October 2000

By: K. B. Napier

Catholicism Rules U.S. Navy Chaplains

Lt Commander Philip Veitch, serving in Italy as a chaplain for the U.S. Navy was recently forced to resign by his Roman Catholic superior, Ronald Buchmiller.

Veitch dared to preach evangelically, saying that no man can stand between Man and God except Jesus Christ. Buchmiller did not like his sermons because they were ‘unpluralistic’ and ‘anti-priest’. In other words, Veitch’s theology was directly opposed to Roman Catholic teaching. 

Astonishingly, Veitch was then brought up on a disciplinary charge of ‘disdain, insolence and contempt’ toward a senior officer!! Veitch was given the choice of resigning or facing a court martial. He felt he had no option but to resign. Since then, Veitch is thinking of reconsidering his resignation, commenting that “I will not have a Roman catholic priest tell me what I can and cannot say.” Good for him!

The same priest also stopped another former chaplain from ending his prayers with “in Jesus’ Name”.

What we have here is a blatantly undemocratic censorship of doctrine and the rejection of a basic constitutional right to worship freely!

The answers are simple – no chaplain should have to serve under a superior whose religion is different, and no superior has the right to veto evangelical, Reformed, Biblical preaching. Veitch should be reinstated and any disciplinary note should be removed from his record. His superior, Buchmiller, should be transferred to another position.

We have already contacted the Chief Chaplain, Rear Admiral A. Byron Holderby about this. We suggest that all Christians ought to do the same, in the interest not only of supporting Veitch, but also of the freedom to preach and believe as one wishes. This is a basic article of the U.S. constitution. And how come homosexuals, who are risks to security, health and morality, get better treatment than preachers of God’s word, which leads only to holiness and purity?

Even if Veitch has by now been reinstated, express your alarm at what has happened and request a review of the rules.

To contact Rear admiral Holderby, e-mail him at coc@bupers.navy.mil

You may call me Carol

46 year old Rev. Peter Stone, vicar of St Philip’s, Upper Stratton, England, made the UK news by telling his parishioners he was becoming a woman. Reports say that he had ‘amazing support’ and newspapers gave him praise and sympathy.

Peter began by getting his ears pierced. Then he had the first  operation and started taking female hormones. As a result his breasts developed and his cheeks became smoother as he tried to get rid of his beard with laser treatment.

Eyebrows have been thinned and shaped, his face has become soft and rounder. Later this year he hopes to have the operation that will finally turn him in to a woman....apart from his voice. He wants to be known as Carol.

Peter claims to have wanted to be female since the age of four and his bishop, Barry Rogerson, spoke of Peter’s ‘plight’ to the parishioners, whilst Peter sat in the vicarage waiting for the response. He feared he would lose his ‘calling’ and living.

“As Carol I felt closer to my true self” he said. “The operation I face is horrendous...No one would go through it unless they were desperate.” Since ‘coming out’ he has received plenty of letters of support. However, he said he won’t stop feeling guilty for some time. For years he has felt ‘tortured’, and he joked about God making his size 10 feet reduce to size 8. He knows where to get clothes to suit his large frame – he has been cross-dressing for years – having started by putting on his wife’s dresses twenty years ago.

Yet, he is also a Territorial Army chaplain. He thinks his dog-collar will help to hide the Adam’s Apple. How would he cope if a man made a pass at him? “I don’t know. It will be strange. I haven’t felt gay and I have never moved in those circles. But who can say how things will change? All I want is to be the person I have always felt myself to be.”

Peter speaks of always dreaming of being a girl. As a boy he read the Bible, cover to cover, and discovered God’s injunction against men dressing as women. So he stopped wanting to dress in his mother’s clothes and instead prayed for God to change him in to a girl. But, at puberty, he changed his mind when girls took over as objects of his fancy. His interest in women continued through his college days and he married at 21. Then he started to wear his (first) wife’s clothing.

But, as he did so, he remembered the words of the Bible, and he was filled with guilt, and in an effort to appear to be more normal he and his wife had a child. Even so, he still ‘felt he was in the wrong body’. So he applied for a sex change. This directly led to his divorce. His father was devastated.

Later he remarried, his new wife knowing everything. The marriage only lasted 13 years, for his wife returned to the USA in 1996 and never came back. He said his ex-wives and his daughter have supported everything he has done. So did his bishop, who told him that he had discussed the matter with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who said that there “was no canonical bar” to Peter’s ministry. Peter felt an ‘overwhelming’ relief.

The bishop told the parishioners that “We do not always feel our bodies fit us.” and likened it to being too fat or too thin, as he rallied support for their vicar.

One of those listening stood and said they all loved Peter and so they would carry on loving him as Carol. Everyone applauded. Peter cried at hearing this and later quipped that he has asked the congregation to tell him if he wears the wrong colour of nail-varnish. (Source: The Daily Telegraph, 2000).

Peter thanks God for His mercy...but what is the Christian response? Well, it is nothing like the response of the bishop, the Archbishop, or the congregation. Simply, they have got it radically wrong, as has Peter.

‘Feeling’ one’s body is wrong is an argument that carries no water at all, whether scientific, social or Biblical. Peter is a man and that’s that! He can have bits removed and plastic bits added on  - but he remains a man. We see in Peter a man whose sinful self-indulgence has reached its peak. He ‘went over the top’ a long time ago by mulling over his desires in his heart and mind. For him (and people like him) to suggest that he has no choice, or that he could not help it, is farcical. He is merely a man whose sinful desires have been allowed to get out of control, through fantasy.

The idea that he has felt this way since age four cannot be proved. The mind plays tricks after years of sin! Even if it was a truthful look back at his life, it only goes to show just how evil the human heart is, even at such a tender age. We are all ‘born in sin’, and Peter certainly displays this fact well in an abominable way.

Peter, his daughter and wives, his bishop and Archbishop, and the congregation (except for the one person who voted against his actions), have all ignored God’s plain condemnation of men acting like women. Changing body parts will never make Peter a woman. In this he is deceiving himself. He is also deceiving himself if he thinks God is dealing mercifully with him. If anything, God is giving him over to his own lusts and sin...something He does when a man or woman refuses to act righteously by committing blatant sin in the face of obvious divine condemnation. Peter has no right to his minister’s role.

Peter has chosen to pay for the operations himself, but many now have the sex-change operation at the expense of the State. That is, paid for by tax-payers! This is a gross waste of public money, especially when cancer victims need care and research. 

As old people die for want of cash to pay for vital operations and treatment, people who have self-inflicted problems (such as dangerous- sports people who have accidents, drug takers and homosexuals who contract AIDS, smokers who get lung cancer, etc) are funded in their follies. So-called ‘sex change’ operations (which do not change one’s sex at all – only one’s appearance) are the height of insult to a population that really is ‘desperate’.

Peter is a pathetic picture of a man whose delusion is to be a woman. He can get chopped up and reshaped, but he will remain a man, being deceived and deceiving many others – as he has already done. That a bishop and the Archbishop cannot see any of this as sin is appalling, but not a surprise.

Why write this news report? To show others that not all Christians are stupid! The folly of churchmen does not reflect the state of all Christians. Some readers might charge me with harshness, but my response is only that of God, who plainly condemns what Peter is doing. No doubt, he will submit to a pretend marriage to another man, sometime in the future. Then, he will compound his sin and folly in the eyes of God. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. That is the divine order of things that cannot be altered - by human desire, desperation or medical pseudo-science.