Norbertine Abbey in Santa Fe Posts Message Defending Homosexual Priest

Last August, the Lepanto Institute published a report on Fr. Steve Rosera, a priest of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe who spent 10 years in a publicly registered homosexual relationship and who has openly advocated for same-sex “marriage” for nearly as much time.  Without any action on the part of the Archdiocese regarding this grave scandal, and in light of Archbishop John Wester’s declaration to his diocesan priests that “these negative reports are untrue and hurtful, and anyone who reads this stuff and believes it is full of crap,'” the Lepanto Institute submitted a formal request to the Vatican asking Pope Leo to laicize Fr. Rosera in early February of this year.

In a surprise twist, someone operating under a pseudonym (HurtCallBert) and with a fake email account ([email protected]) left the following comment on our article calling for Fr. Rosera’s laicization:

While it is true that diocesan priests do not profess vows of celibacy, they do make a promise of celibacy to the bishop.  But this is a distraction from the more grave situation, that Rosera entered into a publicly registered “domestic partnership,” which was the precursor for homosexuals to same-sex “marriage.”  Canon Law is quite clear on such grave violations of the clerical state.  Canon 1394 of the Church’s Code of Canon Law states that:

“a cleric who attempts marriage, even if only civilly, incurs a latae sententiae suspension. If he does not repent after being warned and continues to give scandal, he can be punished gradually by privations or even by dismissal from the clerical state.”

The commenter then expressed concern about the time and effort put into exposing Fr. Rosera’s scandalous actions and public statements.  The simple answer to the question is that Fr. Rosera – by his actions and his public advocacy – is a self-declared enemy of the Church’s moral teachings and the sanctity of souls.  It is simply not possible for a priest to serve God and His Church while openly advocating for one of the sins that cries to Heaven for vengeance.  What Fr. Rosera has said and done is on the same level as a Catholic priest who asserts that one can serve both Christ and Satan.

The third assertion is simply a tired-out canard commonly used to quiet criticisms of homosexual advocacy and is not worthy of a response.  But what we did find interesting in this comment was the IP address recorded with the fake name and email address.  Clearly, the commenter had hoped to mask his or her identity, but the IP address gave us the precise location from which the comment was made.  We looked up the IP address and discovered that the internet host from which the comment came is: mail.norbertinecommunity.org.

The website www.norbetinecommunity.org belongs to the Norbertine Community Santa María de la Vid Abbey.  It seemed odd that this community should leave a comment on our website about our call for Fr. Rosera’s laicization, so we looked into any connections between Fr. Rosera and the Abbey and quickly discovered that one of the Norbertine friars from the abbey serves as a parochial vicar under the pastorship of Fr. Rosera at Immaculate Conception Church.

We have no way of knowing whether or not Fr. Gaertner is the one who left the comment, but the connection between the Abbey and Fr. Rosera is clear.  And the fact that the comment appeared to be upset with our concerns about Fr. Rosera’s homosexual activity and advocacy, we thought it important to take a closer look at the Abbey itself.

It didn’t take long to find statements from the Abbey favoring “acceptance” of active homosexuals.  In 2013, the Abbey posted an article on Facebook containing a comment made by the (then) Abbott, Fr. Joel Garner celebrating Pope Francis’ statement regarding homosexuality: “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge them?”

Fr. Garner told KOAT Channel 7 Action News that he believed the pope’s comment is “a very positive stand” while claiming that the Church teaches that “gay people are not bad people, they’re good people.”  From the article:

“I think it’s a very positive stand.” Abbot Joel Garner said, adding that sexuality is human and not addressing that would be wrong.  “If we need anything from our religious leaders its honesty and transparency.”  He hopes that Pope Francis will carry on a legacy of acceptance of everyone.  “The church has clearly taught that gay people are not bad people, they’re good people,” Garner said.

Appearing to affirm this notion that “gay people are not bad people,” the Abbey has posted in celebration of the martyrdom of St. Charles Lwanga – who was executed by an African king for refusing his homosexual advances – from 2019 to 2023.  The strange thing about this is that the Abbey rather starkly omitted the homosexual impetus behind St. Charles’ martyrdom, choosing instead to claim that:

“King Mwanga began to realize that Christians claimed allegiance to their faith above the traditional primary allegiance to the king. He began to kill the missionaries, beginning with the Anglican Bishop James Harrington and his companions in 1885. Unable to stop the spread of Christianity, however, Mwanga decided to root it out entirely. He commanded death for ‘all those who pray.'”

Even the story from Franciscan Media, linked to by the Abbey, says that St. Charles “protected his fellow pages, aged 13 to 30, from the sexual demands of the Bagandan ruler, Mwanga, and encouraged and instructed them in the Catholic faith during their imprisonment for refusing the ruler’s demands.”  The omission of King Mwanga’s homosexual advances on St. Charles and his companions is striking, but fits a pattern for the Abbey.

