Bishop Says Pro-LGBT Church Is a “New Pentecost”

Bishop Stowe baptizes New Ways Ministry as the work of the Holy Spirit while Germany ritualizes contradiction, Munich privatizes celibacy, and France turns the sanctuary into a reception hall.

A Draft from the Open Window

New Ways Ministry’s podcast recently featured Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, in an episode titled “Pentecost Reminds the Church That All Are Welcome.” The episode’s framing is already revealing. Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Ghost descending upon the Apostles to send them into the world preaching Christ crucified and risen, is now treated as the feast of ecclesial inclusion. The Church’s birth becomes the symbolic birthday of pastoral accommodation.

Stowe’s words are not even new. New Ways Ministry had already published his Pentecost reflection in 2020, where he compared the work of New Ways Ministry’s founders and supporters to John XXIII opening the windows, Francis of Assisi embracing lepers, Paul welcoming the Gentiles, Dorothy Day serving the poor, and Mother Teresa tending the dying. Francis, he wrote, had led the Church toward “a new Pentecost.”

That is the scandal beneath the scandal.

Stowe takes an organization long identified with opposition to Catholic moral teaching and places it inside the symbolic lineage of St. Paul, St. Francis, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, and Pentecost itself.

The implication is obvious. The critics are confinement. The activists are the Spirit.

Once that move is made, argument becomes nearly impossible. Who wants to argue against Pentecost? Who wants to be the man closing the window on the Holy Ghost?

But this is precisely how doctrinal revolution works in the modern Church. It does not usually begin by saying, “The old teaching was false.” It begins by saying, “The Spirit is doing something new.”

What St. Paul Did — and What He Did Not Do

The comparison to St. Paul is especially dishonest.

Yes, St. Paul defended the admission of Gentiles into the Church. But he did not welcome Gentiles by baptizing their pagan worship, their temple prostitution, or their former sins. He preached conversion. He brought them into Christ, not Christ into their old life with a blessing attached.

The Apostolic Church did not tell the nations, “Your former life is now a charism.” It said, “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified.”

That is the missing word in the new pastoral vocabulary: conversion.

The entire structure of Catholic moral theology assumes that grace heals, elevates, purifies, and commands. The sinner is loved because he is made for God, not because his sin is an identity to be ceremonially affirmed. The Church receives the sinner as a mother receives a wounded child.

The CDF’s 1986 letter on the pastoral care of homosexual persons made the Catholic position clear: persons must be treated with dignity, but homosexual acts remain morally disordered and cannot be approved. The 2003 CDF document on legal recognition of homosexual unions was equally clear that respect for persons cannot be twisted into approval of homosexual unions or their legal recognition.

That was clear even in the recent post-Vatican II era.

The new method ignores it and presses on with the Bergoglian revolution.

New Ways Ministry and the Canonization of Dissent

New Ways Ministry describes itself as an organization advocating equity, inclusion, and justice for LGBTQ+ persons in Church and society. Its own materials include resources supporting “marriage equality,” married lesbian and gay Catholics, and even a “Catholic Blessing for Same-Gender Couples.” It has also criticized the Vatican’s Dignitas Infinita for its treatment of gender theory and transgender issues.

This is not some neutral parish outreach program. It is an advocacy apparatus.

Nor is its conflict with Catholic authority imaginary. In 1999, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated that New Ways Ministry’s founders had adopted positions incompatible with Catholic teaching and were permanently prohibited from pastoral work involving homosexual persons. In 2010, the USCCB reiterated that New Ways Ministry had no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church and could not speak on behalf of Catholics.

And now a sitting American bishop casts the same movement as part of a Pentecostal renewal.

We are not watching a pastoral outreach to confused or suffering souls. We are watching the rehabilitation of institutional dissent. Yesterday’s condemned activism becomes today’s prophetic ministry.

This is how revolutions become respectable: by outliving the men who once had the courage to forbid them.

