Foundation funds pro-homosexual events on Catholic campuses

December 05, 2011

A recent conference series on “Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church,” held at two Catholic universities as well as two secular institutions, was subsidized by a foundation with a long history of support for homosexual attacks on Catholic Church teaching, the Cardinal Newman Society has discovered.

The “More Than a Monologue” conference series included four sessions, held at Fordham and Fairfield universities, Yale Divinity School, and the Union Theological Seminary. The conferences were dominated by radical critics of Catholic teaching.

In supporting multiple direct challenges to Church teaching, the conferences apparently violated promises made to Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the Cardinal Newman Society reports. The prelates had reportedly received assurances that the conferences would not be "vehicles for dissent."

At one conference, participants joined in a ceremony that was called a “CatholiQ Mass” (with the “Q” standing for “queer”), in which lay people said the prayers of consecration. A principal organizer of the series, Paul Lakeland—an ex-priest who now teaches at Fairfield University—said that the ceremony “was done very tastefully.”

The “More Than a Monologue” series was underwritten by the Arcus Foundation, which supports “organizations around the world working to advance lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) human rights.” In the past the Arcus Foundation has given substantial support to proponents of women’s ordination, to the dissident groups Dignity and New Ways Ministry, and to an effort by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to build a homosexual network within the Catholic Church.

 

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Further information:

• Dissent and Sacrilege at ‘More Than a Monologue’ Conferences (Cardinal Newman Society)
• Dueling monologues (On the News, 9/16)