Dan Savage, discussing the recent gay-bashing incident in which a group of classmates from Archbishop Wood Catholic high school attacked two men in Philadelphia on 11 September:
Catholic bishops do real violence and real harm to gay couples whenever and wherever they can: economic violence, social violence, spiritual violence.
Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, responding to the brutal gay-bashing incident Savage is discussing:
Violence against anyone, simply because of who they are, is inexcusable and alien to what it means to be a Christian.
Archbishop Chaput speaking as archbishop of Denver in 2010, when a Catholic school in his archdiocese refused to enroll the children of a lesbian couple who were practicing Catholics:
If parents don’t respect the beliefs of the Church, or live in a manner that openly rejects those beliefs, then partnering with those parents becomes very difficult, if not impossible.
But as the archbishop went on to admit, Catholic schools do routinely enroll the children of divorced parents, of single parents, of non-Catholic parents, of parents whose moral stances do not, in all sorts of ways, match the ideals held up for them by Catholic moral teaching.
One of the mothers of the children denied enrollment at a Catholic school in Archbishop Chaput's diocese in Colorado in 2010:
She [the principal of this Catholic school] sat me down and told me we were no longer accepted here any more.
And if that's not an act of egregious spiritual and social violence — one explicitly defended by Archbishop Chaput in 2010 — I don't know how to define spiritual and social violence. Since it's hard to imagine an act of spiritual and social violence greater than informing someone that he/she is no longer accepted by, no longer welcome in, a community to which that person has previously belonged.
Especially one that claims to be all about welcoming everyone.
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