Here’s their introduction:

Have you committed a year or more to post-graduate service in the United States?

Do you have reflections to share about your experience in one of America’s faith-based service programs?

Are you interested in being part of a published work?

We are looking for you!

We are seeking individuals who have completed a year or more of service in a faith-based service programs in one of the 50 states or U.S. territories during the years 1995 – 2011. We are interested in hearing from former volunteers who served in either urban or rural areas and in a faith-based programs of any religious tradition, be that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and others!

Peace be with you,

Kate and Jen

While the way in which I identify with is complicated (does “non-institutionally affiliated, non-Mass attending, preacher-of-the-Gospel-at-all-times with a thoroughly Catholic theological imagination” even make sense to me, let alone to anyone else?) and tends to vary from day to day, the question of Catholics and voting resonates with me a great deal. As infuriated as I get when the Church tells us who to vote for, and which issues matter at the expense of which other issues, at the end of the day, I would be lying if I said that being Catholic doesn’t impact how I vote. Because it was through Catholicism that I found social justice. And it was through learning more about Catholic social justice that I found liberation theology, and came across the idea of the preferential option for the poor and the oppressed. And it was taking myself to task, really thinking about what implications a commitment to the preferential option for the poor has for the ways that I act in the world, that has most informed the political opinions I hold today.

While my Catholicism influences how I vote, I have certainly never thought of myself as a typical Catholic voter. I was intrigued, then, to get an email this week from Catholics for Choice with some interesting statistics about Catholics and voting. Not only are Catholic voters not more conservative than the general public, the email stated, but the views and voting trends of U.S. Catholics largely mirror that of the general electorate. While less than half (43%) of U.S. Catholics rank abortion as a “very important” issue to them in this election cycle, almost all (92% and 91%, respectively) feel that the economy and jobs are the among the most important issues. Furthermore, “only 14% of Catholics in the US agree with the Vatican’s position that abortion should be illegal,” and “only eight percent of Catholics believe that the views of the US bishops are ‘very important’ in deciding for whom to vote.”

So while I probably still fall (much) further to the left of the political spectrum than most Catholic voters, I’m actually not all that atypical – I’m informed by my faith tradition, but at the end of the day, it is my own conscience, and not the commands of Church officials, that has the most influence over how I vote.

Kate Henley Averett dreams of a day when she can regularly vote for candidates who are pro-reproductive rights, pro-universal health care, anti-death penalty, anti-militarization, and deliberately and openly feminist, anti-racist, and anti-heteronormativity, with a commitment to eradicating poverty. Until then, even though she often feels more like she’s voting against people she doesn’t want in office than for people she wants in office, Kate still votes anyway.

In Loving Memory of my mentor and friend, Patrick L. Rattigan.

When I first started as a theology teacher at a Jesuit high school in a Chicago suburb, I had an official mentor who supported me through the academic year. There were no desks available next to my mentor in the department office . The closest space was next to the oldest faculty member in the department, and maybe the school. The other teachers, tip-toed around this no-nonsense, cranky, old man, who knew more than anyone. Everyone said hello to him, but there was a level of respectful distance that colleagues kept from this veteran educator. Pat, the old-timer, not only had a desk next to mine, but shared the same free periods. Being one of the youngest teachers in my department, and a naturally extroverted person, I didn’t know I was supposed to be respectfully afraid. So, I talked to Pat as much as he permitted during our planning periods. I began picking up the mail in his faculty box to save him a trip, and in return he started leaving me occasional lesson plans and helpful tools. As the months passed, Pat became my unofficial mentor, and eventually, a good friend.

This experienced educator lived for teaching and had created fine-tuned lesson plans incorporating a style all his own. Pat loved art. He was well-known for creating beautiful PowerPoint presentations that incorporated classic paintings relating to the various theology lesson plans. Occasionally, he would share one of these PowerPoint slide shows with me to use in my classes. He rarely shared these lesson plans with other teachers, so I felt honored to be given these pedagogical treasures. His appreciation of art added a unique dimension to his passion for teaching theology. Pat taught me that art engaged students on a different level. It allowed them to understand our Christian narrative without the confusion and limitations of words. Paintings offered a personal experience that was open to the Spirit.

