Annual Report
of the President of Dignity Canada Dignité
Frank
Testin
president@dignitycanada.org
September, 2014
Our
previous 2012-2013 year was quite busy with the election of a new pontiff and
his interview with the media on his flight from the World Youth Day in Buenos Aires back to
Rome in which he said in response to a question about a possible gay mafia at
the Vatican: “If a person is gay and seeks the lord and has good will, who am I
to judge?”. That comment certainly gathered a great deal of media attention and
was interpreted by many as a signal of a more pastoral approach towards LGBT
members. In the same interview, he unfortunately also remarked that the door is
closed in terms of women's ordination. While there have been very few media
interviews this year, it has still been a remarkable year in terms of several
printed materials and documents.
About the time of
our last House of Delegates meeting, the Jesuit magazine
America
and similar Jesuit publications in other languages released a major article on
an interview held with Pope Francis. In the article, Pope Francis clarified that
his remark about not judging gay persons was directed at all lesbian and gay
persons in the church, not only gay clergy. He also talked about a church as a
home for all, not as a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected
people. He also acknowledged that our teachings are open to revision based on
contemporary knowledge. (see
some excerpts here)
On November
24, 2013, Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation
Evangelii Gaudium: The
Joy of the Gospel was released. Dignity Toronto spent time at two
monthly meetings discussing various parts of the document. Overall, I
found it to be encouraging in that it clearly defines the church as all the
people of God, and it emphasizes that Jesus calls all of us to minister to the
poor, to remove structural causes of poverty, as well as to learn from the poor,
if we want to follow the teachings of Jesus. He also pointed out that science
and church teachings cannot be in conflict. (see
some excerpts here)
Synod on
the Family and Consultation Process
At the
beginning of November 2013, the Vatican announced that it had asked all bishops
to obtain the views of church members on several questions concerning the
spirituality of Catholic family life, which would serve as part of the
background information for the Synod on the Family, scheduled to take place over
two sessions in 2014 and 2015. The Vatican issued a Preparatory Document in
which it provided background information - a type of environmental scan - on the
changing state of families and asked a number of open-ended questions that it
thought should be addressed at the bishops’ meetings. We learned that the
Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales had posted the open-ended
questions on the Internet and invited all Catholics in their jurisdiction to
complete it.
On November 7th,
we wrote to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) inviting it to
undertake two activities: (1) administer an on-line survey which could be
completed by all Canadian Catholics based on the questions posed in the
Vatican’s preparatory document; and (2) commission a scientific survey of all
baptised Catholics on the questions, which would enable us to generalize from
the sample to the all Catholics in Canada. We did not receive a reply and we
learned that the CCCB was leaving it up to bishops to decide how they would
answer the questions in their own dioceses.
By mid November
we learned that in the United States, Catholic Organizations for Renewal (made
up of Dignity USA, Call to Action, Corpus, New Ways Ministry, Roman Catholic
Womenpriests, and six other Catholic reform organizations in the USA) decided to
make available to their own members and other Catholics an Internet survey which
covered the questions raised in the Vatican’s Preparatory Document. They had
fortunately obtained advice from survey consultants who created several
close-ended questions which are easier for respondents to complete and easier to
analyze. (In the end, some 16,000 responses were received.)
With permission from the US
organization, Dignity Canada Dignité and Catholic Church Reform co-sponsored an
Internet survey for Canadian Catholics to complete. As in the USA, we used
Survey Monkey, that cost us around $50. Norman and I worked closely on entering
the questionnaire into Survey Monkey, and generated the results after the survey
period ended on January 4th. Our survey became available on line and
was promoted through our email list and website on November 27th. The
results from the 87 respondents were compiled after the cut-off date, and a
report was sent electronically on January 6, 2014 to
Most Rev. Paul- André Durocher, CCCB President;
Most. Rev. Luigi Bonazzi, Apostolic Nuncio to Canada;
and Most. Rev. Lorenzo Baldisseri, Secretary General, Synod of Bishops, who
acknowledged receipt and thanked us at the end of January for our input. We also prepared a
narrative summary of the responses to the close-ended
questions and made it available on our website. Those on our email list were
informed of the availability of the results.
On June 26,
2014, the Vatican released the document
Instrumentum Laboris,
published in advance of the Synod on the Family. It presents a summary of
input primarily from bishop conferences, with some mention of input received
from other organizations (observations). One disappointment is that many
bishop conferences seem to have remarked that problems which families are
experiencing are the result of church members not understanding and following
the official church teachings. As you can imagine, a number of reform
organizations expressed disagreement with this interpretation and responded that
the problems are often due to the teachings themselves. (see
some excerpts here)
On January 6th,
I was interviewed by Paul Gallant with IN Toronto magazine.
Persecution
of LGBT Persons Overseas:
On January 31st,
we sent an email to those on the DCD email list re. laws in Russia, Uganda,
Nigeria and Jamaica, and included the New Ways Ministry campaign to
tweet pope
Francis.
We sent a
letter
on February 27, 2014 to the CCCB president re. persecution of LGBT persons
overseas.
On March 1st
we sent an email to those on the DCD email list re. persecution of LGBT persons
overseas, with an invitation to contact bishops. The DCD correspondence to CCCB
was included as a sample.
On March 5th
we sent an
email to the Prime Minister re. persecution of LGBT persons in
Uganda, Russia and Nigeria.
On May 16th
we agreed to be one of several endorsers on an open letter addressed to the Hon.
John Baird, Minister of Foreign Affairs, initiated by the
#EndHateLaws coalition
and the Canadian HIV AIDS Legal Network.
May 15th:
We contacted everyone on our DCD list asking them to contact their senators in
order to pass
Bill C-279, The Gender Identity Bill.
On June 23rd I was a
panellist for a breakout session on
spirituality and religion
at a conference entitled
Dare to Stand Out: Canada's National Gender and Sexual Minorities (GSM)
Service Providers' Summit 2014
sponsored by
Jer’s Vision based in Ottawa and held in conjunction with
Toronto’s World Pride celebration. As a presenter, I was allowed to attend the
entire two-day event. Through various presentations, I was especially struck
by the plight of LGBT persons overseas and by the burdens faced by transgender
persons in Canada, especially the almost insurmountable challenge in finding
employment.
On July 16th
I received a short email from a woman in New Brunswick asking how one can
start a Dignity chapter. I replied on July 21st inviting her to
check out our national website and including the annotated document (received
from the Vancouver chapter) on how to start a chapter. I also asked for a
mailing address in order to send her some of our brochures. A follow-up email
was sent on September 2nd. However, there has been no reply to
date.
In conclusion,
it’s been a fairly active year in terms of correspondence. As you know, I’ve
been particularly interested in supporting the equal civil rights for LGBT
persons in other countries, especially in countries with substantial Catholic
populations.
I want to thank
Norman and Kevin for the support they’ve given me, and I want to thank all
chapters for your efforts and accomplishments. Each of our chapters has its own
particular circumstances, and no size fits all.
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I recently ran
across this quote and I think that we have followed it in our efforts:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours
are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
–
Teresa
of Avila
(1515-1582)
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This weekend,
following our annual business meeting in Canmore, Alberta, we
are invited to enjoy the great outdoors, to recharge our batteries by returning
back to nature. I’ve asked myself the question of whether the Divine entered
human affairs 2,000 years ago, or 13.8 billion years ago, and the answer I’ve
heard from the mystics is that the Cosmic Christ has been part of our world
since Day One. May we sense the
Divine in all of Creation this weekend and in the rest of our lives.
Frank
Testin
President, Dignity
Canada Dignité
September 27, 2014 |