#liberal catholic

[katyacannon]

" the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law... If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let us not become boastful, challenging one another, envying one another. "

- Galatians 5:22-5:26

[emjee]

Thinking about how the main character of Conclave is a man with doubts who is not enjoying himself and his name is Thomas Lawrence which in terms of saints translates to Man With Doubt Being Roasted Alive. It’s so on the nose and I absolutely love it and wouldn’t change it for the world.

[ohholydyke]

See the thing about fundamentalists and trads and Christian nationalists and MAGA evangelicals and ethnocratic bigots is that they render the faith so boring.

I take no issue with the fact that they would look at me and say that I’m not a member of the faithful because their faith is radically, inherently, ontologically distinct from mine. My God is too big and too loving and too esoteric to fit neatly into the gendered understanding of an authoritarian white father disciplining his children for not perfectly falling into lockstep. My Savior is the man who told the religious leaders “Caesar can have his idolatrous blood money, but give God your heart and your faith,” challenging the notion of an earthly ruler. My apostles wrote of the throne of man being empty—there are no masters or kings or governments, there is only Jesus Christ, Basileus Basileōn, king of kings. I believe in radical oneness with God through Christ—one flesh and one body, biblical marriage with the bridegroom whose flesh and blood make up the holy Eucharist. My faith is Queer, ancestral, esoteric, anarchist, insurrectionary, anticolonial, antiracist, unorthodox, disruptive, free. When I encounter the divine, or pray to the saints, or sit in the chapel to pray, I am experiencing communion with the sublime, in every sense of the word, the same presence that made the apostles fall to their faces before the transfiguration, that shaped the world from void, that animates the deep care and rage which boil into every aspect of my being.

When conservatives tell me I am not a Christian it is only because they cannot conceive of a Christ and a faith so big, so all encompassing, so beyond anything our human minds can comprehend, and they cannot conceive being in tune with this divinity and being left senseless by the knowledge that the divine above all else is us and loves us more than we could ever comprehend, such that experiencing this love is enough to leave one fundamentally, ontologically changed down to the fiber of their being. I feel sorrow for them. I pray that Christ may reach into their hearts and open their eyes, that they may see not only the horrors that they commit but also the deep love and freedom that awaits them through abandoning their fundamentalism and their bigotry.

Or, in other words, me every time I see another conservative Christian whining about how people aren’t doing Christianity right because they don’t adhere to a super narrow and watered down version of the faith:

[memecucker]

Bodily autonomy to do what, exactly?

Recreational abortions

[traditionaldream]

Obesity is not cute, healty or normal. It shouldn't be celebrated or encouraged. Lying to fat people saying they look beautiful and empowered are just pitiful lies.

Going to the gym, working out and caring for your body, as well not wanting to be fat, isn't "fatphobia", is just what normal beings do.

Fat liberation is a dangerous lie.

[queerliblib]

okay but it’s even funnier on mobile, because what’s the news of the day?

the pope saying ‘faggotry’ and your very own queer library 🌈 ✨

you can read the full article here

🏳️‍🌈 help QLL thrive for another year! 🏳️‍⚧️

[avidabsurdist]

Hey folks, My family is trying to relate to each other more and we're all going to start doing things the other people like to try and get closer.

I want to watch a Dimension 20 season with them and I don't know which to pick

(we have 3 adults, 2 are early 50s, one 20 y/o that's me, and a 17 y/o shithead I love dearly)

[queerism1969]

[many-sparrows]

I love you social justice oriented Christians. I love you Gary (my pastor) who presided over gay weddings before they were legally binding and before the church had come to a decision on it. I love you Conrad (old pastor I work with) for getting arrested for protesting the Iraq war and performing a lesbian wedding the minute it became legal for a couple who'd been together for decades. I love you Dr Donald Hertz for your sermons on Acts 20:27 and your life spent living out that verse and for causing trouble when you were still a student assigned to a segregated church in Birmingham and for spontaneously joining a grape boycott picket line outside of a Safeway in Berkeley because that verse says we cannot shrink away from our duty to each other. I love you Martin Luther's common chest. I love you Charles de Foucauld. I love you Oscar Romero. I love you Dorothy Day. I love you for giving me a legacy to carry on.

[raayllum]

me looking at the religious trauma i gave sir sparklepuff and sizing rayla up next like "is it finally time for your catholic coded deconstructionist fic"?

[victusinveritas]

"...or during June, when the Sacred Heart of Jesus requires protection for some reason." has me rolling as a Catholic school survivor (K-BA) who still ended up embracing Liberation Theology despite a lot of attempts from parochial school theology to drive folks like me away.

