The following is the first part of a keynote address delivered by Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, in New York City, during the 2023 Outreach conference. It has been edited for clarity, length and style.
I speak with you tonight in my role as the executive director of DignityUSA, but this organization is much more than my employer. I have been a member of Dignity since 1982, when I attended a Mass at Dignity Boston shortly after my graduation from college, and as I was beginning my graduate studies at the former Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass.
Having been told my lesbianism made me unfit to lead my Newman community during my college years, finding a Catholic community that welcomed me and helped me integrate my sexual orientation and my faith felt miraculous.
This community has been my faith community for my entire adult life. It is where I met my wife (on Easter Sunday, 29 years ago), where we married, where our children were baptized. It is where I met most of the people who are my dearest friends, and it’s the community that has accompanied me through major losses and challenges in my life.
Finding a Catholic community that welcomed me and helped me integrate my sexual orientation and my faith felt miraculous.
It is the community that has called and supported me as a minister, that has allowed me to live out a vocation I have known since I was a young child. I know that many of you who are part of Catholic LGBTQ communities understand what a blessing this is in our lives. And what a gift it is to find one.
It is also important to note that in telling Dignity’s story, and in bringing forth some of what we’ve learned, there are many moments when things the institutional church did or did not do caused great harm. I will be talking about some of these.
As in Scripture, the story of God’s people is one of attempts to discern truth, the essence of belief and the will of a mysterious God. Over and over throughout our history, Dignity has held positions different from the official teachings of the church, and that is true today. Indeed, I am sure there are some in our church who find it scandalous that I am speaking at this conference. I hope they can listen and find some common ground in what I say.
We, in Dignity, have always held firm to our faith, our baptism, our membership in the Body of Christ. We believe that, like all other Catholics, we have gifts to bring as well as things to learn from our church. You will hear my language about the queer Catholic community change during this talk. This reflects how our community’s sense of ourselves has evolved over time.
Finally, I want all of you to know that, although it is my voice you hear, this presentation draws on the insights and witness of literally thousands of people. What you will hear this evening are stories and lessons from my reflections on two sources of insights.
First, for nearly two years preceding DignityUSA’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2019, our entire organization engaged in a jubilee period. Our national board invited everyone associated with Dignity to engage in a personal and communal reflection on our history, our present and our dreams for the future. During each of these three stages, every community was invited to hold listening sessions, given questions to help guide their conversations and asked to submit a report on what they heard.
We believe that, like all other Catholics, we have gifts to bring as well as things to learn from our church.
Online sessions were held so people unaffiliated with a chapter or caucus, or unable to attend a local session, had the opportunity to participate. Over 84 percent of Dignity communities and members took part in this effort. A team of board members and staff read every one of these reports and compiled an executive summary of each phase. This made it easy for me to review what was important to our members, and to draw on the broadest range of perspectives in thinking about what we’ve learned.
Early years of Dignity
I invited dozens of Dignity’s leaders—people who have given, in many cases, decades of their lives to ensuring that our ministry is available to all who need it—to share their thoughts with me on lessons learned. They responded generously, articulately and with palpable love for their faith and community.
It is impossible to describe their contributions as anything other than Scripture. So, with gratitude to all whose thoughts have inspired this talk, let us turn now to consider just a few of the many lessons learned.
In the beginning were shame and isolation. These were the needs that spurred the birth of Dignity. In the late 1960s, our founder Father Patrick Nidorf was an Augustinian priest based in San Diego. Father Pat shared this story of what inspired him to begin a ministry for gay Catholics.
The Catholic gay people whom I had met were frequently bothered by ethical problems and identity with the church. It seemed obvious that the church wasn’t meeting the needs of the gay community. In counseling gay Catholics, there always seemed to be an excessive and unreal problem of guilt that was sometimes reinforced in the confessional instead of being resolved.
Father Pat’s proposal got approval late in 1968, and in the early months of the following year, about a dozen lesbians and gay men started meeting for prayer, Bible study and sometimes Mass in a home in San Diego. As our archives document:
Since [Father Pat] doesn’t want religious fanatics or homophobics [sic] to disrupt or dominate meetings. He requires the return of a completed application form (and when in doubt, a personal interview). He charges five dollars a year for participation and requires that all be 21 years of age and have a membership card, which he issues. The monthly gatherings are closed to anyone else.
When I hear Pope Francis talk about the ministry of accompaniment, Father Pat’s work in these early days often springs to mind. He demonstrated a clear understanding of LGB and ally Catholics’ longing to remain connected with their faith and their church, to do so in a space where they did not face condemnation. Perhaps most importantly, he understood the need for a place where they could be safe from the very real threats they faced in everyday life.
