Association of US Catholic Priests Undermines US Bishops By Pushing Pro-Abortion LGBT “Equality Act”

The Association of US Catholic Priests (AUSCP) is once again undermining the legislative efforts of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) and assailing immutable Catholic moral teaching.  The Catholic Church formally teaches that all homosexual inclinations are intrinsically disordered, and all homosexual acts are intrinsically evil (and can NOT be approved under ANY circumstances), and yet on July 2, the AUSCP sent an email to all members titled “Assembly Reflection and Upcoming Webinars.” This email contained an entry calling on members to sign a petition from Daily Kos Liberation in support of  H.R. 15, known as the Equality Act.

The USCCB is absolutely opposed to previous and current versions of this bill, and with good reason.

According to the USCCB website, the Equality Act:

• exempts itself from the bipartisan Religious Freedom Restoration Act, in an explicit and unprecedented departure from one of America’s founding principles, thereby infringing on religious freedom and making it more difficult for individuals to live out their faith
• forces religiously operated spaces and establishments, such as church halls, to either host functions that violate their beliefs or close their doors to their communities
• requires women to compete against men and boys in sports, and to share locker rooms and shower facilities with men and boys
• forces faith-based charities that serve all people to violate their religious beliefs, and threatens the welfare of thousands of beneficiaries of charitable services such as shelters and foster care agencies, by forcing a multitude of them to be shut down
• jeopardizes existing prohibitions on the use of federal taxpayer funds for abortion, likely pressuring or even mandating the performance of abortions by health care providers in violation of their consciences, and ultimately ending more human lives
• hinders quality health care, by forcing health care professionals, against their best medical judgment, to support treatments and procedures associated with “gender transition.”

Furthermore, according to the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) language in the Equality Act “would roll back federal law that protects the consciences of pro-life nurses and physicians who object to participating in abortions because of their deeply held religious or moral beliefs … The Equality Act would also jeopardize the longstanding Hyde Amendment that protects federal taxpayer dollars from funding abortion.”

This is not the first time the AUSCP has officially endorsed legislation in direct contradiction to the US Bishops and Catholic teaching. In 2021, the AUSCP officially endorsed the “Every Child Deserves a Family Act”(ECDF) , and encouraged others to do so as well.  The ECDF was a push from homosexual activist pressure groups to force LGBT adoptions from any organizations that accept federal funding for their adoption services and was vociferously opposed by the US Bishops.

More recently, the AUSCP drafted and adopted a document challenging the Vatican itself to permit the ordination of homosexual men and called for a “new Catholic Ethic” of human sexuality and sexual behavior.

By supporting these bills that would enshrine false gender ideology and calling for change in Church teaching on sexual behavior, the AUSCP is signaling its belief that homosexual inclinations are well ordered and homosexual activity can somehow be approved. However, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states in section 2357:

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

So, once again, the AUSCP is openly pushing an agenda that directly attacks Catholic moral teaching as they ask their priest members to approve men in women’s bathrooms, loss of religious freedom and forcing doctors to murder babies, all while stabbing their bishops in the back!

This wicked organization must be stopped. Please contact your bishop to let him know that this rogue association of priests is acting in opposition to all decency and moral order.