Sexual diversity, the Catholic Church, and all that remains unsaid

So the Church is supposed to simply be there whenever people who reject its teachings feel like having a comforting experience?

Sounds like this is a monologue in the name of not being a monologue to me, and the only listening that will be going on is to that of like-minded speakers. Why not listen to what the Church actually teaches, you may find it enlightening.

Prof. Lakeland says the conference is not "another attempt to challenge the church’s teaching on homosexuality."

Someone needs to challenge the Church's teaching on homosexuality. There will be so "solutions" until the Church comes to its senses and admits that GLBT people are every bit as beloved children of God as the rest of us!

God, who is Love, calls us to love without question, and without measure. The rain falls on all. Our conversion to love comes through love not rejection, not division, but through transcendent love. How dare we hold people outside a building called church because we still find no place for all within our cramped heart.

The measure by which we love is the measure we receive Love.

Love with all of our hearts and all of our minds and all of our souls and all of ourselves. Love our neighbor as ourself.

Love our enemy and so we all soon discover ourselves converting always more deeply to Love.

As Our Holy Father Saint Benedict wrote 1500 years ago, may we all get there together.

It is the only way we will

The Church should still be open to the fact that its teaching may be less than perfect on this topic, including its understandings of sex, why we are sexually moral and the nature of marriage in both law and sacrament. It really is hubris to think that natural law teachings are not subject to change.

I can't recall Jamie's previous blog but I reacll liking it. This one too is sensitive and wise. I write because I have, on occsion, criticized you for what I thought was stridency and aggressiveness. One of us is growing. I'd like to think it's you but I suspect it's I.

Your little story within the story about the funeral for the child of the lesbian couple is what touched me most. Christ was palpably present in that room and palpably present in your retelling. The only religious absolute in this story to make present the mercy of Jesus. When a parish behaves this way, then I am getting a glimpse of the "Mother" the hierarchy speaks so glibly about. And this remnds me: Dulles forgot on model of Church in his "Models of the Church." The Church as mother. The Church being a mother to her children.

The church teaching on various controversial issues has apparently been TOO CLEAR for those who DO NOT WANT to conform.

Maybe if all the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics joined the SSPX Rome would listen to us?

What I've learned from this article are:

Celibate gays live in accordance with Church teaching, presumeably therefore, ... well the conclusion is obvious.

Some gays care as little about the salvation of children as they do about their own, being willing to perjure themselves by solemn promises to God (or is this part of baptism skipped?) in order to set their children on the pathway of life toward God.

Their formal cooperators in this are ministers of the Church.

The Church's sacraments should be given as emotional comfort and not as means of salvation, God -- see second above.

And all the above, so say theology professors at esteemmed Catholic universities, is within the gray and undefined areas of Church teaching.

Jamie, thank you for this article. At my parish one of the its leading and most beloved members recently came out as a lesbian after decades in the closet. Membership in my parish runs the gamut from traditional to progressive. When she came out, they had to decide if they were going to accept or reject this member.

I am happy to report that I don't know of a single member who has made her feel unwelcome. Even the more traditional members of the parish have stood by her. Now, it is a non-issue.

As more and more children are being raised in same sex households, hopefully these children will not be reject out of fear and hate.

When we deal with pastoral situations a great Church maxim applies well understood in the East, Ecclesia supplex, anyone who has not got the compassion to go beyond legalism ( qv.Jesus and the Pharisees and Sadducee's and Lawyers) and chunters on about Church teaching, (which in the case of anonymous bloggers, and anonymous e mail response comments should be disregarded), obviously has little pastoral theology, canon law and scriptural understanding, because they cannot but have ignored the Lord's own Gospel commands, forgiveness, the demands of the Beatitudes, the last judgement and the command of Jesus that we judge NOT and so on. As they say on the streets, 'get real', life isn't about text book doctrine it is about people and their situations.

Given that the Church's teaching on homosexuality is dead wrong and distinctly not Christ-ly, why the heck wouldn't we challenge its position?

