On the other hand, several sources are reporting that someone who claims to have been there gives a different version:
"just wanted to let you know that there is a lot more to this story than has been published। I was in a meeting with Fr Marcel and heard the whole story। The woman in question brought her lesbian partner into the vesting sacristy just before the funeral Mass and made sure to introduce her partner to Fr Marcel, introducing her as her ‘lover’. He told her then that she should not present herself for Communion."Maybe. Maybe not. But while all of this is necessary to consider in order to avoid buying into the mainstream, anti-Catholic culture's portrayal of the event, in the end it doesn't change my earlier analysis. No matter how well the Church and her leaders and members conduct themselves, there will always be troublemakers. Even if Barbara Johnson was here acting in (for lack of a better term) good faith, there will be others who will deliberately try to set the Church up. It goes back to Nero, who claimed that the Christians were the ones who set fire to Rome. The real question is how the Church deals with it.
Whether or not Johnson was trying to set the Church up in this case is irrelevant. The Church has been setting itself up for this for a long time. As was the case with the sex abuse scandal, the truly distressing thing was not the behavior of the priest. In the sex abuse business, priests acted immorally and criminally, but that's going to happen with a certain number of school teachers, Protestant ministers, and college football coaches. It's tragic, but it's going to happen. The bishops' response was to ignore the priests' behavior, cover it up, and enable them to continue their predations, and therein lies the true horror of the sex abuse scandal.
Here, unlike the sex abuse cases, the priest seems to have acted correctly within his understanding of Catholic doctrines and canon law. But this time the bishops took action immediately; they threw him under the bus. And just as their inaction was wrong in the sex abuse crisis, their action was wrong in the case of Fr. Guarnizo.
The church has consistently taught the disordered nature homosexual behavior, as may be seen in sources ranging from the Bible to paragraphs 2357-59 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. At no point has Johnson attempted to deny her lesbian relationship: in fact, she appears to be trumpeting it. So what does Cardinal Weurl do? Rather than calling her to conversion, he apologizes to her, throws Fr. Guarnizo under the bus, and "said he did not believe in denying Communion because it is impossible to know what is in another person’s heart." (This in addition to dissing the concept of the Requiem Mass as a time to pray for the deceased and instead canonize her--excuse me, celebrate her life.) So all the priests and bishops throughout history who have denied people communion, excommunicated them, and placed them under an interdict were wrong, Your Eminence? Were St. Thomas Becket's excommunications wrong? Was Archbishop Joseph Rummell wrong to deny communion to segregationist civic leaders in Louisiana in 1962? Your Eminence, do you claim to be more Catholic than the Catholic Church? Talk about clericalism . . . .
Once again, I will state that had the leaders of AmChurch been doing their jobs for the last half-century, this episode never would have occurred--or if it had, it would clearly have been a case of intended Catholic-baiting, to which the Church could respond with consistency and solidarity. But not only have the bishops militantly refused to teach and defend the faith; they now, once again, in this episode, capitulate and pander to the forces of secularism and anti-Catholicism. How, I wonder, will God judge them for what they have done to His Church?
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