Thread: Vatican Disputes White House Guest List for Papal Visit

Invitations to transgender activists, first openly gay U.S. Episcopal bishop and activist nun to White House event prompt pushback

By Francis X. Rocca
Sept. 17, 2015 7:45 p.m. ET

On the eve of Pope Francis’s arrival in the U.S., the Vatican has taken offense at the Obama administration’s decision to invite to the pope’s welcome ceremony transgender activists, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an activist nun who leads a group criticized by the Vatican for its silence on abortion and euthanasia.

According to a senior Vatican official, the Holy See worries that any photos of the pope with these guests at the White House welcoming ceremony next Wednesday could be interpreted as an endorsement of their activities.

The tension exemplifies concerns among conservative Catholics, including many bishops, that the White House will use the pope’s visit to play down its differences with church leaders on such contentious issues as same-sex marriage and the contraception mandate in the health care law.

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment on the Vatican’s reaction to the ceremony’s guest list. White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Thursday he was unaware of the names of individuals on the guest list, but cautioned against drawing any conclusions on specific guests “because there will be 15,000 other people there too.”

In the last few days, several people have acknowledged or made public their receipt of invitations to the event, which will be held on the White House’s South Lawn on the morning of Pope Francis’ first full day in the U.S.

Among the expected guests is Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a self-described “Catholic social justice lobby” in Washington. A spokesman for Network, Joe Ward, said in an email message that the organization was unaware of any tension with the Vatican over the invitation to Sister Campbell.

In 2012, the Vatican’s doctrinal office cited ties to Network as one of its reasons for ordering an overhaul of the Leadership Council of Women Religious, an umbrella group that claims about 1,500 leaders of religious orders, representing 80% of U.S. nuns. That decision drew wide protests in the U.S. The overhaul ended in April, having effected few substantive changes.

The Vatican had cited Network in connection to the LCWR’s failure to promote Catholic Church teaching against abortion and euthanasia.

In 2010, Sister Campbell drafted a “nuns’ letter” signed by 60 heads of religious orders and umbrella groups urging Congress to pass the health care bill even though it contained provisions that the U.S. bishops said would provide for abortion funding and require private insurers, including Catholic institutions, to provide contraceptives in violation of Catholic teaching.

In 2012, Sister Campbell led the first “Nuns on the Bus” tour to protest proposed cuts in federal funding for social services.

According to the Network website, other members of the Nuns on the Bus will join Sister Campbell at the White House on Wednesday, and Sister Campbell will attend Pope Francis’ address to Congress the next day as the guest of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Bishop Gene Robinson, who has also been invited to the pope’s welcoming ceremony, is a former Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay Episcopal bishop in the U.S. He is also an ex-spouse in a same-sex marriage. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Another guest, Mateo Williamson, is a former co-head of the transgender caucus of Dignity USA, a group for LGBT Catholics. He said the Vatican’s disapproval of his presence at the ceremony “speaks to the necessity for continued dialogue” between transgender Catholics and the church hierarchy.

“This is really not so much of a political statement as it is the reality that there are so many LGBT Catholics and family members of LGBT people who would really benefit from this message coming from the White House,” he said.

Mr. Williamson, who is transgender, said he would be attending the ceremony as a guest of Vivian Taylor, a transgender woman who was invited by the White House and who formerly served as executive director of Integrity USA, an LBGT advocacy group in the Episcopal Church.

The presence of these figures is especially irritating, the Vatican official said, because it isn’t yet clear if the White House has invited any representatives of the U.S. anti-abortion movement, traditionally a high-priority cause for the U.S. bishops.

The White House is seeking to play down its differences with Catholic Church leaders during Pope Francis’ visit, and to emphasize areas in which President Obama’s agenda aligns with the pope’s.

Two such areas include combatting climate change, which the pope called for in his May encyclical on the environment, and the recent rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba, in which the pope played a key role behind the scenes.

Pope Francis is likely to speak several times during his U.S. visit about environmental protection and to call for lifting the economic embargo against Cuba.

Some U.S. bishops hope the pope will also address their concerns about what they consider threats to religious liberty, specifically in regard to the contraception mandate and the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision to recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

For instance, some church leaders fear that anti-discrimination laws could force Catholic schools and institutions to hire and extend benefits to spouses in same-sex marriages, despite church teaching that marriage is exclusively the union of a man and a woman.

The pope will give a speech dedicated to religious liberty at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park on Sept. 26, his second-to-last day in the U.S.

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/vat...gyWj?mg=id-wsj

President Obama will apparently test just how far Pope Francis’ notorious tolerance will go by inviting a rogue’s gallery of people opposed to Catholic teaching to greet the pontiff at the White House during his visit next week.

In a stunning show of political indecorum, Obama has invited a series of individuals who publicly flout Catholic teaching, including a pro-abortion religious sister, a transgender woman and the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, along with at least two Catholic gay activists.

The White House was illuminated in gay pride colors on June 26, 2015, after the Supreme Court legalized gay same-sex marriage.

One of the invitees, retired Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson, made history by becoming the first openly gay episcopal bishop in 2003 and subsequently the first to divorce his gay partner in 2014, after having previously separated from his wife of 14 years. He has attended a number of religious events with the Obama administration, offering a prayer at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and taking part in the 2014 National Prayer Breakfast.

