Cardinal Robert McElroy brings with him to the nation’s capital a lengthy, disturbing history of promoting views at odds with the Magisterium of the Church.
(LifeSiteNews) — New Ways Ministry (NWM), a dissident pro-LGBT group presenting itself as a Catholic organization, issued a statement declaring that it is “delighted that Pope Francis has appointed Cardinal Robert McElroy as the next archbishop of Washington, D.C.”
“The most exciting feature about this appointment for New Ways Ministry is the cardinal’s strong positive statements regarding LGBTQ+ issues,” declared the group’s executive director, Francis DeBernardo.
“Cardinal McElroy has been appointed to the nation’s capital at a time when a new presidential administration and Congress have strongly indicated that legislation repealing civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people are at the top of their agendas,” DeBernardo said. “We are confident that Cardinal McElroy can provide a strong Catholic voice affirming the human dignity of LGBTQ+ people and the need for laws that will protect them.”
DeBernardo went on to catalog the many reasons that NWM is ecstatic over McElroy’s promotion, beginning by praising him for describing “anti-LGBTQ+” reactions as nothing more than a “demonic mystery of the human soul.”
He continued:
In 2018, McElroy publicly refuted the way gay priests were scapegoated for the clergy sexual abuse crisis, saying that such abuse was a matter of power, not sexual orientation.A cardinal with a long, disturbing history is headed to DCThat same year, he supported Aaron Bianco, a gay pastoral worker in his diocese who was threatened with harm by traditionalist churchgoers because of being married to a man.
In 2016, he was the first (and one of just a few) who offered condolences to the LGBTQ+ community after the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, saying the tragedy was “a call for us as Catholics to combat ever more vigorously the anti-gay prejudice which exists in our Catholic community and in our country.”
That same year, McElroy supported Pope Francis’ apology to gay and lesbian people, and he called for greater affirmation and welcome for the LGBTQ+ community.
McElroy brings with him a long, broad, disturbing history of promoting views at odds with the Magisterium of the Church.
He has issued calls to admit the divorced and “remarried,” and people actively engaged in homosexual lifestyles, to receive Holy Communion. Indeed, McElroy has staunchly opposed Church teaching on the “intrinsically disordered” nature of homosexual activity, decrying the Catechism of the Catholic Church as employing “very destructive language” on the issue. The cardinal has backed the work of notorious LGBT advocate Father James Martin, S.J., and suggested that same-sex “marriages” can “enrich the lives” of participants.
In 2021, as a bishop, McElroy defended admittance to Holy Communion of Catholic politicians who openly support abortion, contrasting with the prohibition stipulated in Canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law, and calling any such denial a “political weapon.”
CondemnedFounded in 1977 by pro-LGBT nun Jeannine Gramick, NWM was officially condemned by the Vatican in 1999.
Despite this, the group has enjoyed a sweeping rehabilitation under Francis, who has written letters of support and even met with Gramick along with her heterodox collaborators at the Vatican.
In 2010, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) declared that NWM “has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church” to speak on the LGBT issue.
“No one should be misled by the claim that New Ways Ministry provides an authentic interpretation of Catholic teaching and an authentic Catholic pastoral practice,” wrote Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., Archbishop of Chicago on behalf of the USCCB.
“Their claim to be Catholic only confuses the faithful regarding the authentic teaching and ministry of the Church with respect to persons with a homosexual inclination,” George said. “Accordingly, I wish to make it clear that, like other groups that claim to be Catholic but deny central aspects of Church teaching, New Ways Ministry has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church and that they cannot speak on behalf of the Catholic faithful in the United States.”
As LifeSiteNews has reported for many years, NWM does not seek to help Catholics struggling with same-sex attraction or gender confusion live chaste, holy lives. Rather, it is striving to normalize the LGBT agenda in the Church by radically altering and even abolishing long-established Church teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts, transgenderism, sex-change surgeries, and a range of other sexual behaviors.
The Catholic Church unequivocally condemns homosexual acts.
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church states.
The Catechism is equally clear on what constitutes a family, stating, “A man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family. This institution is prior to any recognition by public authority, which has an obligation to recognize it.”
