The following April 15 posting comes from the late Father Malloy’s blog site, written by Gibbons Cooney.

On April 20, Mary Kay Henry, International President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), will address the parishioners of San Francisco’s notorious Most Holy Redeemer Church. According to the parish bulletin, Henry’s subject will be “How Being Catholic Informs my Leadership.” Unsurprisingly for a speaker at Most Holy Redeemer, Ms. Henry is openly homosexual.

Ms. Henry’s Catholicism bears the same relation to Catholicism as same-sex marriage  does to marriage, and in fact, Henry admits as much. On May 29, 2012, Henry told the Denver Post “I think of my church as the church of the people and not as the institutional hierarchy that has doctrines that are not connected to my faith.” In other words, her faith is something other than Catholicism.

That the doctrines “not connected to Henry’s faith” include the doctrine that homosexual acts are sinful and the doctrine that marriage is between one man and a woman goes without saying. But they are not unique. In an April 12, 2011 SEIU press release, opposing a congressional attempt to de-fund Planned Parenthood, Henry wrote:

“Planned Parenthood is an essential part of our nation’s healthcare system, yet a handful of ideologically-driven Members of Congress want to prevent millions of American women from receiving life-saving healthcare. Since its formation, Planned Parenthood has been a leader in providing access to services such as cancer screenings, annual exams and other important preventive services. Every dollar in federal funding goes toward preventive care. Simply put, Planned Parenthood saves lives.”

“Simply put, Planned Parenthood saves lives.” Obviously, another Catholic “doctrine not connected to Henry’s faith” includes the doctrine that human life is to be protected from conception until natural death.

Less than a year later, on February 13, 2012, writing as president of the SEIU, Henry urged Senator Barbara Boxer to vote against the Blunt Amendment. The Blunt amendment, written in response to the HHS contraception mandate, would have allowed employers to refuse to include contraception in health care coverage if it violated their religious or moral beliefs. It was defeated in the senate. Every Catholic bishop in the United States supported, and still supports, such a conscience exemption. As a result of the rejection of the Blunt Amendment, a number of Catholic universities and other institutions and persons were forced into suing the government in an effort to simply exercise their first amendment right to religious freedom, to be faithful to the Church. Yet Ms. Henry, who claims the name Catholic, used the considerable power of her union to oppose this.

Ms. Henry’s invitation is a particular slap at San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage. On March 26 of this year, the day the Supreme Court heard arguments on the Proposition 8 case, the archbishop, joined by thousands of others, was speaking in front of the court against the redefinition of marriage. A scant two hours before, Ms. Henry, in the exact same spot, had been addressing a crowd in support of the redefinition of marriage–precisely the opposite message (see photo above, courtesy of SEIU Facebook page)..

Given her leadership role in opposing non-negotiable teachings of the Catholic Church it seems contradictory that Henry would title her talk “How Being Catholic Informs my Leadership.” It compels the obvious questions: 1) where she could have arrived at such a definition of what “Catholic” means, and 2) in what sort of “Catholic” environment could she have been practicing, that such a definition went unchallenged.

But when one learns that Henry has been a parishioner of Most Holy Redeemer since 2007, was indeed listed as a lector in the church at that time, the contradiction resolves itself, and the root of her understanding of “Catholicism” crystallizes….
As the inverted image of San Francisco’s St. Mary’s Cathedral, the counter-cathedral of Most Holy Redeemer becomes the source of inverted teaching. On November 23, 2009, we noted an article in the publication Metro Active San Jose, called “Gay Catholics Come Out.” The article profiled San Jose’s St. Julie Billiart church. The Metro wrote “(Fr. Jon) Pedigo said that as he started to notice the growing LGBT Catholic community that was coming to St. Julie’s, he decided to consult the established gay Catholic community at the Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in San Francisco’s Castro District.”

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