San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
‘LIFE IS GOOD’ NOW FOR AARON BIANCO
SANDI DOLBEE: GAY CATHOLIC RESIGNED FROM HILLCREST CHURCH THREE YEARS AGO WHEN HIS LIFE WAS THREATENED
Three years ago, Aaron Bianco was going through hell. Homophobic notes were being left on his car. His tires were slashed. Someone broke into the church where he worked and painted an anti-gay slur on a wall.
The front doors to that church were set on fire.
He was getting death threats. Conservative websites published lengthy diatribes about him, with pictures of Bianco and his husband and scathing accusations about how he was trying to turn St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Hillcrest into a PROLGBTQ parish.
One parishioner even tried to slug him.
“It was horrible,” Bianco remembers.
Never mind that St. John’s was growing, with an influx of both gays and straights, along with families with young children, filling the pews of the aging church, which is located in the historically gay epicenter of San Diego.
His opponents were unrelenting. Homosexual acts are considered a sin in the Catholic Church, so why was the diocese allowing this openly gay man be the pastoral associate, a leadership position in which he was essentially “running the show” with his “prohomosexual activism”?
They argued that as a practicing homosexual, he was violating the diocese’s own code of conduct and was not living as a faithful Catholic.
Finally, after months of torment, an FBI agent sat in Bianco’s office and asked him a question: Is this job worth dying for?
Bianco resigned, to the chagrin of San Diego Bishop Robert Mcelroy, who said at the time that there was “nothing Christian or Catholic about the hateful and vile people whose persecution of Aaron Bianco drove him from his ministry.”
In his farewell remarks at the evening Mass on Oct. 21, 2018, Bianco
asked for prayers for his family and himself. And he promised this: “I will never stop speaking for an inclusive church.”
Then he left, putting the hell behind him.
Now, three years later, he says this: “Life is good.”
He believes the good that eventually came out of his ordeal outweighs the bad. His plight drew widespread media attention — from The New York Times to the National Catholic Reporter. As word got out, letters of encouragement from as far away as Australia flooded his mailbox. A Vatican official wrote him to say Pope Francis was praying for him.
His opponents “may have won the fight,” Bianco says, “but they didn’t win the war.”
Unwavering faith
Bianco is an adjunct instructor at the University of San Diego. He teaches two theology courses at the Catholic school, a lower-division class on introduction to Catholic studies and an upper-division class on Jesus and justice.
“I love teaching at USD,” he says. “The administration has been very good, my chair is great, and I love my students.”
For the record, he says he teaches what the Catholic Church teaches.
“Then I allow students to have discussions. We have great discussions about what does it mean for them to be Catholic.”
He adds: “When I have students at the end of the semester who send me a message and say, ‘Hey, Bianco, I’m actually thinking maybe I will get confirmed,’ then something has gone right, and that’s what’s important to me.”
Bianco, by the way, remains unwaveringly Catholic. He was born into the church in an Italian Catholic family in New York and studied for several years in Rome to be a priest. He dropped out after Pope John Paul II said gay men should not become priests.
“I have always found Catholic churches to worship in where I’ve felt welcome,” he says. On one recent weekend, he drove to Manhattan Beach to attend a Mass filled with “young families, straight, gay, old, young, a vibrant place.”
But his husband has stopped going to church. “He had issues before with things that the church said, and then when all of that happened at St. John’s, that was just the end of it for him.”
Why does Bianco stick with a faith whose catechism teaches that same-gender sexual behaviors are “acts of grave depravity”?
First, he does not believe his relationship is a sin. But his allegiance goes deeper than that.
“I truly believe that the fulfillment of the truth is found in the Catholic Church,” he says. “I truly believe that, and I know it sounds crazy. And so yeah, when I go to Communion, I truly believe I’m receiving Jesus. I’m not going to allow someone to take that away from me.”
By virtue of his baptism, he believes he has a right to be in the church.
“It is my home.”
