Catholic Bishops Blast Father James Martin For Publicly Questioning Bible’s Teaching On Homosexual Acts

Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest who consistently blurs the line on Catholic teaching regarding homosexual acts, got a complete shellacking from several American bishops for publicly questioning the Holy Bible’s teaching on the subject.

Though Martin has positioned himself as an LGBT-friendly priest, he has always maintained he agrees with Catholic teaching on homosexual acts while simply calling for more compassion for such individuals. On Wednesday, that facade dropped almost completely when he tweeted an article from the Protestant Scripture scholar and theologian Walter Wink, which said that the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual acts should be questioned due to the Bible’s alleged endorsement of slavery. Martin even used the words “interesting” in reference to the passage.

“Interesting: ‘Where the Bible mentions [same-sex sexual] behavior at all, it clearly condemns it. I freely grant that. The issue is precisely whether the biblical judgment is correct. The Bible sanctioned slavery as well and nowhere attacked it as unjust,'” he tweeted. “’Are we prepared to argue today that slavery is biblically justified?’”

In response, Catholic bishops immediately condemned this line from Martin.

“Thank you for acknowledging that you question scripture,” said Bishop Strickland of Texas. “If we go down that road, where do we stop? I know you have lots of support, but you are challenging the Deposit of Faith that I promised to defend. As a bishop, I’ll keep defending it.”

“How convenient to use slavery to justify support for homosexuality, totally overlooking the fact that the Bible is overwhelmingly the story of God freeing His People from all slavery – physical & political, but also slavery to idols & false gods, to moral & spiritual aberrations!” said Cardinal Napier of South Africa, as reported by LifeSiteNews.

After a severe backlash on social media, Father Martin once again blamed it all on “far-right Catholics” that failed to see the nuance in his tactic.

“Yesterday I was called a ‘heretic’ for supposedly going against church teaching. In fact, I linked to [an] article by the Protestant Scripture scholar and theologian Walter Wink. So if you would like to call anyone a “heretic” it is Mr. Wink, the author of many books on the Bible and a scholar who probably forgot more about the Bible than those who would condemn him for ‘heresy’ have learned. But he’s dead, after years of service to the Lord, so the puerile name-calling probably won’t bother him,” he said in a lengthy Twitter thread.

James Martin then went on to make the claim that Catholics are not biblical fundamentalists, even though all Catholic teaching has basis in scripture.

“I said that Professor Wink’s short article about biblical criticism was ‘interesting’ (which it was) and was thus lambasted by Catholics who excoriated me for not accepting the ‘inerrancy’ of Scripture. News flash: Catholics are not biblical fundamentalists. Cf: ‘Dei Verbum,'” added Martin.

“This points out, once again, that some on the Catholic far-right who are quick to condemn and use names like ‘heretic’ are not reading things very carefully. (E.g., ‘Building a Bridge.’) And some also don’t know, or actively reject, current Catholic teaching (e.g., Vatican II),” he concluded.

As noted by LifeSiteNews, Pope Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Divine Afflante Spiritu spoke about the inerrancy of scripture:

The sacred Council of Trent ordained by solemn decree that “the entire books with all their parts, as they have been wont to be read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old vulgate Latin edition, are to be held sacred and canonical.” In our own time the [First] Vatican Council, with the object of condemning false doctrines regarding inspiration, declared that these same books were to be regarded by the Church as sacred and canonical “not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority, nor merely because they contain revelation without error, but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their author, and as such were handed down to the Church herself.”