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

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Have you discussed your situation with your priest? I recognise that you’re in a tough situation without an easy answer to satisfy but I think a priest will have much more to offer you by way of great advice and real understanding. Also, there are various types of religious life; vocations are not limited to just the priesthood or marriage …take nuns, for example… there are many types of religious orders, I understand. It may simply be that he has some pearls of wisdom to share with you that we haven’t considered and which may rejuvenate you. I am sorry I don’t have much help for you besides, though.
 
Benadam said:
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Prodigal_Son:
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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This is just as true of heterosexual people.
 
What I’m saying here is there’s a point where it needs to go beyond being focused on that struggle. Married people have discussions on how to stay chaste, yes, but there’s also discussions on how to grow your faith through marriage and how to serve God as a married person and all that. There tend to not be those discussions for lay singles in general or for those who have SSA - it goes to “how to deal with your struggle with chastity” and kind of stops there.
 
Gab123 said:
That’s the whole point of Pride Parades, which encourages people to be proud of who they are. The problem is when who we are involves a sinful lifestyle. Then there’s nothing to be proud about…Thus Sexual activity outside of marriage between a man and a woman is always degenerate, and we see in the pride parades the many deformations and abominations which one specific inclination can degenerate into.
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The word “pride” in “pride parades” is really a misnomer. It would be more accurate to call them “freedom parades” or “liberation parades”. These parades arose from the marches that took place after the Stonewall riots in 1969. The police usually raided gay bars about once a month in New York City, lined patrons up, checked their ID’s and arrested those without IDs or who were in drag. These people often had their names published in the newspapers and lost their jobs as a result. So, after the police raided the Stonewall Inn in 1969, gay people decided to fight back and not let themselves be oppressed any more.

And I don’t go to these parades because I’m proud, I go to be with other people like myself. It was pretty amazing for me when I went to my first parade in San Francisco in 1982, coming from an isolated, rural town where I didn’t know a single other gay person to a place where I wasn’t alone anymore and was surrounded by thousands of other people like me.

And these parades and other types of marches serve another important purpose, too. They show mayors and city councils that they have thousands of constituents that they should pay attention to if they want to get re-elected. How else would laws get passed in many cities to ban discrimination against LGBT people in housing and employment? And how do you think that gay people finally got the Federal government and other institutions to start paying attention to the AIDS epidemic?

Just to give an example of what gay people have been up against, when the first outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease took place in 1976 and 221 members of the American Legion fell ill at a convention in Philadelphia and 34 died, the investigation launched by the CDC was massive, the largest in the agency’s history. Millions of dollars were spent and 20 agents from the epidemiology division and many others at the state level were committed to finding the cause of the outbreak. There were 86 articles about the outbreak in the New York Times in the first month alone. But seven months after the first AIDS cases appeared, even though the death toll among gay men was four times greater than for Legionnaires disease, there was an incredibly apathetic response from the CDC and only 6 short articles had appeared in the New York Times. By the end of 1982, there were already 771 AIDS cases reported and 618 deaths. It wasn’t until 1985 when the blood supply was contaminated and many others, including children such as Ryan White, started to get sick and die that a major response started to take place. By that time, more than 12,000 people had died from AIDS.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
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 sounds good, but it’s not going to happen, at least not in the United States. Most people have become way too individualistic here in the US to make that kind of sacrifice.

In the 19th and early 20th century, many people, especially single people, but also families, used to live in boarding houses and residential hotels. Even when such people had their own room, they often ate together in a common dining area and socialized together. There’s an excellent book about this, Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). But such places are a thing of the past here in the US now.
 
Sort of? But also, like, when I’ve been in churches, there are actual groups for married people on how to live your christian faith in marriage. There are books at the Catholic book stores; there are people willing to give out advice. There are readily available ministry opportunities that look for married people and look to work around married people’s lives. Very little of that focuses just on chastity within marriage. There’s a laid out path for, if you want to know how to live out your faith as a Catholic married person, here are examples and discussions and all sorts of things that can help you and people you can talk to and all that.

There really isn’t that same sort of structure for the lay single state. There’s a lot about chastity, and beyond that there seems to be a shrug and “well you can volunteer?”

I’m probably exaggerating, but it’s more about it being clear where people like you fit into the wider faith community. Young married couples, or married couples with children, tend to be seen as more standard and as such it’s more clear where they fit in and how they contribute to the life of the church. People who are committed to the lay single state, along often with those divorced but not annulled and some others, often feel there’s much less of a support system and clear way of living for God.
 
The numerous groups focused on married people can also have an unintended effect on those who are struggling with their marriage. It’s like peer pressure but with a spiritual component. It’s like if you do not have ideal Catholic marriage or family you are doing something wrong.
 
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You are absolutely correct. And the Reagan administration didn’t give a darn about gay people until it hit home, as you say, when the blood supply became contaminated with the HIV virus. Still, if it weren’t for gay activists, progress in combatting the disease with regard to medications would have been even slower than it was already. Most of the mainstream (straight) community was ill-informed of the extent of the emerging epidemic until it inevitably became part of the mainstream media. Gay people were expendable and regarded as the lowest of the low on the totem pole (non-PC expression, I know, but appropriate nonetheless). At the same time, however, the Church, although theologically opposed to the use of condoms (which gay groups such as Act Up vehemently objected to) DID pay some attention to caring for gay AIDS patients. John Cardinal O’Connor of New York City, for example, would visit AIDS patients incognito. And I understand there were nuns who participated in the fight to raise awareness of the epidemic.
 
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I believe you are serious here, and I agree only with your last sentence.
 
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Here’s a sentence everyone here should truly agree with:
Repent, and believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
 
The discernment process includes evaluation of such, as possible obstructions to religious life.
 
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I define “vocation” as God’s desire for one to be either married or in religious life. Are we defining the term in the same manner?
 
So how about those who are neither?

God does not have any plans for them?
 
Father Mychal Judge. Chaplain of the New York City Fire Department. He died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, giving last rites and what help he could to the injured and dying firemen, and others, that day.

A priest and a martyr.
 
If we are single we are called to consecrate ourselves to Christ and strive to live by the evangelical counsels. That’s a kind of secular religious life, yes?
 
But, to your point, sometimes these issues don’t arise until priests find themselves in certain situations.

I guess my point is that those who are homosexual are not more or less capable of controlling themselves than heterosexual people. Regardless of your attractions, celibacy is a challenge. You have to work at maintaining it.
 
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