From Roman Catholic to Quaker

Описание: QuakerSpeak is a weekly video series. New video every other FRIDAY!

SUPPORT QuakerSpeak! https://quakerspeak.com/donate/
SUBSCRIBE for a new video every other week! http://fdsj.nl/QS-Subscribe
WATCH all our videos: http://fdsj.nl/qs-all-videos
___

Become a Friends Journal subscriber for only $28
http://fdsj.nl/FJ-Subscribe

Filming and Editing by Layla Cuthrell

___

Transcript:

After I was excommunicated from the Catholic Church -- what allowed me to heal through the process was not just the therapy, but my fundamental belief, that all Quakers have, is that God is within me. I look at it now as a blessing. The whole thing was a blessing. It didn't feel that way at the time, but I look back on it and say, “Yeah, this is where I needed to be.”

So my name is Joseph Izzo. I prefer the pronouns they/them/their. I'm from Washington, D.C. I've lived here for almost 60 years.

My introduction to Quakerism actually started during the Vietnam War. I was heavily involved with the Catholic peace movement, while I was still a Roman Catholic and in the Catholic religious order. And everywhere I went, every conference that I attended on peace and trying to end the Vietnam War, there were Quakers. As I listened, I kept thinking to myself, you know, if I wasn't a Roman Catholic, I think this is the only other religious denomination I could consider belonging to.

I was a child of the, a young adult actually, of the 1970s -- which was when a lot of the civil rights movement was going on, women's rights was going on, LGBTQ rights were going on, and the end result was I was affected by all of that. Because of my positions on women's ordination, I was promoting women's ordination, and because as campus minister at the Catholic University of America, I started a support group for the Gay and Lesbian Student, Faculty and staff. This did not put me in good standing with the Vatican. I guess I was kind of naive about the politics of the Catholic Church at the time, so I didn't think anything that I did was going to be noticed. It just so happened, though, that the person who was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict the 16th -- he was an ultraconservative cardinal at the time, and he he went about repressing theologians that weren't in agreement with the Catholic Church's doctrine and dogma.

So what initially happened to me was that I was going to be shifting ministries from campus ministry to working with this organization called New Ways Ministry, which was specifically a Catholic LGBTQ ministry. The two co-directors, Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father Bob Nugent, were writing books about the need for the church to change their theological view about sexuality in general and the concepts of gender, and so forth. Jeannine asked me if I would be willing to be the co-director with her while Bob was away, but I couldn't do that without asking permission from the order. So I started the process and I got called in by the Superior who told me I had to cease and desist all activities advocating for gay people, doing anything about women's ordination, and so forth. And I was like, really puzzled. I thought it would be a pretty easy thing because the order that I was in, these were all college educated men. Many of them had doctoral degrees in different fields and so forth.

One of the the actual teachings of the Catholic Church is that the members of the church are supposed to follow their conscience. The conscience should be well formed by the teachings of the church, by the words and the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels and so forth. But you're basically supposed to follow the truth as you've been given the truth to understand. And that resulted by the end of 1982 of my being excommunicated from the order and then from the church.

It's all about power and control. You know, this is the problem with with most denominations. The people that have the power and control, they want it their way, and if anybody dissents from that, you're wrong, you're evil, you're sinful, whatever. It's the politics of organized religion. Which is why another reason why I'm a Quaker. We're not hierarchical. We're congregational in our approach to everything. We're very democratic in that sense. There's nobody at the top telling everybody what they have to do, what they have to believe or anything.

To a large extent, when I was still a Roman Catholic, my spirituality was wrapped up in a lot of anger. Anger and all the disagreements I had with the church's doctrines and dogmas and beliefs about sexuality and women's rights and so forth. And when I became a Quaker, all that anger dissipated. No more anger. My spirituality could be directed toward the goodness and well-being of others.
___

The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.