When All Saints’ Day came around on that first year, Pat gave me a non-art related gem. He reminded me what All Saints’ Day was about. “Nelle, remember to tell your freshmen that we all have the potential to be saints. It’s not about being perfect. In this day and age, people place the saints upon impossible-to-reach pedestals. It’s our job to close the gap and help them see that sainthood isn’t synonymous with being perfect. It’s about being our truest self—the one God created us to be.”

Pat may have said that the 14 year-old, first year students needed to hear this, but I think I needed to hear this, as well. Occasionally, these words come to mind, and I smile thinking of Pat’s truth-filled lessons. Pat retired from teaching a few years ago and died this past February 2010. Pat wasn’t perfect, but he dedicated his life to teaching young people. Through works of art and literature, he challenged students to recognize the sacredness in the world and within each of us.

On this November 1st, we remember all of the people who have lived faith-filled lives. May these holy people who are no longer physically with us, remind us of our own potential and call to be saints.

M. Nelle Carty is trying to remind herself that sainthood is not so far away as it seems.

In my day job as a professor of American Studies I work to help my students question and explore “facts” about the United States that are often taken for granted. The standard narrative (the supposed “fact”) that I’ve just finished exploring with one class is the notion that “America is the Land of Opportunity”. We have thought about where this idea comes from, the cultural and political structures and systems that keep it alive, and its limits. Just last week we considered the ways in which unspoken advantages of gender (male), race (white), language spoken (English), and class (middle/upper) have opened up opportunities for some while making opportunities hard to access for others. After thinking about women, people of color, non-English speaking Americans and those without family support or a bit of luck, commonly held beliefs are harder for my students to sustain uncritically. What looks like an issue of “hard work” = success at first glance gets a lot more complicated. Class materials often upset my students’ sense of the United States as a pure meritocracy where fairness reigns.

Fairness. The sense that dedication and following the rules matters. Fairness. It is something that I honor and desire and encourage. I suspect this is in part a result of growing up in a family of six siblings and complex family negotiations. Fairness. It is something that my 8-year-old seems particularly sensitive to in playground debates and when discussing the relative size of desserts. Fairness…it is something that I can’t get away from when reading and reflecting on this week’s readings – especially the Gospel. When I engage with the text via my Ignatian training and imagine myself in the story I always find myself to be one of the unnamed persons on the street who is angered by the choice Jesus makes: Zacchaeus gets to host him? Really? Really…..? It doesn’t seem “fair”. “So what,” I find myself thinking against my best wishes. “So what that he said he will (future tense!) give away his possessions (hrmph!). He’s been taking advantage of others forever!” (Insert your favorite self-righteous stomp and head shake here).

And then I return to the first reading and I am swept into a gentle reminder and into a softness of metaphor and imagery where I am called to let go of my bean-counting sensibilities and remember that I too am a sinner and that I too am one of God’s creations and that I too am loved and embraced—because I too am of God and God is in me. The lyricism of the phrases (“how could a thing remain, unless you willed it/or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you?”) calls me to see myself and then to see others in a new light. We are worthy, we are loved, we are OK. I can understand the gospel more fully in this light. I still can’t picture myself as Zacchaeus. I can’t see the story through his eyes, but I notice him in the tree and I am more aware of his desire to find a way (back?) to God. I know this path.

But I would be remiss if I did not own up to the fact that as a woman in the Catholic church I am stuck on the “fairness” issue: There are so many who are called. There are so many who are ready now. There are so many who have fought the good fight and lived the good life and are ready to take up posts as leaders in the church and these women, these people made in God’s image…are not invited in. I think that my fixation on fairness may need to stick around for a while.

Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello holds a PhD in American and New England studies from Boston University. She is currently an assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies and coordinator of American studies at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts, where she teaches many courses inspired by her time in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in the 1990s.

