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November 19, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – After consulting with mostly pro-homosexual fringe groups and individuals seeking to normalize homosexuality within the Catholic Church, NBC News declared LifeSiteNews to be “alt-right.”

In an article titled “How the Catholic ‘alt-right’ aims to purge LGBTQ members from the church,” NBC rendered the same judgement about Church Militant and the Lepanto Institute, claiming all three are “ratcheting up the rhetoric with personal attacks on supporters of gay Catholics.”

NBC interprets defending Church teaching to be both “ultra-conservative” and “anti-gay.”

NBC sees our reporting on the bombshell Pennsylvania grand jury report exposing decades of clerical sexual abuse consisting mostly of priests preying on teen boys as “weaponizing” the report to “scapegoat homosexuals.”

“I call them the ‘Catholic alt-right,’” Fordham University theologian Jason Steidl told NBC News. “We haven’t seen anything like this before. I think they are part of a bigger cultural movement. These people have hitched their wagons to Trump’s presidency, to his tactics.”

Father James Martin, SJ, who is the Church’s chief apostle of the normalization of homosxuality and transgenderism, told NBC, “They inject fear, hatred and homophobia into religious discourse.”

NBC did not mention if their reporters asked whether Fr. Martin regularly injects lies, fear, hatred, and heterodoxy into religious discourse.

“They use the same tactics as the political alt-right: lies, personal vilification and demonization of minority groups,” continued the Jesuit, apparently oblivious to the fact that he had just done so himself.

Martin also accidently offered praise for LifeSiteNews, pointing out, “Some bishops promote sites like LifeSite.”

“I know some people read them in Rome,” he added.

Another pro-gay activist told NBC that groups such as LifeSiteNews have been emboldened by President Trump, not recognizing that it is authentic Church teaching and the fullness of the Gospel which primarily inspire Catholics, not occupants of the oval office.

NBC cited New Ways Ministry, a dissident anti-Catholic group repeatedly banned from speaking in Catholic dioceses, asserting that “gay” Church employees have lost their jobs due to stories published by LifeSiteNews and others. One of the Church workers the article cites as blaming his resignation on Catholic news sites actually gave an interview in 2015 to the Wall Street Journal about his open homosexuality and his bishop’s knowledge of it, something the NBC article didn’t mention.  

NBC also failed to mention that New Ways Ministry was condemned in 2010 by then-president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, and in 2011 by Washington, D.C. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, then-chairman of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine.

Additionally, in 1999 the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “permanently prohibited” the group’s co-founders, Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father Robert Nugent “from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons,” after ruling that their teaching was “erroneous and dangerous” and “doctrinally unacceptable.”

Bishop Christopher Coyne of the Diocese of Burlington, Vermont, who served as USCCB spokesperson throughout the group’s annual fall assembly in Baltimore last week, told NBC:

The promotion and defense of the faith should invite an encounter with the merciful love of Christ and contribute to a more civil and peaceful dialogue in our church and society.

Bishop Coyne’s statement fails to consider the authentic “love of Christ” which entails not just the easy parts of the Gospel, but the “hard parts,” as Cardinal Robert Sarah has said. The Gospel makes huge demands on the life of the believer, as witnessed in the Cross of Christ.

The Church teaches “things in the Catechism about homosexuality that some members of the clergy choose not to quote, including the clear warning: ‘under no circumstances can [homosexual acts] be approved’ (CCC 2357),” Sarah wrote in the forward to the book Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay.   

“The respect and sensitivity to which the Catechism rightly calls us does not give us permission to deprive men and women who experience SSA (same-sex attraction) of the fullness of the Gospel,” continued Cardinal Sarah, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. “To omit the ‘hard sayings’ of Christ and his Church is not charity.”

Bishop Coyne continued, suggesting that LifeSiteNews and others are guilty of “digital stoning,” ironically casting a couple of stones himself against what are deemed to be conservative forces within the Church.

I urge my brothers and sisters to exercise extreme caution before giving credence to anyone who instigates shameful, digital stoning as a way to defend the Church. Catholic participation in the public square should be marked by both fidelity to the Gospel and to charity toward all our fellow citizens.

NBC cited the 2004 John Jay Report, commissioned by the USSCB in the aftermath of revelations of priest predation in the Archdiocese of Boston, as proof that there is “no connection between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of children by priests.”

The John Jay Report revealed that the overwhelming majority of clerical sex abuse cases involved priests preying on teen boys.

The Pennsylvania grand jury report and the just-released landmark study by sociologist Father Paul Sullins of the Ruth Institute both also show that homosexual priests have been responsible for 80 percent of clerical sexual predation over the decades. NBC makes no mention of those.

As eminent speaker and writer Monsignor Charles Pope has noted, the Church’s clergy sexual abuse problem is not, as NBC asserts, priests targeting “whoever was around them regardless of age or gender.”

“This is homosexual attraction,” wrote Msgr. Pope. “Regarding the sexual abuse and harassment of seminarians or priests by bishops or other clergy, obviously 100 percent of those victims were male.”  

In an August 2017 opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal, Cardinal Sarah said:

To love someone as Christ loves us means to love that person in the truth. “For this I was born,” Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “to bear witness to the truth.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church reflects this insistence on honesty, stating that the church’s message to the world must “reveal in all clarity the joy and demands of the way of Christ.”

Those who speak on behalf of the church must be faithful to the unchanging teachings of Christ, because only through living in harmony with God’s creative design do people find deep and lasting fulfillment. Jesus described his own message in these terms, saying in the Gospel of John: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” Catholics believe that, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the church draws its teachings upon the truths of Christ’s message.

Cardinal Sarah added:

We do not need to look far to see the sad consequences of the rejection of God’s plan for human intimacy and love. The sexual liberation the world promotes does not deliver its promise. Rather, promiscuity is the cause of so much needless suffering, of broken hearts, of loneliness, and of treatment of others as means for sexual gratification. As a mother, the church seeks to protect her children from the harm of sin, as an expression of her pastoral charity.