Word: ordain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...substitute services. William McManus, a retired Indiana bishop, warned that the strong tradition of Sunday Mass could be undermined "if we bless this monster." Bishop Raymond Lucker of New Ulm, Minn., urged a study of the priest shortage that would face such issues as "Why can't we ordain people other than celibate males?" For the Vatican, however, that is a question not open to discussion...
...energy to cloaking that fact. Today not only have many of them come out of the closet, but they are also staging rallies, disrupting worship services and aggressively demanding church endorsement of their life-styles. For gay liberationists, nothing would better epitomize moral acceptance than for the churches to ordain open, practicing homosexuals as clergy. The result is a bitterly fought battle over the acceptance of gay ministers now being waged in both the Roman Catholic Church and mainline Protestant groups...
...call a lesbian couple as assistant pastors: Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart, both graduates of Luther Northwestern seminary in Minnesota. Bishop Lyle Miller refuses to approve them as ministers because they will not commit themselves to sexual abstinence. The congregation, half gay, will have to ordain the women on its own, defying both the ordination rules of the 5.3 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its policy against "homosexual erotic activity" among ministers...
Some Protestant denominations have landed on the liberationist side. The Unitarian Universalists openly welcome gay clergy. The United Church of Christ, which in 1972 became the first major denomination to ordain an avowedly homosexual clergyman, subsequently stated that homosexual orientation is no barrier to ordination, leaving open the matter of ministers' active sexual behavior. The United Church of Canada is in an uproar over a similar policy issued last year...
Catholic teaching holds that all homosexual acts are sinful, though a homosexual orientation is not. There are U.S. Catholic bishops willing to ordain priests with homosexual proclivities as long as they promise to remain celibate and support church teaching on the topic. But in practice, the barrier between homosexual orientation and homosexual activity is difficult to maintain. No doubt aware of that, the Vatican issued a sharp decree in October 1986 that is known among enraged gay Catholics as the "Halloween letter." The text warned that homosexual inclination tends "toward an intrinsic moral evil" and "must be seen...