New Ways Ministry welcomes appointment of Cardinals-designate Fernández, Rys
July 20, 2023
New Ways Ministry, long associated with dissent from Catholic teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts, welcomed Pope Francis’s decision to elevate Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández and Archbishop Grzegorz Ryś to the College of Cardinals.
New Ways Ministry described the former as “open to blessing queer couples” and the latter as “a Polish archbishop who seems more LGBTQ-positive than his country’s episcopate at large.”
A 1999 notification by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith chronicled efforts by Cardinal James Hickey of Washington and by the Vatican to address criticism of Catholic teaching on homosexuality by New Ways Ministry’s founders, Sister Jeannine Gramick, SSND, and Father Robert Nugent, SDS. The Congregation described their views as “doctrinally unacceptable” and permanently prohibited them from undertaking “any pastoral work involving homosexual persons.” In 2010, Cardinal Francis George, OMI, of Chicago, then president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, affirmed that “New Ways Ministry has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church” and that it “cannot speak on behalf of the Catholic faithful in the United States.”
Pope Francis, however, lauded Sister Gramick’s work in a handwritten letter dated December 2021 and released the following month.
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