The day after the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law of the land, J. Patrick Hornbeck II married Patrick Anthony Bergquist at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan.
This would hardly be newsworthy, except for the fact that Hornbeck is the Chairman of the Theology Department at Fordham University, a Catholic university run by the Jesuits.
For the whole article read here.
UPDATE HERE
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This Post Has 3 Comments
its so difficult to know what to think. Homosexuality exists in nature, so i guess that God made some people gay and therefore I think that homophobia in any form is unchristian and illogical. However, i also firmly believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.
The other way of looking at it is that homosexuality exists because we are part of a fallen world and its NOT God’s plan. I really don’t know.
To Emma/Emma: Identical twin studies give the lie to the inevitability of the homosexual predisposition, or at the least of there being a necessity to follow such a genetic predisposition behaviorally. Beware of this line of argumentation, because you leave yourself open to a kind of “determinism,” in which free will is not truly free. One might just as well claim that adulterous behavior is genetically determined — it’s just that the geneticists and other materialists haven’t been able to “prove” it yet, though you are so confident that “someday” they will! In point of fact, you are then left with nothing but materialism, in which “we” don’t even exist, not as truly free agents. This existential question is in fact answered in the Bible: God says “I AM WHO AM”; and Genesis says that we humans are made in God’s image! We, though possessing a nature, are body and soul, intellect & will.
Try another point of view: ALL sin, and our tendency to sin, is potentially genetically determined! However, with the grace of Baptism, and the grace of the sacraments — including especially Confession — we are given the needed help, in a community of believers, to “deny the flesh”. “The” flesh here just as Steve Ray points out in one of his talks on John chapter 6, on the Eucharist — as in earthly things in general. We are in the world but are not to live as though “of” the world! Indeed, in some ways, we should accept all our own failings as a participation in Christ’s sufferings, and our willingness to take up our crosses, and not to throw them down and surrender to our failings, is the supreme test of our own love for Jesus.
Jesus Himself felt incomparable love for all of us — that is, indeed, what He felt when He hung upon the cross — this is something that I have been given to believe and even, a bit, to experience (though a bit frighteningly), through prayer and meditation on Jesus on the cross! (I say “given” because all of our consolations in this life are gifts and are not something that we attain to on our own power!) We are to live — not we, but Christ in us, and through us, as St. Paul says in Galatians 2:20 — and that includes the cross.
For some people, that cross is a predilection to gossip; for some, it is to commit adultery; for others, to be jealous (all the deadly sins can fit this description). In a sense, it is with joy that we accept and embrace, with Christ, our suffering when we deny ourselves! Unless we take up our crosses…… It is a gift to see our sufferings united with Christ’s — He Who lived and walked amongst us precisely, in a sense, actually to live OUR lives, as well as His own — to feel and to experience OUR lives. “He became sin” (2 Cor. 5:21).
Be at peace, dear Emma! God loves all of us! ALL of us have our little crosses to bear. Denying our Lord the LOVE of denying ourselves is unthinkable. We are here not to “dominate” our lives — they are not our own, anyway! We are here to give our lives, all of them, to Jesus! Without reservation!
That he’s a professor at a Jesuit school makes this no more of a surprise than if he worked for an art studio in the Castro District.
The next American Jesuit who publicly condemns gay “marriage” will be the first.
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