LEAKED EMAIL: Cardinal Dolan to all archdiocesan staff after the funeral of Cecilia Gentili
Cardinal Dolan has one key thing he wants us to understand.
“I am a burning church/
I am artifice and years collapsing/
I have not yet become all that I'll be.”
-Laura Jane Grace
“The bar is set very high for 2024, but I have faith in Chappell Roan getting 100 drag queens together to do the “HOT TO GO!” dance in front of the tabernacle at Saint Patrick's Cathedral before the year is out.”
-Tony Ginocchio - who is me - in this post from January 3rd
FROM: Dolan, Timothy <bigdog11@nyarch.info>
TO: [full staff listserv]
SUBJ: Last Thursday's Events
To all chancery, parish, school, and clergy associates:
The first thing that I want to make absolutely clear is that I'm not mad. In fact, seen in a certain light, this is actually funny to me and now I'm actually laughing. I know it seems like I'm very mad, but again, I'm not mad. Even though the pastor of Saint Patrick’s already had to put out a condemnatory statement that thanked Catholics who “share our outrage,” we are not mad. Nobody here is mad. That is very important to understand. Nobody, least of all me, is mad that Saint Patrick’s Cathedral unknowingly hosted the funeral of celebrated transgender activist and sex worker advocate Cecilia Gentili, or that the funeral was apparently a giant star-studded event, covered by, among others, the Washington Post, the Hill, and the AP wire. Emmy-winning actor Billy Porter gave a eulogy. People were dancing in the aisles. Multiple applause breaks were reported, and the funeral service was described to me as generally “raucous”.
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral is one of the holiest sites in all of Catholicism. That’s what I tell people all the time, even though there’s no way to objectively quantify the holiness of a house of worship, and even if there were, the ninety minor basilicas in the United States alone would technically place ahead of our cathedral. But last Thursday marked the darkest day in the history of Saint Patrick’s since the Opie & Anthony incident. So I want to encourage everyone on staff, when we book funerals, to try and avoid getting us into situations like these. Using the most recent incident as an example: when someone calls and asks to set up a funeral for Cecilia Gentili, we're allowed to ask “sure thing, and who was Ms. Gentili?”, and then when that person literally responds “she is a sex worker advocate, an icon and an activist…Google her, because she’s quite famous,” we're allowed to then Google Ms. Gentili and very quickly find her extensive obituary in the New York Times. And then we can start thinking about, hey, this person was specifically shouted out by the governor of the New York when she passed away, she’s written and performed multiple one-woman shows, she was the director of a health policy nonprofit for queer New Yorkers, she was on that FX series Pose, so is this funeral going to just be a quick sleepy affair, or is it going to bring 1,400 people to the cathedral - a crowd so big that the presider literally made a half-hearted joke at the top of the service that “Except on Easter Sunday, we don’t [usually] have a crowd that is this well turned out” - and also these 1,400 people perhaps don’t have very warm fuzzy memories of how the Catholic church has treated them, and so we may find ourselves forced to be the assholes when we decide to shut the funeral down partway through, drawing backlash from basically every corner of the city. I had to tell a radio station that “We didn't know the background. We don't do FBI checks on people who want to be buried,” despite the fact that none of the above information requires any sort of FBI-level security clearance to obtain; still, if I had pointed out that finding all of that information was so easy that even an amateur blogger could do it in about six minutes, it could have come off as me sounding mad, which is the last thing I want, given that I’m not mad at all that this happened. The fact is, we didn't think through all of this, and we should in the future. Mistakes were made. It happens. Really shouldn’t have happened here, it would have been extremely easy for any one of a very large number of people to prevent this exact thing from happening by doing one of several extremely easy things, but there’s no sense getting mad about it now. So I haven’t. I’m not mad.
To be honest, a lot of this is on them, too. The funeral’s organizer told the Post that “the immediate reason [for choosing the cathedral] was [Gentili’s] ongoing confliction with the church and how the church perceives and treats us as a people.” A statement from Gentili’s family claimed that the funeral “brought precious life and radical joy to the Cathedral in historic defiance of the Church’s hypocrisy and anti-trans hatred.” Now, I’m not mad about this, but I do think these comments are somewhat uncalled for. We are not “hateful” towards transgender individuals, we merely refuse to acknowledge that they exist. You can’t hate something if you insist that it isn’t there in the first place. That’s why the policies that multiple diocese, including ours, have put into place over the past two years just outright refuse to acknowledge the existence of transgender people, and where possible, either ignore them completely or pressure them into not being transgender. One of my brother bishops describes these policies as “deliberately exclusionary”, which is correct, and represents a clear difference from “hateful” policy, so nobody should be calling it hateful. To look at the policy for our archdiocesan schools specifically, I have personally encouraged “young people, working with their parents, [to] bring [gender dysphoria] issues to their pastor as well as to other trained professionals who might best assist them in clarifying and defining issues of self (and sexual) identity in accord with Catholic teaching and God's natural plan.” Based on this passage alone: to say that I “hate” transgender people is ridiculous. I love these people, as long as they are the correct gender, and if they’re not, I hope they’ll meet with someone who will force them to be the correct gender, so that I can eventually love them. To be mischaracterized as someone who preaches “anti-trans hatred” is frustrating (but not angering, because none of this makes me mad). I would never turn my back on or preach hatred to the marginalized; that said, transgender people are not really all that marginalized, and as I’ve expressed in a real Wall Street Journal op-ed I wrote last year, they’re nowhere near as marginalized as, say, police officers.
I take this all very seriously - not seriously enough to be mad about any of this, though - and if we’re not willing to come together as an archdiocese and do the work required to protect our sacred spaces, we run the risk of people not taking our church or our faith seriously. When incidents like the Gentili funeral happen, Catholics get the wrong ideas and start thinking that I’m just some doddering old man who has no idea what he’s talking about. They start comparing me to Cecilia Gentili and all she was able to accomplish for the abandoned and ignored, and start asking what the hell it is I do all day anyways. They start thinking that I’m just saying things to sound like a big conservative heavy, but in reality I have no ability to think even five minutes into the future. They start thinking that a large group of activists can just show up to any major cathedral in the United States, even openly plan a large raucous event there, bring “precious life and radical joy…in historic defiance of the Church’s hypocrisy” and nobody on the archdiocesan staff is even going to do a ten-second Google search ahead of time, much less try to stop the activists at all. The people in Saint Patrick’s last week were mourners, but other activists might see them and think that it’s incredibly easy to organize large public demonstrations on the bishops’ home turfs in response to despicable policies or statements, and that those demonstrations will very quickly embarrass us, highlight the absurdity of our policies, call attention to the absurdity of our far-reaching authority in the first place, and, ultimately, make me and my brother bishops mad. That’s a real risk for the future. But thankfully, it didn’t happen this time, because I’m not mad. You’re not allowed to tell anyone I’m mad.