Posted on 05/16/2015 2:18:30 PM PDT by Steelfish
Jason Steidl PhD Student, Fordham University
A Letter to the Couple at Mass Posted: 05/15/2015 To the Married Couple at Mass:
I saw you enter the Sunday morning service recently at a Manhattan parish. You were a few moments late and sat down as the congregation began to sing the Gloria. I watched carefully and wondered if you were real. Had a married gay couple really come to worship at a Roman Catholic Church? I would not have been so surprised if we had been at an Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Universalist service. Many of these churches have supported LGBT relationships for several years. The Catholic Church is another story, though.
After watching you for a while, I could tell that you were married because of your matching rings and the way you sat close side by side. You were just like any other young couple in the congregation. You were not self-conscious and you were not making a political statement. You were just being you. At Mass.
I imagine that it was not easy to be at Mass together. Church life for LGBT Catholics can be an incredible challenge. When you were younger and coming to terms with being LGBT, you probably read the church's catechism, which characterizes gay sexuality as "objectively disordered" and gay sex as an act "of great depravity." When you experienced your first romance, you probably knew that the Church would not see any of the good that came from it. When you got married, it was not in a Roman Catholic Church, because the institution does not believe that same-sex marriage is a real possibility. Throughout your lives, you must have seen how much social, spiritual, and political capital the Catholic hierarchy has squandered opposing LGBT progress.
Our own Cardinal Timothy Dolan, whose annual financial appeal was announced again on the Sunday I saw you, has been on the front lines of the culture wars against LGBT people for years. If you listened to some of the Catholic rhetoric on LGBT rights, you may heard that your marriage is a threat to humanity and civilization as we know it.
Because of all this, it must have required a lot of courage for you to show up at church alongside the one you love. The act of worshiping together in your community of faith, which for most other couples is simple and routine, is neither simple nor routine for you. Still, though the church may have done much to hurt you and make you feel unwelcome, you came.
Your presence did not go unnoticed. Many other parishioners saw your public relationship on Sunday, and many will see you in the future when you come again. Your love for each other is a prophetic sign before God and the world. Through your lives together you show that your love is the same as any other love that becomes concrete in self-sacrificing and life-giving relationship. This is the same love that Jesus Christ embodied when he entered the world and offered himself as the total and world-changing self-gift of God. This is the love that we celebrate at Mass.
Your witness to love is key to transforming our church into a community that welcomes all people and recognizes God's work in all loving relationships. Last Sunday, you showed our parish that you were ok being gay, married, and Catholic. Your participation in worship showed that your conscience is clean before God. Your comfort with each other and other believers was a sign that you, with all LGBT believers, are an integral part of the body of Christ. It was good for the church that you came to Mass. Your participation and presence were transformative.
The Catholic Church is an institution that changes slowly--often agonizingly so. The church's timeline stretches across millenia, and its responses to social changes are frequently measured by decades, or even centuries. In the meantime, lives rapidly pass by and suffer from the tradition's intransigence. Today, LGBT Catholics lose their faith and are forgotten by the pastors charged with their care. Marriages are devalued by an institution embedded in modes of thought from centuries past. The gifts that LGBT couples bring to the church go unrecognized. LGBT believers suffer because church leadership refuses to acknowledge, or even dialogue with, the signs of the times.
In spite of the spiritual harm that parts of the Catholic Church commit against LGBT believers, there are signs of hope. LGBT Catholics continue to attend and be involved in local parishes. These believers live out true Catholic faith, which Hebrews 11:1 describes as "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." The church is broken, but LGBT Catholics have faith that God is working to fix it. The presence of LGBT Catholics in parishes testifies to God's grace working to bring the church to conversion. God never gives up on sinners, or sinful religious communities. As more and more LGBT Catholics are public about their sexual orientation and Catholic faith, the church realizes that LGBT individuals are a gift, rather than a threat, to the body of faith.
In local parishes, more and more priests and ministers are moved by God to reach out to the LGBT community. In New York City, nearly a dozen LGBT friendly parishes and ministries work to heal the hurt caused by the church in the past. Pope Francis, perhaps more than anyone else, has advocated for pastoral work that reaches out to heal those who are spiritually wounded. He has called for a church that acts as a "field hospital after battle" by going outside itself to meet people where they are at and learning from the ways that is has failed to act as an agent of healing in the past.
In conclusion, I want to thank you both on behalf of all LGBT Catholics. Thank you for your witness to same-sex love. Thank you for coming to church and being you. Thank you for looking beyond the pain you have experienced and becoming a source of healing. Your love for each other and other believers is a share in the love of God, which, in the words of 1 Corinthians 13:7, "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." This love is not passive, but works to change the world for the better. Your love, with God's love, is transformative for the church. Please keep your love coming.
Sincerely,
An LGBT Catholic
PhD in which pseudo-academic marshmallow major?
Also, it said to go and multiply.
I know how that works. But, I don't know how this other works.
Go ahead and call me bigoted if you want.
The author spend a lot of time and energy staring at this pair in church, a pair he presumes to be a gay couple.
Makes you wonder if he had binoculars in his pew, he could even tell that both wore matching rings. Meanwhile, the pastors’ homily continues to be politely ignored by a small group of people, some asleep, others distracted.
“The church is broken, but LGBT Catholics have faith that God is working to fix it.”
Precious!
Liberation theology nonsense.
Why is the gay parishioner targeting Catholic beliefs when it is actually the divinely-inspired Holy Bible that condemns same-sex sexual relationships, Romans 1:25-27 a good example?
In fact, Romans 1:25 indicates that same-sex sexual relationships are a consequence of violating the First Commandment.
Except His lasted longer than a few weeks, and he didn't have a whole posse of other partners.
