Brother Thomas Augustine, M.I.C.M., is the Superior of Saint Benedict Center in Harvard, Massachusetts, and the Principal of that community’s Immaculate Heart of Mary School. He has publicly stood up for Catholic morals against those who would, in the name of “inclusiveness” promote a perverse lifestyle that is opposed to Catholic morality in South Boston’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. Because of this, he was personally attacked by Boston Globe writer, Joan Vennochi. The Globe had the decency to publish his response, which is reproduced below.
(Boston Globe) Joan Vennochi has the astonishing hubris to impose her secularist vision on the Catholic Church (“Church values,” Op-ed, March 6). Vennochi would like to have the pope or one of his “local surrogates” pick up the phone and read her script to Saint Patrick’s Day parade organizer John Hurley and to me.
That is not going to happen.
As the Supreme Court has affirmed, the veterans have a right to control their own message and maintain their own values.
As for the church, it would never force anyone to march with agents of the culture of death, such as abortion providers, the Hemlock Society, or homosexuals.
Jesus Christ once compared the Kingdom of Heaven to a wedding feast. When the king saw a guest not properly attired, he said to his servants. “Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22:13).
All that over improper dress; what would he have done to a group parading unnatural lust?
Brother Thomas Dalton
Harvard
The writer is principal of Immaculate Heart of Mary School.
