Bishop Leo Frade appeared on television to explain the circumstances surrounding the reception of Father Alberto Cutie into the Episcopal Church.
Frade spoke to Maggie Rodriguez, co-host of the Early Show, this morning.
On The Early Show Friday, Rodriguez, whose family in Miami has been close to Cutie for years, spoke with Bishop Leo Frade, the head of the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida. He officiated at the ceremony Thursday at which Cutie and the woman who’s now his fiancée converted.
Rodriguez said, “I know Father Cutie believes, because he said it on this program, that what he did was wrong. He broke an oath and he lived a lie for two years. Are you concerned at all about the message that you’re sending your parishioners by inviting someone like that into your church?”
“Well,” Frade responded, “for a single person, kissing and loving another single woman, I think that a scandal would have been if he would have been — if she would have been a married woman or something like that. But Father Cutie is a single person, loving another single person, and when you have to obey your heart, indeed, the teaching that he could tell our people is that love is able to conquer everything.”
Asked why he welcomed Cutie into his church, Frade explained, “We have been talking to him as friends. We’ve known each other from the year 2000. We are both Cubans, and dealing in ecumenical and also trying to bring a peaceful change in Cuba. And he became more and more interested in our church, and showed that interest, and with time, about two years, it has been a long search for him, because he did not want to leave the Catholic faith. Actually, he traded his collar, his Roman Catholic collar for another different Catholic collar, which is the Anglican, the Episcopal collar.”