Patheos blog
July 7, 2019
By Barry Duke
FATHER John Duffell would certainly have had a black mark placed against him when, in 2011, he told an aspiring young priest to lie about his sexuality.
It happened at a Catholic conference on sexuality held at Fordham University, New York. Duffel told delegates that “the church is perhaps the only way of affecting change in the world”, but added: “The church is not perfect.”
To an audience member who asked, in writing, how he should deal with the feeling that he is “broken” after being told he cannot enter the priesthood because he is gay, Duffell answered:
You’re not broken, the system is broken, and therefore you deal with it as a broken system; you lie.
Then the priest, a friend of pop star Lady Gaga, attended an LGBT fundraiser in his church hall in 2017. His parish’s Gay Fellowship partnered with the Born This Way Foundation, an LGBT-rights group founded by Lady Gaga, to hold a dance at the Blessed Sacrament Church.
Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, writing for LifeSiteNews, exploded:
Under the leadership of Cardinal Dolan, the Archdiocese of New York has become ever more involved with homosexual activism that openly contradicts Catholic doctrine on human sexuality and even celebrates behavior that the Church condemns as deeply sinful and ‘intrinsically disordered.’
Well, as the saying goes, revenge is a dish best eaten cold, and Duffell has been indefinitely suspended from ministry after a canonical penal process found him guilty of serial sexual misconduct.
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