First in-person LGBTQ Catholic ministry conference held in the US

Some 200 participants gathered for the first in-person Outreach LGBTQ Catholic Ministry Conference held in New York City on June 24-25.

More than 200 people from all over the United States and Canada, as well as from the United Kingdom, Italy, Colombia and Uganda, gathered June 24-25 in New York City for the first in-person Outreach LGBTQ Catholic Ministry Conference.

"These were theologians and writers; high school teachers and college professors; pastors and parish lay leaders; mothers and fathers; gay, straight, bisexual, lesbian and transgender people -- all part of the same church," said Jesuit Father James Martin.

The priest is the editor at large of America magazine and a driving force behind its new website, outreach.faith, which provides news and resources for LGBTQ Catholics, their families and the people who minister with them.

The goals of the conference, held at St. Paul the Apostle Church and at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University, "were to build community, share best practices and worship together, and by that measure the conference was a success," he said in comments posted on the outreach.faith website.

The conference opened with an evening keynote on June 24 by Bishop John E. Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, whose overall message to LGBTQ people was: "I love you."

In a morning keynote on June 25, Father Bryan Massingale, a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University in New York, issued a "prophetic challenge" to the church to see LGBTQ issues "as inseparable from race and color."

Loretto Sister Jeannine Gramick, who has been engaged in LGTBQ ministry for more than 50 years and is the co-founder of New Ways Ministry, delivered the evening keynote that closed the conference. She told her listeners that substantive change in the church comes slowly.

In breakout sessions, panelists addressed such topics as LGBTQ ministry in Catholic parishes; ministry with families with LGBTQ members; employment in Catholic institutions; ministry with Transgender people; LGBTQ issues and mental health; theology and LGBTQ people; and "The Catholic Rainbow: Race, Ethnicity & Intersectionality."

Father Martin and Paulist Father Rick Walsh concelebrated a June 25 evening Mass at St. Paul the Apostle Church for participants.

The conference's co-sponsors were America Media and Fordham's Center on Religion and Culture.

"Many people met others engaged in similar ministries and found they shared similar hopes and dreams. Simply coming together physically helped build a sense of community in a ministry where people can sometimes feel isolated," said Father Martin.

Jude 1:3-7
3 Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. 4 For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

5 Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved[c] a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. 6 And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day— 7 just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire,[d] serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.

Romans 1:18-32
God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

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