On 18 June 2023, the Abbey’s current abbot, Fr. Robert Campbell, gave a homily on Matthew 9:36—10:8 wherein Our Blessed Lord sent the 12 to heal the sick, raise the dead and cleanse lepers.  Beginning at the 6:10 mark of the homily, Fr. Campbell asks “Who are the lepers?”  At this point, he states that “polite society” considers homosexuals and transgenders to be those who are unclean, whom “we should despise, who we should cancel, and who we should kick out of our public spaces.”  He calls self-identified LGBT individuals “vulnerable people who are just trying to be who they are,” as if perverted sexual proclivities are somehow integral to their human nature.  He then admits to working “daily with a transgender chaplain who is just as much an agent of healing” as he is.

As a backdrop to this, earlier that same month, the same-sex “marriage” advocacy organization Human Rights Campaign declared a “national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people.”  The reason behind the “emergency” was the introduction of 417 legislative bills throughout the US aimed at protecting families, children, and religious communities from LGBT propaganda and influence and banning sex-change procedures on children.  So, in June 2023, social media exploded in a culture-clash over these and other LGBT issues, giving context for the “twitter” comments Fr. Campbell made in his homily.  Clearly, he (and by extension, the Abbey) are siding with the LGBT movement.

The next year, 9 June 2024, Fr. Campbell made yet another derisive remark about “polite society” for not having “caritas compassion … for those those marginalized people” rejected by them.  While he doesn’t explicitly mention homosexuals or transgenders, his reference to “polite society” is a call-back to the same people he derided in June the previous year for rejecting the LGBT movement.

But the problem with the Norbertine Community of Santa Maria de la Vid is not limited to supporting the filth of the LGBT movement.  In addition to this, the Abbey has sacrilegiously provided Holy Communion to non-Catholics and maintains a close relationship with the heretical Fr. Richard Rohr and his heretical Center for Action and Contemplation.

In 2019, a candidate for a doctorate in ministry – Jonette Gay – submitted an 88-page “major project” to the faculty of the Lancaster Theological Seminary (associated with the Universal Church of Christ).  On page 16 of the project, Ms. Gay provided a rather interesting anecdote regarding a “retreat for clergy” she attended at the Abbey.  She wrote (with emphasis added):

I participated in a retreat for clergy that was ecumenical. It was held at the Norbertine Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was titled: Called back to the Well. The renewal retreat was funded by the Lily Endowment for spiritual development of clergy. I commented to one of the Roman Catholic monks how impressed I was that they served me, a Protestant, communion even though I knew it was against their polity. He told a story about a man who traveled often to Ireland. He loved looking down at the country-side from the view of the airplane. He mainly loved the ancient stone fences separating the green pastures. One year he saw no fences. He was puzzled. Had they been removed. He knew they had been there for centuries. How could this be? So, he asked about this strange phenomenon. And he was told, “Oh, you must have never been here this time of year before. We let the vegetation cover the fences once a year.” The monk then said to me, “That is a metaphor for God’s vantage point. There are no boundaries when we relate at this deep level.” The order and the novelty do not have to lose their respective properties in order to be connected. I am still Protestant and he is still Roman Catholic. Yet as he said at this deep level the lines between us are inconsequential.

In a footnote regarding the “Norbertine Center,” she specifically linked to the Norbertine Abbey Santa Maria de la Vid.  Given the disposition referenced by the priest to whom she spoke, it appears that this is not the first time they have provided Holy Communion to non-Catholics, nor would it be the last.  And this shouldn’t be surprising given the close relationship the Abbey has with Fr. Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation.

On the Abbey’s “resources” page, it lists and links to the Center for Action and Contemplation.

Additionally, one of the Abbey’s oblates, Christina Spahn, spent eight years as “as one of the first co-directors of the Center for Action and Contemplation.”

In 2022, the CAC provided the Abbey with a $10,000 grant.

In October 2023, Fr. Stephen Gaertner – the same priest who serves as the parochial vicar for Fr. Rosera (see above) – wrote a piece about the Abbey and its “all are welcome” message for the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC).  In his piece, he demoted the person of the Holy Spirit to a “universal spirit or holy energy,” as a kind of resonance found among “Buddhists, Jews, Indigenous Traditions, Secular Humanists, Agnostics and just about every culture and creed in between.”

In May of 2023, Fr. Richard Rohr wrote a fundraising appeal stating, “we hosted a gathering of Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) staff, Board, and Faculty at the Norbertine Abbey on the outskirts of Albuquerque. Our gathering was called to review and confirm the big and exciting plans we have for the future of our mission.”

In 2024, the CAC announced a $1,500 per person, 3-day retreat they would be holding at the Abbey.

In January of this year, The Abbey’s director of the Norbertine Spirituality Center wrote an article, again published by CAC.

Clearly, there are strong ties and a working relationship between the two organizations.  The problem with this is that Fr. Richard Rohr and CAC have a long history of supporting and promoting LGBT ideologies, New Ageism, and the condemned ideology of universalism.

