NOTE: AS ALWAYS THIS IS SATIRE!
Prominent Jesuit writer, commentator, and personality Fr. Parent Ryan SJ, founder of the “LGBTQ Catholic ministry” named Outfall, has announced that his organization will be leading a commemorative pilgrimage to two historic sites of LGBTQABCDEFG++ history in the Middle East. Running in June 2027, the pilgrimage will pay respect to the victims of anti-LGBTQ violence in the two ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, where LGBTQABCDEFG++% “folx and folkind” faced persecution from the hands of a homophobic attack from the sky. But the trip, according to the pilgrimage coordinators, also has “nothing to do with the LGBTQ issue or anything going against Church teaching.”
Featuring memorial liturgies, bereavement services, counseling, affirmative action, bathhouses, emotional support animals, reflective Pride Parades, spaces for mutual support, pastoral counseling, and community building, and even more, the two-week-long pilgrimage scheduled by Fr. Parent Ryan and Outfall aims to help our rainbow siblings, the LGBTQABCDEFG++%$@ folks “process their identity, mourn their historical compatriox (yes this is the new LGBTQABCDEFG++%$@## folks affirming spelling!) and emerge reknewed in faith in mankind’s power to transcend the oppressive power structures of the past, to build a future where love is love is love is love (etc.), and be freed from the fearful heterosexist bigoted intolerance of prejudiced past paternalistic viewpoints about the tragic destruction of those two cities that a certain set of LGBTQ hostile homophobes wrote about in the biblical text as it has been received and interpreted within the living tradition.”
But it’s also, according to Fr. Parent Ryan, at the same time, about how “the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah mentioned in that old book called the Bible, err, actually, that really great gay-affirming book, really had nothing to do with LGBTQABCDEFG++%$@## issues. The real sin of those cities was a failure of hospitality. Their real sin, in fact, was actually a failure to open themselves up to the surprises of the spirit and welcome themselves into a loving relationship where bridges with LGBTQABCDEFG++%$@## folks could be lovingly built.”
Fr. Parent Ryan continued, “Really, Sodom and Gomorrah’s real sin was that even they were too homophobic to realize that the homophobes around them and in nature destroyed them for being too homophobic. Sodom and Gomorrah didn’t even have an annual Pride Mass or Pride Parade. Think about it. Sodomy never happened in Sodom. But it also should have happened. Our LGBTQ sisters and brothers and, well, other things face a marginalization just as severe, or even worse than anything that may or may not have happened in Sodom and Gomorrah. This pilgrimage is merely an invitation to encounter, to build bridges, to tear down walls, to tear down doctrine, err, well, bad habits of the mind that oppose effective altruistic dialogue. ”
Outfall hopes that publicizing the pilgrimage will force bigoted Catholics out into the open and force their bigotedness against a group of faithful Catholics who merely want to mourn the ministrations of bigoted bigotry and showcase these evil deeds by bringing them into the spotlight and creating authentic opportunities for building bridges towards effectual change that will drive out any residual patterns of exclusion.
“There are all kinds of pilgrimages. Dance pilgrimages, Luce pilgrimages, building-a-bridge pilgrimages, beer pilgrimages, computer pilgrimages, AI pilgrimages,” commented Cardinal Gunter Schuster of Dusseldorf, Germany, who will be a chaplain on the pilgrimage alongside Fr. Martin. “What’s another one, even a so-called LGBTQ one, when it’s run by faithful Catholics in full communion like Fr. Martin and myself? This pilgrimage has nothing to do with pushing LGBTQ stuff on the Church. It is my opinion that it should, but of course, it’s only my opinion as a private theologian.”
As of today’s announcement, the trip has already sold out to a mixed crowd of Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) and United Methodist clergy (err, make that clergix!), with an additional round of pilgrimages on the Outfall’s future agenda to meet the demand they’ve been experiencing for commemoration and mourning of the victims in this important aspect of LGBTQ history.
Outfall has already begun preliminary discussions with the Dicastery for Divine Worship about the possibility of a new optional memorial on the liturgical calendar: the “Commemoration of the Victims of Sodom and Gomorrah” to further help Catholics commemorate the brothers and sisters they need to be better at building bridges with, but who were so bigotedly destroyed so many years ago.
Cardinal Schuster added in a comment to The Daily Anathema that Outfall is looking at building shrines on the sites of Sodom and Gomorrah “to better serve pilgrims and help awaken the Church to the need to integrate the wounds of history into a better bridge that they can build back better toward a better future. This might make some people uncomfortable,” he stated. “But often discomfort is the very beginning of becoming alive and converting to a more inclusive faith that’s not afraid to reach out to the peripheries.”
The Vatican Dicastery for Communications, in reply to The Daily Anathema’s request for comment, stated that these “affairs provoke difficult questions that the next phase of synodality will hopefully be brave enough to begin challenging us all to answer.
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