And he argues that the church actually teaches the importance of individual conscience as your defining moral compass.
“There are times, through prayer and education, you actually can go against church teaching if your moral compass is leading that way. The church has always taught this. They don’t like to talk about it, but it’s taught.”
The war rages
The tug-of-war over homosexuality is still very much ongoing in the Roman Catholic Church.
Officially, the catechism of the world’s largest Christian denomination is unequivocal: “under no circumstances” are homosexual acts condoned. Unofficially, there are indications of increasing tolerance in some parishes, including LGBTQ outreach ministries like the one at St. John’s (a spokesman for that ministry says it continues there with no repercussions).
Even among the hierarchy, the messages can be a bit mixed.
Earlier this year, more than a dozen retired and presiding U.S. Catholic bishops — including San Diego Bishop Mcelroy and Auxiliary Bishop John Dolan — signed a statement of support for the protection of LGBTQ youth.
“The Catholic Church values the God-given dignity of all human life and we take this opportunity to say to our LGBT friends, especially young people, that we stand with you and oppose any form of violence, bullying or harassment directed at you,” the bishops said in their statement. “Most of all, know that God created you, God loves you and God is on your side.”
But in another statement released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, several prelates expressed concerns over President Joe Biden’s decision to extend federal discrimination protection to include LGBTQ people.
“There are times, through prayer and education, you actually can go against church teaching if your moral compass is leading that way. The church has always taught this. They don’t like to talk about it, but it’s taught.”
Aaron Bianco
Biden’s action, they said, “threatens to infringe the rights of people who recognize the truth of sexual difference or who uphold the institution of lifelong marriage between one man and one woman.”
As for the Vatican, Pope Francis rocked the Catholic world when he seemed to lend his support to gay civil unions.
“You can’t kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this. What we have to have is a civil union law — that way they are legally covered,” he said in a documentary.
Then, in March, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose job it is to safeguard Catholic orthodoxy, sternly reaffirmed that the the church cannot bless same-gender unions. The pope, officials said, “gave his assent” to the statement.
However, it’s not over yet. This month, as part of a campaign called “Love Wins,” Catholic priests in Germany defied that edict and began blessing same-sex unions.
Public opinion among U.S. Catholics appears to be solidly on their side: 69 percent approve of gay marriage, according to the latest Gallup Poll.
The minority, however, is very vocal — and very convicted.
They insist the church cannot change its stance because this law comes from God, as laid out in the Bible. Catholic Answers, an organization that defends and explains the church’s teachings, puts it this way: “All of Scripture teaches the unacceptability of homosexual behavior.”
Instead, homosexual Catholics are called to chastity so that they can, according to the catechism, “gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”
Why the gays?
Bianco does not want to talk about the groups that mounted the campaigns against him. The groups denied being involved in any of the church incidents when contacted by media back when this was happening.
Bianco doesn’t think the perpetrators — who were never caught — were being told what to do to. “But when you send out rhetoric, it causes those types of people to act,” he adds. “We just saw that recently on a very big scale in this country.”
He says that once in a while these same groups will “send me creepy emails or write things about me on their websites.” But it’s nothing like it used to be.
While he says he’s moved on, clearly the scars linger. Please don’t print my age, he asks, or any other “identifiers” that might be used to help locate where he lives.
He says he’s puzzled over how the LGBTQ issue became such a bitter battleground for his faith.
“Why have we decided that’s the group that we are going to put a litmus test on?”
As he retraces the hell of three years ago, he returns to the letters of support.
“That’s the church I know and that’s the church I belong to. And so those who are consumed with hate, it burns in them like a wildfire, and I refuse to allow that fire to come near me.”
Each morning, he repeats this mantra: “I’m not going to allow anyone to take my peace from me.” Or his religion.
When he was studying in Rome, he remembers a bishop telling him that if he leaves the Catholic Church and simply screams at the closed doors, no one will listen. But if he stays and fights for what he believes, they have to listen.
“And so it’s what I do.”