Controversy draws protesters before Dodgers’ Pride Night

Devout baseball fans might view their teams’ performance as heavenly or hellish, depending on the quality of play. Currently, it’s the Los Angeles Dodgers’ handling of their annual Pride Night — not the team’s record — that has provoked emotional reactions from religious people, including prominent faith leaders, Catholic nuns, and even the team’s All-Star ace.

Indeed, three high-ranking U.S. Catholic leaders this week suggested the team had committed blasphemy.

The Dodgers have been holding Pride Nights for 10 years, but this year’s edition on Friday night became entangled last month in a high-profile controversy.

Under a barrage of criticism from some conservative Catholics, the team rescinded an invitation to a satirical LGBTQ+ group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to be honored at Pride Night. The Sisters’ performers — mostly men who dress flamboyantly as nuns — are active in protests and charitable programs.

A week later, after a vehement backlash from LGBTQ+ groups and their allies, the Dodgers reversed course — reinviting the Sisters’ Los Angeles chapter to be honored for its charity work and apologizing to the LGBTQ+ community.

The Dodgers’ reversal was welcomed by LGBTQ+ allies, including some Catholic nuns. But it infuriated many conservative Catholics, even at the highest levels of the U.S. hierarchy.

On Monday, the team was lambasted in a statement from Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, and the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Military Services.

They asked Catholics to pray on Friday “as an act of reparation for the blasphemies against our Lord we see in our culture today.”

“A professional baseball team has shockingly chosen to honor a group whose lewdness and vulgarity in mocking our Lord, His Mother, and consecrated women cannot be overstated,” the archbishops said. “This is not just offensive and painful to Christians everywhere; it is blasphemy."

Phoenix-based Catholics for Catholics organized what it called “a prayerful procession” in a parking lot outside Dodger Stadium. A couple hundred people, many wearing red clothing in honor of the sacred heart and toting signs, gathered Friday in the hours before the Dodgers hosted the San Francisco Giants.

The group had urged participants not to bring children because “we do anticipate hostility from anti-Christian protestors.”

The gathering attracted a large Los Angeles Police Department presence, with officers standing around watching as traffic approaching stadium backed up. Three helicopters flew overhead.

One woman held a blue sign invoking the name of the late Dodgers Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully, a devout Catholic, that read, “Vin Is Sad.” In her other hand, a white sign said, “Uphold Dodger Code of Conduct. No Mocking Religion.”

Although official Catholic teaching opposes same-sex marriage and same-sex sexual activity, there are many Catholics who want the church to be more inclusive toward LGBTQ+ people. Among them are nuns in the U.S. who have ministered empathetically to LGBTQ+ Catholics, and took note when the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence made news last month.

One of them, Sister Jeannine Gramick, has ministered to LGBTQ+ Catholics for more than 50 years and is a co-founder of New Ways Ministry, which advocates on their behalf.

She publicly shared a letter she wrote to the Dodgers, welcoming their reinvitation to the drag group and saying its members deserved recognition for their charity work.

“While I am uncomfortable with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence using the nuns’ old garb to draw attention to bigotry, whether Catholic or not, there is a hierarchy of values in this situation,” Gramick wrote.

“I believe that any group that serves the community, especially those who are less fortunate or on the margins of society, should be honored.”

However, Sister Luisa Derouen, renowned for her outreach to transgender Catholics, said she was “deeply offended” by the Dodgers’ decision to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

"I realize they do a lot of good for many people with their philanthropic work, and I thank them for that,” she told the Associated Press via email. “But where my passion about this most comes from is with regard to my religious life.”

“I have spent about 30 years passionately trying to help people understand and respect the lives of gay, lesbian and trans people,” she added. “Women religious are their best allies in the Catholic Church — we don’t deserve for our lives to be caricatured in this kind of demeaning way.”

“Why can’t they do all their wonderful work without disrespecting our lives, when we have done so much to help others respect their lives?”

MLB pitchers Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers and Trevor Williams of the Washington Nationals criticized the Dodgers for reinviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, saying they resented the group’s mockery of Catholicism. Williams, on Twitter, encouraged his fellow Catholics “to reconsider their support of an organization that allows this type of mockery of its fans to occur.”

But each pitcher said he had no objection to the broader tradition of Pride Nights.

“This has nothing to do with the LGBTQ community or Pride or anything like that,” said Kershaw. “This is simply a group that was making fun of a religion. That I don’t agree with.”