Bishop Moeddel and NACDLGM

Just What Is Bishop Moeddel Up To?
Cincinnati bishop's talk at national gay ministry conference raises questions
(March/April 2001)

BY MICHAEL S. ROSE

IN THE PAST TWO ISSUES, St. Catherine Review has published brief excerpts from articles reporting on Bishop Carl Moeddel’s talk to the 7^th annual conference of the National Association of Catholic Diocesan Lesbian and Gay Ministries (NACDLGM) in Oakland, California. These excerpts were taken from reports in The Wanderer and San Francisco Faith. The brief excerpts have raised numerous questions among our readers, especially those in the Cincinnati archdiocese. "Just what is Bishop Moeddel up to?"

No doubt, many of our readers have expressed their concern to Bishop Moeddel, auxiliary bishop of Cincinnati, about his personal interest in "targeting" the local Catholic high schools and then the elementary schools as the "top priority" of the new ministry to lesbians and gays. A few readers have sent us copies of the bishop’s response to their inquiries. While he admits to having addressed this conference, he denies certain claims made in the articles. It is opportune then that SCR finally obtained a tape and transcript of the bishop’s talk so that we might clarify the issues in these pages.

To one SCR reader, the bishop wrote, "It is not true that I am supporting or promoting youth groups in our secondary schools for gays and lesbians. I am not doing so." However, in his Oakland talk, delivered last September 8, he said, "I was pretty proud of the fact that we were starting… a youth support group for gays and lesbians at the secondary school level," which was "being done under the auspices of our Catholic Social Services and the counselors there." (He also admitted that the local director of Catholic Social Services "torpedoed" his plans).

On a second issue, Bishop Moeddel has responded to readers that "it is not true that I said that I was going to promote my agenda with elementary school principals." Yet, at the conference, the bishop told his audience:

"…our priority in the coming year is to try to get into all of our high schools. Talk to all of our teachers. Hopefully to move from there into our elementary schools, but starting with our high schools."

"The excuse for my being here"
Aside from the content of his talk, many first wonder why the bishop would address such a controversial group, known for its flagrant antipathy towards Church teaching in the area of sexual morality.

Speaking to his Oakland audience last fall, Bishop Moeddel admitted that he and Peg Black, director of the Family Life office in Cincinnati, came to the conference "as learners more than teachers." Revealing that the Archdiocese of Cincinnati has only a fledgling gay/lesbian ministry, he recognized easily enough that his audience may well be much more experienced than himself. Given his relative inexperience, he jested that the title of his workshop could be called: "The Excuse for My Being Here."

I’m not sure the irony of his remark was intentional. Back home in Cincinnati, Catholics are asking him just that: What is your excuse? Did he mean that his talk was an excuse to attend the conference? Or did he mean that his talk would explain the reason for his interest?

Perhaps some background on the organization is in order: NACDLGM was founded in 1994 by Father James Shexnayder from the Diocese of Oakland as the official organization which serves as a clearinghouse of information for and about the diocesan ministries to gay and lesbians. In June of that founding year, following the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered parade in San Francisco, Fr. Shexnayder celebrated a Mass for Catholic participants, most of whom were self-identified members of Dignity, a group condemned by the Vatican. In his homily that day he stated: "We must not let our homophobic society confine our homosexuality to the bedroom… Our homosexuality must burst forth from the bedroom and leaven all society"—such is the philosophy of the executive director of NACDLGM.

Speakers—mostly Church employees—at past years’ conferences betrayed in the most obvious ways their dissent from and distaste of Catholic teaching on sexuality and the natural law. They have spoken of their efforts to promote acceptance of the homosexual life in parishes, schools, diocesan offices, and in state legislatures. They have boasted how they have achieved power in many important dioceses. They have explained their methodologies: how they intimidate and mislead opponents (especially parents of children in Catholic schools), how they recruit fellow homosexual activists for Church positions, and how they incorporate homosexual propaganda in liturgies.

Speakers have unapologetically supported "covenantal gay friendships," i.e., same-sex marriage, adoption of children by same-sex couples, artificial insemination for lesbian "mothers," special rights legislation for homosexuals, introducing homosexual issues into religious curriculums, and inviting gay and lesbian Catholics to be eucharistic ministers, lectors, and catechists.

Those who speak at and attend these NACDLGM conferences are primarily gay and lesbian activists who intend not to "minister" to anyone but to reform what they see as a "homophobic society." They seek to accomplish this primarily by "converting" those Catholics who still object to homosexuality and the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles.

