The ballyhooed Pride Night appearance of the anti-Catholic Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence came and went with few in attendance at the Los Angeles Dodgers game Friday night.
Video of the pregame ceremony showed just a few fans on hand when the anti-Catholic group received a Community Hero Award.
The ceremony was around an hour before game time, but the mostly empty seats might have been impacted by the thousands of Catholics protesting outside the main entrance to Dodger Stadium on Vin Scully Avenue, according to eyewitness reports.
The public-address announcer said the group supports meal programs in the Los Angeles area and cited "their outstanding service to the LBGTQ+ community."
Some in the sparse crowd cheered and a few booed, as the PA announcer introduced Sister Unity and Sister Dominia — two men dressed flamboyantly as nuns.
Official Catholic teaching opposes same-sex marriage and same-sex sexual activity, but there are Catholics who want the church to be more inclusive toward LGBTQ+ people.
"While I am uncomfortable with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence using the nuns' old garb to draw attention to bigotry, whether Catholic or not, there is a hierarchy of values in this situation," said Sister Jeannine Gramick, who has ministered to LGBTQ+ Catholics for more than 50 years and is a co-founder of New Ways Ministry.
"I believe that any group that serves the community, especially those who are less fortunate or on the margins of society, should be honored."
But Sister Luisa Derouen, renowned for her outreach to transgender Catholics, said she was "deeply offended" by the Dodgers' decision to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
"I realize they do a lot of good for many people with their philanthropic work, and I thank them for that," she wrote to The Associated Press via email. "But where my passion about this most comes from is with regard to my religious life.
"I have spent about 30 years passionately trying to help people understand and respect the lives of gay, lesbian, and trans people," she added. "Women religious are their best allies in the Catholic Church — we don't deserve for our lives to be caricatured in this kind of demeaning way.
"Why can't they do all their wonderful work without disrespecting our lives, when we have done so much to help others respect their lives?"
Robert Barron, a Catholic bishop in southern Minnesota and formerly an auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles, told his 240,000 followers on Twitter the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence "can only be described as an anti-Catholic hate group."
"I'm a big baseball fan. I've even thrown out the first pitch at a Dodgers game," Barron tweeted. "But I'd encourage my friends in LA to boycott the Dodgers. Let's not just pray, but make our voices heard in defense of our Catholic faith."
Criticism was not confined to Catholic ranks. The Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told listeners of his syndicated radio show the Dodgers "completely capitulated."
"The company is falling all over itself with what one author called years ago, 'The Art of the Public Grovel,'" Mohler said.
MLB pitchers Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers and Trevor Williams of the Washington Nationals criticized the Dodgers for reinviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, saying they resented the group's mockery of Catholicism. Williams, on Twitter, encouraged his fellow Catholics "to reconsider their support of an organization that allows this type of mockery of its fans to occur."
But each pitcher said he had no objection to the broader tradition of Pride Nights.
"This has nothing to do with the LGBTQ community or Pride or anything like that," Kershaw said. "This is simply a group that was making fun of a religion. That I don't agree with."
Material from the AP was used throughout this report.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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