Controversial Chicago Cardinal Who Called Same-Sex Marriage ‘Fiction’ Has Died

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who had a strained and discordant relationship with the LGBT community, has died. 

Francis George, elevated to Cardinal in 1998 by then-Pope John Paul II, has died at the age of 78, after an extended battle with cancer. The retired Archbishop of Chicago, George had a relationship with the LGBT community that was marked by harsh language and ungenerous commentary.

In 2012, Archbishop George supported a local priest upset that a planned gay pride parade would pass his church. “You don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism,” George told a local news station, announcing that services at that church would be canceled for that Sunday. He later apologized for those remarks.

Also that year, Cardinal George celebrated the marriages of some 400 Catholic couples, but managed to link the occasion with his unceasing fight against marriage equality, and calling same-sex marriages friendships.

“Marriage is what it is, what Jesus said from the beginning: Two in one flesh, for which man leaves his family and joins himself to his wife; and wife leaves her family, and joins herself to her husband. There must surely be ways in our civil society, where we can honor friendships, where we can respect other people, without destroying the nature of marriage. It is very important, for your whole lives, give witness to what marriage truly means. And while civil laws might change – if they do – then society will be the worse for it.”

In 2010 George, as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), partnered with the Mormon Church to fight same-sex marriage, and ended up comparing the fight for equality to Soviet Russia.

“Any attempt to reduce that fuller sense of religious freedom, which has been part of our history in this country for more than two centuries, to a private reality of worship and individual conscience so long as you don’t make anyone else unhappy, is not in our tradition. It was the tradition of the Soviet Union.”

In 2013, on New Year’s Day, Cardinal George issued a letter stating same-sex marriages are “a legal fiction” and that gay people must live celibate lives or risk God’s love.

“Marriage comes to us from nature,” he added. “The human species comes in two complementary sexes, male and female. Their sexual union is called marital. It not only creates a place of love for two adults but also a home for loving and raising their children. It provides the biological basis for personal identity. It is physically impossible for two men or two women to consummate a marriage, even when they share a deep friendship or love.”

During Leadership Day 2012 at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Illinois, George answered questions from students on same-sex marriage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=428XKBoyS4M

Lamenting what he saw as persecution of Christians in America, George had said in 2010, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

 

Image: Screenshot via YouTube