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Sister Jean Anne Zappa, "president" of the Ursuline Sisters of Louisville in Kentucky.Ursuline Communications / Youtube screen grab

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February 8, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – A group of U.S. religious sisters have joined a slowly growing list of U.S. bishops who are telling young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender that “God is on your side.”

LifeSiteNews reported Jan. 25 that seven bishops and one cardinal had signed a statement in partnership with the pro-homosexual advocacy group Tyler Clementi Foundation in support of young people who identify as LGBT. Since this report, four more bishops have been added along with the Ursuline Sisters of Louisville. The list of one cardinal and 11 bishops who support the statement are the following (names in bold are newly added):

  • Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin
  • Archbishop John C. Wester
  • Bishop Steven Biegler
  • Bishop John P. Dolan
  • Bishop Thomas Gumbleton (retired)
  • Bishop Joseph R. Kopacz
  • Bishop Robert McElroy
  • Bishop Denis Madden (retired)
  • Bishop Ricardo Ramirez (retired)
  • Bishop John Stowe
  • Bishop Anthony B. Taylor
  • Bishop Edward Weisenburger

The Ursuline Sisters of Louisville, an order originally founded by Italian Saint Angela Merici, added their names to the statement on Feb. 5.

“We, the leadership of the Ursuline Sisters of Louisville, support the recent statement, ‘God Is On Your Side,’ by twelve U.S. Catholic Bishops in support of at-risk LGBT youth and the work of the Tyler Clementi Foundation,” the sisters stated in a press release. “LGBT youth are children of God, created by God and loved by God. We stand in solidarity with them.”

The Ursuline sisters who signed the statement are the following:

  • Sister Jean Anne Zappa, President
  • Sister Anne Mary Lochner, Vice-President
  • Sister Rita Ann Wigginton, Councilor
  • Sister Yuli Oncihuay, Councilor
  • Sister Agnes Coveney, Councilor

Thank you, Fr. James Martin, SJ , Tyler Clementi Foundation. We are grateful to the U.S. Bishops who signed “God Is On…

Posted by Ursuline Sisters of Louisville on Monday, February 8, 2021

The Tyler Clementi Foundation bears the name of an 18-year-old man who committed suicide in 2010 after his roommate at university filmed him engaging in homosexual acts with another student and then released the footage to the public. “Without Tyler’s knowledge, his roommate secretly pointed his computer’s camera at Tyler’s bed, left the room, and invited other students online to watch Tyler in a most private, intimate act with another man,” states the foundation’s website about the event.

The Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are one of the four sins that cry to heaven for justice. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts 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” (CCC 2357).

The Catholic Church furthermore teaches that the homosexual inclination is also “objectively disordered” since God created sexual attraction for the purpose of drawing a man and a woman together to become husband and wife in marriage. In other words, the Catholic Church teaches that God does not make anyone “gay.”

In a 2019 Declaration of Catholic Truths, Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Athanasius Schneider, together with several other bishops, made clear the Catholic position when it comes to people who are inclined to members of the same sex.

“Hence, the opinion is contrary to natural law and Divine Revelation that says that, as God the Creator has given to some humans a natural disposition to feel sexual desire for persons of the opposite sex, so also He has given to others a natural disposition to feel sexual desire for persons of the same sex, and that God intends that the latter disposition be acted on in some circumstances.”

Jesuit priest Fr. James Martin, who promotes the normalization of homosexuality within the Catholic Church, has been following closely who has been signing onto the Tyler Clementi Foundation statement.

A petition was recently launched asking the Jesuit Order to publicly censure Fr. Martin for promoting a bastardized pro-LGBT version of one of the world’s most revered images of Our Lady – the Black Madonna.