Cardinal O’Connor Story: 1989 Homosexual Agitators at Mass

“In 1989, when John Cardinal O’Connor was Archbishop of New York, a group of homosexual agitators advertised a plan to disrupt his Sunday Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. The police were alerted, and priests were invited to attend as a show of support for their bishop. The Mass was uneventful until after the Gospel was read. Then, as the cardinal began preaching, a few dozen men stood up from various seats of the vast cathedral and began shouting foul obscenities and ridicule in the direction of the cardinal. The cathedral echoed with the bristle of curses and contempt. The police quickly stepped in and began removing the men from pews while the congregation joined with the cardinal in praying a fervent Rosary. Some of these men, however, had chained themselves to the pews. The difficulty stretched the time to a lengthy interruption. Finally the Mass could continue. But some men had waited for another moment of verbal assault. As the consecration was prayed by the cardinal and a hundred or so priests in attendance, about six men from the protest now rose up from the pews in a resurgence of blasphemous abuse. The loud shouts were thick and crude as the sacred words of the consecration were recited by the united voices of the cardinal and his priests. I was in my first year as a priest. I left the cathedral that day with an entirely different understanding of the Mass and its actual mysterious link with the noise and filth that surrounded Jesus Christ hanging on a Cross outside the walls of Jerusalem” (157, Haggerty, Conversion).