Bishop Roderick Caesar, 53, thinks he was 17 or 18 when a friend confessed, “I am in the life,” meaning he was homosexual. Caesar sat with his friend and prayed. “I told him I would be his friend until the day he died. I also told him I would pray that he would not find happiness.”
Caesar, pastor of Bethel Gospel Tabernacle in Jamaica, Queens, helped organize a rally against gay marriage at City Hall on March 29 with the 400-church City Covenant Coalition, led by Puerto Rican-Italian Joseph Mattera. Earlier, on March 14, more than 8,000 Hispanic evangelicals converged in the Bronx for the nation’s largest rally to date against gay marriage. One of the speakers was a white Assemblies of God pastor.
In New York City and elsewhere, African American and Hispanic pastors are facing off against a large homosexual-rights contingent over the issue of gay marriage. For Christian leaders steeped in personal compassion, the confrontation is full of anguish, fear, and anger.
And then, for a different perspective, in NCR(eporter), writer Richard Rodriguez
I find myself in a one-sided battle against various bishops of my church, and at what I perceive is their abrogation of moral example. I do not expect the church to bless my union with another man, but I do expect the church — at a time of sexual scandal within, at a time of extraordinary example of love and fidelity on the part of gay couples — to admit at least ambivalence or puzzlement or pause at all the church does not understand about the mystery of love. The church is no longer my teacher, maybe because my life doesn’t teach the church.
And yet, and yet, the most influential document describing the intersection of my religious and mundane life was composed, 40 years ago, by an assembly of princes of the church at the Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes described how Catholics must and should live in a spirit of exchange with the world beyond church doors; learning from the world, as well as teaching the world.
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