Here’s my question. It took this priest 80 years to figure out that the Church was against same-sex marriage?
An elderly priest at Creighton University has chosen to leave the Jesuit order and laicize himself at least partly over the Church’s refusal to ordain women and endorse same-sex marriage.
In an open letter to friends and supporters that appeared in The National Catholic Reporter, the 80 year old Fr. Bert Thelen, S.J.,announced his decision and said that it was Creighton’s community that “freed, inspired, and encouraged” him to renounce his vocation.
Thelen stated plainly his reasons in his letter, saying, “I am doing this primarily out of the necessity and consequence of my new call, but, secondarily, as a protest against the social injustices and sinful exclusions perpetrated by a patriarchal church that refuses to consider ordination for women and marriage for same-sex couples .”