CV NEWS FEED // The organization Gays & Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (GLITS) on Tuesday announced that it would hold a press conference Wednesday “to request an explanation from St. Patrick’s Cathedral” for what they described as “cutting short the funeral mass service of Cecilia Gentili.”
In a press release sent via email, GLITS stated that its press conference would be held at noon on Wednesday, February 21, at City Hall Park. The organization said it will demand “a public apology” for the “painfully dismissive and exclusionary language” the Cathedral used in a statement after the scandalous incident.
As CatholicVote previously reported:
On Thursday, February 15, a crowd of LGBTQ activists held a funeral for Cecilia Gentili at the historic St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, New York. Gentili was “a transgender activist and actress, former sex worker and self-professed atheist,” according to the New York Times. Gentili passed away on February 6 at age 52.
The mob … eulogized [Gentili] as: “This whore. This great whore. St. Cecilia, Mother of all Whores!”
During the service, participants, many of them wearing extravagant drag, repeatedly interrupted the priest and broke into loud chants. One reveler took to the podium to pray for “access” to “gender-affirming healthcare” – a cause the Catholic Church opposes.
The founder of GLITS, Ceyenne Doroshow, organized the event. In comments to the New York Times, Doroshow admitted to deceiving the cathedral in the runup to the gathering by keeping details about Gentili “under wraps.”
After the event, the Cathedral issued a statement expressing “outrage” at having been deceived. The statement also assured concerned Catholics that a Mass of reparation had been said at the cathedral since the LGBTQ stunt desecrated it.
According to GLITS’ recounting of the events, however,
St. Patrick’s Cathedral was filled with over 1,400 mourners and community members for the iconic homegoing of legendary trans activist, actress, and community leader, Cecilia Gentili. This joyful and celebratory commemoration of her powerful legacy was abruptly cut short by a rash decision made by clergy members of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“In a live stream video of the funeral service,” the press release says, “a male voice can be heard apparently directing Fr. Edward Dougherty to ‘…move to a funeral service – no mass…’ Ms. Gentili’s service ended an hour earlier than had been scheduled, thus denying her the full funeral mass that was agreed upon.”
GLITS also now claims that “the current narrative from St. Patrick’s Cathedral leadership that they were manipulated by funeral organizers of the identity of Ms. Gentili is simply not true.”
“Funeral organizers advised Cathedral staff to look up Cecilia Gentili, her work, and the community she served,” the statement claimed:
To now place responsibility on the funeral organizers to have affirmatively disclosed the gender identity of their loved one is imposing a burden upon the mourners that would not be expected of a non-transgender person.
GLITS claims that the initial plan for the funeral service included a Mass, but that the Cathedral changed the plan during the event.
“Still reeling from the pain of Cecilia’s loss, community members are asking for an explanation for this decision which seemingly violated Catholic Canon Law governing the denial of funeral masses,” the statement added.
Fr. Gerald Murray, a canon lawyer and pastor in New York, explained to CatholicVote that “the decision to switch from a Mass to a Funeral Service was a pastoral decision to avoid further scandal. It was well justified by the offensive content of the words spoken by lectors.”
The GLITS statement concluded with a demand that the Cathedral apologize.
“In the spirit of Cecilia’s love and care, the community she served requests a public apology to heal from the pain caused to all those who have witnessed what has transpired in the days since Cecilia’s beautiful homegoing service,” the statement concluded:
Under the direction of Pope Francis’ call for a more open and inclusive church, we hope that LGBTQ+ parishioners and mourners won’t be left to feel abandoned yet again by the faith that they still want to call home.
CatholicVote Vice President Joshua Mercer questioned the sincerity of GLITS’ statement in light of how irreverently the radical activists had behaved at the cathedral.
“How they expect any Catholic in America to see them as sincere and worthy of respect is beyond me,” Mercer said. “It’s Catholics who honor and properly bury the dead – and it’s these clowns who instead dance around and interrupt the presiding priest at a funeral to yell about what a ‘whore’ the departed was.”
“They invaded our house of worship, mocked our teachings, and shouted obscenities in our most sacred space,” Mercer continued. “They basically held an anti-Catholic political rally at one of America’s most iconic Catholic churches, and even tried to trick a priest into saying Mass while they were at it so he could hand out the Holy Eucharist like a party favor for them.”
“And now they’re demanding we apologize?” Mercer concluded. “They really want to rub it in our faces.”
>> CARDINAL DOLAN PRAISES PRIEST AS ‘HERO’ FOR STOPPING MASS AT WILD LGBT ‘FUNERAL’ <<
Before GLITS released its demand for an apology, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, praised the cathedral’s actions in an episode of his Sirus XM show that aired Tuesday.
“I think our cathedral acted extraordinarily well,” he said. He stressed that cathedral staff “had absolutely no idea” what would transpire when they approved the funeral request for Gentili. The cardinal also emphasized that no one knew the deceased man’s “background.”
“We don’t do FBI checks on people who want to be buried,” Dolan said.
“Once the funeral started is when the trouble started, because of the irreverence and the disrespect of the big crowd that was there,” he explained. “Again, I applaud our priests who made a quick decision that ‘uh-oh, with behavior like this, we can’t do a Mass.’”
