Bishop Cupich and the Elephant in the Room

September 19, 2018 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Chicago priest and his parishioners have burned a rainbow flag that was once displayed at the parish, in an act that the priest has called an “exorcism,” in apparent defiance of the Archdiocese of Chicago, led by pro-LGBT Cardinal Blase Cupich.

Although a spokeswoman for the archdiocese told the Windy City Times that “the pastor has agreed not to move forward with these activities,” after Fr. Paul Kalchik of Chicago’s Resurrection Parish said he would burn the flag publicly, the priest went ahead with the event in private, joined by several members of the parish. They reportedly prayed prayers of exorcism as well.

Kalchik told the Chicago Sun-Times that he was the victim of homosexual sex abuse by a neighbor as a child, and defended his actions as a response to homosexualist “propaganda” in the Catholic Church.

“That banner and what it stood for doesn’t belong to the Archdiocese or Cardinal Cupich. It belongs to the people of this parish who paid for it,” Kalchik told the newspaper. “What have we done wrong other than destroy a piece of propaganda that was used to put out a message other than what the church is about?”

“The people of this parish have been pretty resilient and put up with a lot of B.S.” Kalchik told the Sun-Times. “And it was just by accident that this banner that was made to celebrate all things gay … did not get destroyed when I first got here.”

It is not clear if the priest also burned donation pledge cards as he had planned to do, in likely response to corruption in the archdiocese revealed in recent scandals involving Cardinal Cupich.

The burning was carried out in “a private way, a quiet way, so as not to bring the ire of the gay community down upon this parish,” Kalchik told NBC News on Monday. “It’s our full right to destroy it, and we did so privately because the archdiocese was breathing on our back.”

Kalchik told NBC News that the flag was a “profane” symbol because it mixed the LGBT rainbow with a cross, and said that using the cross as anything other than a “reminder of our Lord’s passion and death . . . is what we consider a sacrilege.”