“A strong sign for queer-friendly pastoral care”: Lucerne churches involved in Pride Central Switzerland

“A strong sign for queer-friendly pastoral care”: Lucerne churches involved in Pride Central Switzerland

The Catholic Church in Lucerne has deepened its involvement with Pride Central Switzerland, set for August 23rd, through direct participation, financial sponsorship, and new initiatives centred on the so-called Queer Bible. Organisers describe this as a natural extension of pastoral activity, though in reality it represents a striking departure from the Catholic faith and a public accommodation with the ideology of the age.

St. Peter’s Chapel at the centre
Since Pride Central Switzerland was revived in 2022, the Catholic-run St. Peter’s Chapel on the Reuss has been the hub of church activity. Its director, Meinrad Furrer, a Catholic theologian who identifies as queer, has spearheaded participation, drawing in not only the Catholic city and cantonal churches but also the Evangelical Reformed and Christian Catholic (Old Catholic) bodies.

Ingrid Schmid, communications head for the Catholic Church of the City of Lucerne, explained: “With our Pride commitment, we want to send a strong signal for queer-friendly pastoral care, an ecumenical stance, and a creative theological project: the Queer Bible.”

The Pride Slam and the “Queer Bible”
This year introduces a Pride Slam, staged in a local bar, with preachers and poets performing together. At the Pride festival itself, the ecumenical team will staff a booth offering “queer Bible verses” and personal blessings, distributed via a “wheel of fortune.” The climax comes on Sunday, August 24th, when St. Peter’s Chapel hosts a Celebration of Pride service. Clergy from the Reformed, Old Catholic, and Roman Catholic traditions will preach short sermons on texts from the Queer Bible, randomly drawn during the liturgy.

Public witness and financial backing
Church-affiliated participants will also march behind a banner declaring: “God loves diversity. We do too.” Both the Catholic City Church of Lucerne and the Cantonal Catholic Church contribute personnel and money. Nana Amstad-Paul, Synodal Councilor for pastoral and ecumenical affairs, stated that the cantonal church “is naturally committed and happy to support the Catholic Church’s presence at Pride.” Funding has been incorporated into the project budget of St. Peter’s Chapel since 2022.

A rupture with Catholic doctrine
Though presented as pastoral innovation, the Lucerne programme contradicts clear and authoritative teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law,” and therefore “under no circumstances can they be approved”¹. To propose a Queer Bible is not creative theology but a profanation of God’s Word, which the Church has always guarded against distortion.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s declaration Persona Humana (1975) warned explicitly: “There can be no true promotion of human dignity unless the essential order of human sexuality is respected”². Far from respecting that order, the Lucerne initiative turns sexuality into an ideology and Scripture into propaganda.

Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor warned against “creative hermeneutics” that manipulate Revelation to justify behaviour the Church has always condemned³. The Queer Bible embodies precisely this danger: a counterfeit gospel that replaces the call to repentance with affirmation of sin.

False inclusivity and pastoral deception
The slogan “God loves diversity. We do too.” is emblematic of the confusion. God indeed loves all people, but His love is inseparable from truth and a call to conversion. To suggest that God’s love ratifies every human lifestyle is to collapse divine charity into sentimental relativism. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded the German Bundestag in 2011, the Church cannot submit Revelation to the shifting majority opinion of society, but must remain anchored in the moral law inscribed by the Creator⁴.

Moreover, to offer blessings on the basis of a person’s “queer identity” is a direct contradiction of the CDF’s 2021 Responsum, which declared: “The Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex”⁵. That prohibition applies equally to liturgical gimmicks which attempt to cloak ideological approval in religious symbolism.

A sign of the times
What is presented in Lucerne as “queer-friendly pastoral care” is in truth a capitulation to secular activism. It substitutes ideology for evangelisation, entertainment for worship, and affirmation for conversion. The result is not pastoral care but pastoral betrayal.

As St. Paul admonished: “Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine” (2 Tim. 4:2). The Catholic faithful, both in Switzerland and beyond, are left with the scandal of seeing their Church not defending the deposit of faith, but bending it to the rainbow banners of the age.

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2357.
2. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona Humana, 1975, §8.
3. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 1993, §53.
4. Benedict XVI, Address to the Bundestag, Berlin, 22 September 2011.
5. CDF, Responsum ad dubium on the blessing of the unions of persons of the same sex, 15 March 2021.