Gay Patient Says Catholic Chaplain Refused Him Last Rites

A Catholic chaplain at MedStar Washington Hospital Center stopped delivering a 63-year-old heart attack patient Communion prayers and last rites after the man said he was gay, the patient said Wednesday, describing a dramatic bedside scene starting with him citing Pope Francis and ending with him swearing at the cleric.

Details of the exchange earlier this month between the Rev. Brian Coelho and retired travel agent Ronald Plishka couldn’t be confirmed with the priest, who did not respond to a direct e-mail or to requests left with the hospital and the archdiocese. The archdiocese of Washington, for whom he works, declined to comment and said Coelho “is not doing interviews.” The bedside discussion was first reported Monday in the Washington Blade.

You were obviously someone who didn’t need a blood transfusion in the midst of the GRID/HIV/AIDS epidemic in this country, during the 1980s-and-’90s. There was no reliable method of screening blood supplies for the disease during those years. Thousands of completely innocent blood transfusion recipients were condemned to an early, horrendous death as the direct result of the refusal of the male homosexual community to assume full responsibility for its extraordinarily promiscuous, risky sexual behaviors. Homosexual activists’ predictions at that time, of a corresponding, imminent heterosexual HIV/AIDS plague, never materialized, but the public would never have known it because of the incredibly slick “diversionary tactics” exquisitely executed by organizations like “Gay Men’s Health Crisis,” among sympathetic others. You couldn’t possibly have imagined my fear, as a wife and mother already of two very young children during those days, of receiving contaminated blood as the result of my status as a “high-risk” pregnancy patient. Neither “marriage equality,” nor any other special societal designations, will “put lipstick on this pig,” “Tigerized,” because, as the English poet, John Donne, so eloquently wrote, in his “Meditation XVII”: “No man is an island, entire of itself...” or, more contemporarily, “It Takes a Village,” by former First Lady, Hillary Clinton. When someone else’s “bedroom business” affects the health and stability of the society in which my family and I live, then, it automatically becomes my business. I strongly suggest that all Americans read the latest “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” HIV/AIDS statistics. They’re a real “eye-opener.”

It's not the priest, Gr. Coelho, who made this fodder for public discourse. It's the gay man who took it to the press. As of now, a week after the alleged incident, neither Fr. Coelho nor anybody else in the church has said one word about Mr. Plishko or his sex life.

It's Plishko who is running around demanding publicity. Really, I'm starting to consider the "right to privacy" to be more of a duty. Gays? Trannies? Horndogs? Sluts? Shut up about it, already.

Exactly, ALPAPilot.

You have to applaud this man, a member of a maligned minority, who has the courage of his convictions, and expresses those convictions in a gentle and loving manner.

By "this man" I mean, of course, Fr. Coelho. He saved Mr. Plishka from a disastrous misstep, which is, to receive Our Lord in Holy Communion while in a spiritually unready state. Instead, he kindly invited Mr. Plishka to receive his priestly blessing -- at which time Pishka told him to "get the fuck out of here."

This is not a spiritually radiant response to a man who has just offered you a blessing. Sadly, it tends to confirm that Mr. Plishka was demanding Holy Communion in an inward state of turbulent wrath. It demonstrated that he was in such condition that the type of union implied by "communion" would be a lie.

Fr. Coelho's hand of benediction was verbally slapped back. Plishka was offered a blessing and he responded with a curse. May God bless Fr. Coelho. May God keep offering Mr. Plishka the grace he so angrily rebuffed.

If he is around to tell the story, he didn;t need last rites any way.

Historically, the Sacrament is associated with death beds, but you don't have to be on your death bed to receive the "Annointing of the Sick." Today, the Church emphasizes the healing aspect of the Sacrament, both physical and spiritual.

James 5:14-15
Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven.

“You couldn’t possibly have imagined my fear, as a wife and mother already of two very young children during those days, of receiving contaminated blood as the result of my status as a “high-risk” pregnancy patient.”

Au contraire, Grandma. Quite a bunch of assertions you’re making, for someone who has no idea of my history. My post was about people losing their identities to their sexual preferences, which then become the primary attribute of who they are. If that sexual proclivity leads them to become modern day Typhoid Marys, and are indeed a danger to society, then that’s a situation where they need to be identified. Apples and oranges.

My wife’s first husband turned out to be bisexual, and later died of AIDS. We were terrified that we had both become HIV positive as a result, and our lives were on hold until the tests came back negative. I certainly know, first hand, of the terror you went through.

And forgive me if I avoid reading anything written by Hillary Clinton, especially “It Takes a Village...” There’s just no substitute for two dedicated parents to produce responsible children. Which includes the recognition of your societal contract, requiring you not to become a burden or a health threat to everyone else.

“Since when did someone’s private, sexual life become fodder for public discourse? Ain’t nobody’s business but his own.”

Juxtaposed with:

“My post was about people losing their identities to their sexual preferences, which then become the primary attribute of who they are.”

Unless I’ve missed one of your later comments concerning this specific news report, “Tigerized,” I simply don’t grasp the connection which you claim between your two separate, completely disparate statements, quoted above.

American homosexuals may agitate for “fairness” and “tolerance” all that they wish, but, in the end, with the rapid advances in human pre-implantation genomic testing, along with the possible existence of a readily identifiable “gay gene,” I have to wonder if “marriage equality” will have evolved to mean much of anything 50 years from now. Abortion-on-demand, ironically, might just prove “the final solution” to “the homosexual problem,” just as it has with Down Syndrome today. This is but one of the cultural nightmares that over 100 years of “progressive”—and, now, “libertarian”—policies has wrought.

I’ve never read Hillary Clinton’s book, “It Takes a Village,” either, but even a broken clock is correct twice a day. The most conscientious of parents cannot monitor their sons’ and daughters’ activities every minute of every day. In order to realize optimum child-rearing results, then, it is absolutely essential for them and their children to belong to a “network” of family, friends, neighbors and teachers, possessing values similar to their own, who can offer support to them in times of need. When my husband died unexpectedly, at 43 years-old, it was nothing short of a godsend to me. Tragically, these nearby, like-minded support systems are missing from the lives of many, if not most, children growing up in our country today. This concept does nothing to detract from the indispensability of the traditional nuclear family.

Grandma!

We agree on so much, I don’t understand why you insist on busting my chops over something you have misinterpreted. Why the hostility?

My statements are not disparate at all. I happen to reside in an area filled with all sorts of gay activism, and have endured first hand the extreme promotion of the gay agenda where one’s sexuality becomes their primary characteristic. It’s part and parcel of trumpeting how much “courage” you have for being openly gay. Hogwash. Big deal. I don’t care.

However, when AIDS first was identified, there was a local group of gays who actually considered being HIV positive as a “badge of honor” of being true to the gay lifestyle instead of the suicide pact it really is. Now I’m concerned as they continue their barebacking activities. Safe sex is a societal obligation for everyone, including gays.

True, parents can’t provide 24/7/365 monitoring of their kids. But they can give them the weapons to resist most of the destructive behaviors prevalent today. Again, I live in area with generational welfare dependency, and all the evils that have spawned from these neighborhoods. I don’t need Hillary to tell me to trust my children to these obviously failed societies which avoid decent parenting.

I’m sorry you lost your husband early in life, and am happy that you found a community support network to deal with the aftermath. That’s the benefit of living amid people who share the same goals and bear the same responsibilities of being faithful to our social contract.

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