In defense of a good priest: an email I sent to Bishop Robert J. Brennan of Columbus, Ohio

An email I sent to the Bishop of Columbus, Ohio:

June 30, 2020

Dear Bishop Brennan, I am a former resident in the Columbus diocese, and am a retired writer and editor currently residing in Hungary. I have met Fr. Klee a number of times and hold him in high esteem. His anti-abortion work is very commendable. In castigating this good and holy priest, Fr. Klee, you write that, "The Catholic Church proposes a beautiful, life-giving and liberating vision to the world based on the truths about the human person, human sexuality, marriage and the family. We proclaim with one breath the Splendor of Truth and the Joy of the Gospel. The fundamental truth is that every human person is created in the image and likeness of God and as such, must be treated with dignity and respect."

If that is so, dear Bishop Brennan, then why does Our Lord give such a carefully graded explanation of how to remonstrate with persistent sinners in St. Matthew 18, ending with if they will not listen even to the Church, then to treat them “as Gentiles or tax collectors” (this is the same chapter has the famous explanation of how the angels in Heaven rejoiced at the one lost sheep that has been found, and the dire warning against anyone who causes “a little one to sin” and also the “better to enter Heaven maimed than go to Hell whole” verses)? Persistent sinners are not to be accepted into the body of the Faithful, even though they were made in God’s image. Our Faith demands a very moral behavior on our part, and thus I wonder why so often many in the Church deny this "liberating vision" to souls in mortal sin regarding carnal sins such homosexuality? (But hardly limited to homosexuality.) First Corinthians 6, in the latest New American Bible version, says plainly, starting with verse 9, “Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor sodomites 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 That is what some of you used to be; but now you have had yourselves washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God."

As a life-long Biblical scholar, I would insist a number of points are relevant in this passage. Yes, homosexuality is certainly and clearly condemned, but so are other grievous behaviors. St. Paul takes that as a given; he lists them all in order to stress that to be baptized, confirmed, and to receive the Most Holy Eucharist, and then afterwards to engage in sodomy (or these other sins), is one of the most heinous acts a Christian can do, as it makes the Incarnated God indwelling in the Christian to be personally partaking Himself in the sins. St. Paul is very clear on this, as in verse 15 in the same First Corinthian chapter above, he writes, “15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take Christ’s members and make them the members of a prostitute? Of course not!” Also, in the larger Biblical context, homosexuality is one of the sins that "cried out from the ground", as Genesis says of the sins of Sodom (and Jewish rabbinical tradition commonly holds that homosexuality was prevalent in the days before the Flood). No Vatican II pastoral document reversed all that, and that Council declared itself not to be a dogmatic council, so no dogma was changed, either.

Homosexuality also refutes Our Lord's grace, as well, destroying the "New Creation in Christ" that a Christian is supposed to be. This is, of course, the “Divinization” dogma, what the Eastern Christians famously call Theosis. The teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament, particularly in St. Paul and St. John. Examples: John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation) 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4 might well put it best; see also Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 8:15 (the famous “Abba! Father!” verse) 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12. And of course, 3 John 3:1 “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.”

God’s Incarnation didn’t lower God so much than elevate human nature up to God. Theosis is achieved through grace – not by nature – and is our incorporation into Christ, raising us up to participate in His Divinity (as St. Peter teaches in 2 Peter 1.4). Usually described in the Western Church as an Infusion of Grace, the dogma insists our natures are changed. (This teaching is denied in Protestantism, which teaches Imputation of Grace: God assigns grace to us but doesn’t actually divinize or change our nature.) Yet because our nature is changed via the sacraments, we cannot intentionally engage in a sin we refuse to see is a sin. Rather, we are “to be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” (St. Matthew 5:48) The stakes are very high. As St. Athanasius wrote: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460] Or as St. Thomas Aquinas put it: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]

As a professional writer, I find the Biblical writings, and the Holy Church’s clear pronouncements over the past two millennia, to be obfuscated in all the modern-day pompous and pretentious verbiage of the currently in-fashion (and very cliché) way of speaking about the Church’s mission, such as you example in your writing about Fr. Klee that I quote above. We must never betray the Holy Gospel, even if we believe it is too difficult for modern people. In the case under discussion, about which Fr. Klee’s Gospel witness is being discussed, active homosexuals who do not repent of their sin – need I remind you that "repent" means turn away? – are in serious danger of Hell? Do you deny that truth to them? That at least is the plain meaning of St. Paul I quoted above, and the Church has understood it that way for two millennia. Have we somehow "evolved" beyond the Gospel? Are we now too nuanced, too sophisticated, too chic to “preach Christ, and Him Crucified”?

In sum, are we to mirror the irreligious zeitgeist around us? The Supreme Court ruled in Roe (1973) that unborn people weren't people, and they ruled later ruled two men could marry each other (Obergefell), or two women (but why not two men and three women, or some other combo?) and thus ruling there's no legal difference between a vagina and an anus, and in this very month, in Bostock, these supreme legal mavens ruled that women weren't women – that any man who wanted to claim he was a woman could do so and BE a woman according to law, thus, legally, removing legal recognition of the female sex from actual biological women. Maybe next they'll rule that shoes are ships and cabbages are kings. It's all a farce.

Dear Bishop Brennan, such are the famous “signs of the times” (St. Matthew 16:3) today. In such an environment, where “plain speech” is rare, I quite understand it might make a bishop unpopular to affirm Our Lord Christ’s traditional moral teaching today, but then, bishops wear purple to remind them that they may well need to be martyrs. Throughout history, the "Splendor of Truth" has been witnessed in blood, martyrs' blood, because “the world” rejects it. As St. John wrote (quoted above) “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” Bishop Brennan, are you willing to be a martyr to your "Joy of the Gospel" that has led to Our Lord's Crucifixion, the death by martyrdom of all His Apostles, except for St. John, who died in exile? To be a Christian is not to enter Public Service Club, still less is it what the Anglicans like to call themselves, “a Church for all peoples” (thus becoming a Church of very few people at all). Your martyrdom would be to garner the hatred of the sinful culture in which we live. Is that too much for you? Today in the world, according to opendoorusa site, between 8 and 11 Christians are killed every day. Against this reality, is it too little to ask good priests like Fr. Klee be supported, and indeed, honored, and that the all too common smarmy cant that covers up the unconfessed, uncorrected sins of the flesh, eschewed? After all, not fully preaching the Gospel is a direct affront to Our Lord and a mockery of the Holy Spirit's inspiration of St. Paul's writings.

In closing, while neither you nor I know whether any specific, individual homosexual, or fornicator, idolater (this age worships sex, self, and pride), or adulterer will go to Hell (unless you so bind one formally in your full ecclesiastical capacity) but we are charged with witnessing the Gospel, you far more than I, a simple layman. And you are supposed to see the sacraments refused to an unrepentant sinner. In the spirit of Christian charity and in the umbra of Canon 212, I have witnessed to you today, and on Judgment Day you can witness to God that I did.

In Christ,

Ronald Blackstone Crow