N.B. Lust and centering ideations and lifestyles around it, is essential to the LGBT and contemporary mindset and worldview. Following closely upon that is glorification and idealization of physical beauty and so-called mundane “perfection”. When Christianity fails to evangelize and nature ever abhors a vacuum, paganism inevitably rears its ugly head once again.
People are so exercised about Martins problematic advocacy for LGBT issues specifically, that they have mostly failed to notice that this is only one part of the larger problem with his ministry: his ministry is to be the chaplain for the Beautiful People.
Martin is the kind of priest who reliably will show up at high society events like the Met Gala, a socialite who will cultivate relationships with all the Right Sort of people.
And Martin sees his ministry in general of basically re-assuring the Beautiful People that Jesus agrees with them, that their values don't even need to be baptized, because they are already fine. Martin's project is to ransack Christianity to find ideas that he can revise so that he can give some sort of spirituality to the value system and worldview of the Beautiful People. Because, after all, since they are the Elite and the Beautiful People, their values are good and set the pace for the rest of society.
(A telling story: on Ross Douthat's podcast, Douthat asked Martin what the distinctively Christian contribution to sexuality is, and Martin -- always carefully choosing his words -- said that it was that the Christian message about sex was that it should be a way of "showing reverence to the other." Douthat gently pushed back on this, rightly pointing out that this is just a slightly spiritualized way of putting what most of his Manhattan admirers already think)
Martin isn't exactly opposed to people going to Mass. It's just that that kind of Christian discipleship is superfluous for the Beautiful People.
And, of course if you are an elegant Manhattanite, the LGBT cause is one of your darlings. So, of course, that cause is going to be one of Martin's darlings, and he's going to do for it what he does for anything else. He's going to tell you how Jesus already agrees with you, because as an elite Beautiful Person, you must be a good person too, and he's going to try to craft a spirituality that fits your values.
The really interesting thing about this confirmation episode then, isn't even that it is an LGBT thing. The really interesting thing is that it is a high society event. Martin is the chaplain to the Beautiful People, and Gio Benitez is one of the Beautiful People, so of course the socialite priest Martin is going to be there.
One wonders whether the actual Jesus would approve of this rejection of his call to discipleship. One wonders, if the LGBT issues were abstracted out, what Pope Francis would think of a priest who chooses to be the chaplain to the Beautiful People. That certainly wasn't his vision for the Church . . .
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