The Battle for Pentecost

By Diogenes ( articles ) | May 26, 2004

[St. Harvey Milk, by iconographer Robert Lentz, O.F.M]

Gay Catholics are planning to make Pentecost Sunday into an agit-prop fest by presenting themselves for communion wearing rainbow sashes. Chicago's Cardinal George has instructed his priests to refuse them, and his reasoning is dead on target (thanks to Otto-da-Fe for the link):

Tthe cardinal wrote that wearing the sash indicates disagreement with church teaching that gay sexual relations are sinful, and therefore those who wear the sash should not receive communion.

"The Rainbow Sash movement wants its members to be fully accepted in the Church not on the same conditions as any Catholic, but precisely as gay," the cardinal wrote. "With this comes the requirement that the Church change her moral teaching which is from the Lord and his Apostles."

The overall strategy is not in doubt. In the short term, gays want to do to Pentecost what rad-fems have done to Valentine's Day (with the annual V Monologues controversy) -- i.e., to overwhelm the traditional meaning of the feast with political shock tactics so that, by a kind of Pavlovian stimulus-response, to think of Pentecost is to think of rainbow sashes is to think of gays is to think of ... herpes simplex, or Rembert's Nantucket Dream.

Will gays succeed in soiling the idea of Pentecost? Probably not. But anyone who thinks that their assaults on the Church will fizzle and fade away has not been paying attention. It's war. It's going to be with us a long time.