The following is an email we received this week from one of our readers. The links have been verified.
California Catholic Daily:
Attached you’ll find a copy of a past bulletin (May 14, 2017) from Holy Name of Mary Catholic parish (San Dimas, CA).
Father Danyluk came out as gay in 2005 during the homily at his former parish. (image: Paul Chinn/SF Gate)
The controversy pertains to page 1 of the bulletin. There you’ll find an assortment of photos, one apparently of a lesbian couple with a baby and another apparently of two male homosexuals with a child.
The offense of these photos will be obvious to all faithful Catholics.
Indeed, at least some Catholics at HNM were very offended by the bulletin, and the pastor, Fr. Rich Danyluk, was even made aware of this, though to my knowledge he never issued an apology.
Perhaps the pastor’s reactions shouldn’t be a surprise, however. Fr. Danyluk is a known homosexual (see 2007 SF Gate story, “Gay priest leaves parish he loves“) and by 2015 it had already come to light that his LBTQ outreach program was really a counterfeit Catholic ministry (see here).
All best,
(name withheld)
Editor’s note: In 2007, The SF Gate ran a story “Gay priest leaves parish he loves” about Father Rich Danyluk. The following is excerpted from that story:
For most of his life, [Father] Danyluk avoided openly facing his homosexuality. He knew he was gay by about seventh grade. In seminary in the late 1960s, he went to the rooms of fellow seminarians, had his first sexual experiences and pretended that they never happened.
“That’s sick. That’s using somebody,” he says now. “It was the acting out.”
Within a few years, he began drinking heavily.
“It gave me a little more freedom to do things that I knew were wrong,” he said. “It just numbed the senses.”
In the early 1980s, he began seeing a counselor to come to terms with his sexual orientation but returned at times to drinking and illicit sex. He was stopped twice for drunken driving while leading a Southern California parish in the 1990s. After the second arrest, in November 1999, he was sent to a rehab center in Minnesota.
That was a turning point in his life. Before leaving for treatment, he told worshipers at his final service about his alcoholism, apologized and asked for forgiveness and prayers. They gave him a standing ovation.
He said he’s abstained from alcohol and has been celibate ever since.
In September 2005, Danyluk was angered by the Vatican’s proposed guidelines about gay seminarians. As eventually adopted, they prohibit the acceptance into seminary of “those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’ ”
Danyluk thought it was time to speak up to his parish. He grabbed the Gospel and held it aloft before the congregation. “This is either the good news for everybody or nobody,” he said.
That included all gays and lesbians, he said, including those in attendance, to whom he added: “I’m one of you.”
There was no backlash from the bishop of Oakland, the Most Rev. Allen H. Vigneron, who Danyluk says supports gay priests.
“There’s a passage in Scripture that God said to Jesus, ‘You’re my beloved son in whom I’m well pleased.’ I believe God says that to every male, and he says ‘You’re my beloved daughter’ to every woman. Finally, that sunk into me, that I don’t need a priest or a bishop or a pope to tell me who I am. I want everyone else to have that same right.”