- the Nicene Creed as usually recited by Orthodox Christian congregations

Growing up I never knew the Nicene Creed was the source of such controversy. As a child I thought such things, the things I learned by heart, that I recited together with my family, week after week, year after year, were indelible, that they had always been just as they are now.

But, of course we learn as we grow older that this is not so. Even something as old, as seemingly stable as the Nicene Creed has for me in adulthood taken on a new level of perplexity. Indeed, adulthood itself seems to be a sort of endless complication of things that used to once be so simple.

On Sundays, I usually attend an Antiochian Orthodox Church near my home with my partner, a cradle Orthodox. We love the welcoming, tight-knit community there, and the high concentration of converts makes it so that my blond hair doesn’t immediately betray my non-Orthodox status.

Sometimes during the service I almost forget I’m Catholic, even when we cross ourselves (the Orthodox tend to cross themselves a lot) and I do mine “backward.” I have grown to love the abundant incense, the prostrations, and especially the icons, that second congregation that despite its two-dimensionality somehow seems to peer out at the congregation and participate in the service as we do. If the Catholic Church for me has always been clear the clear, bright, and light infused colors of stained class, the Orthodox Church is the luminous golds, and earthy browns and reds of the icons.

I do feel out of place at Orthodox church when we recite the Nicene Creed. The Catholic and Orthodox versions of the creed are similar, but the differences are so central to the theologies of both traditions that disagreements over them have had shattering repercussions and, some argue, directly led to the Great Schism of the eleventh century, when the two churches formally separated. These differences seem small now (i.e. the difference between “essence” and “being” or the addition of “and the son” when stating from whom the Holy Spirit proceeded) were at one time considered matters essential to salvation.

When it is time to say the creed, I usually stumble along reciting the Catholic version softly to myself, which is difficult to do when everyone around you is reciting something just a little different. But then, perhaps ironically, but also soul-liftingly we all say in unison that we “believe in one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.” Despite our creedal differences here is a reaffirmation of unity that has always seemed to me at once comforting and also mystifyingly naïve.

But, earlier this month the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation released a statement “Steps Toward a Unified Church” which includes a commitment to a common “statement of faith,” a common creed. The Catholic Church concedes that, in the interest of Church unity, “the original Greek form of the Creed of 381, because of its authority and antiquity, should be used as the common form of our confession in both our Churches.” If unity is achieved, Catholics will recite the version of the creed now used by Orthodox churches.

Perhaps this all seems somewhat superficial. After all, the Orthodox Creed as printed above is very similar to what is recited in Catholic churches. Can we count these small agreements as real achievements when the Church has huge issues to tackle like the ordination of women, the future of Catholic higher education, and the place of the LGBT community in the Church?

But, words are so very important. The words chosen by early church councils, used in our liturgies, and by our theologians are the basis for so much of Church dogma. And, small steps like this acquiescence on a point that at one time seemed incontrovertible reignites my hope that important change is possible in the Catholic Church. I rejoice, perhaps selfishly, that true communion between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches could be possible. And, I cautiously celebrate this small indication that the Church may be willing to consider compromise when a higher end is within sight.

Rebecca Curtin holds degrees from the University of Notre Dame and Harvard Divinity School. She lives in Somerville, MA.

]]> http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/27/one-holy-catholic-and-apostolic-church/feed/ 0 Jen & Kate small window image(2) http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/24/perfect/ http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/24/perfect/#comments Sun, 24 Oct 2010 09:00:30 +0000 Kate Dugan & Jen Owens http://fromthepewsintheback.com/?p=2128 ]]> Felicia Schneiderhan

My first thought always when hearing today’s Gospel is “Good, I don’t have to be perfect.”

See, I have this perfectionism thing going. My spiritual advisor reminds me that my perfectionism is really pride in disguise; really me trying to be God. “And where’s the God in that?” she asks.

Well, God’s not in the room at all. If I practice perfection, I have no need of God. Self-sufficiency! Let me do it myself! And let me get it right!

