San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy said recently that there is “repugnant” and “corrosive” bigotry toward individuals identifying as LGBT on the part of “a group of people across all religious views.”

This “particularly antagonistic” regard for LGBT individuals by people in this group generates from the depths of the souls, Bishop McElroy said. It is a reality that must be faced and one that is “incompatible with what we hope to be as a church.”

The bishop was cited and quoted by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni for a recent “The Scariest Catholic in America” op-ed that focused on another Catholic venue rescinding a speaking engagement from controversial Jesuit Father James Martin.

Bruni’s NYT op-ed last weekend followed a number of others that framed Martin in an exceedingly laudatory light, beginning by calling him “a Roman Catholic rock star.” It also minimized Martin’s troubling presentation of the LGBT issue, contending that all he has done is call for Catholics to be more respectful and compassionate to LGBT-identifying individuals.

Martin is the American Jesuit priest, writer and editor-at-large of the Jesuit America magazine. Pope Francis named him as a consultant to the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications in April 2017.

Father Martin has made numerous troubling public assertions regarding homosexuality that are at odds with Church teaching. They include, among others, suggesting that God created homosexuals as they are and that chastity is not required of homosexuals. He has stated that Catholics should reverence gay marriage, and gave his support to transgenderism in children and the idea of gays kissing at the sign of peace during Mass.

“McElroy said that while there are calm-voiced critics of Father Martin with earnest concerns about what they see as the church’s drift from traditional sexual morality,” Bruni wrote, “there are also out-and-out bigots whose methods are ‘incompatible with what we hope to be as a church.’”

“We have to face the fact that there is a group of people across all religious views that are particularly antagonistic to LGBT people,” McElroy told him. “That comes from deep within the human soul, and it’s really corrosive and repugnant.”

McElroy was among those critical of the Martin cancellations early on. He wrote last fall that opposition to Martin’s speaking engagements was a “campaign of distortion” that “must be challenged and exposed, calling it a “cancer of vilification is seeping into the institutional life of the church.”

McElroy said as well that it was a “concerted attack” on Martin’s work, driven by homophobia, a “distortion of fundamental Catholic moral theology” and “a veiled attack on Pope Francis and his campaign against judgmentalism in the church.”

McElroy formally endorsed Martin’s book. The bishop has commended one of his LGBT-affirming parishes for its “particularly welcoming” approach, and he has said the Catechism of the Catholic Church language defining homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered” is “very destructive language that I think we should not use pastorally.”

Full story at LifeSiteNews.