Switch Hitters Ball
Will new pastor change things?
On Saturday, June 16, San Francisco’s Most Holy Redeemer Parish again hosted the Switch Hitters Ball, an annual fundraiser for the San Francisco Gay Softball League.
The parish has hosted the event each year since 2007. Video of this year’s ‘ball’ has already been posted on YouTube.
The ‘switch hitter’ in the annual event’s title does not refer to a batter who is able to hit from both sides of the plate; it refers instead to the transvestite nature of the ‘entertainment’ that takes place at the ball.” In other words, a Catholic parish is providing a venue for a drag show.
A by-no-means exhaustive list of past events held at Most Holy Redeemer includes the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Revival Bingo (cancelled by the archdiocese under outside pressure); annual fundraisers by two sado-masochistic organizations -- the InterClub Fund and the Golden Gate Guards (cancelled by the archdiocese under outside pressure); the 2007 Desperate Dive Drag Show, followed a week later by Archbishop George Niederauer’s Mass at the church during which he was ambushed by two Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in the communion line and for which the archbishop later publicly apologized; annual parish participation at the Gay Pride parade (cancelled by the archdiocese under outside pressure); the scheduled May 2010 performance by students of Sacred Heart High School of Atherton of the pro-homosexual propaganda play Be Still and Know (cancelled by the archdiocese under outside pressure, but performed instead at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco), the 2011 planning session for Catholic participation in the Gay Pride parade; and the 2011 scheduled hosting of homosexual activist speakers for their Advent Vespers series (cancelled by the archdiocese under outside pressure).
So, while this year’s Switch Hitters Ball may be scandalous to the Catholic faithful, it is by no means unusual for Most Holy Redeemer -- and the archdiocese appears to ignore scandal at the parish except when public pressure mounts.
Most Holy Redeemer will soon be getting a new pastor, Father Brian Costello of Star of the Sea Church, who is scheduled to take over on July 1. He replaces Father Steve Meriwether, who has been pastor since 2004.
Whether the change in pastors will result in a different direction for the renegade parish remains to be seen.
In the meantime, the June 17 parish bulletin reported: “Father Steve Meriwether will be returning to San Francisco shortly and will be celebrating Mass Pride Weekend on June 23 and 24. This will be his farewell to our parish before he moves on to his next assignment.”
via calcatholic.com
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