There are days when I “to-do” everything right. From the minute I wake up till the minute I go to sleep, I follow the rules and the to-do list to a perfect T. I wake up when the alarm goes off and instantly put my feet on the floor, ready to go. I do my morning prayer and meditation as specified. I eat what I am supposed to. I spend within my budget. I am on time. I get along with everyone – if only because I am so attuned to following the plan for the day that I have little time or attention for anyone. (Interacting with others is never on the to-do list.)

I’ll admit, these days are few and far between. But when they happen – oh, the glory of perfection! The rapture of going to sleep knowing that every piece of my puzzled day snapped perfectly into place. I am indeed proud on days like these, because they prove I can manage my own life, thank you very much.

Funny thing on these quests for perfection: they are sought alone.

For example: I have recently discovered that nothing brings out my perfectionist tendencies like being a new mom. I am so inexperienced and dead-set on doing everything right for my four month-old son that I miss the obvious.

Sleep books stack high on my nightstand, so I can stay up late reading about how to perfect my son’s sleep schedule, so that his brain will develop perfectly and he will be perfectly happy all the time. According to my current reading, he should be napping three times a day, at 9, noon, and 3, and then going to bed for the night sometime between 6-7. This is the daytime schedule: 9, noon, and 3. This is the schedule.

Yesterday my husband spent the afternoon working from home, and he observed me trying all sorts of means to get our son to take his 3 o’clock nap: ignoring his fussing and crying; lying down with him in our bed. This went on for nearly an hour before Mark changed his diaper and gave him a toy and he settled down. An hour later, at dinner, our baby ate voraciously.

“Maybe he was hungry,” Mark said. “Maybe that’s why he couldn’t settle down to nap.”

After a few minutes of defensively denying that I could ever miss my son’s hunger cues, I had to admit, Mark may have been right. Our son will eat just a bit, fall asleep, and as soon as I put him in his crib, he’s wide awake again, and I spend an hour trying to get him to fall back to sleep. I interpret his fussing and crying as sleep-deprivation, which may only be partly right. But had I stopped and been present in the situation, rather than vehemently sticking to the plan of perfection, I may have noticed that perhaps he had just nodded off early and needed to finish his meal.

If I am so set on following the plan perfectly, I miss the reality of the situation. I miss the other person. I miss the relationship.

In today’s Gospel, the Pharisee who follows the law perfectly, speaks his prayer to himself. Whereas the tax collector, a sinner, would not even dare to raise his eyes to heaven, for he knew to whom he was talking. Following the rules is beside the point; what’s important to God is that we enter into a relationship with Him. So often, our failings make it possible for us to acknowledge our need for God, to enter into the room with him. But joy and gratitude could serve this purpose just as well. In the end, our fulfillment is not from doing everything right, but from connecting in a meaningful way to God, and to those around us.

]]> http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/24/perfect/feed/ 3 Jen & Kate IMG_7546 http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/21/late-for-the-party/ http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/21/late-for-the-party/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 09:00:00 +0000 Kate Dugan & Jen Owens http://fromthepewsintheback.com/?p=2124 ]]> by Angela Batie Carlin

I just returned from four days at my alma mater, where the annual convocation and reunion celebrated 80 years of women at YDS. I am still unpacking the images, the feelings, the thoughts, and the treasures of the experience.

I was emboldened and ignited by the tales of overcoming discrimination and firmly claiming a place in the Church and in the Academy from women a generation before me. It’s hard to believe that just decades ago – memories and experiences of women still living – there were quotas that only allowed ten women to attend the school. There were lectures from the dean that the women should be aware of all the men that were kept out of the school to allow their admission, all the “slots” they took up. There were scholarships lost upon the occasion of marriage. There was a sit-in in a men’s restroom because the only woman’s restroom on campus was three flights of stairs and an entire hallway away from the study spaces in the library. Women recalled being the first or second ordained in their tradition and the struggles that went along with that. There were no female faculty, no mentors when women first started. The history is not ancient; it is still right here, graspable.

