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Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, in a video message for 2020 'Pride Month'YouTube

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LEXINGTON, Kentucky, June 4, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Dissident Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, reaffirmed his longtime LGBT advocacy, joining a virtual “Pride Blessing” event earlier this week.

Stowe, a notorious homosexualist who once issued a “pride” “prayer card,” joined the Zoom meeting on Tuesday with activists and other dissident “Catholics.” The event was hosted by heretical pro-LGBT organization Dignity USA, which rejects Church teaching on several points of faith and morals. 

Dignity USA billed the event as a reaction to the Vatican’s pronouncement earlier this year that same-sex relationships cannot be blessed. The teaching, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in March, declared that the Church lacks “the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex.” God “cannot bless sin,” it emphasized.

“In March, the Vatican released a statement saying that the Catholic Church could offer no blessings to the same-sex couples,” Dignity USA acknowledged ahead of the Zoom “blessing” event. The group called for an “empowering” “Pride Month” this year and urged “that the Vatican’s pronouncements on LGBTQI people and their love will not be the final word.” 

The meeting reportedly had an attendance of around 200 people. 

Bishop Stowe gave a general blessing at the event, highlighting the “annual celebration of Pride.” “Dear friends in the LGBTQ community. I offer a prayer, a blessing, for each of you during this annual celebration of Pride,” he said. 

His speech was preceded by a “Pride Blessing” from Dignity USA executive director Marianne Duddy-Burke, Catholic News Agency reported. “You have been judged worthy and holy of my delight,” Duddy-Burke said. “Therefore, go with pride, which is not sin for you but salvation, a promise of liberation for all.”

The Catholic Church holds that homosexual inclinations are “objectively disordered” and that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and gravely sinful. “They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church states. “Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

Stowe and Dignity USA’s dissident event reflects LGBT “blessing” ceremonies that proliferated across Germany last month in a wave of defiance by German priests and bishops that Catholic leaders decried as “schismatic” and blasphemous. 

Along with Stowe, other attendees at the meeting included Mary McAleese, a pro-abortion former President of Ireland; Miguel H. Diaz, an Obama-era U.S. ambassador to the Holy See; and Fr. Bernard Lynch, an actively homosexual priest in a same-sex relationship. 

Sponsors included Faith in Public Life, a nonprofit backed by George Soros that recently tried to get Archbishop Joseph Naumann removed from his post as the head of U.S. bishops’ pro-life committee. Top LGBT groups like Human Rights Watch sponsored the event as well.  

As Catholic News Agency noted, both Diaz and Lynch have been accused of sexual assault. After leaving the Obama administration and joining the University of Dayton as a professor in 2013, “reasonable cause” was found that Diaz targeted a married couple with “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.”

Lynch likewise was accused in a 2019 lawsuit of abusing a teenage student while working as a campus chaplain at a New York high school in the 1970s. He previously had been accused of abusing another student who attended the same school, though he was acquitted in court.

Diaz and Lynch each referred to homosexuals as “prophets” at the Dignity USA event and purported to bless sodomitic and otherwise unnatural relations.