Janine Denomme was a witness to how an openly lesbian Catholic could serve her church, steadfast in her faith, as illness and suffering united her more and more to the sufferings of Jesus. Her diagnosis with stage three colon cancer more than a year ago brought her closer to the suffering Christ as she followed the "way of the cross" in her own tortured body. In her writing and speaking she sought to help all those suffering from any illness or separation come together under the compassion of a suffering Christ and a church in which healing was possible.
Her spiritual journey took her to seek priestly ordination in a church where misogyny and homophobia are endemic. Her vision took her beyond the rules condemning her to automatic excommunication for being ordained, and she accepted that the organization of Roman Catholic Womenpriests is true to the Catholic tradition, ordained by valid bishops who are successors to Jesus' apostles.
Jesus admonished his disciples not to trumpet their good deeds before others in order to seek praise from those observing their actions, but instead "do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing," so that "your father who sees in secret will reward you." Today's Catholic church has turned this teaching around: Priests, nuns and lay leaders whose "alms" includes work towards equality for women, or who teach about using condoms to reduce the risk for HIV/AIDS, for example, must perform their ministries in secret, because if the hierarchy finds out that church teachings on particular issues are not being followed to the letter it will punish those who are not closely following "the rules."
On the other hand, the church incessantly trumpets its condemnation of equal civil rights for LGBT persons, so that everyone can see how faithful it is being to "traditional" ideas about marriage and family. The "good deeds" that the Catholic church is doing for its LGBT members are certainly being kept secret, because there are indeed very few of them. The evil of denying Denomme a Catholic funeral at St. Gertrude church is being reported and blogged around the world.
In conversations before her death, recorded on her CaringBridge.org journal and in e-mails to friends by partner Nancy Katz, Denomme expressed the wish to be buried from St. Gertrude—the parish which she considered home and at which she had served in various leadership positions over the years. Predictably, the church denied her access to a Catholic burial, with the archdiocese stating that by her ordination—the archdiocese called it "simulated"—she had automatically excommunicated herself from the church.
"Simulating the sacrament of holy orders"—playing church. That's the final word on a woman who spent most of her life trying to be Catholic and to minister to those who were marginalized and to the suffering, to live her life in a way that expressed the faith in her heart. Those are the words the church wants trumpeted on the news channels, the analysis of the men vowed to celibacy who must keep a woman away from the altar at all costs.
When I interviewed Denomme for an article about that ordination, her compassion for her church—St. Gertrude on West Granville Avenue in Chicago—and its pastor, the Rev. Dominic Grassi, led her to refuse to discuss her relationship with the parish and how it might change once she took the step of becoming ordained. The unspoken subtext was perhaps a hope that if the parish could stay out of the news, her relationship with it would not have to be severed. As if to say, "I'm coming out in a big way here, but I'm not looking to get Father Dom and St. Gert's in trouble, and if we can keep under the radar of the hierarchy, then maybe I can still be part of the church family that means so much to me."
Her death and the church's shunning blew the lid off that idea. Fine distinctions about the church as a bureaucracy as opposed to the "people of God" comprising the faithful get strained to the breaking-point. Oh, things will go on as before, and many good Catholics—laity and priests—will still do good deeds inclusive of LGBT persons, secretly as always. Without Janine around as a public witness, St. Gertrude's can return to its under-the-radar ministries that may include a broader spectrum of families that your run-of-the-mill parish.
But Janine must not be forgotten—a powerful spiritual force for good reminding the church that inclusion is really possible. That at then end of your life when suffering brings all your spiritual understanding to a sharp focus on what really matters, rejection is not possible. Inclusion is, in fact, the inevitable answer.