The needs and realities of those being served must drive any ministry
In this case, the need to know God’s unconditional love, to be in a supportive spiritual community, to know we have a place in the church we love and that claimed us in baptism, to find sanctuary from social and religious oppression, these were all recognized and met. And the ministry thrived.
When I hear Pope Francis talk about the ministry of accompaniment, Father Pat’s work in these early days often springs to mind.
By 1970, Dignity was meeting mostly in Los Angeles, as interest there exceeded the number of folks who gathered in San Diego. Father Pat had started advertising the group’s existence in The Advocate and the Los Angeles Free Press. Due to the group’s growth, meeting in homes was no longer feasible, at least in Los Angeles.
In September 1970, Saint Brendan Catholic Church of Los Angeles opened its doors, and Dignity met in the parish hall. The group was so excited by this welcome that they urged Father Pat to write the archdiocese to explain his ministry and Dignity’s beliefs. These had been outlined by Bob Fournier, an early lay leader.
We believe that homosexuality is a natural variation on the use of sex. It implies no sickness or immorality. Those with such sexual orientation have a natural right to use their power of sex in a way that is both responsible and fulfilling … and should use it with a sense of pride.
Although this language was tweaked, it was still bold, provocative and forward-thinking language for 1970. What was ultimately adopted read: “We believe that gay, lesbian and bisexual persons can express their sexuality in a manner consistent with Christ’s teaching.”
Although Pat thought contacting diocesan officials was not prudent, he eventually gave in to what he described as “continual prodding,” and sent the letter in early 1971. Very shortly thereafter, Pat and his provincial were summoned to meet with Timothy Manning, the archbishop of Los Angeles. By the conclusion of the meeting, Pat was ordered to stop his ministry. Nine days later, he announced his resignation at Dignity’s monthly potluck and meeting, attended by about 90 people. The group responded with despair at first, but after a speech by Bob Fournier, decided to continue as a lay-led ministry.
What was ultimately adopted read: “We believe that gay, lesbian and bisexual persons can express their sexuality in a manner consistent with Christ’s teaching.”
Even as a momentous transition in leadership occurred, it became clear that there was strong interest in Dignity across the country. The ads that Father Pat had placed were being seen by folks traveling to Los Angeles and people from other countries, including the Philippines, Australia, Canada, England, Holland, Switzerland and the West Indies. Letters were flowing into the address listed in the ad, and a small group of original members replied to each one, providing their phone numbers for follow up.
Early members report spending dozens of hours each month on the phone or writing letters to those making inquiries, hearing their stories and eventually, trying to help them get Dignity communities started wherever they were. By November 1971, Louisville, Ky., organized the first chapter outside of southern California.
Let’s think about this for a moment: Here are people scorned by family, church and society, who are labeled (and often think of themselves) as sick, sinful and criminal. Yet, just as the early church had unlikely leaders, they became apostles who spread out across the land, planting the seeds of good news for LGB Catholics.
An affirming spiritual community is healing
It can transform shame to generous purpose, instill a sense of giftedness and turn pariahs into ministers. Isn’t this what we see in nearly every LGBTQ ministry? There is miraculous grace in recognizing, in naming, in affirming wholeness and holiness. Over time, we see people become fully alive, living into who they were created to be.
Dignity grew quickly in those early years, with officers and volunteers providing long-distance support, and sometimes traveling to places where people were meeting under the name and model of Dignity. Gay Catholics from Canada and Australia traveled to the U.S. to meet with Dignity leaders. As these groups formed, many members and leaders believed it was important to reach out to local Catholic leaders, including their own pastors, priests from religious orders, religious women’s communities, and in some cases, bishops, to let them know about Dignity and ask for their support.
It can transform shame to generous purpose, instill a sense of giftedness and turn pariahs into ministers. Isn’t this what we see in nearly every LGBTQ ministry?
Certainly, this did not happen everywhere, but in more than a few instances, the groups met with some significant support. Father John McNeill, then a Jesuit priest, agreed to allow Dignity to reprint his writing, some of the first Catholic theology to argue for inclusion and respect for gay people. Priests offered their services as presiders and provided pastoral counseling. Nuns and priests became members of Dignity communities—sometimes openly, sometimes incognito.
Churches, chapels and Newman centers served as meeting places. In some dioceses, bishops collaborated with Dignity by appointing chaplains or developing what were then called “gay and lesbian ministries.” Some bishops even presided annually or a few times per year at Dignity liturgies.
