I’m sure everyone’s penned this into the diaries already, but the Roman Catholic church is holding its Eucharistic Congress (don’t ask me) in Ireland this year, with one of the – er – Congressional events taking place in the RDS on Sunday.

lgbtNOISE are holding a demonstration to coincide with it. Via their fb event page, NOISE writes:

The Vatican and many Catholic Church officials around the world have a detailed and shameful history of opposing the civil rights of LGBT people and their families. Countless Church authorities defame and offend LGBT people on a regular basis. Church leaders lobby governments to prevent LGBT people’s civil rights. Among the issues Noise campaigns on is civil marriage equality which is a civil right not a religious rite. If Catholic leaders want nothing to do with same-sex marriage, they don’t have to have one.

To emphasise the principle of the separation of church and state LGBT Noise will protest outside the Eucharistic Congress on Sunday the 10th of June at 12 noon as the Papal Legate, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prepares to open the week-long event. We will gather across the road from the Anglesea Road entrance to the RDS, Dublin 4. Bring along your friends and family and let’s have a respectful and dignified protest.

RIGHTS NOT RITES!

There’s more info for your perusal on that page, detailing church doctrine in relation to LGBT people.

For instance, there’s the letter from the then Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) who wrote to bishops as head of the now Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly The Inquisition) discussing the “Pastoral Care of Homosexuals”, which included the following:

It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church’s pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase (No. 10).

What is at all costs to be avoided is the unfounded and demeaning assumption that the sexual behavior of homosexual persons is always and totally compulsive and therefore inculpable. What is essential is that the fundamental liberty which characterizes the human person and gives him his dignity be recognized as belonging to the homosexual person as well (No. 11)

Anyway, what do you think about the planned protest? Will you be attending? Confess in the comments!