It is from this crowd that Bishop Moeddel sought to "learn" about what he and his Family Life office might do back home in Cincinnati. In fact, he admits that Father Ray Kellerman, one of two chaplains for the Cincinnati ministry to lesbians and gays, "learned" at the annual NACDLGM conferences in 1998 and 1999. (For more specific information on speakers who have appeared at previous conferences, see SCR’s May/June 1999 issue).

Fidelity to what?
The point of Moeddel’s talk, he explained, was to describe the founding of the Cincinnati ministry to lesbians and gays, one that he says is based on "compassion and fidelity." First, he recounted his role in the drafting of the controversial 1997 document Always Our Children, (AOC) saying that, although many bishops were "disturbed with the content," he was "proud of the document, quite frankly." After having served on the committee that issued AOC, he returned home to Cincinnati, he said, excited to "make this document known in our archdiocese." In the mean time, the Vatican withheld its approval of AOC, requesting hundreds of changes in order to clarify Church teaching and approach to the subject.

Obviously enthusiastic, he traveled to three parts of the archdiocese to offer open workshops on the subject, and later, along with Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, formally established the ministry to lesbians and gays.

The only other public program offered by the ministry group thus far, he said, was a day of reflection which attracted, in Bishop Moeddel’s estimation, about forty people. Although two more days of reflection were advertised, they were canceled due to "lack of interest," he added regretfully.

But the bishop explained that days of reflection for gays and lesbians isn’t the primary focus of the new ministry. The "top priority," he clarified, is to "change the environment" in the Catholic high schools in order to make them "safe places" for gay and lesbian students. The complaints he’s been hearing, he told his Oakland audience, is that high schools are "hostile environments" for those attracted to members of the same sex.

Bishop Moeddel explained that he and three others have begun to give teachers in-service days in order to promote Always Our Children. "We spoke to teachers, staff, principals of our high schools, about the document," he said, "about the Church’s teaching on homosexuality, about creating a safe place on our high school campuses, about identifying someone or some folk on our high school campuses that would be identifiable as somebody they could go to."

These workshops, the bishop claimed, were successful "where we did it," and added that he was scheduled to meet with all the high school principals in the archdiocese "in effect to give them the same spiel, but in effect ask them to invite us to in-service days."

"Hopefully," he added, he wants to move on from there "into touching our elementary schools." Thus, the bishop is implying that the environments in our Catholic elementary schools, which serve 5-13 year-olds, may also be "hostile" to gays and lesbians. What Bishop Moeddel is talking about here is indoctrination of the youth in Catholic schools to accept homosexuality as normal, while painting the propaganda as "tolerance" and "anti-discrimination" education. Do our children really need such indoctrination, especially when most Catholic schools can’t even teach the Catholic faith to their students?

Bishop Moeddel is simply parroting activist groups such as the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). The theme of GLSEN’s annual conference in Chicago last year was "Ending Hate, Beginning in Schools." Much time and energy was spent there strategizing how to make schools "safe places" for homosexuals. The common recommendation was that schools can be "safe" only when those who disagree with homosexuality are "converted" or prohibited from speaking out.

It is no secret that for the past decade or so homosexual activists have taken this route: work with the kids as young as possible, so they are receptive to the gay agenda right from the get-go. That saves having to "convert" them later, which is more difficult. It is also no secret that high schools have become the recruiting grounds for a fresh generation of young men and women willing to enter the gay or lesbian culture and lifestyle.

If this sounds like an improbable conclusion based on what Bishop Moeddel told the Oakland conference, consider what an employee of the Archdicoese of St. Paul-Minneapolis had to say to his 1998 audience at the same conference: Bill Kummer, General coordinator of Family and Friends of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Persons in Catholic Education disclosed his step-by-step plan to transform nine of the eleven high schools in his archdiocese into "gay-friendly" schools that have gay student clubs, publish gay newspapers, have "queer literature" in their libraries, and permit same-sex couples to dance at their high school proms. He also claimed that, under his direction, the schools have adjusted their curricula to include "gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered" ideology in most classes.

How did he do it? Kummer explained that the best way to accomplish these objectives is through "faculty in-service programs" designed to desensitize teachers to homosexual issues and then developing and implementing an "inclusive curriculum"—taking "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered experience and finding ways to write that into curriculum" in every subject.

