Las reacciones de los fieles

Andrew Sullivan empieza a publicar reacciones de los católicos a los dictados de Roma:

GRACE AND GAYS: An email that speaks to the spiritual distress many of us are in right now:

I've been especially torn the last year with what has transpired in the church with regard to gays. I attend mass but can't bring myself to go to communion. I'm in a small diocese (Helena, Montana) and know the bishop, who was taught by my father, and recently suggested to him that the not so sotto voce message I and many gays are getting is that of all God's people, gays are one group the Catholic church no longer pretends to want in the fold. His silent stare confirmed that conclusion. While my personal family has always accepted me, I'm still stunned at the feeling of devastation I have experienced as a once beautiful and open church has so dramatically turned, and turned with such force against gays, both in the laity and the clergy.

I studied under a great Belgian Jesuit at the Catholic University of Louvain, Piet Fransen, who took two years to expound upon Grace, "the living, loving presence of God in the world, the church, and us." I have thought of those days, and the lessons I learned. I have told my gay friends that leaving the Church is for me impossible, for it would be to abandon grace which I have found in every turn of my life, in family, friends, lovers; in the communities I have known, including parishes and dioceses. It was not merely a "church" we are asked to leave, but the belief that we and our lives are part of that loving presence. I've come to realize that it is the Church which now has come to declare our lives and our existence as gay Catholics to be grace-free zones. Perhaps that is why my bishop was able to stand quiet, his silence confirming that neither he nor the Church saw anything in our lives worthy of being part of his church.

To feel, as I do, unable to attend communion any more because of the new hierarchy is one thing. The loss is enormous. But to be informed that you are somehow inherently morally sick is quite another.

NOW, THE FAMILIES: The impact of the new baldly bigoted policy of the Vatican toward gays is not just restricted to gay priests or gay Catholics, but affects their families as well. I know my own family has been torn up by the new anti-gay stance. Others are as well. Here's an email that speaks to the widespread pain wrought by the proposed ban on gay priests and apparent papal assertion that homosexuality represents a "serious personality disorder":

I, too have felt the complete and utter devastation of the Catholic church's new and most hateful policies designed (in my opinion) to push out every last gay Catholic. But let me point out that this is not just affecting the Catholic gay community, but everyone who loves them. As a cradle Catholic and married mother of 3 children, one of them gay, I have found it utterly impossible to pass through the doors of a Catholic church for some time now. I have three children in different stages of their education in three different schools - two in Jesuit Universities and one in a Catholic high school. And though our experience with the Jesuits has been most wonderful, the conclusion reached by this family of five is that we can no longer be a part of a church that has deemed one of our beloved family "evil". I am all cried out, heartbroken, a bit lost, but at peace with our decision."