So, if I get this correctly, you want to judge my efforts in my work, my ability to reason and my moral judgement, and in that very same sentence you use a world worn cliche like “hooker with a heart of gold?” while commenting on my ministry?
No, that is not correct. No judgment has been delivered from others (including me) as to the content or worth of your ministry. As to “cliches,” there is truth in many cliches. The fact remains that people who live all kinds of morally compromised lifestyles are sometimes very nice on a personal, one-to-one level, showing what is called secular virtue despite clearly opposing some or many elements of morality.
It is you who has repeatedly countered the moral arguments given by others with protestations about your emotional attachment to human beings in your ministry and how that somehow makes it difficult to accept your Church’s doctrines on human sexuality. For example:
Having spent a long time meeting and spending time with gay couples, sometimes in the most dire of circumstances, I couldn’t discern any difference between the committed straight couples and the committed gay couples in terms of what was between them. They loved each other, cared for each other and wept over losing one another the same as straight couples did.
Another example:
This is what this poster said:
Simply becase people may have some sort of pre disposition towards drug use, alcohol abuse, mental illness, pedophellia, etc. does not make the behaviour right to such a point that we should encourage it.
And this is the way you responded to him:
Easy words to say in a vacuum. Try doing something like volunteer visits in hospitals and jails and let me know if you still feel OK making those comparisons.
And earlier you also brought up the same false dichotomy that is your theme on this thread:
when I was ministeirng in the hospital, my experience with same sex couples moved me. I won’t repeat all that. It may be in contrast with the church’s teaching on that matter, but it is wholly in keeping with the call to love and mercy that was taught to me as a child.
Yes, again, that is called
pastoral ministry, which many decades ago mostly only priests and sisters engaged in. They experienced no conflict between Church teaching and “the call to love and mercy.” Nor, in this decade, should lay people who are firm in their faith experience such conflict.
Shifting to this comment of yours:
I am constatnly told to accept facts and truths,to admit this or that. Well, it is also a fact that no one on this board has my work experience.
Precisely how would you know that?
No one has asked me a thing about what I do,.
Given the matter of same-sex “marriage,” “what you do” is irrelevant. (As is “what I do” irrelevant, as is irrelevant the various lay and religious ministries in the Church, which are completely separate from the actual topic of this thread, which is the Church’s position on this contemporary issue, which in turn dervies from her immutable moral doctrines.) There are prison ministries in the Church – some lay, some religious. Yet I’ve never heard any of the people in those ministries share angst about how possibly we shouldn’t lock criminals up, because (undoubtedly) some of them are nice. In fact, many may be nice, and still many others have converted in prison and carry on ministries and other righteous works of their own. Yet many of these latter are serving life sentences and those sentences will not be reduced by their good works, even including sanctity in some cases. If you didn’t mean any of that, it came across (to me) as a position of yours: that emotional bonding does or should affect a Catholic’s acceptance of Catholic doctrine. (And similarly, that those who accept the Church’s doctrine are somehow detached from the sufferings of others, “don’t understand” in the special way you do, etc.) There is no mutual exclusivity there. Pastoral ministry complements moral truth; it does not contradict it.
I meant that I have learned about a part of Catholic culture I have never understood before. I am from a place where people’s understanding of the faith is simpler. I still have my beliefs, but I consider myself much more prepared to go on with my education and my work and I respect the intellectual basis of our church’s ideas more than I ever have. That’s what I meant.
I’m glad for that. Frankly, this is the first time I have seen you attempt to communicate that on this thread. It’s difficult to come to common ground when people aren’t clear about their message(s).
In fact, I’m rather surprised at how you turned on me. I was the one earlier who wished you well when you introduced the subject of getting an M.A. in theology. I didn’t say it sarcastically, and I offered a blessing. But it’s a real problem when a poster goes in and out of a thread in the disconnected way you have.
I am going to get my masters in theology at a good Catholic school and will continue in my profession, so all will be revealed in time, I’m sure. Thanks everyone. I wont post here any further.
to which I replied:
I wish you well in your studies. God speed.
Given that several other posters on this thread have expresed difficulty communicating with you, you might want to take a look both at how you express yourself and how you receive the communication from others. Because, as I always say, if a person didn’t “mean” to say X, then it’s a really good idea not to say X. We communicate most efficiently when we say what we mean.
