Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: An Eye-Opening Dialogue About Pope's Year of Mercy and Catholic Gay-Bashing

One Purgatrix Ineptiae, responding* to Joshua McElwee's article at National Catholic Reporter noting that Pope Francis has opened a Jubilee year calling for a church that puts mercy before judgment:

The number of people whose response has been, "Hooray! A year of mercy! I can't wait to bash the people I hate! Let's bash Archbishop Chaput! Let's bash George Weigel! Let's bash JP2! I just love mercy!" is a pretty good indication of what a flop the whole thing is likely to be.

Victor Victoria responding to Ms. Ineptiae:

Good grief! This from someone who has been bashing away with gay abandon for quite a while now ... I know, because as a gay man, I've been on the receiving end of your incessant gay bashing invective. 

I would say that your post exemplifies the psychoanalytical phenomenon of projection ... and that you really, really want the whole thing to be a flop, because who in their right mind would ever place mercy before judgement! 

In the words of Pope Francis, "In the Catholic church we have some -- many -- who believe they possess the absolute truth and they go on sullying others through slander and defamation and this is wrong. Religious fundamentalism must be combated. It is not religious, God is lacking, it is idolatrous." 

These fundamentalists seem to despise God's promiscuous showing of mercy to those on the peripheries (à la the older son). Francis has got it, Chaput and Weigel ... probably not. (By their fruits and all that.)

And, of course, the uncomfortable reality confronting the nice rhetoric about mercy is that Ms. Ineptiae and others in her gay-bashing camp lay claim to the title Catholic with perfect right, as someone responding to Victor Victoria who claims to be gay and living with the "cross" of his "disorder" and "sin" tells Victor. It's Ms. Ineptiae's church because she and other gay-bashing thugs like her have been able to drive gay folks who refuse to hate or apologize for ourselves from their church — as the powerful "liberal" Catholic academic and journalistic establishments have stood by in perfect silence.

And as the top leaders of the Catholic church have refused to speak out even when LGBT people are being targeted by violence in many places in the world . . . . 

It's Ms. Ineptiae's church. And she knows it, and crows about it with perfect freedom in the dialogue spaces of NCR, while this and other "liberal" Catholic journals continue to collude with the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church in pretending that LGBT suffering is not real suffering, and that there are bigger problems in the world to deal with — real ones — than the question of the humanity of LGBT persons.

* Addendum the next day, 9 Dec.: it appears that the moderators have now deleted the comment by Purgatrix Ineptiae.