Swoffles:
This all being said, I wonder how I will be welcomed in the Catholic church as a gay man. Would I be opening myself up to discrimination? I truly prefer a “high-church” ritual and have also been sort of turned off by the guitar-playing, t-shirt/short wearing atmosphere of some catholic churches I have been to. Any ideas? Some of my Catholic friends, snidely dismiss the Episcopal Church as the “church born between the legs of Ann Boleyn”…something that is not partiucularly historically accurate. Again, I am looking for direction. Thanks.
The Episcopal Church/USA would welcome you as a practicing homosexual and in most jurisdictions you would be able to find a form of liturgy to accomodate your tastes.
The ‘continuing Anglicans’ and traditionalists such as myself would generally say that you are not ‘a homosexual’–you have engaged in sinful homosexual activity, for which you must repent in order not only to formally join a traditionalist group but for your own soul’s sake. Most traditionalists whom I know deny that there is any such thing as a ‘homosexual identity’. Homosexuality, in my own view and the view of many likely me, is always a wicked, willful and sinful crime against nature which invariably marks it’s practitioners as not of the Elect, unless they ultimately and decisively repent and eschew any such activity. Which makes homosexuality, as a sin, neither better than nor worse than adultery, fornication, murder, violence, hatred, pride, etcetera.
To the best of my knowledge, the RCC considers homosexuality to be ‘objectively disordered’ and sinful. Great emphasis is placed on the need for homosexuals to repent and seek help to alter their ‘orientation’ and to live either celibately or in a newly-discovered heterosexual ‘identity’. You could not be baptised a Roman Catholic (assuming that the RCC priest who receives you is conforming to RCC rules) if you remain actively engaged in a homosexual lifestyle.
I may have some issues not spelled out clearly–and where there are two Episcopalians you will invariably have at least three opinions, so I look for some howls from that quarter–but no one else seemed wont to directly address the issue that looked to me to be the most relevant to your situation.
