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

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Benadam said:
I doubt a man with SS attraction will ever know if he can handle male confessions.
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This is the most puzzling thing I’ve read all day. How would this be any different from a straight priest hearing a confession from a woman?
 
Sancte Michael Archangele,
defende nos in proelio;
contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium.
Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur:
tuque, Princeps militiae Caelestis,
satanam aliosque spiritus malignos,
qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo,
divina virtute in infernum detrude.
Amen
 
:roll_eyes: it was not a strawman. It was a legitimate and logical extension of what you said. You discussed Dante as if it were fact. I pointed out that his words are not fact. If you didn’t want your words to be taken that way you should have been more precise.
anon10271182 said:
If by “gay” you mean those who have unrepentently engaged in homosexual intercourse throughout life then yes, a special place that they share with blasphemers and usurers. Circle seven, round three. A plain of burning sand and an endless slow rain of fire. Not fun.
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anon10271182 said:
I will take every word of Dante literally before I’ll believe the abominable lies that homosexual intercourse is anything but wickedness and a sin against God and His creation.
'Nuff said.
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No one is answering the question, and some people are just saying things that make gay people feel less welcome – and I’m not talking about simply clarifying that sin is sin.

I think that the Church has historically been very welcoming of people with SSA into vocations, including both the priesthood and heterosexual marriage. Now that marriage is all about romantic love and sex, that’s a harder sell. I doubt marriage SHOULD be all about love and sexual attraction, but that cat’s out of the bag. I go back and forth on the priesthood, but I definitely think that religious orders must be open to chaste gay men and women.

Our family households need to be open to them too. If you have a gay brother or sister that lives alone and tries to follow Church teaching, why not invite them to live with you and your family? Why not involve gay Christians in our normal lives? This is a larger problem of an unhealthy focus on the nuclear family to the exclusion of a broader community.
 
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It bugs me that we can’t talk about LGBT people in the church without ending up harping on the sinfulness of homosexuality. I expect that this is hardly an issue for those seriously seeking their role in the faith community.

Telling someone what not to do is often much less helpful than telling them what to do. The lay single state is often treated in our churches as little more than an unfortunate diversion between childhood and either marriage, priesthood, or religious life.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
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Benadam:
I doubt a man with SS attraction will ever know if he can handle male confessions.
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This is the most puzzling thing I’ve read all day. How would this be any different from a straight priest hearing a confession from a woman?
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Or a heterosexual priest hearing the confession of a man who committed adultery or had sex before marriage.
 
No. I take that back. I am not going to respond to your childish remark with a childish remark of my own.

You want to be quoted fully? I edited my post to include all of it.

The point still stands, and everyone can see it.
 
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DarkLight said:
It bugs me that we can’t talk about LGBT people in the church without ending up harping on the sinfulness of homosexuality.
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This is exactly right. Let’s compare. Suppose we were having a conversation about how to make violent teenagers feel welcome in the Catholic Church – and we should be having those conversations! Wouldn’t it be strange if people kept saying, “Violence is wrong! They have to change.”

Duh! Of course they have to change! The Church is how they change! So – make them feel welcome!

But with “the gay”, everyone will just be like, “They’re welcome to come, but they need to stop sinning.” This gets everything precisely backward. The Church is not a reward for the holy, but a boon for the weak. Build the field hospital, and make people welcome to come in. An invitation and a kind hand to a violent teenager is not an endorsement of violence. It is a path out of the violence.
 
Taking sentences and sentence fragments out of of context so as to distort their original meaning, then attacking these isolated sentences and sentence fragments, is a form of straw man argumentation.
 
That’s part of it, but also - desires and tendencies don’t just vanish. There often seems to be nothing beyond “don’t practice homosexuality” offered to those with homosexual desires. At some point those in the church are going to say, ok, now what? We have a long list of what not to do. But where do we belong and what can we do? If we can’t marry, and we’re not called to the priesthood or religious life, is there anything for us beyond the kid’s table? How can we live out our lives and serve the church as lay singles?

Those who have made the choice and committed themselves to celibacy need more than continual harping on the need for celibacy, or being treated as though they are always one step away from immorality.
 
DarkLight said:
That’s part of it, but also - desires and tendencies don’t just vanish. There often seems to be nothing beyond “don’t practice homosexuality” offered to those with homosexual desires. At some point those in the church are going to say, ok, now what? We have a long list of what not to do. But where do we belong and what can we do? If we can’t marry, and we’re not called to the priesthood or religious life, is there anything for us beyond the kid’s table? How can we live out our lives and serve the church as lay singles?
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Oh, I didn’t mean to say that inviting was the last step. I agree that there needs to be some paths for people to walk, and that right now we are lacking in that.

My point was mostly about the ugly dynamics of this thread.
 
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mrsdizzyd said:
No. I take that back. I am not going to respond to your childish remark with a childish remark of my own.

You want to be quoted fully? I edited my post to include all of it.

The point still stands, and everyone can see it.
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See my edited response here. Point still stands. You presented Dante as something to be taken literally. Dante is not fact.
 
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If someone chooses to believe that homosexual intercourse isn’t wicked and mortally sinful, that is their grave error. Before I believe it, I will take Dante’s description of Hell literally. At least Dante’s description is not founded on a diabolical deceit.

Please note that other than the last sentence, I use the future tense in the above paragraph. There is significance in the future tense in both prose and poetry.
 
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That is not were the problem arose.

Remember that in response to this:
Thorolfr said:
That’s a new revelation to me. I didn’t know that gay people go to their own special department in hell. :roll_eyes:
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You said this:
anon10271182 said:
If by “gay” you mean those who have unrepentently engaged in homosexual intercourse throughout life then yes, a special place that they share with blasphemers and usurers. Circle seven, round three. A plain of burning sand and an endless slow rain of fire. Not fun.
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This is what I was responding to before you started tossing around straw man images.
 
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I’m married to a person of the opposite sex too, and I have kids. I don’t think DarkLight thinks we have a bed of roses. She thinks we have a “groove” in which to ski in, using a cross-country skiing metaphor. We have a sense of how our gifts can benefit the body.

I don’t think exclusively gay people have that. I’m sure they don’t, because I once thought I might live life as a gay man, and I had no idea how to both be gay and be Catholic. That made no sense to me. In my case, fortunately, I am genuinely attracted to women, so I can live a married life, but not everyone is me. And non-gay singles need a lot of guidance they’re not getting too.
 
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And I hope you understand my meaning.

People who are unfamiliar with Dante or even the teaching on hell could walk away from what you initially wrote thinking there actually are different circles of hell.

If you would have been more precise with your language (poetry, future tense, imaginative descriptions of hell vs. condoning homosexual acts, etc.), then I never would have responded.
 
It’s a shame more people don’t read Dante. His central messages are completely in line with Catholic Moral Theology. 😇
 
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Prodigal_Son said:
This is the most puzzling thing I’ve read all day. How would this be any different from a straight priest hearing a confession from a woman?
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You’ve got a point. but as a general rule the characteristics of inordinate desires are not known until the environment introduces the stimulus they seek. It’s better to not have them in challenging environments.
 
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