If this was a "self-sacrificing and life-giving relationship" --- as Dr. LGBT has pre-determined via, I suppose, keen intuition ---- it's possible they've sacrificed (given up, or even never practiced) perverse sexual relations. Possibly they have a wholesome, normal spiritual friendship?
If this were the case (if...if...if) would Dr. LGBT even be interested in them?
Talk about "The Narrative" overtaking anything resembling the facts.
Feelz Before Realz!
Not at all.
I have to believe that 99% of the people know in their hearts that homosexual acts of perversion are terribly wrong. At that includes the homosexuals that feel that they are trapped in their depraved lifestyle. There is a way out - but Western society is now telling them that all is well and that they should continue to 'celebrate' their disease.
The problem is that the Media and Schools are constantly - constantly - and constantly - drumming this message into people's heads so that we are at the point where society is saying black is white and up is down. Inside people know better - but they figure that they must be wrong to say otherwise.
There is nothing wrong with being a bigot against evil. And it is evil to encourage someone ensnared in a sinful lifestyle to continue to march to hell.
Found this very informative article yesterday about gay life expectancies.
“Church life for LGBT Catholics can be an incredible challenge.”
I bet it can be considering 1) The Catholic Church doesn’t recognize and probably will never recognize that relationship and 2) it’s an oxymoron.
I know many individuals who are LGBT or who are pro LGBT who seem to want the trappings of Christianity and the grace of Christ but they don’t want the doctrine/the word of Christ. There is a core incompatibility between Christianity and the sexual revolution whether it be LGBT, swingers, casual sex, acceptance of “love driven adultery” and any number of other fleshly worldly orientations that are sinful.
That said it is only the LGBT that represent a total in your face affront to a Christian doctrine concerning the family and the healthy place for sex in a Christian life. There are no parades for adulterers, adulterers and divorcees are still largely excluded from being church deacons as are others who are known to have character issues that are incompatible with such positions. There really isn’t any compromise that can be reached. Proud LGBT are not coming to church as repentant sinners and while they may not be unique in that respect given how soft and muddled the message of the church as become they are be more overt in their insistence of putting their fleshly desires first and foremost in their lives. They simultaneously make the argument that God made them gay while insisting transexuals must be surgically corrected because evidently God didn’t make their gender correctly while entirely ignoring the fact that because one is born with the capacity for certain sexual desires does not remove the free will involved in choosing whether or not to act upon them.
So not only does their argument require that Christianity accept same sex relationships something that the Bible clearly from Old to New Testament totally rebukes and where it doesn’t rebuke it makes clear as Jesus pointed out “He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’” (Matthew 19:04) but it requires that virtually any sexual desire whether it be adulterous or even nonconsenting be treated as if they are immutable traits like skin color that no one should be expected to resist.
Proud sexual revolutionary “Christians” are committing great heresy and those who twist Christianity into some warped sickly sweet “love theology” are teaching their flocks to reject what Christ said was the most important commandment which was to “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. “ (Matthew 22:36). They mislead their flocks by purposely obscuring what the biblical view of loving the “Lord your God” which is obedience (1 John 5:2–3) not simply a nice feeling and singing hip modernist tweenybop songs for Jesus.
Those that mislead their flocks are treading a dangerous path. They have the part about grace somewhat right but are allowing their flocks to remain imprisoned in their fleshly and worldly context by allowing them to reject the teaching of Christ and the word he came to fulfill. Christ did not come to allow us to remain proud in our sinful fleshly natures. He came to show us a way to salvation in spite of them through grace. Christ made it very clear how he felt about those who lead their flocks astray. “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”(Matthew 18:6).
I pray for those who have fallen into this trap because I know personally how tempting it can be when the leader of the fallen is offering you the world trying to convince you that his material good fortune and fleshly delights are really blessings from God when they are just bait in a spiritual trap that will soon have you betraying those you love, lying, neglecting, and in reality abusing in ways that you would never have imagined and of course that is how you determine ultimately what is a blessing of God versus a devil’s bargain. God doesn’t bless you in ways that require you breaks his commandments and hurt and betray those you love.
This PHd student had better check the quality of his education. There are many Catholic churches and religious that recognize gay marriage and other things frowned on by orthodox Catholics. The Catholic parish closest to my house (Shrine of the Immaculate Conception) has 4 or 5 visibly gay couples in a mass of 150. There might be others not so “out” that I’m not aware of. I’m no expert in recognizing them.
They read the scripture, are servers of the host, and full Catholics by all appearances. I don’t go there often. I find the nearby upstart protestant church much more “catholic” than the RC church.
It isn’t just gay marriage. Don’t expect those at Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to believe in the Immaculate Conception either. To them it is just a poetic story trying to make a point. You don’t want to know the point that they thing the poetic story is trying to make.
Then maybe their bishop should tell them to knock it off.
“There are many Catholic churches and religious that recognize gay marriage and other things frowned on by orthodox Catholics.”
Toleration is different from “recognition.”
1) The Orthodox Catholic Church doesn’t, there are some congregations that call themselves Catholic which do.
2) Marriage generally means the joining of opposites, how are people of the same gender opposites?
Speaking of which conformity to society and/or peers is something which has been experimentally been shown to be strong with people who:
1) Have low self-esteem
2) Have not really decided their beliefs
3) Have not premeditated a situation or decision in a given setting beforehand.
The Apostle Paul says that if they take communion, they are eating and drinking damnation unto themselves. I Cor. 11:29
I agree with you in principle. But note that Matthew 18:15-17 shows that Jesus taught that a Christian congregation is to ultimately kick unrepentant sinners out of the congregation.
In fact, 1 Corinthians 5 is an example of Paul basically telling that church to do what Jesus had taught as it concerns a sexual offender.
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