Pope Benedict's Legacy

Pope Benedict’s leadership in the church, as Pope and earlier as Cardinal Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope John Paul II, caused tremendous damage to LGBTQIA+ people, as well indeed to millions of Catholics throughout the world. 

So did his irresponsible way of dealing with the sexual abuse crisis ravaging the Church and his blind refusal to consider the ordinations of women or married priests.

I wish to focus here on his hostility to LGBTQIA+ people and most significantly to those living and dying with HIV/AIDS.

Having founded with Dignity New York the first pastoral AIDS Ministry in the city in 1982, I saw the devastating consequences of his teachings. At the height of the AIDS pandemic, Cardinal Ratzinger forced our communities out of Catholic church property all over the world.

In his misleadingly titled letter published in October 1986 on “The Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons”, he labelled us disordered in our nature and evil in our Love. This letter, published with the blessing of John Paul II, became for young dying men the most lethal opportunistic infection of an already ignominious death sentence. This long suffering and hated minority were blamed by the Church for their disease. In despair many ‘good Catholics’ took their own lives. This was a new low in the long and troubled journey of the Catholic institutional Church.

Never, to my knowledge, have a sick and dying community been blamed anywhere or anytime for their disease. Alcoholics are not condemned for causing themselves kidney cancer, or smokers for causing themselves lung cancer. To add insult to injury, those of us advocating for legal protection in jobs and housing for our dying brothers and sisters were told, that it was understandable that efforts to secure civil rights for LGBTQIA+ people would be met with violence. What this in fact did, by excusing such behaviour, was expose us to violent attacks on the streets of our towns and cities and in the courts. It also justified the rejection by many Christian families of their dying gay sons.

The use of condoms was strictly forbidden. This not only helped spread the pandemic amongst the poor but further exposed the health of both straight and gay people to the ravages of the disease. Tragically, this policy caused untold numbers of deaths and vast needless suffering.

After what I can only call the soul murder of so many sisters and brothers, I pray Benedict rests in the arms of our loving and forgiving God. There with the people he so self-righteously rejected and condemned with his Church teachings, he will sit with the Christ who said the lost, the last and the least will be first in God’s Love.

Fr. Bernárd Lynch