Gay Catholic Mission Week St Louis June 1 - 7!!!!!

Building Catholic Very Very Near Futures

Creatures! Remember how I co-founded a nonprofit? It started with a friend’s question: “What if we could reach [gay] people, helping them to build deep trust in God and envision a Catholic future for themselves, before they got all tangled up? What if we had Catholic education, for all ages, which encouraged gay kids in both self-acceptance and fidelity? What if the next generation started out way ahead of where we did?”

At the same time that I was starting to work out what might help that future come into being, Keith Wildenberg was wondering how to share with others the insights he’d learned through decades of mentoring and evangelizing in gay communities. By our powers combined—and for the honor of Grayskull!—we became Building Catholic Futures, the Voltron of evangelization, equipping Catholic institutions to better serve and share the Gospel with LGBT+ and same-sex attracted people of all ages. We are not a support group. Support is necessary, but as Dorothy Allison says (this was my high school yearbook quote), “Survival is the least of my desires.” We want to help all those responsible for the care of souls in the Catholic Church—parents, teachers, priests, catechists, gay randos who love our communities and want to serve our people—share Jesus’ call to missionary discipleship.

So what does that look like? Lol well we’ve got a million projects in process, and we’ve had a couple events already. If you donated to our Kickstarter, we will be updating you very soon to tell you about your INTERNATIONAL IMPACT (aka I went to Wales) and projects that are ready for on-the-ground implementation. But that will have to wait until after we do a mission week in St Louis. We’re all going to the world’s fair!
(but not in a creepy way)

On Saturday, June 1, Keith, Nate Tinner-Williams, Grant Hartley and I will share a panel at St Francis Xavier (College Church), on “Gay Catholic Discipleship,” followed by q&a.

Mon - Wed, June 3 - 5, Keith and Nate and I will be hosted by the Aquinas Institute’s Center for Community Engagement and Evangelization, for a three-day workshop on accompaniment of lgbt/ssa+ people. This is our Journeys curriculum: grounded in the Siena Institute’s work on intentional discipleship, but also in hundreds of conversations with gay etc people across a wide range of relationships to the Catholic Church. This curriculum does such a great job (imho!!!!) of drawing out common themes in queer Christian experience, the obstacles we so frequently encounter in Catholic settings and the unexpected inroads that can help us find our path with Jesus. I basically think what we are doing here will ring true and also offer new insights, even for people who have been doing this work for a while. Alan Downs meets Aelred of Rievaulx! Audre Lorde meets Liane de Pougy! Lectio divina meets LUNCH!

Sign up here for what I genuinely think will feel like a first-of-its-kind, unexpected, necessary intervention. Cost is $150/person but did I mention you get lunch?

Thursday evening (time tba I believe), the Aquinas Institute will also host a devotional event for lgbt+/ssa people, likely evening prayer. Details to come but I hope many of you are able to come to that. Incorporating purely devotional events (rosary walk, Adoration, etc) is something I really hope to do in all of our “mission weeks”; we thought it might be too complicated to arrange in St Louis because this is our first week-long bonanza, but then the Institute raised it as a possibility themselves. Heart emoji, flaming emoji, flaming heart emoji.

And then Friday, June 7, we’ll be at St Stephen Protomartyr (reunited with Grant) at 7pm for a panel and q&a on “Finding the ‘Yes’es in Scripture.”

Please pass this on—tell your friends! tell your fans! tell your foes! Email me eve_tushnet@yahoo.com with any questions, and/or if you’re in the area and want to get together. And please pray for us, that we may serve Christ and all the children of the Church.

look at our draft logo! it’s St Gertrude the Great’s vision where St John the Beloved told her about lying against Jesus’ breast at the Last Supper and feeling the beating of the Sacred Heart. I DIE I SWOON