A group that advocates on behalf of
LGBT Catholics is calling on Pope Francis to remove two leaders who
blamed the LGBT community for the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
In a statement released Wednesday,
Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, said
that “these churchmen have exploited the world's most dangerous
modern public health crisis to promote their own biased and
prejudiced views of LGBTQ people.”
In a letter released last week,
Cardinal Raymond Burke, a U.S. prelate currently living in Rome,
blamed the pandemic in part on efforts to promote LGBT equality.
“We need only to think of the
pervasive attack upon the integrity of human sexuality, of our
identity as man or woman, with the pretense of defining for
ourselves, often employing violent means, a sexual identity other
than that given to us by God,” Burke said. “With ever greater
concern, we witness the devastating effect on individuals and
families of the so-called 'gender theory,'”
“There is no question that great
evils like pestilence are an effect of original sin and of our actual
sins,” he added.
Bishop Ramon Castro of Cuernavaca,
Mexico blamed the crisis on the increasing acceptance of transgender
children, abortion and assisted suicide.
DeBernardo called on Pope Francis to
act.
“These irresponsible messages from
highly placed church leaders will only incite desperate people
seeking an ‘enemy’ behind the virus to perpetrate acts of
violence toward LGBTQ people,” DeBernardo
said. “Instead of saving lives, the bishop and cardinal are
endangering them.”
“Pope Francis should remove both men
from public ministry for dangerous and irresponsible language about
LGBTQ people, and also for promoting ignorant disinformation in the
midst of a global health crisis,” he said. “The Catholic Church,
a worldwide religion already widely discredited, cannot ignore such
recklessness.”