I have written quite a bit about that parish and the gay-enabling filth that has poured forth from that place for many years; see here, here, here. Regrettably a sizable portion of the parishioners seem to be of Muth's homophile mindset. They conducted a meeting to discuss this development, and possible actions they would take. A Defend Life reporter attended that meeting. After she was recognized, she was ejected. No one questions their right to remove people from their meetings. However, one can wonder why they were so afraid to have a reporter in attendance. What did they have to hide?
She wrote the following article, that I'll append below. I'll have more commentary, with actions that you can take to help restore spiritual health to the Church in Baltimore.
Abp. Lori orders
early retirement of LGBT activist priest
Denies Fr. Muth’s
request to stay on; parishioners plan pushback
Archbishop William Lori has told
Father Joseph Muth, pastor of St. Matthew and Blessed Sacrament parishes in
Baltimore, that he wants the long-time LGBT activist priest to retire in
September 2020, at age 72.
Father Muth told his parishioners
that he asked the Archbishop that he be allowed to remain until he was 75, but
that Lori denied his request.
Muth, who was ordained in the
Archdiocese of Baltimore in 1974 and has served in various archdiocesan
churches since then, has labored indefatigably for years to promote not just
acceptance but downright approval of active homosexual and other LGBT behavior
by both St. Matthew Church and the Catholic Church in general.
The priest has been an active member
of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based national organization founded in 1977 to
push for acceptance of active gay and lesbian Catholics within the Catholic
Church.
The Congregation of the Doctrine of
Faith condemned the group’s positions on homosexuality in 1999.
Father Muth’s pro-homosexual efforts
have met with payoff.
In 2015 Newsweek.com ran with a
hugely sympathetic article and videos about the LEAD (LGBT Education and
Affirming Diversity) Ministry, which Muth founded at St. Matthew.
The following year, the Baltimore
Museum of Art hosted an exhibit featuring videos extolling Muth’s efforts,
through LEAD, to condone homosexual behavior.
On February 18, about fifty people
attended a meeting in St. Matthew parish hall to launch a campaign opposing
Archbishop Lori’s retirement dictum.
“This is the first of three meetings
we will have,” explained former priest Peter McIver, who helped conduct the
meeting. “We don’t want to have a knee-jerk
reaction—we want to get ideas and strategy.”
Father Muth, present at the meeting,
quoted from the Letter of James 1, 2:
“Count it all joy, my brethren, when you meet various trials, for you
know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.”
His listeners responded with
enthusiastic applause.
One of the meeting organizers then
read aloud Father Muth’s lengthy statement, which he had given at his January
15-16 Masses.
“The Archbishop wants me to retire” in
September 2020, he told his congregants.
Archdiocesan policy calls for a
priest to notify the archbishop when he turns 70, he explained.
Muth said he wrote to the Archbishop
that he would be 70 in 2018. He asked
him for permission to stay until 2023, “when I turn 75.”
One reason for his request, he said,
was to see his pastorate “through the final stages of its strategic planning
process.”
The Archbishop, in a January 2020
letter, replied that “after careful consideration,” he thought it would be “in
the best interests” to keep the original retirement date of September 2020.
After the organizer finished reading
Father Muth’s statement, the priest commented to the audience, “Messengers come
and go—however, the message stays the same:
All are welcome.”
The organizer then fielded questions
for Muth from the audience, which two helpers posted on large sheets of paper.
Many of the questions revealed the
questioners’ anger and frustration at the Archbishop’s retirement mandate.
“What is meant by ‘after careful
consideration’?” asked one person.
“Why did they pick on Father Muth?”
asked another.
“Is this the only parish that has a
reputation of being as liberal and welcome to all?” a woman asked.
Another woman asked Muth directly,
“Do you have the sense that you know that [Lori’s retirement mandate] is
because of your activism to the immigrants and the LGBT community?”
“I have a sense that that is part of
it,” Muth admitted. “But there are three
other parishes with an active LGBT group, and five others are considering it.”
While the questioning was
proceeding, a man in the audience, who earlier had mentioned that he was part
of the LEAD Ministry, saw a Defend Life
reporter sitting next to him taking notes, and asked if she was a reporter, and
with whom.
When she told him, he immediately
got up and walked over to Father Muth, who was standing nearby, and whispered
to him.
A few minutes later, the woman
conducting the questioning announced, “This is a safe place, where a person can
give their thoughts and opinions freely.
We’re going to pause for several minutes and ask that anyone who is
planning on reporting the meeting to respect that and leave.”
She looked straight at the reporter.
The reporter objected to the term
“safe place,” saying that she was not going to use names, and no one’s “safety”
was going to be violated.
The organizer repeated that this was
a planning and strategy session for the parish, and parishioners wanted to be
able to speak freely.
“But this is a newsworthy event,”
the reporter objected. “It’s of rightful
interest to Catholics in other parishes in the Archdiocese! What about freedom of the press?”
The organizer continued to insist
that she leave.
“So I’m being ordered out,” the
reporter retorted. She put on her coat
and left.
Defend
Life has reported critically for four years on the LGBT activities of
Father Muth and the LEAD Ministry, and of Archbishop Lori’s tacit permission,
by his silence, of those activities.
Those reports included a photo
revealing Father Muth marching in the 2016 Gay Pride Parade in Baltimore in
2016.
Defend
Life also published a photo of LEAD Ministry members marching in
Baltimore’s 2018 Pride Parade with signs
identifying them as from St. Matthew Catholic Church, despite Lori’s asking
Muth that no such signs be carried.
END OF ARTICLE
So the presence of the reporter was going to prevent the parishioners from speaking freely? Why? Are they really such delicate little snowflakes? Probably so, for the facilition of moral depravity often leads to cowardice and shame.
We can bet that one of their strategies will be to blast the Archbishop's office to get him to stand down. What we MUST do is to contact his office too. We must thank him for this step that he is taking and urge him to stand firm and not waver in the face of pressure - be it from these errant parishioners or perhaps even his homophile brother bishops.
I'd also suggest contacting Father Muth or at least the parish office. Urge him to obey the archbishop's request without further ado. Urge him to use his retirement time to repent and do reparation, for owing to his gay activism, he has placed his soul in grave danger of damnation with that danger being multiplied for the sacrilege against his own Holy Orders.
Here is contact information for Archbishop Lori. Contact information for Fr Muth is here. You might also want to go to their social media sites and leave them messages.
