‘Outreach’ website hopes to inspire online L.G.B.T. community for Catholics

James Martin, S.J., has been serving the marginalized ever since he joined the Society of Jesus. He has worked with street gangs, the sick and dying, refugees in East Africa and prison inmates and people experiencing homelessness.

“So the L.G.B.T. work just sort of made sense,” Father Martin, editor at large for America, said in a recent interview. “One of the universal apostolic preferences of the Jesuits now is walking with the excluded…. Jesus went to the margins. That’s where this community is right now in the church. They’re the most marginalized group in the church bar none.”

That mission to reach the marginalized L.G.B.T. community led Father Martin and his collaborators to launch a new website, outreach.faith, on May 1. The site, which operates under the auspices of America Media, will include news and essays as well as helpful resources like videos, books and links to welcoming organizations. The website will also feature the Gaudete series, which will profile parishes across the United States that are welcoming to L.G.B.T. Catholics. Michael O’Loughlin, America’s national correspondent and author of Hidden Mercy, will be a contributor.

“By hosting Outreach as a channel within America Media, we are able to provide a secure and accessible home for this important new ministry,” said Matt Malone, S.J., president and editor in chief of America Media.

The website itself grew out of the annual Outreach conference, which has been hosted virtually since it began in 2020. The Outreach website will host videos from the conference and bring together resources in multiple languages—including Spanish, French, German, Lithuanian and Hungarian, among others—to serve Catholics around the world.

“Just this week, I was speaking with a person whose son came out at age 30,” Father Martin said. “And it was difficult for him. We think that now it’s easy, but it’s still difficult. It’s even more difficult to find a place in the church, which is one of the reasons for this website. To really help people find a place where they feel welcomed. I hope this website reaches out to the margins and brings them to the center.”

Whether one feels welcomed in the Catholic Church often depends on where a person lives, a reality Father Martin called scandalous. “I hope the website is a place for people to find support when they can’t find it elsewhere,” he said. “It can be a place for them to know that there are people in the church who welcome them and will treat them with respect, compassion and sensitivity, as the Catechism asks us to do.”

Mark McDermott spent more than 30 years as a corporate lawyer on Wall Street and is one of several donors who, along with several foundations, are making the site possible. He will be primarily responsible for writing and producing the Gaudete series. He left his practice earlier this year, in large part, to dedicate his life to work that supports L.G.B.T. Catholics.

“I’m one of those people who had a long journey through a pretty dark and thorny path. I’m 55, and didn’t really come out to my family until I was 47,” Mr. McDermott told America. “I’m very happily married now and could not be luckier. But it’s only with the benefit of some hindsight that I realized what a wicked journey that was. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. And I want any resource brought to bear to help anybody who’re on that path, especially young people, find their way out of it.”

The Gaudete series will feature parishes like St. Clement in Chicago and St. Francis Xavier in New York, communities where Mr. McDermott found welcome.

The Outreach website, he said, is not meant to supplant the numerous organizations that support the L.G.B.T. community. “We want to be a centralized resource for everybody,” he said, adding that some groups have names that may not immediately be recognized as L.G.B.T.-friendly. “If people could become aware of one another and reach out and talk to one another, that’s a good thing.”

Mr. McDermott was an altar server when he was a child in Iowa. One message he learned in faith formation classes stuck with him.

“Jesus loves us all. Everybody,” he said. “Jesus loves everybody. It took me maybe 40 years to come back to that.”

“I believe that no life is truly authentic unless it is oriented somehow toward the divine. And I really believe all human beings are hardwired for that, whether they realize it or not, whether they want to admit it or not,” he said.

“That is what that inexplicable, maddening yearning is that we all feel for something we can’t describe,” he continued. “It is a travesty that so many L.G.B.T. people feel cut off from that.”

Through the website and the community it forms, Mr. McDermott hopes members of the L.G.B.T. community will have a new experience of faith.

“The God we believe in became human. And not just any human, but a nobody from nowhere. And he died an ugly, nobody death, you know?” he said. “If that isn’t hanging out with the lowly and the marginalized, I don’t know what is. To have done that as an expression of love is [an idea] you have to force yourself to come back to.”

That S. J. after his name tells me all I need to know.

Jesuits are the Catholic Churches worst enemy after being for centuries the “INTELLECTUAL GOOD GUYS.”

Because they thought they were smarter than God, they followed Satan, who also thought he was better than God, and that should be the end of them in the Catholic Church.

The Church will soon AGAIN SET ITSELF ON A MORAL COURSE just as soon as they solve the Francis problem.

Respectfully, the “Catholic Church” has no use whatsoever for this evil man. Be careful not to confuse the Catholic Church with the counterfeit religion created during Vatican II. The “Catholic Church”, herself, is the “Mystical Body of Christ”. And, as such, Jesus Christ could never advocate or support sinful behavior. What many of us believe to be the actions of the Catholic Church are, in fact, the actions of the Modernists of an entirely different religion who cleverly and deceptively gained control of the power structure of the Church during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). They have the infrastructure, not the faith.

Following Vatican II there was, initially, little change. But over the next 50 years the successive popes (all Modernists) gradually appointed more and more Modernist leaders in key ecclesial roles, so that today the Modernists control Rome. Those actions, combined with the local takeover by the bishops (after the adoption of “Collegialism” during Vatican II), an entirely separate religion is being practiced in place of the Catholic religion. That false religion is often referred to as “Conciliarism” by traditional Catholics since it grew out of the Second Vatican Council.

An interesting comparison can be made between the Catholic Church and our American government. It is often said that while we elect certain people to run our government, many of us realize that our government is very much under the influence of the “Deep State”—even the very existence of which is often denied by the Satanically-inspired media. Similarly, while many of us would like to believe that we are members of the “Catholic Church” (because we attend Mass at Catholic Churches), in reality, the pope, bishops and priests today are actually promoting the teachings of a very different religion than that of the Catholic Church.

At this time in history the only organization that continues to adhere to all of the truths of the Catholic Church that were extant prior to Vatican II (including the Traditional Latin Mass) is the Society of St Pius X (SSPX). Although there are other “traditional societies that offer the TLM, all have either adopted the teachings of Vatican II (those in “full communion” with Rome, such as the FSSP, CMRI, etc.) or those that have rejected specific Catholic teachings of the Church like the SSPV and Bishop Williamson’s group.

Following Vatican II (1962-65), all of the popes were adherents of the heresy of Modernism. Unfortunately,

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