Homosexuals: A pastoral approach

by Editor · January 7, 2004

Imagine, if you will, being the citizen of a country whose government propagates the view that Catholics are inherently corrupt and their Mass subversive. Imagine this notion being perpetuated in militant terms by members of the civil service and much of the public.

Such a situation is analogous to the experience in the Church of Catholics who are homosexual.

The letter by 23 Chicago diocesan priests, on which we report this week, argues that the Church leadership’s statements on homosexuality, in tone and even in content, serve to alienate homosexual Catholics.

The archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, shares that concern when he acknowledges that there is indeed a “pastoral problem”, and that the language employed by the hierarchy “does not help us in welcoming men and women of homosexual orientation.”

Cardinal George validly points out that the Church’s usage of “philosophical and theological language” may be misapplied by secular society, and presumably Catholics who are not versed in these disciplines.

Whatever semantic distinction there may be, however, is obscured when such statements are issued for public consumption without qualification or explanation.

Moreover, many statements issued on behalf of the Church, including Cardinal George’s, tend to misunderstand and even prejudice homosexuality.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church acknowledges that homosexuals “do not choose” their sexual orientation (indeed, who would pick a sexual orientation that is subject to so much malice and alienation?). The Catechism further teaches that the Church is not opposed to homosexuality, but to the “homosexual act”.

This distinction is not always made clear.

Often, Church documents operate on the negative assumption that homosexuals, by virtue of their orientation, inevitably engage in sexual activities, and therefore require conversion.

Surely homosexuals are as inherently capable of following the Church’s call to chastity as their unmarried heterosexual counterparts.

Unless the Church knows better, it must presume that individual homosexuals in the Church are not engaging in sexual activity, just as a priest must presume that his confirmants are not engaging in pre-marital sex, or married communicants are not engaging in extra-marital affairs.

Indeed, if only the homosexual act is at issue, the Church should as loudly condemn acts akin to “homosexual sex” practised between heterosexuals, including married couples.

If intrinsically and gravely disordered acts are at the root of the Church’s concerns, one could argue, it might take equivalent action against masturbation which the Catechism condemns in terms similar to the homosexual act (para 2352) with the appropriate injunctions directed against any group of people likely to engage in it.

The Catechism (para 2358) says that for most gays and lesbians, their “homosexual condition is a trial.”

It continues: “[Homosexuals] must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity.”

As Cardinal George admits, this has not always been the case. It may be hoped that the letter by the 23 priests from Chicago will alert the hierarchy to conceive a more compassionate response to a grave pastoral problem.