Fr. Rohr is the founder of the CAC and serves on the CAC board as well as their executive committee. He is also the academic dean of CAC’s Living School.

Fr. Rohr described himself in a 2012 interview with “progressive” radio host, Doug Pagitt, as having been able to “somewhat live in that position on the edge of the inside [of the Catholic Church]” and that “the Franciscans have always backed me up…and the Church can’t take on the whole [order].” The evidence shows that Fr. Rohr is diving off the cliff rather than “somewhat on the edge.”  In 2015, Fr. Rohr received and distributed “communion” at an Episcopalian service, in direct violation of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Ecclesia De Eucharistia, #30, which states:

“The Catholic faithful, therefore, while respecting the religious convictions of these separated brethren, must refrain from receiving the communion distributed in their celebrations, so as not to condone an ambiguity about the nature of the Eucharist and, consequently, to fail in their duty to bear clear witness to the truth.”

Fr. Rohr on homosexuality

• Fr. Rohr co-presided at a “commitment ceremony” between two lesbians according to a source reporting to The Wanderer and corroborated in a talk given at the CAC.

• Fr. Rohr more recently stated in his daily meditation from Nov. 9, 2017, “Binary genders (male and female) are more an imposition of our dualistic minds than the nature of reality.” He went on to say, “When Christians label LGBTQIA individuals as “other,” sinful, or “disordered,” we hurt these precious people and the larger community, and we actually limit ourselves. Fear of difference creates a very constricted, exclusive, and small religion and life, the very opposite of what God invites us into.”

Fr. Rohr on contraception and abortion 

• In the 2012 interview given on the Doug Pagitt Radio show, Fr. Rohr responded to question about the bishop’s response to the contraceptive mandate that it was a “politicized bogus issue” since “98% of Catholic women at different times in their lives have used contraception” and for the bishops “to now try to take some kind of moral high ground…is disingenuous…and has made an awful lot of us lose respect for their leadership.”

• Fr. Rohr noted in his daily reflection from September 17, 2017, that the Church tends to be “preoccupied” with things “Jesus never talked about” such as abortion, contraception and homosexuality instead of nonviolence and loving our enemies. 

Fr. Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation supports New Age practices and teaching 

• The CAC hosted a workshop inspired by Starhawk, a self-proclaimed witch and neo-pagan practitioner of goddess-worship.  Below is Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation flyer which advertises the class at the CAC.  Considering that Starhawk is a “witch,” note the emphasis on the use of the word “magic” in the flyer:

• The CAC newsletter, The Mendicant, published a testimonial in 2014 with the following statement: “I came to the Living School simply because Richard Rohr had been the first, in my experience, to pray to ‘Mother God’ in a Mass.”

• The CAC promotes Labyrinth walking as well as the Enneagram.

Fr. Rohr conducts retreats with spontaneous nudity and “healing touch”

• According to researcher Stephanie Block, Fr. Rohr told The New Ways Ministry Conference in 1997 that his all male retreats (with both homosexual and heterosexual participants) often end with men spontaneously going nude and performing a healing ceremony “laying hands” on each other.

• Fr. Rohr crudely states, “We often have campfires, and I know some of you have been at these where it happens, so you know what I’m talking about. Always, always, there’s some guys – I mean, is it in their hard wiring? – they’ll strip and have to leap over that fire, burning their balls…I don’t know what it is. They’re the ‘real’ men, who can leap over the fire, naked.”

• Fr Rohr explains: “And then beginning with the elders I lead them through an extended meditation … I invite them to lie down in what is, for the male, the most vulnerable position – on his back. Then the other men surround them and cradle their bodies and especially touch and lay hands on and pray over those places where the man holds wounds…” He continues, “[It] sounds like a rather simple, innocuous ritual – well, it blows them out of the water. It usually goes on the whole night. They don’t want to stop. The man becomes their Father that they never had; their Father that they could never touch; their Grandfather who died when they were a boy; their Brother that they wanted to be friends with.”

• Fr. Rohr discussed the wounds mentioned in the point above with these words: “… [E]very initiation rite involves some ritual wounding, scarring. Two-thirds of the world, independently of one another, came up with some scarring of the penis, in the place where a man is most symbolically himself, most empowered, most potent, erect and ejaculated, there’s all of his energy – it’s there you must bleed…”

Conclusion

As they say – “those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”  We would never have looked into the Norbertine Community Santa Maria de la Vid Abbey had someone from within their community not left a message indirectly supportive of Fr. Rosera on one of our articles.  And because of this message, we thought it worth looking into whether this community is also supportive of LGBT ideologies, and it is abundantly clear that it is.  Additionally, we discovered that the Abbey has provided Holy Communion to non-Catholics, that it is involved in heterodox and deeply questionable spiritual practices, and is closely associated and aligned with the heretical Center for Action and Contemplation.

Because of this, we have added the Abbey to our charity reports list with a designation of “NOT Safe.”