All are Welcome
The ALL ARE WELCOME MASS is a monthly celebration of Sunday Mass, at which all are welcome, with a particular welcome for lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered) people, their parents, family members, and friends. Celebrants have included Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and diocesan and religious priests.
We, the organisers, hope all who take part feel they belong in a PRAYING COMMUNITY. We invite you to come along and take part in the ALL ARE WELCOME MASS. We ask you to tell people about it. We are very keen to hear from Catholic priests who would like to take part as celebrants.
The ALL ARE WELCOME MASS is open to the public. It takes place in the chapel in Avila Carmelite Centre, Bloomfield Avenue (off Morehampton Road), Donnybrook, Dublin 4 (parking available) on the THIRD Sunday of each month at 3.30 p.m. The liturgy, the Sunday Mass, is followed by chat over tea and coffee in Avila’s dining room.
The ALL ARE WELCOME MASS started in June 2012 in the home of one of the founding organisers. In November 2013 it moved to Avila Carmelite Centre.
We, the organisers, are :-
Noel Moran, Michael Hayes, Phyl Stanley, and Louise O’Sullivan.
Please contact us by email:- allarewelcomemass@gmail.com
Our website is:- www.allarewelcomemass.com
Wonderful idea!! Can’t make it myself but will be with you in spirit.
Why is the ‘All are welcome mass’ necessary? Is it because all are not welcome at other masses? It certainly implies this.
This is not truly pastoral. The reality is that our church teaches that those who are in homosexual relationships separate themselves from God. This is tough for many to accept but truth will always remain truth. Jesus said the road to heaven is hard not easy. Shame on Archbishop Martin for partaking in and allowing such a mass to take place in his diocese. If anything it creates the sin of scandal in my opinion. .
This is an opinion piece in today’s Tablet. I think the final sentence says it all.
June is a favourite month for Gay Pride marches, and this year they have taken on particular poignancy because of the massacre at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Many gay people saw this attack as homophobic. Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, said recently that the Catholic Church owed gays an apology for having contributed to a climate of homophobia. Pope Francis, asked about this at a press conference on board the papal aircraft, agreed. “I believe that the Church not only must say it’s sorry … to this person that is gay that it has offended,” he said. “But it must say it’s sorry to the poor, also, to mistreated women, to children forced to work.”
Cardinal Marx’s original statement, made in Dublin, coincided with the controversy in the Church in the United States over the apparently deliberate refusal of various Catholic spokesmen there to acknowledge that the Orlando massacre was aimed specifically at the gay community. That caused great offence among gay people, not just those who were Catholics. If this was what the Pope had in mind, then he was repudiating the line taken by conservative church leaders regarding Orlando, as disrespectful. More broadly, those leaders spoke out of a tradition of homophobia, which is the antithesis of respect.
The Gay Pride movement is if anything a claim for respect. The Catholic Church cannot remain neutral to that claim. It is not sufficient to say gay people are entitled to respect simply as human beings. They are entitled to respect because they are made in the image of God, who made them the way they are.
I am listening just now to a lecture on disability, which sees disabilities as also the image of God in human beings. I tend to disagree, and to say instead that disabilities such as blindness are tragedies but become the image of God through identification with the Cross.
Gayness is still regarded by the Vatican as a disability, but is no longer seen as such in the modern world, and rightly.
Columnists
Another piece on the same subject, also from today’s Tablet, by Fr. Richard Leonard SJ.
‘Being gay is who you are, and God doesn’t make junk,’ a straight man said.
29 June 2016 | by Richard Leonard | Comments: 0
‘Being gay is who you are, and God doesn’t make junk,’ a straight man said
When they come to analyse major shifts and changes in society, cultural theorists speak of “fault lines”. They sometimes apply the London Underground’s famous safety warning: “Mind the gap”. Two recent events made me aware of contemporary Catholicism’s major fault lines, and how we need to very carefully mind the gaps.
The first was a gathering for 85 well-educated Catholics aged 18–25. Quickly, conversation settled on one of the many consequences of the clergy sexual abuse crisis: the Church’s lack of credibility in its moral teaching. It appeared none of them would give the Church’s position much weight because the gap between our teaching and practice has been revealed to be just too great.