When in 1997—nearly four years ago—SCR warned that these in-service workshops were no doubt coming to Catholic high schools, we were dismissed by many as "jumping to conclusions." Yet if you aren’t deaf and blind to the world around you it’s somewhat easy to predict what’s coming next, especially from the gay lobby that first worked vociferously in the secular world, including private and public schools, and now have more than wormed their way into the diocesan structures and Catholic schools under the approving eyes of homosexualist priests and bishops, of which there are many. They almost always hide under the tarps of "compassion," "discrimination," and "tolerance" to further their real agenda: changing society, including Catholic society, to accept homosexual coupling as normal. Homosexuality is to be seen as a "gift from God," inborn, natural, and unchanging.

Bishop Moeddel is aboard and enthusiastically so.

Teaching what the Church teaches?
To be fair, Bishop Moeddel did say expressly that ministry to gays and lesbians needs to be marked by fidelity. "It means that we’re faithful to the teachings of the Church, because we minister in the name of the Church," he said.

Great!

But then the bishop went on to reveal that he might not understand Church teaching himself. He claimed that, according to the Catechism, "man and woman should acknowledge and accept his or her sexual identity and that homosexuality refers to the exclusive or predominant attraction toward persons of the same sex." The idea conveyed is that homosexuality is a kind of "sexual identity," and should be accepted as one’s fixed and permanent identity. The actual quote from the Catechism (no. 2333), however, is part of a paragraph describing the complementarily of man and woman in married life. Bishop Moeddel’s statement is a distortion at best.

Then he again quoted the Catechism out of context, saying that "sexuality affects all aspects of the human person" and treats this teaching too as if it were referring to sexual preference, inclination or "orientation." Not so. Again the Catechism is addressing the complementarity of the sexes—male and female, not homosexual and heterosexual. The full quote in context is: "Sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and soul. It especially concerns affectivity, the capacity to love and to procreate" (CCC, 2332).

Later he moves into talking about sin, which he said, is always subjective. "There is no such thing as objective sin," the bishop claimed, "…a moral act is more than an objective evil." In his context, he implicitly makes the case that consensual homosexual acts are not objectively sinful. This more than muddies the waters of moral theology, since according to the Catechism, the objective nature of sin concerns the intrinsic nature of the moral act. The bishop’s statement in fact is wrong. Homosexual acts are always sinful because they are "intrinsically evil"—just like willful murder or defrauding a worker of his wages. These objective sins, however, may sometimes be venial (as opposed to mortal sins) if they are committed without "full knowledge and deliberate consent" (CCC, 1857). But the "grave matter" of homosexual acts is what constitutes "objective sin."

Unfortunately, it appears that Bishop Moeddel has succumbed to modern liberal moral theology which denies the existence of objectively intrinsic evil. Liberal theologians mistakenly claim that all evil and sin are subjective and exist only in the human mind (intellect) and heart (will). They omit the third requirement of "grave matter" which is always objective and is observable; thus it can be judged. An abortionist, for instance, commits an objective sin when he murders a child. Subjectively he may be guilty only of venial sin—if say, he was mentally ill and did not have "knowledge of the sinful character of the act" (CCC, 1859). But he is involved in objective and observable sin nonetheless.

This mistaken idea that there is no such thing as "objective sin" comes in handy for those who want to justify homosexual acts and lifestyles. The Bishop Moeddel crowd can simply claim then that gays and lesbians who are engaged in habitual acts of homosexuality are not "sinners" or that they are not "sinning" if they don’t understand their acts as sinful, i.e., in opposition to God’s law. Sorry to say, this is faddish poppycock; the ramifications of this false theology are many.

Might then Catholic parents be justified in their concern about what might come of Cincinnati’s gay and lesbian ministry, especially with someone like Bishop Moeddel as its apostolic spokesman? Are they justified to wonder why the "top priority" of this so-called ministry is making Catholic high schools into "gay-friendly" environments? Are they justified to wonder why Bishop Moeddel, Peg Black, and Father Ray Kellerman are keeping such strange company? Are they justified in wondering why the bishop is so enthusiastic about one particular document out of thousands issued during his past thirty-eight years of priesthood? Are they justified in suspecting that "gay-inclusive" curriculums are going to be the ultimate fruit of in-service workshops? Are they justified in wondering if some day their own children might not be subjected to an environment hostile to anyone who doesn’t accept homosexuality and the rest of the gay agenda?

In a word: yes.

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