The hierarchy of the Church is so immature and ignorant on the subject of human sexuality that they have become a totally dysfunctional unit. They demonstrate intolerance of others who have been disenfranchised from the Church because of their sexual orientation, they demonstrate homophobia on a regular basis and they are guilty of misogyny when it comes to women being ordained to priesthood and episcopate. They are doomed to be frozen at Trent.

The LGBT community can know that they are in the ascendancy within the Gospel- based, forward-looking element of the Catholic Church.

When reading something like this, I find I can only shake my head in disbelief. ..And horror and anger. I find the focus of this conference to be gravely offensive to those who wish to live Catholic faith to it's fullest.
In particular, I find Ms. Manson's comment about the Church's "doing so much to push people away"..extremely offensive!

Put simply, Our Church has never pushed anyone away from Herself or Truth. If someone chooses to live a gay or lesbian lifestyle..there will be consequences. When we, Creatures and/or Children of God, choose to reject God's Truth, we cannot be justly enraged when our soul screams out in pain. It's not screaming out against the Church's "evil" attitude, it's screaming out against the human refusal to acknowledge the whole of Truth.

I find the very idea of this conference to be..deplorable..in no small part because, despite the stated intent, these sorts of actions may well lead many directly into sin.

I'm aware of one, and only one, means to avoid this snare: Repent and remove yourself from the gay or lesbian life you're living.
If you can't do that, no sacrament the Church might attempt to offer will truly help you; you have made yourself spiritually and intellectually incapable of properly handling God's grace.

Neither I nor the Church can change that.

Dear Veronica,
Your comment breaks my heart. The answer to your question is yes, just as Jesus said: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." He did not mention anything about practicing Catholics. Also, I would mention that one of the seven spiritual works of mercy is "Comfort the sorrowful." Nuff said.

I am a father of five, a grandfather of seven, and a great-grandfather of three. I have ministered in the Church for over fifty years, nineteen as a Permanent Deacon. (Retired) I sit here and weep with joy after reading this article. Indeed, no one is separated from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus. Thank you Jamie for your wonderful witness.

What's with the "meta-language" mumbo jumbo. Try keeping the commandments and studying the Catechism and Scriptures for a start. Trust in Jesus not yourself in this matter. Rejoice, for the Lord came to save us from Sin, Death and the Devil. Again I say Rejoice!...

I can not prove the accuracy. However I think it deserves investigation:

