The Washington Post reports (June 2) that Joseph Nadeau, a music director at St. Agnes Catholic Church in Roeland Park outside Kansas City has been forced to resign because he also directs the Heartland Men's Chorus, a gay choir in Kansas City.
In January, the St. Agnes Catholic Church hierarchy summoned Nadeau into a closed-door meeting, he said. Nadeau said that Monsignor Gary Applegate told him that, to continue as music director, he needed to resign from Kansas City's Heartland Men's Chorus, take a vow of celibacy and acknowledge that homosexuality was a disorder.
"Science and psychology have taught us that homosexuality isn't a disorder," said Nadeau. "If I had agreed to that, I would have felt like I was being very dishonest with myself. And I think there are a lot of parishioners who feel the same way."
He talks about his starting work at St. Agnes:
"During the interview process, I wanted them to know what was going on with me. I told them I was the director of a gay men's choir," said Nadeau. "I was greeted by a Catholic Church that I thought didn't exist: very kind, very loving, very compassionate."
Under his direction, the music program grew to include two children's choirs, youth and contemporary ensembles, and a Spanish-language musical liturgy. But in 2003, a group of conservative parishioners started campaigning against Nadeau, whom they saw as an emissary of a movement to "legitimize homosexuality at the parish level."
Members collected signatures on petitions to the papal nuncio, while an anonymous group stapled pictures of Nadeau to ads of underwear-clad men and slipped them under churchgoers' windshields, he said.
Later that year, Nadeau said former Kansas City Archbishop James Keleher wrote a letter to the congregation stating that if Nadeau kept his two jobs separate, he did not see a problem.
The leadership at the archdiocese changed last year, with Archbishop Joseph Naumann taking over for Keleher. In January, Nadeau said Applegate informed him that his membership in a "gay-affirming" group kept him from living out church doctrine.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/02/AR2006060200374.html
