(LifeSiteNews) — Major League Baseball (MLB) must rectify the great injustice it created when the Los Angeles Dodgers chose to celebrate the self-styled “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” (SPI) on “Pride Night” while continuing its decades-long neglect of the true religious heroes of the AIDS scourge: Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.
In a stunningly wrong-headed move, the great American Pastime struck out by officially recognizing the blasphemous, hideously costumed “Sisters” whose major contribution to fighting AIDS involved promoting the use of condoms, quilting, and meager fundraising efforts. And while the scourge of AIDS was claiming the lives of multitudes of homosexual men, the SPI somehow deemed it smart to use the deadly epidemic as an opportunity to destigmatize gay sex, going to far as to insist that “guilt” is an “STD” (Sexually Transmitted Disease) akin to Gonnorrhoea or Syphilis.
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On balance, did the SPI save lives, or destroy lives? Based on what occurred Friday night at Dodgers Stadium, MLB has chosen to believe that the SPI are supremely holy and blameless.
“In calling for using protection during sex and abstaining from shame, the Sisters’ approach stood in stark contrast to the Catholic Church’s handling of the AIDS epidemic,” noted Lily Lucas Hodges, an historian who teaches courses on the AIDS epidemic and LGBT America at Chapman University.
Hodges compared the exiguous role of SPI versus that of the soul-saving Catholic Church during those frightening years:
While the church largely stuck to its positions, the Sisters continued to develop their safe-sex campaigns. They ran “bar ministries,” distributing condoms at LGBT bars while discussing AIDS prevention, and they appeared on floats at Pride parades around the world to promote condom use. In 1991, they introduced the Condom Savior Consecration and Vow, with the call and response: “Latex equals sex. Latex equals life. Latex equals love.” As scholar Jason Crawford put it, the Sisters were “turning condoms into the instruments of human salvation.”
That series of declarations is wholly different from the message of the Gospel and is anti-life at its heart. Most troubling, the loud and clear messaging of the demonic “Sisters” group has always been the relentless, decades-long mockery of Christ and His Bride, the Church.
Mother Teresa’s Sisters: true heroes of the AIDS epidemic
Mother Teresa’s Sisters’ care of those with AIDS during the same troubling time period offers a stark contrast with the silly, pre-adolescent men in religious drag.
As soon as the specter of AIDS revealed itself to the world, Mother Teresa immediately rose to meet the challenge of caring for those who had no one to care for them.
The first of her homes – perhaps better described as hospices – for indigent men who were dying of AIDS opened in New York City on Christmas Eve 1985, a time when the disease still wasn’t fully understood. Other attempts to open AIDS centers in the city had failed due to intense community opposition.
Mother Teresa was undeterred.
“We want that nobody dies unloved and uncared for,” said the Missionaries of Charity founder when the facility, named “Gift of Love,” opened at St. Veronica’s Church in Greenwich Village. “We are hoping that they will be able to live and die in peace by getting tender love and care.”
Several months later, Mother Teresa opened a similar facility known as “Gift of Peace” in Washington, D.C. Other homes for the terminally ill afflicted with AIDS would soon open in other U.S. cities, including nearby Baltimore. In less than 15 years, there would be more than 600 such homes around the world.
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Most of the AIDS-stricken men who ended up in the care of the Missionaries of Charity were men who were already homeless, had been rejected by their families, or who simply had nowhere else to turn. Before finding their way to Mother Teresa’s Sisters, they were doomed to die alone in obscurity.
“We pray especially for the sick and the unwanted,” explained Mother Teresa when Gift of Peace first opened.
“The greatest disease today is being unwanted, unloved,” she added. Yet this is what her sisters achieved throughout the AIDS epidemic, treating those who had been left to die alone by society with the utmost of dignity and respect. No one died at the Missionaries of Charity AIDS homes without having experienced true human compassion and experiencing the love of God.
In the early 1990s, I served as a volunteer one night per week at the Missionaries of Charity “Gift of Peace” House in Northeast D.C., helping to care for these men.
What I witnessed there was astounding. These saintly Sisters, apart from their daily time reserved for prayer, devoted their waking hours to taking care of every need of the men they had welcomed into their home.
By the time the men arrived at Gift of Peace, AIDS had already thoroughly ravaged their bodies, and often, their minds. Many were bedridden and incontinent and required around-the-clock care. Many also suffered from dementia.
I recall one young man who, as a result of the dreaded auto immune deficiency disease, had suffered a stroke. He was paralyzed on one side of his body, could no longer communicate verbally, was plagued by constant diarrhea and had been reduced to wearing diapers. He was distressed to no end by his incapacitated condition, but the Sisters’ infectious joy and indefatigability buoyed him.
These true Sisters – true missionaries of God – gave everything to care for men with AIDS, while the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” played dress-up like little girls and raised nickels and dimes for AIDS patients via “Dildo Fashion Shows,” “Butt Plug Bingo,” tricycle races, parading as “Brides of Christ,” and hosting “Hunky Jesus” and “Easter Bonnet” contests.
Major League Baseball, please take note: There is no comparison between these unserious adult male “sisters” and Mother Teresa’s Sisters, who act tirelessly with the courage and dedication of Marines in battle. When will you honor them? When will you save your own reputation?
