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Fr. James Martin at Boston College, 2014. Youtube.

April 26, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — After evangelist Franklin Graham posted a series of tweets pointing out the incongruity of presidential candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s claim that he is a “gay Christian,” Fr. James Martin, S.J. weighed in to deflect Graham’s rebuke.

The president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had informed the South Bend mayor via Twitter that homosexuality is a “sin, something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted.”

The pro-LGBT Jesuit didn’t like that.

“Being gay isn’t a sin,” began Fr. Martin’s tweet, contradicting Rev. Graham. “It’s the way that God made some people.”

Yet engaging in homosexuality most certainly is a sin, and God does not “make people gay.”

Over the last few years, Fr. Martin has made it his goal to change the teachings of the Catholic Church in order to normalize homosexuality and transgenderism. His scolding of Rev. Graham is unfounded, as it brazenly defies Catholic Church teaching.

Martin’s book, Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion and Sensitivity, is critical of the Church’s pastoral approaches to those who identify as gay, lesbian, or transgendered.

“The real purpose of this book is to advocate for a relaxation of the Church’s teaching that sodomy is gravely immoral and that any attraction to commit acts of sodomy is an objective disorder in one’s personality,” noted Fr. Gerald Murray when the book was first published. “The thesis of this book is that lesbians, gays, bisexual persons and transsexual/transgendered persons have been made to be such by God, and thus they should gladly live and express their God-given, differently ordered sexuality in a differently ordered way.”

Homosexual acts are traditionally one of the four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance. Basing itself on Scripture and the natural law, the Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are “acts of grave depravity” and are “intrinsically disordered.”

“They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved,” states the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Church teaches, moreover, that the homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered” and constitutes for most a “trial.”

The Church calls for “respect, compassion, and sensitivity” for persons struggling with same-sex attraction while teaching that such “respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”

Martin’s tweet continued: “And be careful about biblical literalism. E.g., should we stone people who work on the Sabbath (Ex. 35:2)? Also, be careful: the Bible says a lot about marriage. Solomon, Moses and Abraham all had multiple wives.”

Martin’s sneering dismissal of the Old Testament fails to address St. Paul’s dire warning to the Romans regarding women who exchange “natural relations for unnatural” and men who “give up natural relations with females” and who burn “with lust for one another,”  (Rom. 1:26–27).

“Males did shameful things with males,” added St. Paul, but Fr. Martin chooses to overlook that shame. 

Rev. Graham, a Protestant, is more in tune with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church than Fr. Martin.

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Doug Mainwaring is a journalist for LifeSiteNews, an author, and a marriage, family and children's rights activist.  He has testified before the United States Congress and state legislative bodies, originated and co-authored amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court, and has been a guest on numerous TV and radio programs.  Doug and his family live in the Washington, DC suburbs.