Germany Shows the Real Method: Pastoral Practice First, Doctrine After

The German blessing guideline, Segen gibt der Liebe Kraft — “Blessing Gives Strength to Love” — shows the next stage.

Stefan Diefenbach, a former priest who left religious life and is now in a same-sex civil marriage, helped draft the German guideline for blessing couples in irregular situations, including homosexual couples. In an interview with katholisch.de, he defended the text as an attempt to translate Fiducia Supplicans into German pastoral practice and connect it with the Synodal Way. He also admitted the essential principle behind the whole project: pastoral practice goes forward, and doctrine follows.

There it is. No need for conspiracy theories. The method is stated plainly.

First practice. Then doctrine.

First create the facts on the ground. First bless the couples, normalize the ceremony, remove a few words that sound too formal, and insist that nothing liturgical is happening. Then, once the faithful have been trained to accept the new reality, doctrine can be “developed” to explain what everyone is already doing.

Of course, the German bishops and their defenders insist that this is not marriage, not a ritual, not a liturgical celebration, not a sacrament. This is the modern ecclesiastical art: doing the thing while denying the category.

A blessing with a prepared guideline is not a rite.
A public gesture in church is not a ceremony.
A same-sex couple presented together is not being affirmed as a couple.
A pastoral revolution is not a doctrinal revolution.
The explosion is only a “development.”

Even the Vatican’s own response shows the absurdity. Cardinal Fernández said the German text did not have Vatican approval and appeared to propose a kind of liturgy or para-liturgy not permitted by Fiducia Supplicans. Leo XIV reportedly agreed that the Holy See does not accept formalized blessings of homosexual or irregular couples beyond what Francis had allowed.

But what does that mean in practice?

Nothing, apparently.

No discipline. No suppression. No real correction. Just another Roman clarification, issued after the damage is done, parsed by the same people who caused the damage, and then absorbed into the next phase of ambiguity.

The Vatican says, “Not that far.” Germany hears, “Not yet.”

Meanwhile the soft porn author running the DDF prepares to excommunicate the SSPX.

Fiducia Supplicans: The Trojan Horse

This is why Fiducia Supplicans remains the hinge of the present crisis.

The document claimed to allow non-liturgical blessings of couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples, while insisting that such blessings must not validate their status, resemble marriage, or become fixed rituals. It spoke of “spontaneous” gestures and warned against liturgical or semi-liturgical forms.

But the damage was already contained in the premise.

Once Rome says that “couples” in objectively sinful unions may be blessed as couples, the distinction between blessing persons and blessing the union begins to collapse. The professional innovators know this. They are not stupid. They understand that ordinary Catholics do not parse Roman footnotes like canon lawyers in a bunker. They see two men or two women presented together for a blessing and conclude, quite reasonably, that the Church is blessing the relationship.

And that is precisely the point.

The ambiguity is the delivery system.

Germany merely did what everyone knew would happen. It took the loophole and built a doorway.

This is the genius of the postconciliar machine. It condemns the conclusion while authorizing the premise.

Munich and the Privatization of the Priesthood

Then comes Munich.

Rainer Maria Schießler, a priest of the Archdiocese of Munich, told katholisch.de that he has a female partner who supports him in his work and gives him strength in his “celibate” way of life. He added that Archbishop Reinhard Marx had never questioned him about it.

Read that again slowly.

A priest publicly says he has a partner. He describes the partnership as a gift. He says it strengthens his celibate life. He says there was never anything to hide or explain.

Canon law, however, is not nearly so poetic. Canon 277 binds clerics to perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and requires them to behave with prudence toward persons whose company could endanger continence or cause scandal.

The issue is not whether every emotional friendship in a priest’s life is sinful. No sane person thinks priests must live as machines. The issue is the public normalization of a quasi-spousal category inside the life of a man consecrated to celibacy.

The word “partner” does not float innocently in modern speech. Everyone knows what it implies. Schießler knows it. Katholisch.de knows it. Munich knows it.

