This. Really.
I majored in music in college, which meant that a disproportionate number of my male (and, increasingly, female) acquaintances and friends were gay. We disagreed on a lot of things, obviously: theology and morality for starters, but oftentimes politics as well. But we’re all still friends because they’re nice, caring people who often went out of their way to help other people. They know I’m Catholic; they know what I believe about homosexuality because I’m Catholic. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. At the same time, we respected each others boundaries: unless they brought it up and seemed genuinely interested in my opinion, we didn’t discuss things like the nature of homosexuality. On occasion, though, we did have a number of very interesting conversations about philosophy, theology, and logic in relation to homosexuality and gay culture at large. I’d like to hope that I planted a few seeds with them, and I know that because I had them as friends and we could have these kind of talks, I had to learn more and more about the Church’s positions, too.
This is entirely sensible.
I just wonder what it is that really lead to the growing rift between the OP and friend. Many of us have had friends or had friends who had friends that simply got to be “too much”. Whatever bandwagon they were on, they simply got too aggressive about it, such that there was no way to enjoy their company if one wasn’t willing to get with their program.
I guess I mean a situation like this. Say that one of us, having been Catholic but not very serious about it, all of a sudden find our spiritual practice in a renaissance. We haven’t changed our minds so much as made our priorities a priority again. OK, so there are two ways this gets in the way of friendships. One is that our basic priorities bother our friends, which wasn’t a problem as long as we didn’t seem to value our values, but does become a problem when we do. We spend too much time at Mass for our previous way of life, or we want to quit doing things that are objectively sinful but also happened to be a major part of our shared social life with our friends. I don’t see how that kind of rift can be helped. If you have friends that are incompatible with living your faith, they’re going to fall away when you are serious about living it. That can’t be helped, and you shouldn’t try.
There is another way, though, that our priorities can get in the way of friendships, even with other Catholics, and that is when we become an obnoxious partisan. We want to talk all the time about all the “spiritual” stuff we’re doing. Instead of witnessing the faith, we proselytize in a way that doesn’t respect the fact that even those we eventually do convert will not be converted in a day, nor is anyone likely to be converted by a Sister Bertha Better-Than-You approach, whether the topic is Christianity, giving up smoking, or Pilates. It isn’t what we think that is off-putting, but what an obnoxious bore we become whenever we talk about it.
If the OPs friend has slipped into the latter category, there is nothing intolerant about saying, “Jack, we disagree on this, we’re going to disagree on this, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a friendly co-existence. Frankly the way you’re going about trying to change my mind is really off-putting. I highly doubt that you’d put up with half that much pressure, coming from me to get you to change your mind. Calm it down, or we need to put some distance between us.”
You don’t wish to discuss the same topics he’s discussing. You apparently liked something else on his page, and his response was to light into you publicly? Am I getting that right? And to tell you you need to call him?