Gay Catholics assess societal change and the impact of Pope Francis

[rug]

Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post - Dozens of gay catholics hold an evening Mass at the St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Washington on Oct. 27.

By Michelle Boorstein

Allen Rose was a high school seminarian in the 1970s when his confession to a priest of sex with a classmate led to the other boy’s expulsion. Rose felt crushed by feelings of guilt and abandonment, and within a few years he began to drift away from Catholicism.

It took two decades to find a path back.

He was working as a paralegal in Washington in the 1990s when he saw an ad for a gay Catholic community that met at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Dupont Circle. By then he’d concluded that being gay disqualified him from being Catholic, but he still felt Catholic, and yearned for Mass and the prayers, sounds and rituals that remained his shared language with God.

Every Sunday night at the gathering known as Dignity/Washington, Rose found a sanctuary full of hundreds of people struggling with negative comments about gay relationships they’d heard in church. Joining Rose were closeted Catholic schoolteachers, men dying of AIDS, former seminarians like himself. Under the vaulted dark wood ceilings, they would pray, take Communion from a once-ordained priest, and be both openly gay and Catholic. That church officials didn’t recognize the service was beside the point.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/gay-catholics-assess-societal-change-and-the-impact-of-pope-francis/2013/11/17/3d5a1db2-424e-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html

[IrishAyes]

1. Very touching. I wish them the best.