What are your ideas for the LGBT person's vocation in the Church?

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Prodigal_Son said:
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mrsdizzyd:
This is the number of accused abusers sorted by ordination.
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Thanks, but this doesn’t give us a per capita number. We’d have to compare the number in that table to the total number of priests ordained in each decade. That would give us a sense of how bad the seminaries were, essentially.
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My previous link was not useful. Here is a better one.

https://cara.georgetown.edu/frequently-requested-church-statistics/

Still doesn’t give a whole decade number and it’s missing the 50s, but it gives you a feel for how things are over time in the US. If you find something better, please let me know.
 
Dlee said:
Someone who is gay does not think about sex all the time or more than a person who is straight.
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Do you have any proof of this assertion? Has anyone studied this particularly idea, or are you just assuming based upon recent media and political opinions into this?

Older texts into sexuality stated the opposite- that homosexuals tend to be obsessive about sexuality and also have a tendency toward neurosis.
 
We just finished a series in our parish, the last was the Pride Center here in town. The statistics came from the director of the program. He said Gay people want a place to belong where they aren’t marginalized, forced to be something they are not. They want friendship and yes, love. We were there to learn and understand, not judge. He made a statement that whenever he holds his partner’s hand, he subconsciously looks around in fear he will be beat up.
 
Augustinian said:
Do you have any proof of this assertion? Has anyone studied this particularly idea, or are you just assuming based upon recent media and political opinions into this?

Older texts into sexuality stated the opposite- that homosexuals tend to be obsessive about sexuality and also have a tendency toward neurosis.
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This is a very good question. The political partisanship on both sides obscures our ability to answer it. However, it is clearly true that sexual minorities have more mental illness issues than heterosexual individuals.
 
Augustinian said:
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Dlee:
Someone who is gay does not think about sex all the time or more than a person who is straight.
Click to expand...
Do you have any proof of this assertion? Has anyone studied this particularly idea, or are you just assuming based upon recent media and political opinions into this?

Older texts into sexuality stated the opposite- that homosexuals tend to be obsessive about sexuality and also have a tendency toward neurosis.
Click to expand...
I’m gay and I doubt that I think about sex more often than straight people. I certainly don’t think about it as often as many people here in CAF seem to. I’ve never been in any Internet forum before that has so many threads that talk about sex. A lot of it does seem kind of obsessive.
 
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“Someone who is gay” almost always refers to a gay man, not lesbians, and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb saying gay men do think about sex more than most, but not because they’re gay but because they are men.
 
There are residential houses for Catholics, sometimes for a single gender only, on university campuses. I see no reason that there couldn’t be a resurgence of residential hotels; they just might be smaller or there might be fewer of them in a metro area. When I see places like this I think there is a place for a residential hotel in the same community.
 
Bruised_Reed said:
There are residential houses for Catholics, sometimes for a single gender only, on university campuses.
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Outside of seminary housing, do many Catholic colleges segregate their Catholic students in separate dorms from their non Catholic students.
 
I doubt it. What I was referring to were state universities. If there is Greek life having something like this is appropriate. It’s not a Catholic sorority or fraternity though, just a boarding house. Most that I’ve found are called Newman House.
 
The writers of older texts on the topic of sexuality knew very little about heterosexuality, let alone homosexuality. There was a popular treatment of gay people, pioneered by the sex therapist Dr. Evelyn Hooker (the name, I know), that involved turning them straight by means of aversion therapy. This consisted of sexually stimulating gay men by having them watch gay porno films and, while doing so, injecting them with a nausea-eliciting drug. The treatment was based on associative learning (Pavlovian classical conditioning). It worked, but only in the sense that many gay patients lost their same-sex attraction. However, they did NOT become attracted to the opposite sex, but instead became asexual.
 
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OP here.

(I’m assuming OP stands for Original Poster, right?)

Anyway, hi. I have not read through all the replies, because part of me strongly feels I will get in a bad mood, as I initially did.

So this may have been clarified along the way, but I want to explain that by “vocation” I’m also including how people are called to love and be human, in general. So take the single or gay person in church: They are called to love others, and because they are human, they are called to meaningful, close inter-personal relationships.

That is, gay people still require close, intimate (if not sexual or married) relationships. Gay people are social creatures like all other humans.

So if people have issue with the idea that there is no current “vocation” for gay people in the church, let me instead express it like this: What are ways the church can accommodate alternative paths to marriage as ways of fostering love and social relationships between people?

And again, I think the question focused on gay people in particular is suitable, since they have their own share of experiences and challenges, including the church teaching that they cannot marry members of the same sex.
 
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I think that people with same sex attraction need to stop announcing it to the world iand keep their sexual struggles private, just like anyone else who struggles with being chaste. also, the Church needs to speak loud and clear about the agenda-driven normalization of the gay lifestyle and its spiritual detriment on children, family and society…
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LOL and just like that, the first new post I read since last visiting put me in a bad mood.

The evidence is overwhelming that LGBT Catholics feel unwelcome in their churches. A simple post like this expresses it nicely how some (many?) Catholics easily toss aside the real struggles of those who are “other.”

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Maybe by using “vocation,” I confused some.

I’m not just speaking about jobs or ways to serve at church and ministry, which (obvious, to me at least) gay (SSA) people should already be able to do.

I’m talking about fostering lives of community and relationship. After all, someone else on here said that the church is based on the family, or the family on the church, or something like that. Well, what if you don’t fit the mold of the typical “family”? It gets hard to form meaningful relationships when Western society increasingly idolizes marriages as the chief form of love.
 
And the church does speak loud and clear on homosexuality, but until the Church has more to offer than a rant against an “agenda-driven normalization” then LGBT people will be driven away.
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Clap clap clap clap clap!
 
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The problem with SSA is that 99% of it is cultural influence of the world, not some chemical imbalance or freak of nature.
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Hmmmmm.

Oh well, it’s good to get used to some of these same CAF posters, so that I know who I can readily skip over and ignore. 😀

Meanwhile, I’ll be grateful to those replies who are actually trying to help:
Answering this question requires an honest and sensitive attempt to understand the struggles, challenges, and experiences of LGBT people, especially in the Church.
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-OP
 
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