John Paul I. As a Bishop and then Archbishop and later Cardinal and Patriarch in northern Italy in the 1960's and 70's, Albino Luciani "did much to encourage single persons to adopt parentless children. It was his lobbying in the Italian Parliament that made it legal for single persons to adopt children in Italy.
When an opposition member of the assembly challenged his proposal: "But, that would make it legal for homosexuals to adopt children," Luciani responded, "The desire to parent children is a basic human need . . . Until the day comes that we can guarantee basic human rights and dignity to the tiniest minority, we cannot truthfully call ourselves a democracy. "
Yet, his adversary objected, `But homosexuals have a record of splitting up after the `honeymoon' is over and this would cause children to lose either one or both parents."
Luciani responded: "There are two major forces involved in making for long term loving relationships and regardless of what Rome might believe, sex is not one of them. As a matter-of- fact, sex is most often a declining force in many relationships. It often has very little to do with the long term survival of a union. The longevity of a relationship of two people who parent children that is so important to protecting the rights of children until they reach adulthood depends not on sex, but rather on the two major forces that create long term relationships, love and companionship. When one considers the latter, the homosexual has a great advantage. Two people of the same sex who fall in love with each other make much better companions of each other because they are more likely to share common interests. It is for this reason that children parented by homosexual couples are less likely to undergo the trauma of arguments in marriage and of divorce. "
His opponent had still another objection: "Nevertheless, homosexuals are pedophiles. This will put children in great danger."
"To begin with," Luciani responded, "homosexuality has nothing to do with pedophilia; one is sexual orientation and the other is sexual perversion. Yet, in that most cases of pedophilia involve incest, we must consider the question. If our objective is to prevent pedophilia in adoption then the only logical action is to permit only homosexuals to adopt children who are only of the opposite sex. This would reduce incest to zero. If we permit heterosexual couples to adopt children, then children would be at risk. "
Within a few years of the passage of that measure, more than a half-million children, who had previously been confined to the streets, were provided loving and economic support by single parents. Some of these were homosexual couples, in which case one of the parents had adopted the child, as it remained illegal for two people of the same sex to adopt the same child.
Very little is known of Luciani's involvement with homosexual parents other than a few short notes written in connection with his orphanages, "We have found that homosexual couples will take handicapped and less than healthy and attractive children. Most importantly, they will take bastards. Heterosexual couples, on the other hand, go for the cutest babies as if they were shopping for a puppy in a pet shop. "
There is another note written in diary format, "Dear Mama,
I have for many years counseled a young couple. They have great sexual attraction for each other, yet, beyond that they have nothing in common. I have yet to be in their presence when they have not been arguing between themselves or yelling at their children. In addition, they both suffer from a serious ongoing drug and alcohol addiction problem for which neither one has ever sought counsel. Both children, having been bombarded during their growing-up years by the incompatibility of their parents, are now confined to institutions. In that I sanctioned this marriage, I must live the rest of my days with this on my conscience.
Last week, this same couple came to me on a matter of such great urgency that I had to cancel another appointment. They told me of a neighbor - one of the new single parents in Italy - who was a homosexual. As a matter-of-fact, another man has been living with him for many years.
I have known of this queer relationship for sometime. Both men are contributing members of the community and spend much of their free time helping out in the parish orphanage. Their two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, are the envy of all who are privileged to experience them.
One night as they were leaving, I noticed tears in their eyes. They told me, it grieves them that they cannot take all of the children home with them.
Mama, it is this experience, more that any other, that has caused me to understand the qualifications of a good parent. There is something terribly wrong with a society that thinks that one's sex is what makes one a good parent. "
Just three months before his death, Pope Paul VI permitted Cardinal Luciani to address the Vatican cardinals on the possibility that the Church might encourage homosexuals to enter into long term loving relationships as they represented the only population group that was large enough and willing to provide economic and emotional support to millions of children who otherwise would be aborted by women too young or too poor to support them. Luciani argued that the Church's traditional position exiled homosexuals from society, forcing many of them into lives of loneliness and despair. He argued the Church's position was one of prejudice, as medical science had proved that sexual orientation cannot be changed and the Bible's condemnation of homosexual acts was scant compared to its vast condemnation of heterosexual acts.
At the conclusion of the session, Luciani had been unable to convince no more than a handful of his audience that the matter should even so much as be discussed. He thanked Paul for having given him the opportunity. He then turned to the Vatican cardinals and told them, "The day is not far off when we will have to answer to these people who through the years have been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose human dignity has been offended, their identity denied and their liberty oppressed. What is more, we will have to answer to the God who created them. "
Forty years before the world's psychiatric and medical communities came to the same conclusion, Luciani reasoned that sexual orientation could not be changed by therapy, that the ability to fall in love is a basic instinct.
Yet, as the psychiatric community tells us today, Luciani found that unlike sexual orientation, sexual behavior could be conditioned by therapy or other circumstances. He reasoned that there are two forces that drive a sexual act, love and lust. He knew when two people are in love, love tends to drive the sexual act and that when two people are not in love, lust tends to drive the act. He understood then what we are coming to know now; a homosexual male, for example, can be conditioned to have sex with a woman only by changing the motivating factor from one of love to one of lust. It is because he felt strongly that God's children not be products of lust; he opposed this type of experimentation.
Luciani's intermediate thesis "Strategy of a Strange War", written when he was an advanced student in theology at the Gregorian University in Rome, was based on this subject. As a young seminarian in Belluno he had done much work in the local prison and had found that heterosexual men who were confined for long periods of time did engage in homosexual acts. But he also found "No matter how long the practice went on a heterosexual male could never fall in love with another male, that lust and not love was the driving force behind such behavior, that when a heterosexual male would have a long term intimate relationship with another male in prison he might grow to like him and even develop great affection for him, but he would never be able to fall in love with him. " pp. 58-59