Jesus would not want gay-bashing

Without a crystal ball, I cannot predict the future. The parade will have been proceeding for several hours before these words make print. It is a safe guess, however, that this year's gay pride rally will have drawn a larger crowd than it did a year ago. One reason for that is the ill-conceived and nasty anti-gay rights demonstration that occurred last Saturday downtown. Violence manifests itself in many forms, and violent words often accomplish only one thing: they stir more violent feelings yet and, sadly, may draw more violent words.

My eyes blinked at these violent words in the press in a local paper last Sunday: “. . . hundreds of Christian anti-gay activists took to the streets yesterday in Taipei.” A pastor was quoted, “The church does not promote hatred and does not hate gays . . . We welcome gays, just as we would welcome murderers, rapists, and robbers in the church.”

Don't you wonder how Jesus would respond to talk like that?

A perhaps not so important language issue comes to mind here. Let us handle that before moving to the heart of the matter.

As is clear in the italicized words that appear in parentheses at the end of this column, I am a Catholic priest (“shen-fu”). That means I am a Christian.

Many a time I've heard Taiwan friends say something like, “Oh, so you're a Catholic. Well, I'm a Christian.” The speaker seems to mean that the one term excludes the other. This is a mistake. In fact, the word “Christian” in English applies to all people who believe Jesus is the son of God, and who accept him into their lives as their personal savior. Catholics are just as Christian in the linguistic sense of the term as our friends who worship God as Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans, or as members of any other Protestant congregation.

The word “protest” is imbedded in “Protestant” because Martin Luther, a frustrated and devoted Catholic priest, protested (in many ways justifiably) against corruption in the Catholic church of his time (the 16th century) and broke away from it to establish a group of followers that in time came to be known as Lutherans. Soon other “reformers” followed Luther's example, and Protestant communities appeared all over Europe. Students of American literature here in Taiwan often read the account of John Bradford, who chronicled the early story of that group of “dissenters” known as the Puritans in the American colonies.

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