Dignity members and some church officials became leaders in early attempts to gain human rights protections for lesbian and gay people. Some Catholic charitable organizations, hospitals and colleges were among the first organizations in the U.S. to add sexual orientation to their non-discrimination policies.
In 1974, the National Federation of Priests’ Councils adopted a motion to support civil rights for gay people. The next year, Dignity helped shape a presentation to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (now the U.S.C.C.B.) urging them to “condemn discrimination, support civil rights and assist Dignity in its pastoral outreach to gays and lesbians.”
Dignity’s delegates to the 1976 Call to Action conference, attended by U.S. bishops, succeeded in getting four pro-gay resolutions passed. Many other Dignity efforts helped drive Catholic leadership towards LGBTQ equality and inclusion in the first decade after Stonewall.
One of my favorite stories is of Dignity leaders in California getting every diocese in the state to urge Catholics to defeat the Briggs Initiative in 1978. The initiative would have made it illegal for gay men or lesbians to serve as teachers, aides, counselors or administrators in California schools. It failed.
The current tension in our church around LGBTQ issues was not always so evident, and the initial support for our community can be a source of hope.
It’s important to remind ourselves of this history, or to educate ourselves if we did not witness it or were not aware of it. The current tension in our church around LGBTQ issues was not always so evident, and the initial support for our community can be a source of hope.
The first impulse of Catholicism is to support LGBTQ people
I believe this reflects the core principles of our faith, which are love, justice and community. We Catholics believe, with every fiber of our being, that each person is loved into being by God, and that each of us has inherent dignity that must be respected. We speak of ourselves as all being members of the Body of Christ, and we long for that body to be healthy and whole. These convictions have fueled Dignity, as well as other ministries serving LGBTQ people and allies, for decades.
But we live in a big church, and in a world that holds evil as well as grace. So, alongside the blessings of love and inclusion, we also experience fear, jealousy, anger, the desire for power and other impulses that can lead to inequity and discrimination. While there was a great deal of support for Dignity and for lesbian and gay equality from the church in the 1970s and early 1980s, that was not a universal reality in the U.S. Concerns about the acceptance of homosexuality were raised quite early in Rome.
In late 1975, the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith published a document expressing grave concerns about changing social mores on sex and sexuality. The document stated that “no pastoral method can be employed which would give moral justification to [homosexual] acts.” It added: “In Sacred Scripture, they are condemned as a serious depravity and even condemned as the sad consequence of rejecting God.”
We speak of ourselves as all being members of the Body of Christ, and we long for that body to be healthy and whole.
This thinking and language were seized on by many people, including Catholics and some bishops, as authoritative condemnation of any same-sex intimacy, and as a way to raise questions about the legitimacy of Dignity and other ministries to the lesbian and gay community.
As the 1980s began, there were dark clouds on the horizon. A few dioceses began to ban priests from presiding at Dignity liturgies, arguing that separate liturgies for LGB people were not necessary. Catholic officials started to testify at municipal and statewide public hearings against the expansion of equal rights to include sexual orientation. Pope St. John Paul II began to emphasize doctrinal orthodoxy. He was a conservative on issues of gender, sexuality and family, and the Vatican censured theologians whose work questioned official church teaching.
Starting in 1981, Dignity members became deeply concerned about outbreaks of the “gay disease.” In cities and small towns across the U.S., men who had sex with men started becoming ill with a similar series of symptoms, and many died quite quickly. As the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic spread, there was little known about the cause or transmissibility of this very frightening, and almost always fatal, disease. Staff at many hospitals, medical facilities and funeral homes were very fearful.
Some refused to work with people who had symptoms consistent with this disease. Others dressed in full hazmat suits when entering the rooms of patients with AIDS. Patients were often left in filth for hours. Food was left outside their doors. Some chaplains refused to provide spiritual support. The bodies of some people known or suspected to have died of AIDS-related causes were placed in trash bags and left at loading docks. Some funeral homes refused to provide services for these people and their families.
In the wake of this, it fell largely to the personal networks of people with AIDS to care for them. Dignity communities around the country were among those on the front lines, and the fact we were organized often made us a touchstone for desperate folks we had never encountered before. Dignity members found themselves in hospitals, hospices and homes, providing hands-on care, companionship, nourishment, laundry and cleaning services, spiritual care, and, yes, even funerals for literally thousands of people.
We were often with families as they learned their son was gay and did not have long to live, or worse, had died too ashamed or fearful to share these secrets with them.