I felt a little as though I was about 30 years late for the party. The struggle, commitment, energy of the women’s movement at YDS (and other institutions too, I’m sure) seemed so vital, and I felt as though I was surveying the results after the dust has settled, picking through the rubble and making sense of it all. What will the next generation of women think of our era? Will they see us as a chapter in the same book? Or as a dormant era of complacency? What will our legacy be?

As the airplane lifted out of Hartford, the Connecticut, I looked at the leaves on the trees turning vivid shades of red, gold, and amber. The landscape was striking, bold colorful strokes across the hillsides, crisp and stark. Then wisps of clouds reached out and soon all was hidden by the blinding white blanket of cover. I hope the vision of this experience doesn’t recede as quickly.

Angela Batie Carlin received her MDiv from Yale in 2007 and now serves on their Alumni Board. She is overwhelmed with gratitude for the women who paved the way.

]]> http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/21/late-for-the-party/feed/ 0 Jen & Kate YDS http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/17/keep-on-truckin/ http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/17/keep-on-truckin/#comments Sun, 17 Oct 2010 09:00:35 +0000 Kate Dugan & Jen Owens http://fromthepewsintheback.com/?p=2117 ]]> I am teaching a student for whom English is a second language, and a recently acquired one at that. He is soon going to take a test that is far too advanced for his current level, and so he muddles through impossible readings and pretends to understand “communism” and “altruism” when really he needs a much more concrete and basic vocabulary. He needs “radiator” and “glacier.”

“Tell me what you don’t know,” I say, and he often doesn’t, but when he does, I reach deeper and deeper into my vocabulary, every word leading to another word he doesn’t know. Bringing me to where there are sounds instead of words, gestures, my hands thumping against my chest and pulling at each other, slamming a pen to the table and then setting it down with a soft caress: teaching the word gentle. Then we look at the rest of the sentence. He wants to give up, and sometimes so do I.

This Sunday’s readings have an almost maniacal focus on persistence. Moses has to keep his hands held up in the air in order to win a battle, and, unable to do this on his own, he enlists people to actually hold his hands up for him! This is a delightful image, but it’s also a little strange. It sort of sounds like God is one of those vending machines that you can only get the candy out of if you jog it in just the right way, but then if you’re lucky you’ll get two! Except in this story, what you get is mowing down your enemies with a sword, which is far less sweet-sounding.

The Gospel has a story that I love, about this judge who doesn’t give a damn about God or anybody, and the persistent widow who keeps after him to give her a just decision. As with the Moses story, I can picture it perfectly. It is basically the strategy my mother has taught me for dealing with difficult people, especially in a customer service context—just keep calling them until they have to do something about you. Persist where God’s concerned, this story says to me, just barrel forward, and things will come out all right in the end.

“[B]e persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient,” the letter to Timothy insists, and for a moment I am heartened—but I can’t help but feel a bit intimidated, too, and it’s not just by the striking number of things I could potentially persist in. It’s by the idea that someone is always also going to be persisting in opposition to me, that what I see as remaining faithful to what I have learned and believed will be someone else’s something to persist against. What if the other guys keep their hands up longer? What if somebody else is there knocking on the judge’s door before I get up in the morning? What happens when we all think we’re the beleaguered widows, and we just keep pushing and pushing against each other?

I know it’s supposed to be a good thing. Just keep praying, don’t stop. God will hear you. But I’m feeling a little on edge. Midterm elections are coming up, replete with the steel edged righteousness of this whole Tea Party business. Kids persecuted for their perceived sexuality are killing themselves (I always think of the parents, of the impossible transformation of a room in your home to this place of death). Gay men were tortured in the Bronx (Every time I see a train going to the Bronx I feel a little strange, like it means something different now, or it should, like I don’t know exactly where I live anymore). A match is poised to be struck near Sudan’s powder keg. I’m worried about all this mowing down with a sword going on. I’m not feeling so brave. I get a bit of a chill when I hear how persistent we should be with our prayers, because I know what some people are praying for, and it scares me half to death. And I know that my prayers might do the same for them.

“Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth,” the psalm tells me. “Pray always without becoming weary,” the Gospel urges, calling it a “necessity”. What would a just answer to everybody’s prayers even look like? Would I know it when I saw it? Would those praying so earnestly in opposition to my prayers? It would have to be something strange, I’m sure, something barely recognizable, except by the wild crackle of grace, like static electricity in a sheet just out of the dryer, transforming your mundanest of chores into this new, surprising risk. What else could give justice to us all?

Persist, the readings say, persist in prayer. I think of teaching that student. We both swim in a sea of meaning. I draw an awkward picture of a radiator, and wave my hands wildly to delineate the vast iciness of a glacier. Again and again we cannot understand each other, we cannot meet, but I find new words, get to the bottom where there are no words, flail and draw and gibber and describe. He listens, frowns, smiles, lies and says he understands. At last his eyes light and he says, “I know! I know that one.”

Persist. God, it’s me. I’m feeling so persecuted and so unworthy of your attention and so pissed off at you for your apparent distraction. I’m feeling so helpless and attacked. I’m feeling like I should be doing something and it’s as big as a glacier and as urgent as a battle, but I don’t know what it’s called, do you? I’m afraid you love the others more than me. When I was a child I was so sure of you. Save everyone, ok? All of us. And all of them. God, it’s me. It’s me. God? God. I’m here. I’m here.

Rebecca Lynne Fullan finds tutoring, doing the dishes, getting up in the morning, writing, and prayer all lessons in persistence. As is spelling persistence, which she persistently tries to do with an a at the end.

]]> http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/17/keep-on-truckin/feed/ 0 Jen & Kate 1253866_glacier_wall http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/13/the-bullies-aren%e2%80%99t-just-kids-and-sometimes-they-speak-in-god%e2%80%99s-name/ http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/13/the-bullies-aren%e2%80%99t-just-kids-and-sometimes-they-speak-in-god%e2%80%99s-name/#comments Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:00:44 +0000 Kate Dugan & Jen Owens http://fromthepewsintheback.com/?p=2113 ]]> by Kate Henley Averett

For weeks now, I’ve been thinking nearly constantly about the climate for LGBTQ people in our country. It’s hard not to: the recent media attention given to suicides of LGBTQ youth, most of whom had been bullied in their middle and high schools, has gotten a lot of people talking about it. The responses have been varied – from everyday folks reaching out to bullied youth via You Tube to tell them that it gets better, to discussion on television shows from public figures like Ellen DeGeneres, Anderson Cooper, and a whole host of celebrities appearing on Larry King Live, about what causes bullying and what we should be doing about it.

But the few responses that have struck me the most have been from those who have called out the American public – namely public religious and political figures – for modeling the very bullying behavior we, as a nation, are acting so surprised and perplexed over. Comedian Sarah Silverman had a particularly pointed video message for America in which she said:

Dear America: When you tell gay Americans that they can’t serve their country openly or marry the person that they love, you’re telling that to kids, too. So don’t be f***ing shocked and wonder where all these bullies are coming from that are torturing young kids and driving them to kill themselves because they’re different. They learned it from watching you.

Similarly, in a video commentary/PSA for the Trevor Project, queer ally, activist, and comedian Kathy Griffin quipped:

So let’s talk about these bullies. I just don’t think they came up with this anti-gay bias on their own. They weren’t born with it. The politicians, so-called religious leaders, and pundits who have made careers out of saying that being gay is wrong, or immoral, or that gays are somehow less than, they all have blood on their hands. Yes, all you anti-gay public figures, and you know who you are, you have the blood of these dead teens on your hands. Remember trickle-down economics back in the ‘80s? Well this is just trickle down homophobia.

What Silverman and Griffin both point to here is an idea that Catholics should find it easy to get behind – that when something is wrong with part of a society, it tends to have ramifications throughout. Put differently, when one part of the body is hurting, does the rest of the body not feel its pain? When one part of the body is infected by hateful, biased rhetoric, would we not expect this infection to spread to other parts of the body?

