“I dream of a church where two men and two women can stand before the Church, proclaim their love and have it blessed in a sacrament of marriage. And that their love would be seen as divine. That God is present in that relationship. When we look at their relationship, we touch God,” he said, according to the Jan. 10 post.
Massingale’s statements are contrary to the Catholic understanding of marriage as a union of one man and one woman.
The documentary interviews various dissenting groups as well, including Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, and Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder of New Ways Ministry.
In 1999, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith permanently barred Gramick and New Ways Ministry co-founder Fr. Robert Nugent from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons due to “errors and ambiguities in their approach.” In a February 12, 2010 statement, then-U.S. bishops’ conference president Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said the group’s claim to be Catholic “only confuses the faithful regarding the authentic teaching and ministry of the Church with respect to persons with a homosexual inclination.”
“No one should be misled by the claim that New Ways Ministry provides an authentic interpretation of Catholic teaching and an authentic Catholic pastoral practice,” Cardinal George continued.
(Story continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
Another commentator is Jason Steidl, a Catholic theologian.
“I want the church to see that our relationships, our sexual desire, are holy, something given to us by God. That’s a gift to the church. Not something to be hidden away, not something to be ashamed of, but something to be celebrated. Something that makes us grow in relationship with each other and makes us grow in relationship with God,” he said.
David credits Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a religious studies professor at Manhattan College in New York, for inspiring the creation of photo art of Jesus.