Some of the dead were our lovers, partners, friends, community members. We were often with families as they learned their son was gay and did not have long to live, or worse, had died too ashamed or fearful to share these secrets with them.
As we lived through the pandemic years, many political, medical and religious institutions failed to even acknowledge the crisis, with some calling the disease God’s punishment for perversion. We became advocates, pushing the powerful to respond to this overwhelming suffering and loss. We were leaders in ACT UP, the National Catholic AIDS Network and countless faith-based advocacy groups.
We negotiated the trauma of both individual losses and the clear realization that our lives—and the lives of sex workers, addicts, infected children and men who had sex with men—were considered expendable. This was the price of keeping “good” people safe. For those who survived this horrific period, that trauma lives on to this day.
Ministry means meeting the needs of the world (or of your community) despite the costs
This lesson, borrowed from the theologian Mary E. Hunt, is a call to all of us, not just a chosen few. In those desperate days, we learned we had within us what was needed to meet the challenge.
As the pandemic reached its peak, the Vatican released the infamous “Halloween Letter.” Officially entitled the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” this October 1986 document outlined much of what is still official Catholic teaching on homosexuality.
It was riddled with language that gay and lesbian people, our families and many pastoral ministers found offensive, demeaning and unnecessarily harsh. The letter states that the 1975 Vatican statement, while appropriately labelling same-sex sexual relationships as “intrinsically disordered,” was not clear enough in its characterization of “the homosexual condition itself,” which could not be considered “neutral, or even good.” The letter reads:
Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.
The document finds that when people engage in same-sex activity, “they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent.” Another statement that added to the uproar was a section where church officials refuted efforts to expand protection of civil rights for gay and lesbian people. And in what was clearly a reference to H.I.V./AIDS:
Even when the practice of homosexuality may seriously threaten the lives and well-being of a large number of people, its advocates remain undeterred and refuse to consider the magnitude of the risks involved.
Gay and lesbian people, and many others, saw in this language tacit support for anti-gay violence. While some would caution that the document’s wording is theological language with precise meanings that do not always correspond to popular usage, the reality is that this document was released into the world and read by countless people of diverse backgrounds. It caused immense pain for many people, especially members of the LGBTQ community, at the time of its release and in the decades since.
The 1986 letter caused immense pain for many people, especially members of the LGBTQ community, at the time of its release and in the decades since.
As the text began to circulate, hundreds of Dignity members left our communities, calling this letter the final straw. They could no longer continue fighting to maintain their affiliation with a church that could say such vile things. For their spiritual, emotional and, in some cases, physical well-being, they needed to step away.
Some joined other faith communities, often the Episcopal Church or Metropolitan Community Church. Some found other spiritual pathways, and some felt so much anger and pain that they rejected any kind of spiritual or religious practice, at least for a period of time. The ruptures in our communities and in many friendships were another source of pain during this very difficult period.
The language in the 1986 letter referencing Catholic groups “[pressuring] the church to change her teachings” and advocating for expanded legal protections was widely believed to be directed towards Dignity, and other groups inspired by Dignity’s growth. Another part of the letter directed bishops to ensure that ministry to gay and lesbian people was developed and run by ministers who deeply understood and upheld church teaching on sexuality and marriage. It then stated:
All support should be withdrawn from any organizations which seek to undermine the teaching of the church, which are ambiguous about it, or which neglect it entirely. Such support, or even the semblance of such support, can be gravely misinterpreted. Special attention should be given to the practice of scheduling religious services and to the use of church buildings by these groups, including the facilities of Catholic schools and colleges.
Six weeks after the publication of the letter, the first eviction of a Dignity chapter from a Catholic church occurred when the Syracuse group was told, two weeks before Christmas, that it was no longer welcome to use that space. In quick succession, Dignity communities in Atlanta; Brooklyn, N.Y.; Buffalo; Cincinnati; Minneapolis; New York City, Pensacola, Fla.; Richmond, Va.; Washington, D.C. and Vancouver were forced from their homes. Dozens of expulsions followed as the months went on.
In some cases, a pastor or chancery staff member offered Dignity members a choice: they could continue to meet at the church if they renounced Dignity’s Statement of Position and Purpose. Dignity is very proud that not a single chapter accepted this offer.
Evicted chapters, and chapters that suspected eviction, quickly reached out to other faith communities in their areas. Almost all found gracious welcome in Congregational, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Metropolitan Community, Presbyterian and Unitarian churches. In many cases, Dignity members created meaningful rituals, like shaking off dirt from their shoes, as they left their former spaces and processed to their new homes.
