Shadowlight's Lighthouse

Last week, at church, the Gospel reading was about Faith and Works, an important tenet of the Catholic belief system as I understand it. The homily (a sermon defined as being a clarification to the congregation of what the Bible readings mean and how they apply to the parishioners' lives) wasn't about faith or works. The bishop had asked that all priests instead read a statement from him about Gay Marriage and why it must not be allowed to be legal. Father LM, God bless him, prefaced it with a story about his early childhood in the Deep South in the 1930s, where the KKK ruled like secret police, how the Klan burned down the only Catholic church within 50 miles of his home, how the Catholics rebuilt it, and how the Klan waited for them to finish, then burned it down again. Father LM's point was that, since hating people was bad, the Church doesn't hate homosexual people just because it (apparently) hates homosexuality. My thought at the time was, "Bad Bishop! No Religious School Funding!"
This week, the Gospel reading had two messages. One was that anyone who does good in Christ's name is a Christian and will be rewarded. (I want to have cards printed up to hand out to evangelicals.) This part mirrored the Old Testament reading, where Moses is told by a scandalized Israelite that two tribe elders are prophesying in the camp, not in the religious tent off at a distance, and Moses says, "Would that _all_ the people of Israel were prophets, and had the Spirit with them." This part was not touched on in the homily at all. The second part was "If an eye offend thee, tear it out." Father F did a brief bit (the standard "this isn't literal") but explained that his marching orders were to play a DVD (yes, a DVD) of the bishop telling us why Gay Marriage was bad etc. Now, none of these churches are set up or equipped to give DVD video presentations, so they fiddled with, and finally, after four wrong buttons, played a little portable DVD player, laid out on the pulpit, with the pulpit microphone lowered to the speaker on the player. I sat there, incredulous and clenched in anger, listening to Bishop M make arguments about how 'traditional marriage has always been the standard throughout civilization', and 'Gay Marriage is a "dangerous sociological experiment"' and how 'a child needs a mother and a father, and two people of the same sex, regardless of how much they might love each other, are depriving that child of either a mother or a father' (no, seriously, these are his arguments.) I kept thinking, "I intend no harm to anyone in this church. I intend no harm..." Then, in the middle (unless he was just getting warmed up for a long one), I got up, and without a word, head down, steps determined, I walked out of the church.