[believerswithkamala]

Why you can be against abortion and still vote for someone who wants to legalize it.

I do not like abortion. I think it is a difficult, sad, and complicated thing. I believe in an ideal society there would be no abortion because in an ideal society there would also be no poverty, no rape, the adoption system would be seamless and all relationships would be healthy. But we don’t live in an ideal society. And poverty, r*pe, unstable relationships, and abusive relationships all exist. The foster care system and the adoption system is messy and often traumatic. There are circumstances where women could die without an abortion. We can and should strive to get as close to an ideal society as possible, but we will never get there. Abortion needs to be legal and accessible and it’s not a woman’s fault. It is a product of systemic issues within society.

Legalizing abortion just allows women to access care that is unfortunately often necessary. It is a hard choice and it’s important that women have the autonomy to make the difficult choice. What I might see as an unnecessary abortion might seem very necessary to someone else. And both arguments would likely be valid.

This doesn’t mean we have to accept abortion and do nothing about it. We can strive to fix the issues that cause it. We can strive to create a society where relationships are more stable. We can make sure everyone receives proper s*x education and birth control is easier to access. We can strive to improve the foster care and adoption system. We can strive to reduce poverty, which is a step Kamala Harris can and will help with if she is elected. And we can change our perspective of rapists. If r*pists were held accountable, less women would have abortions because of it and less women would endure that unimaginable trauma. Again, Kamala Harris became a prosecutor in part because she wanted to hold these people accountable. She understands this issue on a very deep level.

I don’t believe children of r*pists are less valuable than any other child, but I do believe that a woman who had her body violated should not have to carry a pregnancy that resulted from that. Most likely the abortion would occur before the unborn can feel pain and while it is very sad, if a woman feels that’s the best option then it is the best option.

Abortion is sad, but it is sometimes necessary and women need to have the right to make their own decisions. There are systemic societal changes we can make to reduce abortions and that’s what we should pursue instead of banning procedures that are often necessary and blaming women for getting them. It’s not a woman’s fault. It is a symptom of societal issues.

[gregoriaofnyssa]

The Forgotten Cost of Immigration

I'm not really anti-immigration. My ancestors are immigrants, and most of my greatest friends are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. I am actually kind of indifferent, politically, to immigration. But there is a fruit of immigration that I think does not get spoken about often enough-- in fact, I've never heard it spoken about. Immigration tears children away from their homelands. It is a naive, liberal fantasy to say people do not possess blood memory, to say that land does not carry a spirit and does not imbue that lasting spirit in its people. It does. We can all feel it.

My most recent non-domestically (US) born ancestors were my great-grandparents, who came from Western Armenia and Iran. This is on my Father's side. I am far removed from that place, but I still ache to see, to touch, to smell my homeland. I love my country, yes-- America is the place that raised me. But my blood never spilled to protect this land. I mourn the factors that drove my family away from the places that raised them, and the land over which their blood did spill. Today, many immigrants come to America because of conflicts that America caused or exasterbated.

I have to wonder why, instead of accepting immigrants, why we don't try to put to a stop, at least to our part, of what is causing their need to migrate. It is a tragedy to leave one's homeland. It is a tragedy to raise children away from where their blood was designed to be. It creates a feeling of lifelong mourning. Americans complain sometimes of the recent influx of Palestinian immigrants. If it bothers you so, why not advocate against the billions and billions of dollars America lavishes upon the israeli war machine, which is the very thing causing those migrants in the first place? I know, because I have seen it, because I know them, they don't want to come here. They want to live in the place their blood belongs. No one really wants to leave their homeland-- they want to leave conflict, poverty, and danger.

I am mourning a past I never possessed. A heritage I will never be able to fully embrace.

[asherwentinsanelol]

please sign this

[ffcrazy15]

An article in the NYT this morning on the immigration surge was blanketed with comments of people saying things to the effect of “I’m a progressive/liberal/democrat but…” And then some of the most bigoted shit I’ve ever seen. How they support the mass deportations. How “cultural unity” is important. How we need to “take care of Americans first!”

I weep for this country. How quickly we are swayed by fearmongering and the mere threat of inconvenience, while our fellow human beings beg us, literally beg us, for help. Starving families, people seeking a new life—people with children, damn it!

The greed and ignorance on display is nauseating. I want to scream or kick something. Christmas barely two weeks away, and the whole country sneering that the inn is full, that they’ll shut their eyes to whatever it takes to make it happen.

God have mercy. Christ have mercy. Break our hardness of hearts!

[identityquest]

samuel is my favorite weird little catholic monk