These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.”
Matthew 10:5-8
Cecilia Gentili, who died on February 6, 2024, was a former sex worker who suffered drug addiction and was jailed at Rikers Island, before becoming an advocate for sex workers, as well as a representative for the, gay, lesbian, and transgender community. She is the founder of the COIN Clinic, short for Cecilia’s Occupational Inclusion Network, a free health program for sex workers. She also acted in the FX television series Pose, about the underground ballroom dance scene in the 1980s and 1990s. She also performed two one-woman stage shows.
Born in Argentina, Gentili was a self-professed atheist who had been “reexamining my relationship with religion” as part of a Narcotics Anonymous, a program she regularly attended. She told Interview magazine last year, “Religion is such a complicated issue for most queer and trans people. I used to go with my grandmother to the Baptist church, and they didn’t want me there. They made it very clear. I used to go to the Catholic church, too, and both were such traumatic experiences for me as a queer person. So, I came to identify as an atheist, but I know that so many trans people have been able to find a relationship with faith in spaces that include them.”
A funeral Mass was held for her on February 15 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. The service was controversial because a Christian worship service was held in a cathedral for an atheist who advocated for the rights of sex workers and the LGBTQIA+ community.
At the service, many who gathered in the sanctuary displayed behavior that was disrespectful to a hallowed institution, as those seated in the pews referred to her as “Saint Cecilia,” and changed the words to the sacred hymn Ave Maria, to “Ave Cecilia,” before dancing the aisle.
Catholic liberals praised the church for hosting the service for a transgender woman. Before the funeral, Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for this segment of the New York Archdiocese, told The New York Times, that “a funeral is one of the corporal works of mercy which is a model for how we should treat all others, as if they were Christ in disguise.”
The conservative group CatholicVote described the funeral as “unbelievable and sick,” and that it was “a mockery of the Christian faith.” Nicholas Gregoris, a co-founder of the Priestly Society of Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman, called it “revolting,” a “blasphemous and sacrilegious fiasco, a deplorable desecration of America’s most famous Catholic Church.”
Father Edward Doughtery, who celebrated the Mass, said, “When all this is said and done, we need to have better relationships and more conversations with the Catholic Church. If they want to help us, we need burial funds and sustainability, not condemnation.”
After the service, Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, who condemned the funeral service, directed the cathedral to conduct a Mass of Reparation, which is a Mass conducted to re-sanctify the church after a scandalous activity.
The two sides on this issue will never reconcile, nor should they be expected to. Yet, I find the need to re-sanctify a sanctuary appalling as it is disrespectful of a child of God. A sanctuary never needs to be cleansed because a nonbeliever or someone with an alternate lifestyle was blest within its sacred walls. A church sanctuary is a place of acceptance, it is not a lecture hall for theological debate. The Sunday school classroom is a symposium, the sanctuary is a haven. The sanctuary of a church must always be a sanctuary.
I allude to the ministry of Jesus among the lepers, the foremost group of outcasts in the community. When Jesus sent forth the disciples on their ministry to the House of Israel, there only one physical disease that he specifically mentioned, and that is leprosy.
Jesus was knowledgeable of the panoply of laws recorded in Leviticus that dictated the status of lepers and how they were discriminated against, deemed outcasts of society. Lepers had to live in communes outside of the city gates. They were required to announce their presence by crying three times, “Unclean! Unclean! Unclean!” A garment must be worn above the upper lip, the hair kept in disarray, and the regulations in Leviticus read on ad infinitum.
There was no place for them in society, in Jesus’ day or the days to follow. In the Middle Ages, a person with leprosy would be brought into the church and a funeral service would be conducted. At the conclusion of the sacramental act the penitent would be sent out of the church wearing a black robe to live as if already dead. Forbidden to reenter the church, the sanctuary walls had “squint” holes so Sabbath worship could be observed while remaining outside.
Let us not make others into lepers. We can be appalled at their lifestyle. We can judge their ethics. We can denounce their doctrines. We can, and should, openly speak against their conduct and beliefs, but they must always be welcomed in the church. We are not expected to sanctify their lifestyle, nor are we to condemn them from the fellowship of Christ.
Walter Rauschenbusch is a theologian who I frequently study, and whose systematic theology – the social gospel – I adamantly promote.
Walter Rauschenbusch, in 1886, began his pastorate in the Second German Baptist Church in the “Hell’s Kitchen” section of New York City. It was located in urban poverty and funerals for children led him to social activism. He maintained that the Church had an essential role in the fight against systemic injustices. In 1897, he began teaching the New Testament and church history at Rochester Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York.
In 1892, while a pastor at Second German Baptist Church, Rauschenbusch and some friends formed a group called the Brotherhood of the Kingdom. Pastors and leaders joined the organization to debate and implement what became known as the social gospel. Rauschenbusch became one of the most prominent theologians instituting this school of systematic theology.
In Rauschenbusch’s early adulthood, mainline Protestant churches were largely allied with the social and political establishment, in effect supporting such practices as the use of child labor and the domination of robber barons. These church leaders relinquished their calling to be pastors to the disadvantaged in order to protect and sustain their status and a relationship with their benefactors. Contrary to this, Rauschenbusch saw it as his duty, as a minister and student of Christ, to act with love by trying to improve social conditions.
Rauschenbusch’s view of Christianity was that its purpose was to spread the Kingdom of God, not through a “fire and brimstone” style of preaching, but by the Christlike lives led by socially conscious Christians. The theologian did not relate Jesus’ death as an act of substitutionary atonement; rather, he came to believe that Jesus died “to substitute love for selfishness as the basis of human society.” Rauschenbusch wrote that “Christianity is in its nature revolutionary” and tried to remind society of that. He taught that the Kingdom of God “is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven.”
In his book Christianity and the Social Crisis, that was published in 1907, he listed six “private sins” that Christ died for, and six “social sins.” These six “social sins” which Jesus, according to Rauschenbusch, bore on the cross: Religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit [being “the social group gone mad”] and mob action, militarism, and class contempt – every student of history will recognize that these sum up constitutional forces in the Kingdom of Evil. Jesus bore these sins in no legal or artificial sense, but in their impact on his own body and soul. He had not contributed to them, as we have, and yet they were laid on him. They were not only the sins of Caiaphas, Pilate, or Judas, but the social sin of all mankind, to which all who ever lived have contributed, and under which all who ever lived have suffered.
A church sanctuary will never be in need of a Mass of Reparation, for it is always and forever will be – a haven – heaven on earth – the Kingdom of God – a sanctuary for the outcasts of society.