Yesterday, the New York Times ran the loveliest obituary for Fr. Robert Carter (pictured at right), a Jesuit priest who helped found the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Dignity USA, an activist group of gay Catholics. Fr. Carter's work in social justice and tending to the earliest victims of the AIDS epidemic represented the Catholic Church at its best. I spent my high school and college years at Jesuit schools which taught me not only how to think analytically but to be service-minded. I've long admired Jesuits' independent thinking in what is often (and mistakenly) assumed to be a single-minded institution. I found the last lines of the obit particularly wonderful:
"For him (Fr. Carter), there was no contradiction between homosexuality and Christianity. In his memoir, Father Carter wrote: "Since Jesus had table fellowship with social outcasts and sinners, those rejected by the religious establishment of his time, I consider myself to have been most fully a Jesuit, a 'companion of Jesus,' when I came out publicly as a gay man, one of the social rejects of my time. It was only by our coming out that society's negative stereotypes would be overcome and we would gain social acceptance.""
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