Catholics must respectfully resist Bishop Drainey’s promotion of the LGBT+ agenda

By John Smeaton   |   11 June 2025

As Pope Leo XIV enters the firing line of the homosexual lobby following his re-statement of Catholic teaching on marriage, it’s the painful duty of Catholics respectfully to resist Bishop Terence Drainey, who continues to advance the LGBT+ agenda in his diocese of Middlesbrough, UK, and all bishops who subvert Catholic teaching.

The Diocese of Middlesbrough LGBT+ Ministry was established, ostensibly, to give a “warm welcome here in the Diocese for everyone, and this includes in an explicit way members of the LGBT+ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and those who identify under ‘plus’).” According to Pink News, the “plus” in LGBT+ “represents all other sexual identities including pansexual, asexual and omnisexual — amongst many others.”

The purpose of the bishop’s LGBT+ ministry is not a pastoral outreach seeking to enable Catholics to fulfil their vocation to chastity by ordering their sexuality to the conjugal love of a man and a woman. On the contrary, Bishop Drainey explicitly calls on the Church to re-examine its theological position on “sexuality, gender and identity … in the light of modern scientific discoveries and of the lived experience of people with different sexualities and identities” and to “welcome and celebrate humankind in all its wonderful diversity”.¹

Bishop Drainey’s challenge to Catholic teaching is reflected in the monthly newsletters published by Fr Tony Lester, parish priest of Our Lady’s Church in York, and co-ordinator of the Middlesbrough Diocese LGBT+ ministry. 

The April 2025 edition of the newsletter gives centre-stage to a talk given by “Brother” Christian Matson, in Lexington, USA, whom Fr Lester describes as the “first openly transgender religious” who had been “welcomed” into the diocese by Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky. Christian Matson, Fr Lester said, was giving a talk about “his experience of being trans and Catholic” and his talk was “appropriate for the whole family”.

As the Catholic World Report has previously reported of Christian Matson, “Church leaders risk sowing scandal and confusion … by allowing a female monk who has been living as a male for years — and who recently publicly announced her transgender identity — to continue presenting herself as a man”. 

In the May edition of the Middlesbrough diocese’s newsletter, Fr Lester continues to sow scandal and confusion on transgenderism by highlighting a news report in which Maxwell Kusma, a biological female, who calls herself a “transgender man”, complains bitterly that “a 2024 Vatican document … alleged a lack of consensus among medical experts about transgender identity and effectively erased the intersex experience through reductive and harmful language”. 

Nowhere in Fr Lester’s newsletters is it pointed out that:²

“In the life sciences, sex is defined by how that organism is structured to function during the reproductive act … Organisms whose reproductive organs are structured to donate genetic material during the reproductive act are designated male. Organisms whose reproductive organs are structured to receive that genetic material during the reproductive act are called female. This is why sex is a binary trait. In humans sex is determined at fertilization by sex-determining genes on the sex chromosomes.”³

Nor do his newsletters allude to the clear scientific evidence that “Intersex conditions are not additional sexes on a spectrum; they are rare disorders in the development of the normal binary reproductive system called Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD).”⁴

And still less does one find in Fr Lester’s newsletters the slightest allusion to Catholic moral teaching on transgender procedures:

“Catholic health care services must not perform interventions, whether surgical or chemical, that aim to transform the sexual characteristics of a human body into those of the opposite sex or take part in the development of such procedures. They must employ all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who struggle with gender incongruence, but the means used must respect the fundamental order of the human body.”⁵

Also, in the May edition of the diocesan LGBT+ Newsletter, Fr Lester puts the spotlight on the media activities of their LGBT+ Ministry chairman, Dr Johan Bergström-Allen, saying “Johan, as well as being a member of our Ministry’s Pastoral Council, is a member of the Diocesan Communications Team.

As Dr Alan Fimister reported last month in the Voice of the Family Digest, shortly after Pope Leo XIV’s election, the openly homosexual Dr Johan Bergström-Allen, appeared on BBC Radio Five Live calling for a change to the doctrine of the Church that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered”. Echoing the bishop, he alleged that “more updated understandings” of the science (as well as of Scripture) required a re-wording of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on homosexuality — a point disproved comprehensively by Dr Fimister in his article.

The gender ideology activism in the diocese of Middlesbrough, under the leadership of Bishop Drainey, is a wound in the side of the Church. It is now serving, in particular, to undermine the clear message of Pope Leo XIV that “harmonious and peaceful societies” can be achieved above all “by investing in the family, founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman, a small but genuine society, and prior to all civil society.” Faithful Catholics would do well to write with filial solicitude to Bishop Drainey, and all such bishops complicit in scandalous activities in support of the LGBT+ agenda, and respectfully oppose them. Bishop Drainey’s address is 16 Cambridge Road, Middlesbrough, TS5 5NN. His email address is bishopsecretary@rcdmidd.org.uk

Notes

1. Parish Consultation Diocesan Synthesis Synod on Synodality, Diocese of Middlesbrough, April 2022. ↩︎
2. Citations 3 and 4: Transgender Belief in Pediatrics: A Call to Heal Minds, Embrace Bodies, Save Lives; The Academy Review, The John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family, Spring Term, Volume 5, Issue 1, March 2025. ↩︎
3. Cf. McHugh PR and Meyer LS. Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences. The New Atlantis; No.50, Fall 2016, p90. Available at https://thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy-pdfs/20160819_TNA50SexualityandGender.pdf ↩︎
4. Cf. Sax L. How Common is Intersex? A response to Ann Fausto-Sterling.J. Sex Res. 2002 Aug;39(3): 174-8. Doi: 10.1080/00224490209552139. PMID: 12476264. Available at https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(17)31708-9/fulltext ↩︎
5. United States Catholic Bishops Conference, Doctrinal note on the moral limits to technological manipulation of the human body (20 March 2023). ↩︎