Remembering John Paul II's angry outburst during World Pride 2000

The Vatican has not changed one iota of its formal teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts.

But the Bishop of Rome's attitude towards gays and lesbians has taken a 180 degree turn since the election of Pope Francis in 2013.

With just a few words -- "Who am I to judge?" -- the first pope to be born in the New World added another verse to "Born This Way", the 2011 hit single by Lady Gaga! 

And since Francis made that now-famous remark, doctrinal hardliners within the Church and other social conservatives (and bigots) have raged against his warm embrace of "intrinsically disordered" persons, as the Vatican describes those of us who are not heterosexuals. 

The Argentine pope angered his critics again last week when it was revealed that he had written James Martin to affirm the American Jesuit in his much-criticized ministry to the LGBTQ+ community.  

How fabulous!

Francis is not exactly a gay rights activist. Not by a long shot. 

He's an 84-year-old priest from Latin America. You won't find men of his generation in that part of the world swelling the ranks of "Queer Nation" or leading chants of "Out of the closets and into the streets!"  

And that's exactly why his non-judgmental attitude towards gays and lesbians is all the more significant.  

After the scolding and moralizing tone of his two most recent predecessors, this pope has substantially boosted the Catholic Church's image among the LGBTQ+ community -- though no one would go so far as to say it's anywhere near fabulous. 

John Paul II and Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) literally beat up on gay men, while promoting self-loathing, closeted and homophobic homosexuals up the greasy poll of the hierarchy. 

It will take a long time to undo the harm these two men have done to gays by their gestures and the poison that flowed from their pens.  

As all are aware, Benedict is the author of the Vatican's current articulation of the Catholic Church's official teaching on homosexuality. The letter he issued in 1986 as cardinal-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) is well-known and increasingly contested.

The language of "intrinsically disordered" and "moral evil"

It describes homosexuals as being "intrinsically disordered" and calls "the inclination of the homosexual person" a "more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil".

The letter states that the inclination is, itself, "an objective disorder".

Ratzinger wrote the script, but John Paul II took it on stage.

The Polish pope's most famous rant against gays and lesbians came during the Great Jubilee of 2000. 

In July of that year Rome was host to World Pride, the global version of the annual Gay Pride celebrations. There was an entire week of events, culminating with a huge parade on the very hot Saturday afternoon of July 8th. 

Somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people joined in the slow, peaceful trek on a route that the city, under the Catholic hierarchy's pressure, mapped out away from Rome's most important monuments. 

Obviously, there were the usual carnivalesque displays of overly made-up drag queens and shirtless musclemen. But the vast majority of those who came out were dressed in Bermuda shorts and polo shirts. 

Some estimate that half of the people in the parade that day were heterosexuals who were there to demonstrate their solidarity with the gay and lesbian community.

But John Paul and the organizers of the Jubilee were furious.

Right from the beginning they had tried mightily, but unsuccessfully, to stop the city of Rome from hosting World Pride.

Stubbornly refusing to admit that Christendom had already died long ago, they demanded the parade route not be allowed to pass by any churches, saying this would be a sacrilege! 

They had no such objections when the Italian government, just one month before, revived a long discarded "tradition" of rolling out tanks and military hardware for the June 2 celebration of Republic Day.

John Paul II expresses "bitterness" 

During the Sunday Angelus the day after the World Pride Parade, an angry John Paul stood at his study window overlooking St. Peter's Square and took aim at what he called, "the well-known demonstrations held in Rome in the past few days".

"In the name of the Church of Rome I can only express bitterness (amarezza) at the affront to the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 and the offence to the Christian values of a city that is so dear to the hearts of Catholics throughout the world," he said.

The Vatican translated amarezza as "deep sadness". But the look on the late pope's face and the tone of his voice indicated that he was more angry than sad.  

Yes, Papa Wojtyla was bitter all right. 

"The Church cannot be silent about the truth, because she would fail in her fidelity to God the Creator and would not help to distinguish good from evil," he continued. 

And here is how he concluded: 

In this regard, I wish merely to read what is said in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which, after noting that homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law, then states: "The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfil God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition" (CCC, n. 2358).

Evil. Contrary to nature. Objectively disordered. And "their condition".

All of that. 

The prefect who becomes pope

Those words, of course, were originally written with the same pen and by the same CDF prefect who, five years later, would succeed John Paul II as pope.

And as Benedict XVI he maintained the same teaching and same line against the LGBTQ+ community. At least in public.

However, the bookish Bavarian professor-pope did not make any of the angry outbursts that his theatrical Polish precursor had. 

He simply ignored those gays and lesbians who sought a to engage him on what most of us know to be, according to theologian James Alison, a teaching based on the false premise that homosexuals are defective heterosexuals!

The European Forum of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Christian Groups gave Benedict an opportunity to address the issue anew in June 2011 when Rome played host to EuroPride.

The group crafted a letter to him a month earlier in which it asked him to denounce laws criminalizing homosexuality, to reprimand Catholics who promote "reparative therapy", to stop opposing same-sex relationships and to fully rethink the Church's teaching on homosexuality 

The pope obviously ignored this, too.

The American expelled from the Jesuits for supporting  LGBTQ+ Catholics

The letter was posted in the mailbox by John McNeill, the American priest who wrote the seminal book, The Church and the Homosexual. 

McNeill, a Jesuit scholar with an impressive academic pedigree, published that book in 1976. 

But during a television interview he admitted he was gay. And a year later the Vatican ordered him not to write or speak further on the issue of homosexuality. 

He obeyed the gag order for an entire decade, but then broke his silence. By doing so, he paid a high price.

The Jesuits, under instructions from the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life in 1987, expelled him from their order.

John McNeill was at EuroPride 2011 for the premiere of "Taking a Chance on God", a documentary on his life and work.

No pope, no cardinals, no bishops had his back or encouraged his ministry. It was a very different Vatican in very different times.

But the courageous McNeill, in a wheelchair, was at the head of the large EuroPride Parade. 

And in contrast to World Pride 2000, we were allowed to pass the Colosseum and other famous sites, ending up in that large field known as Circus Maximus for a huge concert. 

It featured Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, the pop star and gay icon known as Lady Gaga.

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