Half don’t seem to be biblical Christians
Email: Warfel has an opportunity to demonstrate true role of the church
The most recent incident involved two gay men who recently got married. Read more
On Aug. 6, four days after the Rev. Samuel Spiering arrived as the new administrator of St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Lewistown, he met with parishioner Paul Huff to ask him if he and his partner, Tom Wojtowick, had gotten married.
After Huff confirmed the fact, the priest asked to meet with the two men the next day. At that second meeting, Spiering dismissed the pair from their volunteer posts in the church and told them they could no longer receive Communion, a sacrament at the core of a believer’s faith.
Wojtowick and Huff were stunned and stung by the action. It sprang from the Catholic Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage and its belief that homosexual behavior is a sin.
The issue has caused some people to leave the parish and stirred up controversy in the small central Montana town. To address all that has happened, Bishop Michael Warfel of the Diocese of Great Falls-Billings plans to meet with parishioners at the church Saturday night.
Wojtowick, 66, and Huff, 73, lifelong Catholics, have been partners for more than 30 years. The two men, both members and active at St. Leo’s and the community, married in Seattle in May 2013 to have the legal rights of spouses in their later years.
Lewistown is Wojtowick’s hometown. The two men lived in Seattle for nearly 20 years before they moved to Lewistown in 2003 and started attending St. Leo’s.
Wojtowick, who recently retired as executive director of the Fergus County Council on Aging, is chairman of the Lewistown Public Library Board of Trustees and involved in a number of other organizations.
Huff is chairman of the Fergus County Fair Board, a member of the board for Cowboy Poetry and a retired board member of the Lewistown Art Center.
At the church, Wojtowick is an organist, an accompanist and sings in the choir. Huff sings in the choir and is a cantor.
In a timeline provided by Wojtowick, the same day the couple met with Spierling, Wojtowick spoke with Warfel by phone. The bishop asked a number of questions and said he would call again.
Wojtowick and Huff talked with Spiering and Warfel and other diocesan officials in a conference call on Aug. 25. Out of that, Wojtowick said, came an agreement that Wojtowick and Spiering would write a restoration statement, that in part, would support the concept of marriage between a man and a woman, which Wojtowick and Huff were willing to do.
“It was not our intent to challenge that (concept), but to have the rights of civic protections in our old age,” Wojtowick wrote.
When Spiering and Wojtowick met to write the statement, Wojtowick said the priest told him they would also have to set up a timeline for the two men to separate and divorce, which Wojtowick said he and Huff did not agree to.
Though they provided the timeline of events, Wojtowick and Huff are refraining from further comment on the issue until they have heard the bishop speak on Saturday night.
In a telephone interview from Great Falls on Thursday afternoon, Warfel said he knows Wojtowick and Huff “to be good people.”
“This is not animus against someone who happens to be a homosexual; this issue is the same-sex marriage,” he said. “A lot of people put those two together, and obviously there’s a connection, but it’s not the same thing.”
Warfel called same-sex marriage “the issue of our era,” acknowledging that in the U.S., polls show that support for it has edged higher than those who oppose it. But the fact remains that stands in conflict with Catholic teachings.
“As a Catholic bishop I have a responsibility to uphold our teaching of marriage between one man and one woman,” Warfel said. “And I think there’s very solid scriptural teaching on it and our sacred tradition is very strong on it.”
Those teachings leave him little choice, he added.
“Either I uphold what Catholic teachings are or, by ignoring it or permitting it, I’m saying I disagree with what I’m ordained to uphold,” Warfel said.
He has gotten a number of letters on the issue. Some people said that a song sung in Catholic churches titled “All are Welcome” needs to be changed to “Some are Welcome.”
“Everyone is welcome to the journey of conversion,” Warfel said. “But there are certain convictions, beliefs or behaviors that are in direct contradiction to what we believe and teach, and this would be one of them.”
He said his understanding is that Wojtowick and Huff did not publicize their marriage in the community. But once it became publicly known, it had to be dealt with publicly.
Warfel, who sees the Saturday evening meeting as a private one with parishioners, said he’s hoping to find a solution to Wojtowick’s and Huff’s situation. But, saying it is a pastoral matter, he declined to speak further about it.
That's right. Most Catholics don't know their faith.
It is not supposed to matter what I,you, or what Adam and Steve say; what does the Bible say.
When did parishioner opinion begin to have ANY effect on the Word of God?
Warfel is taking a principled stand for truth. I am not by any means Catholic, but I applaud him for standing for what is biblical in this case.
Actions like this should have been taken against people like Ted Kennedy years ago, but they weren’t.
evenly divided?
That’s sad
I don’t know what the big problem is. If the LBGT crowd wants a “CHURCH WEDDING” let them start their own church. There, problem solved. Why do they want to continue creating a problem where a problem didn’t exist before.They know the rules of the Catholic church, and the Catholic church isn’t going to change their rules, no matter what or how these LBGT crowd groan and moan.
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Since when do parishioners decide theology by popular vote?
“At the church, Wojtowick is an organist”
This is proof that the couple are deranged. Why would any sane person want to belong to any organization that so soundly condemns what they are or think they are.
A faith must be strong, or it is only a nominal thing, an aside to life.
Socialism is a twisted parody of Christianity, that substitutes mankind for God as the center of the universe. But the end result is people behaving like the Gadarene swine, in more ways then one.
To start with, they have no direction or purpose other than whim. They dash around hither and yon, with no direction but that of their swineherd, if that. They trample, destroy and consume, creating nothing.
And as a group, they can be possessed with demons, and hurl themselves off a cliff to their doom.
But those of faith are different, for they have guidance and purpose in their faith. They also have clear rules of behavior, which it is their choice to follow or reject, and experience the consequences of each choice.
Yet these are not man’s rules, which can be changed, but the rules created by heaven, which are immutable. If one obeys the rules, they are righteous; if they do not, they are failures. And all the whining and social change in the world cannot change the rules by the breadth of a hair.
And how many of these were local activists? How many are not church members? How many are nominal catholics who rarely go to church?
“Evenly divided”? Any of these so-called Christians read in the Bible what God has to say about whether or not a homosexual relationship is valid in His eyes? This is the problem with the “Church” as a whole; too much man, not enough God.