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Bishop Joseph Strickland addresses the USCCB meeting Nov. 13, 2018.YouTube screen grab

TYLER, Texas, January 30, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― A Texas bishop has expressed his hope that participants in an LGBT Catholic ministry conference will share Catholic teaching.

Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler was responding to a Twitter advertisement for the June conference posted by LGBT activist priest Fr. James Martin, S.J.

“May those who join in this Conference share the full message of Catholic teaching,” Strickland tweeted in reply.

“If Catholics minister without calling sinful behavior sinful then their work is neither truly Catholic nor true ministry. True compassion calls the person from sin to virtue.”

Fr. Martin’s advertisement reassured his fans that the event is still taking place.

“Since many people have been asking, yes, Outreach 2020, the #LGBTQ Catholic Ministry Conference, is still on track,” he tweeted.

“It will be held at Fordham University's Rose Hill Campus from June 18–20. We should have registration information up within a few days. Stay tuned!”

Martin originally announced the event in November of last year.

The intervention was typical of Bishop Strickland, who often uses social media to defend Catholic teaching. Strickland is also known to have challenged his fellow bishops about permitting priests to offer views that contract Catholicism. In a meeting of the USCCB in 2018, he reminded them that “homosexual activity is immoral” and that “real care comes from acknowledging the sin.”

“Do we believe the doctrine of the Church or not?” Strickland asked.

“There’s a priest that travels around now basically saying that he doesn’t, and he seems to be very well promoted in various places,” he continued.

“Brothers, I think part of the fraternal correction, or the fraternal support, we offer each other is to say: Can that be presented in our dioceses? That same-sex marriage is just fine and the Church will one day grow to understand that? That’s not what we teach.” 

In a thread attached to his most recent tweet, Fr. Martin, the author of Building a Bridge, explained that “the conference is designed for those who minister to LGBT Catholics.”

“We will build community, share best practices and worship together,” the author of the pro-LGBT Building a Bridge added.

He listed as the keynote speakers Bishop John Stowe, OFM, the ordinary of the Diocese of Lexington in Kentucky; former master of the Dominican Order Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, O.P.; Sister Jeannine Gramick, SSND, who co-authored the original Building Bridges: Gay and Lesbian Reality and the Catholic Church with Fr. Robert Nugent in 1991; the openly homosexual Fr. Bryan Massingdale, who teaches at Fordham; and Sivagami (Shiva) Subbaraman, the first director for the LGBTQ Resource Center at Georgetown University and a Hindu.

At least one of the speakers is actually not supposed to minister to people with same-sex attractions at all.

The published writings of Sister Jeannine Gramick, 77, and the late Fr. Robert Nugent were denounced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) under its then-prefect, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in 1999. 

“Given the failure of the repeated attempts of the Church’s legitimate authorities to resolve the problems presented by the writings and pastoral activities of the two authors, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is obliged to declare for the good of the Catholic faithful that the positions advanced by Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father Robert Nugent regarding the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts and the objective disorder of the homosexual inclination are doctrinally unacceptable because they do not faithfully convey the clear and constant teaching of the Catholic Church in this area,” the CDF wrote. 

“Father Nugent and Sister Gramick have often stated that they seek, in keeping with the Church’s teaching, to treat homosexual persons ‘with respect, compassion and sensitivity,’” the document continued. 

“However, the promotion of errors and ambiguities is not consistent with a Christian attitude of true respect and compassion: persons who are struggling with homosexuality no less than any others have the right to receive the authentic teaching of the Church from those who minister to them.”

The CDF stated that Gramick and Nugent were “permanently prohibited from any pastoral work involving homoesexual persons” and were ineligible for “any office in their respective institutes.

Gramick was also a signatory, in 2014, of an open letter to then-president Barack Obama asking him to expand American funding of abortion services abroad.