
CV NEWS FEED // Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Tuesday defended the administrators of St. Patrick’s Cathedral for their quick thinking in handling the unexpectedly disorderly funeral service last week. Dolan especially singled out the priest who decided at the last moment to refuse to say Mass for the wild pro-LGBTQ crowd.
“We have a lot of misunderstanding,” Dolan told his co-host Fr. Dave Dwyer, CSP during their Sirius XM show “Conversation with Cardinal Dolan.” “Why in the world [people] still believe what the secular press reports is beyond me,” Dolan added.
Dolan praised St. Patrick’s pastor Fr. Enrique Salvo’s statement swiftly denouncing the “scandalous” event last week. The cardinal called Salvo’s statement “excellent.”
“We had absolutely no idea about this” ahead of time, the cardinal said.
He questioned “why people still think the cathedral purposely” allowed the service to take place. “A lot of people will always believe the worst,” he said. “They don’t like us any more than the [pro-LGBTQ] protesters did in the cathedral.”
St. Patrick’s is the seat of the Archdiocese of New York, over which Dolan presides.
“I think our cathedral acted extraordinarily well,” Dolan explained:
They get a call – they didn’t know the background of this woman who had died. All they know is somebody called and said, “Our dear friend died, we’d love to have the funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral … she’s a Catholic, it would be a great source of consolation, for us, her family and friends.”
And of course the priest at the cathedral said, “Come on in, you’re more than welcome.”
“Which is beautiful,” Dolan added. “We didn’t know the background. We don’t do FBI checks on people who want to be buried.”
While Dolan referred to the deceased in this case as a woman, Gentili was, in fact, a man who called himself a “transgender woman.” Dolan may have misunderstood the facts of the matter. He may also have been speaking from the perspective of the cathedral’s staff when they first received a call about Gentili’s death.
“Once the funeral started is when the trouble started, because of the irreverence and the disrespect of the big crowd that was there,” the cardinal recounted. He called the ordeal “very, very sad.”
>> ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL HOLDS BLASPHEMOUS LGBTQ FUNERAL SERVICE FOR ‘TRANS’ ACTIVIST <<
“Again, I applaud our priests who made a quick decision that ‘uh-oh, with behavior like this, we can’t do a Mass,’” Dolan said:
We’ll do the Liturgy of the Word, which is the readings, and the sermon, and the prayers of petition, and the Our Father, and then we’ll stop it, the Mass is not going to go on. Bravo for our cathedral people who knew nothing about this that was coming up.
And then of course, it got worse with the eulogies. They were very irreverent and disrespectful.
“So anyway, I think [St. Patrick’s Cathedral] did well,” Dolan concluded.
The Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan reported:
During the funeral service, transgender activists appeared to mock Catholic saints and repeatedly celebrated “whores.” The memorial service was for a transgender-identifying prostitute and self-professed atheist who went by the name Cecilia Gentili, also revered by LGBTQ activists as a “transgender icon” and advocate.
“A livestream of the funeral shows [celebrant Fr. Edward] Dougherty delivering a homily to those in attendance, joking, ‘Except on Easter Sunday, we don’t really have a crowd that is this well turned out,’ to which the crowd of transgender activists cheers, claps, and laughs,” Olohan wrote:
Dougherty chuckles. As those in attendance continue to cheer, someone in the background can be heard saying that there should be merely a funeral service, not a Mass.
It was unclear who was speaking.
>> CATHOLICVOTE VOWS TO HOLD ‘TRANS’ ACTIVISTS ACCOUNTABLE AFTER ST. PATRICK’S FUNERAL <<
CatholicVote’s previous report noted that the LGBTQ activist “who organized the event openly admitted that he deliberately deceived the cathedral staff in order to ensure the gathering could take place in the Catholic house of worship.”
CatholicVote reported Friday:
Ceyenne Doroshow organized the funeral and said he did not mention Gentili’s “transgender” identity when he planned the funeral with the church. “I kind of kept it under wraps,” Doroshow said, according to the Times. Doroshow explained that Gentili’s friends “had wanted the service to be at St. Patrick’s because ‘it is an icon, just like her.’”
