a fair settlement the same as if she were the spouse in a traditional marriage.”
Martina seems to have a soft spot for married women: country club blondes, with pretty faces and chic figures a few years older than she is. She woos them, and they fall madly in love with a woman for the first time. After six or seven years the relationship has lost its zest and Martina is ready to move on. But the woman who left her husband and family doesn’t see it that way.
In 1993 the live-in lover prior to Layton, Judy Nelson, wrote Love Match – Nelson vs. Navratilova - a tell-all book about her seven-year relationship with Martina. The Texan, now 63, left her husband for Martina after the two women were first introduced by Nelson’s 11-year-old son, who was a ball boy. In 1991 Nelson sued Martina for “palimony” and the case was settled out-of-court for an undisclosed sum. 
Judy Nelson was apparently a “kept” woman, claiming she was paid $90,000 annually as Martina’s “maid” while accompanying her on the international tennis circuit. Unlike Nelson, Martina never paid Toni Layton a wage.
Nelson chronicled her self-proclaimed victimization further in a second book about the relationship, Choices, published in 1996. Rita Mae Brown, another one of Martina’s exs, wrote the forward to Love Match, where she refers to Nelson as a woman “whose hair gets ruined by a ceiling fan.”
In true lesbian daisy chain fashion, everybody is linked by sex or love. Martina left Rita Mae in 1981 to take up with Judy Nelson. Rita Mae took up with Judy Nelson in 1992 after her breakup with Martina. Rita Mae Brown wrote her own roman a clef about Martina in Sudden Death, a novel about a moody tennis star who cheats on her lover with a fan.
Poor Martina. Three books by seething ex-lovers and it looks like a fourth will hit the shelves unless she coughs up big money. I feel for her. There is nothing on earth nastier and more vicious than a woman you want to leave but won’t let go.
Martina dedicated her fitness book, Shape Yourself, to Toni, calling her “someone pretty darn special.” “When I wanted to dedicate this book to her, she asked me not to do that, but instead to dedicate it to all those who inspire others, not just in words but in deeds because she would not be my inspiration if she had not been inspired by others.”
A friend said: “Toni is still heartbroken but is gradually getting over the split. Maybe she now wishes she had read Judy Nelson’s book before she got involved with Martina?” 
When people forget that the Holy Spirit speaks directly to individual consciences and not only through the church, there is a risk that laypeople would be pushed to the margins of the church’s life, the papal preacher told Pope Benedict XVI and top Vatican officials.
“The ideal is a healthy harmony between listening to that which the Spirit tells me, individually, and that which the Spirit tells the church as a whole and, through the church, what it tells individuals,” said Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household. 
In his weekly Lenten meditation March 27th for the pope and his closest collaborators, Father Cantalamessa focused on a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”
The Holy Spirit, he said, speaks through individual consciences and through the church.
Through the conscience, he said, “the guidance of the Holy Spirit extends even outside the church to all men and women.”
But, the Holy Spirit also speaks through the church, Cantalamessa added. “The interior witness of the Holy Spirit (in consciences) must be joined to that external, visible and objective witness which is the apostolic teaching” of the popes and the church.
“When this is reduced only to the personal, private listening of an individual, the path is open to an unstoppable process of divisions and subdivisions because each person believes he or she is right.”
“But we also must recognize that the opposite risk exists: that of absolutizing the external and public witness of the Spirit.”
“In other words, there is a risk of reducing the guidance of the Paraclete to only the official teaching of the church, impoverishing the varied action of the Holy Spirit. In this case the human, organizational and institutional elements prevail, the passivity of the members is encouraged and the door is opened to the marginalization of the laity and the excessive clericalization of the church,” Father Cantalamessa said.
Father Raniero Cantalamessa’s website can be found here.
Did the Holy Father, and members of his household in attendance, contemplate that the witness of Call to Action, Dignity, Quest, Voice of the Faithful, theologians like Dr. Dan McGuire and Fr. Charles Curran, prophets like Dr. Mary E. Hunt and Sr. Jeannine Gramick, all the men who are listed on the blogroll of this site, and the thousands of gay and lesbian Catholics everywhere…are heeding the voice of the Spirit?
By the time theologian and sociologist Nancy Eiesland was 13 years ago, she already gone through 11 operations for the congenital bone defect in her hips and realized pain was her lot in life. So why did she say she hoped that when she went to heaven she would still be disabled? 
The reason, which seems clear enough to many disabled people, was that her identity and character were formed by the mental, physical and societal challenges of her disability. She felt that without her disability, she would “be absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God.”
By the time of her death at 44 on March 10, 2009, Eiesland has come to believe that God was in fact disabled, a view she articulated in her 1994 book, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability.” She pointed to the scene described in Luke 24:36-39 in which the risen Jesus invites his disciples to touch his wounds. 
“In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the ressurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God,” she wrote. God remains a God the disabled can identify with, she argued–he is not cured and made whole; his injury is a part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for healing.
I recall a lot of Bible stories about Jesus healing the blind, the lame, the disfigured, the possessed, the hemorrhaging. I don’t recall any stories of a man or woman running away when they heard Jesus was in the neighborhood, afraid he might touch them and change their condition. Just the opposite. But did any melt into the crowd when they heard Jesus was coming down the street? We don’t know. The Bible only describes one group.
A lot of people think of homosexuality as a disability or sickness no one would choose not to be freed from, because of the loss, humiliation, vulnerability, and especially, the pain involved.
In a statement about a year before her death, Eiesland described how her experience of pain changed after an extended stay on medical leave.
“I return with pain,” she said, “but for the first time in at least five years I do not come back on pain killers, mood elevators, or other pharmacological means to dull the ache. I say these things neither to inspire, invite your sympathy or disapproval, nor to chisel into your life in any way. I offer here my experience of pain to remind us that for most of us pain will be an ordinary partner in an ordinary life. The social fiction that long-term pain ought to be treated with more and better drugs is an attractive one.
But even when it is severe and unremitting, I am persuaded that pain is a better friend than is the pain killer. As my life began to reveal, one never can be sure what else within you dies when you try to kill the pain.”
Read her whole statement here.