The case study in this discussion became same-sex marriage. As well as I tried to positively present the Church’s ideas about the nature of marriage – and this was before Pope Francis said the Church should apologise for the way it treated gay people in the past – not only did these young Catholics reject these arguments, it also was clear they just didn’t understand them.
Some of them are gay – in or out. They have gay brothers and sisters, relatives, friends and colleagues. LGBTI people are not “other” to them. I discovered that the nature/nurture debate has been resolved. Natural law came in for a hammering: “Being gay is who you are, and God doesn’t make junk,” one of the straight men stated. “It’s like being left-handed, and we used to try and make them write with their right hands. Imagine the state telling left-handed people they can’t get married to other left-handed people.”
Then Stephen Fry was tabled: “At least 260 species of animal have been noted exhibiting homosexual behaviour but only one species of animal ever, so far as we know, has exhibited homophobic behaviour — and that’s the human being.”
Divine law was not immune from attack either: “The Bible says adulterers, women in pant-suits and prawn and pork eaters are as equally abominable as gays, but the Church has worked its way clear to forgive one, and enjoy the rest.” The gap revealed a fault line.
The second event that started me thinking was the murder of 49 and the injuring of 53 largely LGBTI people in Orlando, Florida. While the motives of the allegedly mentally ill, fanatical Islamist Omar Mateen are complex, it remains true that he walked into a gay night club and perpetrated the largest mass shooting in recent US history.
The Pope and several bishops issued powerful and consoling statements of solidarity, but which never explicitly mentioned that the vast majority of the 102 victims were LGBTI. I couldn’t imagine that happening if the dead and injured were mainly Jewish, Baptists, African-Americans, schoolchildren, university students, soldiers, cinema goers or public servants. Maybe only attacks on workers in an abortion clinic could render us so officially mute on why the dead died.
The basis of our unease in naming what we should and must, might be that our official responses to the LGBTI community is lifelong chastity or conversion to heterosexuality. Even though some us pastorally cling to Pope Francis’ anything but throwaway line, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge them?” and that the Church teaches that every sign of unjust discrimination toward our LGBTI brothers and sisters must be avoided because they deserve respect, compassion and sensitivity, it is also true that we continue to force a distinction between the homosexual person and the act, and state that all homosexual acts are gravely depraved and objectively disordered.
For an increasing number of Western Catholics, young and old, these responses do not square with who they are, the gay children they have and the people they know and respect. Our teachings are not being received because they’re read as part of the texts of terror.
We can blame secularism all we like, we can argue that our catechesis has failed, but the present fault lines are not primarily about the head, they are about the heart of human encounter and a broader experience than any other which has previously informed revelation.
The ground is shifting quickly, and long repressed gaps are now appearing. Contemporary theology is filled with danger, and opportunity.
Richard Leonard SJ is the author of What Are We Doing on Earth for Christ’s Sake? (Paulist Press)
I have been to many of these All Are Welcome masses. They are very inclusive and sharing is varied & respectful. Come and see.
“The sin of scandal”.
How about the sin of – teaching young people self loathing to such a degree they self destruct ? Who made you judge ? Heal thy self physician.
I believe you are shameful and scandalous. Likely throw Jesus out of your perfect, scandal free club.
Speaking of perfect.
“Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect…”
‘Perfect’ means ‘whole’ – ‘complete’ – sense of fullness. The Father loves all – having the sun shine and rain fall equally on all – sinners and the perfectly scandalous free. Love enemies and praying for the oppressors.
Good for the priest/s with the courage to welcome everyone – ‘perfect’ly loving as asked to be.
The way is narrow and few find it. Indeed.
“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”
Liam – you are a sinner ? Then why should you be welcomed ? But you are welcome. See you there.
“What sorrow awaits you experts in religious law! For you remove the key to knowledge from the people. You don’t enter the Kingdom yourselves, and you prevent others from entering.”
Unless I’m reading the wrong bible – Jesus was forever causing scandal because of the filthy, scandalous types with whom He would associate – people He knew needed and wanted healing.
God forgive the man, or woman, thinks him/herself fit – sinlees enough – to refuse Jesus to anyone.
“I don’t know if You can hear me
Or if You’re even there…
I don’t know if You will listen..
To a humble prayer.
They tell me I am just an outcast
I shouldn’t speak to You..
Still, I see Your face… and wonder
Were You once an outcast, too ?”