Mateo Williamson, a cross-dressing woman and former co-chairman of the Transgender Caucus for Dignity USA, has also received an invitation to the White House for Pope Francis’ visit. Williamson says that though she now thinks of herself as a man, she continues to be attracted to males. “Today I identify as a gay man and before that was difficult to understand because I thought that in order to be transgender, in order to be a transgender male that I had to be attracted to females but I never have throughout my entire life.”

Though Pope Francis has said that he doesn’t believe in judging persons and is ready to welcome anyone in Christ’s name, he has also said that Catholics do not accept the modern mentality of transgenderism and once said that gay marriage is the devil’s “attempt to destroy God’s plan.”

“The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift,” Francis wrote in his encyclical letter on the environment, “is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.”

Earlier this month, the Vatican officially prohibited transgender persons from being baptismal godparents posing as the opposite sex from which they were born.

In its response, the Vatican Doctrinal Congregation said that “transsexual behavior publicly reveals an attitude contrary to the moral imperative of resolving the problem of one’s sexual identity according to the truth of one’s sexuality.”

Another White House invitee for the Pope’s visit, Sister Simone Campbell, is the pro-abortion executive director of the social justice lobby NETWORK. Campbell fought against the U.S. bishops when Obama’s Affordable Care Act was originally being debated, in an attempt to undermine their abortion and conscience concerns.

Sister Campbell will attend two events: the White House reception and Pope Francis’ address to Congress on Wednesday. Campbell famously helped organize the “Nuns on the Bus” a tour by Catholic religious women to protest the budget of then-Senator Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)

An intermediary for several of the invitations to greet the Pope was Vivian Taylor, a 30-year-old male transvestite who acted as Executive Director of Integrity USA, a homosexual and transgender activist wing of the Episcopal Church, until last March.

“A few months ago I received an invitation from the White House to attend the reception for Pope Francis,” Taylor told CNS News. “I was told I could bring several friends with me,” adding that he is “glad we can bring some LGBT representation to the event.”

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With open eyes and an open heart I joined the Catholic Church just a few years ago at the ripe old age of 43. I love my Church and I love Pope Francis and my trip to the Vatican last year was a highlight of my life. Being blessed by Francis in St. Peter’s Square is something I will never forget.

I should also add that one of the things I love about the Catholic Church is our disagreements. The last thing I want to do is sit in a Church that doesn’t spiritually or politically challenge me.

Nevertheless, until I learned this morning that Francis visited with the Little Sisters of the Poor, the nuns suing the Obama administration for relief from the persecution of a law (ObamaCare) that forces Catholics to violate their conscience, I was beyond frustrated with this Pope.

As our own government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood, an organization that butchers millions of innocent babies and sells off their body parts, the Pope ignoring that issue (and I hope the Holy Father will eventually address it) in favor of the unicorn of Global Warming is an abomination.

And when I live in a country where the poor have air conditioning and cable bills and iPhones and an obesity problem, with all due respect, the Pope’s attacks on capitalism are anti-science. Nothing has done more to lift the poor out of true poverty than free enterprise. If you want to see where true poverty still exists, visit a socialist country — any country where the government has “solved” wealth inequality.

And then there’s the issue of immigration.

Pope Francis urged Catholic bishops in the United States to open their doors to immigrants, asserting that “these people will enrich America and its Church.”

As a Latin American, the Pope apologized for “pleading my own case,” when speaking about the influx of Hispanic immigrants into the United States. He also thanked the bishops for the work they have done for immigrants in this country. …

“Perhaps you will be challenged by their diversity,” he said. “But know that they also possess resources meant to be shared. So do not be afraid to welcome them.”

The Pope also urged the bishops to offer immigrants “the warmth of the love of Christ.”

Again, I mean no disrespect but this is coming from a man who lives in a city-state completely surrounded, literally, by giant walls. Vatican City is a literal fortress.

What would happen to Vatican City if it was to do what Francis is asking America to do?

I’m assuming Pope Francis could order such a thing tomorrow, and after the walls came down he could also choose to greet the wave of “pilgrims” with the “warmth of the love of Christ.”

Of course Pope Francis would never do such a thing because he knows what would happen: Vatican City would be no more, everyone’s security and well-being would be compromised, and the standard of living for close to a thousand residents would be destroyed. Chaos would completely destroy the home of St. Peter.

Just as the loss of Vatican City would be detrimental to the world, so too will the loss of an America as we know it if our culture and free enterprise system is exploded into a giant welfare state by waves of immigrants embraced by mercenary, power-hungry Democrats desperate to use them to increase the power of the State.

Vatican City’s walls allow the Vatican to save itself in order to hold tight to an invaluable culture that exports its generosity and charity and missionary work. Vatican City cannot take everyone in and survive. And it must remain Vatican City or be destroyed at the expense of all the incalculable good it does.

By all means, Pope Francis should push and prod and even shame America and Americans to give and give and give and give. We should do whatever we can to help the refugees in the Middle East and do whatever we can to influence and help Mexico and its people.

But we cannot do that if we’re no longer America.

And all I’m asking is that for the good of the world Pope Francis allow America the same border security the home of no less than St. Peter enjoys.

My Church challenges me. It’s something I invite. With love in my heart this is me, a faithful follower, gently pushing back.

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