7 things a Catholic Can Learn from Pride Month

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Good advice for Catholics and others from the Sistas. Certainly nothing to sneeze at!
 
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Thank you very much for posting this.

The last lines really touched me:
Sisters, many of those who participate in Pride truly feel like Catholics hate them, look down on them, refuse to love them. We are called to re-write that script. We are called to be the Love.
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I often find “the Love” so absent from this forum, I’ve seriously considered quitting, except that I’m called to love everybody on here too, and if I find that more difficult than loving gay people who are not making angry or upset posts or telling others they’re hell-bound, then I see where God is challenging me.

Fr. Mychal Judge was a great example of someone who showed love for everybody to whom he ministered, which included gay and straight alike. Unfortunately he probably won’t be canonized any time soon because many in the Church don’t want a “gay saint”, even though almost no one knew he was gay during his lifetime and there is no suggestion that he ever broke his vow of celibacy. I consider him a hero and probably in Heaven. I pray for his intercession regularly and also pray for his cause should he ever manage to get one.

 
This thing that makes this issue tough is that we all know a family member and/or friends who is Gay.
We must continue to love these people and to pray for them.
 
The Catholic Church has lost every single cultural battle in the last 60 to 70 years. In almost every measure, the Church has become more, not less, overbearing and judgmental in that same time period. As well, Church attendance has hemorrhaged. I don’t disagree necessarily with the content of this article, but I would love to hear how the author expects this trend to reverse, if in fact they wish it to at all. And I bring this up in the context of the language we use to reach out to the secular world, including LGBTQ people.
 
Bullying, of course, goes two ways. We have to make sure we also are not bullied and mocked for standing up for the truth about sexuality and marriage. At least in my community, Catholics and others who hold these values are bullied by those who want to force such false beliefs on us. Sorry but I find this article milktoast in parts.
 
JoeShlabotnik said:
This thing that makes this issue tough is that we all know a family member and/or friends who is Gay.
We must continue to love these people and to pray for them.
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And the important thing for people to remember, when they’re on here blasting gays, is that those of us who do have gay friends and relatives often do not have the slightest problem loving these people, because they’re good, kind, supportive people who happen to be gay and are dealing with it in the best way they know how.

On the bullying point, I am aware that there are some gay people who bully others and oppose the Catholic Church vehemently and vocally. I have seen news coverage of some such incidents right in my own community. But I personally don’t know any gay people like that. The ones I know are actually supportive of my Catholicism, more so than many people I know who are straight. And in fact, one place I frequently meet or see gay people is in church.
 
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AlmaRedemptorisMater said:
In almost every measure, the Church has become more, not less, overbearing and judgmental in that same time period.
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It’s interesting you say this about recent decades, since it seems counter-intuitive to the general thrust of progressive Catholicism at Vatican II and afterward. The author Martin Mosebach made an interesting point about this a while back:
One difficulty that arose from the Church’s abandonment of her traditional liturgy was surely quite unexpected. Many who observe the Church from a distance, and this includes many nominal Catholics, now see the Church as embodied principally in the moral teachings that she requires her faithful to follow. These teachings include many prescriptions and proscriptions that contradict the customs of the secular world. In the days when the Church was above all oriented toward the immediate encounter with God in the Liturgy however, these commandments were not seen merely in relation to the living of daily life, but were concrete means of preparation for complete participation in the liturgy.

The liturgy gave morality its goal. The question was: What must I do in order to attain to perfect Communion with the Eucharistic Christ? What actions will result in my only being able to look on Him from afar? Moral evil then appeared not merely as the that which is bad in the abstract, but as that which is to be avoided in order to attain to a concrete goal. And when someone broke a commandment, and thus excluded himself from Holy Communion, Confession was ready as the means to repair the damage and prepare him to receive Communion again. A surprising result of the reform is that while the Church of the past, which was really oriented toward the liturgy, appeared to many outside observers as being scandalously lax in moral matters, the current Church appears to contemporaries (and not only to those outside) as unbearably moralistic, unmerciful, and meanly puritanical. (From: “Das Paradies auf Erden: Liturgie als Fester zum Jenseits,” Una Voce Korrespondenz 43 (2013), pp. 213-214; translation by Sacerdos Romanus).
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Whoops I said the opposite of what I meant! “Less, not More”. Yet, now that you bring it up, maybe my mistake isn’t necessarily untrue. That is an interesting perspective that I hadn’t thought of.
 
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AlmaRedemptorisMater said:
I don’t disagree necessarily with the content of this article, but I would love to hear how the author expects this trend to reverse, if in fact they wish it to at all
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As a former sociology teacher, trends fascinate me. As a person trying to be a light to those around me, I can’t be too concerned with trends or if my little self and little life reverse a trend, just that I’ve lived my purpose.

I suspect the author is more interested in person to person interaction on this subject than she is historical or sociological trends. We have the truth. We teach the truth. The trends cannot defeat us unless we let despair take over.
 
I suspect you are correct as well. Yet I suppose my question then would be, “How should a person express the truth to one living in contravention of it?” This article had a lot of don’ts. What are her do’s?
 
AlmaRedemptorisMater said:
I suspect you are correct as well. Yet I suppose my question then would be, “How should a person express the truth to one living in contravention of it?” This article had a lot of don’ts. What are her do’s?
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Good question. I think that’s why I like forums so much. We might not be able to ask her, but we can ask eachother.

Maybe we don’t get our do’s from her. Maybe we get them from…Father Mike?
 
VanitasVanitatum said:
I don’t know anyone like that.
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You do. You just don’t know it.

I was at a Church dinner one time and this older woman at the table says she doesn’t know one gay person. LOL. The young man sitting next to her was gay. Of course she didn’t know it. I caught his eye and we had a chuckle.

Gay people don’t always wear a stamp on their forward to let you know they are gay. I promise you, unless you don’t leave your house, you know gay people.
 
I know plenty of gay people who give no suggestion of being gay until there’s some social event and they show up with their same-sex partner.

I also have known a number of men who seemed that they might possibly be gay until they showed up at a social event with their wife and a few kids.
 
I don’t understand how love for God and ones neighbor doesn’t drive every Catholic to their knees to beg for conversion for the many souls at stake and to offer reparation to such great offense against God.
 
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