A daylong conference organised by Catholic lay organisation the Lumen Fidei Institute will include a Rosary procession delivering an anti-LGBT+ petition to bishops.

The conference takes place at the Glenroyal Hotel in Maynooth on Tuesday, March 12, and will include five speakers from the conservative Catholic milieu: Anthony Murphy, John Smeaton, Dr Eanna Johnson, José Antonio Ureta and John Lacken.

At 11.30am, a procession praying the Rosary will carry a statue of Our Lady of Fatima from the hotel to the Irish Bishops’ Spring Conference Meeting in St Patrick’s College Maynooth. The procession will bring will it a petition, which attendees will deliver to the bishops.

A note on the Lumen Fidei Institute’s website explains the content of the anti-LGBT+ petition: “This petition will respectfully ask the Irish Bishops to make our Catholic schools truly Catholic; it will ask them to ensure a proper Catholic priestly formation for Irish seminarians in Maynooth; and it will also ask them to ensure that only faithful Catholic clergy are allowed to minister to the Catholic laity of Ireland.”

Their new petition comes after 72% of bishops ignored letters sent by the Institute last September “to highlight our concerns over the promotion of the LGBT agenda in our Catholic schools and the damage that this will do to children who are educated in these Catholic schools.”

“Because ignoring parent’s concerns about child safety is unacceptable,” the website states, “we have decided that we needed to follow up on this initiative and on the poor response from our Irish bishops.”

The Lumen Fidei Institute has long opposed LGBT+ sex education in schools. This Wednesday, an article appeared on their site warning parents of the supposed dangers of the Sex Education Bill and attacking current SPHE classes as already being too inclusive.

In an interview last year the Lumen Fidei Institute’s secretary, John Lacken, criticised the Catholic Church in Ireland as having become complacent on LGBT+ issues. He bemoaned the inclusion of pro-gay Jesuit Fr James Martin in the World Meeting of Families in Dublin, and said that “You also have a situation in Ireland where the bishops have gone soft on the whole ‘same-sex marriage’ thing.”

The Institute routinely conflates homosexuality and paedophilia, with another page on their website stating “We want our children to grow up in the full knowledge of their Catholic faith, safe from predators, especially the clerical homosexual predators who have caused so much damage to the Catholic Church in Ireland.”

Meanwhile, following a report by the Oireachtas Education Committee this January, the campaign for inclusive sex education continues to gain momentum.