And again, the key move is linguistic. The priest does not reject celibacy. He redefines the atmosphere around it. He keeps the word while changing its social meaning. Celibacy becomes compatible with a publicly acknowledged “partner,” provided the priest himself narrates the arrangement as spiritually supportive.

This is the same pattern as the blessings.

The word remains. The reality shifts.

Aubière: When the Altar Becomes a Stage

Finally, France supplies the liturgical parable.

At Saint Martin Church in Aubière, in the Diocese of Clermont-Ferrand, a deacon reportedly sang Claude François’s “Cette année-là” in front of the altar during a wedding, while guests jumped, clapped, and sang along.

Some will laugh this off. A little French wedding excess. A harmless moment. People were happy. Why be severe?

Because the sanctuary teaches.

Long before most Catholics can articulate doctrine, they learn theology by posture, silence, music, vesture, architecture, and ritual. A church that feels like a church teaches one thing. A church that feels like a reception hall teaches another.

Musicam Sacram, issued in 1967, still retained enough Catholic instinct to warn that at weddings, “anything merely secular” or hardly compatible with divine worship must be avoided. It also insisted that musical instruments associated only with secular use are to be excluded from sacred worship.

The point is not that every wedding must be grim. The point is that Christian joy is not the same thing as entertainment. Sacred joy is ordered upward. Entertainment collapses everything downward into applause.

When a deacon turns the space before the altar into a performance area, he does more than choose a bad song. He catechizes the room. He tells everyone present what the altar is for. Not sacrifice. Not awe. Not trembling proximity to Calvary. A backdrop. A platform. A place where the community can feel itself.

That is why liturgical abuse and doctrinal abuse so often travel together. Once the altar becomes a stage, doctrine becomes a script.

The One Principle Behind the Four Stories

These four stories are not identical, but they rhyme.

Together they reveal the same underlying principle: the Church no longer converts the world; the world supplies the Church with its new sacramental vocabulary.

“Partner.”
“Blessing.”
“Inclusion.”
“New Pentecost.”
“Pastoral practice.”
“Spontaneous gesture.”
“Opening windows.”
“Walking together.”

The old Catholic words remain too, of course. Gospel. Spirit. Mercy. Discernment. Blessing. Celibacy. But they are increasingly used as containers for meanings the Church once rejected.

This is not merely hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would be simpler. Hypocrisy knows the standard and fails to meet it.

What we are seeing is more dangerous: the replacement of the standard while pretending continuity with it.

The innovators do not say, “We reject Pentecost.” They say Pentecost means their revolution.

They do not say, “We reject St. Paul.” They say St. Paul would have joined the inclusion committee.

They do not say, “We reject celibacy.” They say celibacy is strengthened by a partner.

They do not say, “We reject liturgy.” They say the liturgy must breathe with the people, even if that breathing sounds suspiciously like a pop song before the altar.

They do not say, “We reject doctrine.” They say doctrine will follow pastoral practice.

And that last line may be the most honest sentence in the whole mess.

Pentecost or Babel?

At Pentecost, the Apostles spoke in many tongues so that all nations could hear one truth.

At Babel, men spoke in confusion because they tried to build a religious monument on their own terms.

The modern Church keeps invoking Pentecost, but the sound coming out of the sanctuary is often much closer to Babel: many words, endless documents, careful euphemisms, competing clarifications, local experiments, Roman non-denials, pastoral exceptions, and doctrinal footnotes trailing behind the latest scandal like a janitor after a parade.

The Holy Ghost did not descend upon the Apostles so that they could affirm every wounded identity without conversion. He descended so that they could preach Christ with fire, rebuke sin, baptize nations, and bring souls into the one ark of salvation.

A Church that cannot say “repent” will eventually forget how to say “believe.”

A Church that cannot guard the altar will not guard doctrine.

A Church that blesses ambiguity will produce ambiguous Catholics.

And a Church that calls all of this a new Pentecost should not be surprised when some of us smell smoke and ask whether the fire came from heaven — or from somewhere much lower.

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