It was with all this on my mind that I opened an email this past week from Cody Maynus, a student at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, telling about an incident at the University in which a group of GLBTQ and allied students, who wore rainbow pins and ribbons to Mass to stand in solidarity with GLBTQ Catholics, were denied communion by the Archbishop of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

The back story to this incident is that Archibishop Nienstedt recently worked with the other bishops in Minnesota to produce and distribute 400,000 DVDs aimed at Catholic households across the state detailing the Church’s stance on same-sex marriage. According to this Associated Press article, the DVD included a call by Archbishop Neinstedt for a public vote to amend the Minnesota Constitution to define marriage on strictly heterosexual terms. There have been several moves by Catholics to express their displeasure over this campaign, including an organized movement to return the DVDs to the archdiocese.

The 25 or so members of the St. John’s University/College of St. Benedict community (including students, sisters and one monk) who decided to wear rainbow ribbons and pins to the mass that the Archbishop, didn’t seem to think of their act as political per se. One student, Elizabeth Gleich, told reporters that they were simply hoping to make a statement, both to the Archbishop, that they disagreed with the DVD campaign, and to LGBTQ Catholics, that they were in solidarity with them. The Archbishop, however, saw things differently, and decided to deny them communion. Archdiocesan spokesman Dennis McGrath told reporters, “[The rainbow is] a symbol of the GLBT movement en masse, and it was intended as a protest. It was pretty obvious.”

At the end of the day, whether the statement the students were making was political or not is, to me, not the point. The point is that Archbishop Neinstedt, through his DVD campaign and through the act of denying GLBTQ and allied students communion, is contributing to the anti-gay rhetoric that is plaguing our country and having drastic, even deadly effects. Imagine being a 13-year-old kid and being gay, or questioning your sexuality, and coming home after being bullied at school to find your parents watching a DVD in which some of the most revered men in your faith tradition are railing against gay marriage. Bullying and anti-gay talk isn’t just following you home from school via facebook at this point, but it’s coming at you from people who you have been taught to respect, to trust, and to view as carriers of God’s truth. Can you imagine how such a message would make you feel? And at the same time, many of the kids who are bullying you at school are coming home to see this same message, and from it, they take away a sense of divine justification for their actions. To then read in the news that the Archbishop has denied the Eucharist – the source and summit of our faith – to those who stand in solidarity with LGBTQ Catholics, only further reinforces this idea that the bullies are right, that gay people are somehow less than, less important, less deserving of God’s love and the love of God’s people, than straight people.

Public figures with anti-gay messages are bullies, too. They bully with their words, and with their actions designed to publicly reprimand and exclude those who don’t conform to their ideas of what’s right. And as hard as it might be to hear it, our religious authorities are part of this group. If we care about the well-being of LGBTQ youth, and we want the bullying in schools to stop, we have to tell the grown-up bullies to stop, too.

Whether you’re feeling dissatisfied, angry, concerned, sad, or outraged, there are things you can do to take action. Please consider writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper expressing your concern, as a Catholic, over the stance of Catholic officials on LGBTQ issues. Make a You Tube video, write a blog post, or do something to make a public statement to LGBTQ youth – and adults – that the views of the hierarchy do not represent the views of all Catholics, and that there many Catholics out there who love these youth as the beautiful children of God that they are. Wear a rainbow ribbon to show your support and solidarity. While these actions may be seen as inappropriately political by the Catholic hierarchy, I challenge you to remember that in a climate like this, silence – interpreted as assenting to the Church’s words and actions – is just as political and just as powerful a statement.

Kate Henley Averett holds an MDiv from Harvard University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Texas – Austin. She is outraged by the way society treats LGBTQ people, especially youth, and she hopes that you are, too.

]]> http://fromthepewsintheback.com/2010/10/13/the-bullies-aren%e2%80%99t-just-kids-and-sometimes-they-speak-in-god%e2%80%99s-name/feed/ 5 Jen & Kate rainbow-ribbon-270