Priest removes married gay couple from parish ministry

From The Billings Gazette in Montana:

On Aug. 6, four days after the Rev. Samuel Spiering arrived as the new administrator of St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Lewistown, he met with parishioner Paul Huff to ask him if he and his partner, Tom Wojtowick, had gotten married.

After Huff confirmed the fact, the priest asked to meet with the two men the next day. At that second meeting, Spiering dismissed the pair from their volunteer posts in the church and told them they could no longer receive Communion, a sacrament at the core of a believer’s faith.

Wojtowick and Huff were stunned and stung by the action. It sprang from the Catholic Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage and its belief that homosexual behavior is a sin.

The issue has caused some people to leave the parish and stirred up controversy in the small central Montana town. To address all that has happened, Bishop Michael Warfel of the Diocese of Great Falls-Billings plans to meet with parishioners at the church Saturday night.

Wojtowick, 66, and Huff, 73, lifelong Catholics, have been partners for more than 30 years. The two men, both members and active at St. Leo’s and the community, married in Seattle in May 2013 to have the legal rights of spouses in their later years.

Lewistown is Wojtowick’s hometown. The two men lived in Seattle for nearly 20 years before they moved to Lewistown in 2003 and started attending St. Leo’s.

…Wojtowick and Huff talked with Spiering and Warfel and other diocesan officials in a conference call on Aug. 25. Out of that, Wojtowick said, came an agreement that Wojtowick and Spiering would write a restoration statement, that in part, would support the concept of marriage between a man and a woman, which Wojtowick and Huff were willing to do.

“It was not our intent to challenge that (concept), but to have the rights of civic protections in our old age,” Wojtowick wrote.

When Spiering and Wojtowick met to write the statement, Wojtowick said the priest told him they would also have to set up a timeline for the two men to separate and divorce, which Wojtowick said he and Huff did not agree to.

…In a telephone interview from Great Falls on Thursday afternoon, Warfel said he knows Wojtowick and Huff “to be good people.”

“This is not animus against someone who happens to be a homosexual; this issue is the same-sex marriage,” he said. “A lot of people put those two together, and obviously there’s a connection, but it’s not the same thing.”

Warfel called same-sex marriage “the issue of our era,” acknowledging that in the U.S., polls show that support for it has edged higher than those who oppose it. But the fact remains that stands in conflict with Catholic teachings.

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