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

[Gab123]

12 PROMISES OF THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS

1. I will give them all the graces necessary in their state of life.

1. I will establish peace in their homes.

3. I will comfort them in all their afflictions.

1. I will be their secure refuge during life, and above all, in death.
2. I will bestow abundant blessings upon all their undertakings.

6. Sinners will find in my Heart the source and infinite ocean of mercy.

7. Lukewarm souls shall become fervent.

8. Fervent souls shall quickly mount to high perfection.

1. I will bless every place in which an image of my Heart is exposed and honored.
2. I will give to priests the gift of touching the most hardened hearts.
3. Those who shall promote this devotion shall have their names written in my Heart.
4. I promise you in the excessive mercy of my Heart that my all-powerful love will grant to all those who receive Holy Communion on the First Fridays in nine consecutive months the grace of final perseverance; they shall not die in my disgrace, nor without receiving their sacraments. My divine Heart shall be their safe refuge in this last moment.

 

[Mtdobbs]

As far as developing a heterosexual attraction, this is an option for those who struggle with the idea of living a lifetime without sexual intercourse and want to have a family

And yet this option you speak of has been very unsuccessful at times and very harmful. I don’t know what the measurement of success is for you… I understand that you are hopeful that this is an appropriate avenue, but clinical studies, trials and testimonials have shown that it trying to change orientations has been much more harmful. Im not arguing that, out of The virtue of Christian hope, you are hoping that people can change… but it’s not as cut and dry as you think.

 

[DarkLight]

Now, sex has come to be the repository of how we show love, and people feel like the Church is “mean” because this primary “expression of love” is forbidden to only certain (e.g. LGBT) people. (In actuality of course, it is not permitted to any person outside the context of marriage)

So maybe the “vocation” of LGBT people is to show us how to live chastely, to get us away from the idea that sex is how we show love, that there are equally if not more satisfying ways of showing love than sexual acts? Because when single people see an LGBT person living chastely, embracing chastity, they know that that person has committed to something more than the single people think/know/suspect they ought to do.

I think what many of us would like to see is those who are not LGBT also being willing to get away from the primary expression of love to be through sex.

Not that people should give up marriage! But that there should be more room for the development of non-sexual love outside of marriage.

I think our modern church society is a bit scared of sexuality. There’s a focus on avoiding even the possibility of inappropriate sexual desire in a way that stifles the possibility of genuine non-sexual relationships. Many people are uncomfortable getting too close to a gay person because they’re uncomfortable with the idea that attraction might develop. The concern about the inappropriate attraction overrides the development of genuine nonsexual relationships.

 

[Annie]

Ah, that was what I meant, but I wrote than instead of that, which wojld have been clearer .

What I was thinking was that single single people would see that they themselves, in embracing chastity, wohld not be making as large and generous a commitment as an LGBT person who did the same.

Additionally, an LGBT person would of necessity need to explore other ways of expressing love and having friendships with others, while a heterosexual single person could mask that necessity by searching for a marital partner.

 

[Thorolfr]

As far as as you arguing that men who transition to heterosexuality weren’t explicitly homosexual, this man who went through it argues against your theory; listen carefully to what he said about being self-identified as gay:

But this man says that his attractions are “still primarily same-sex attracted”. Normally, we would call such a person “bisexual”. He hasn’t eliminated his homosexual inclinations. In fact, it doesn’t sound as if he’s even substantially eliminated them since his says that his primary attraction is towards men. He’s probably a 4 on the Kinsey Scale: “Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual”.

 

[Gab123]

And yet this option you speak of has been very unsuccessful at times and very harmful.

I’m not saying shock treatments or chemical therapies, but rather the medicine of sanctifying grace, allowing the Holy Spirit to act in us. It’s not a matter of will power; what’s more, look at promise #11 of the 15 promises of the Holy Rosary.

 

[Gab123]

But this man says that his attractions are “still primarily same-sex attracted”. Normally, we would call such a person “bisexual”. He hasn’t eliminated his homosexual inclinations.

The point is now he’s attracted to his loving wife; so I guess the key is to look at someone as a person, not a body.

 

[Fauken]

So what you’re saying then basically is that they haven’t prayed hard enough and/or not enough rosaries. You moved from associating negative thoughts to prayer, but if they just prayed hard/often enough, it will go away. Do I understand that correctly?

 

[Thorolfr]

Thorolfr:

But this man says that his attractions are “still primarily same-sex attracted”. Normally, we would call such a person “bisexual”. He hasn’t eliminated his homosexual inclinations.

The point is now he’s attracted to his loving wife; so I guess the key is to look at someone as a person, not a body.

I’ve known quite a few men, mostly of an older generation, who were probably a 4 or a 5 on the Kinsey Scale who were married to women, and I have no doubt that they loved their wives. But almost all of them were also having sex with men on the side. I’ve even met some of the wives and always wondered if they knew.

If someone’s primary attraction is to men and their sexual relations with their wife are not that satisfying, they will find it much more difficult to stay faithful to their marriage. I’m not saying that it can’t happen, but it will be much more difficult. And in situations like this, a lot of wives and children often end up getting hurt.

 

[PetraG]

As far as I’m aware I don’t think homosexuals can be priests

A man with deep-seated homosexual tendencies that reasonably make continence a perilous prospect cannot be ordained. It isn’t disqualifying to have any homosexual tendencies whatsoever (and there is a continuum).

 

[Prodigal_Son]

How do you know this? In the video the man argued that he always was only attracted to men, before he met his wife.

Because I’ve talked to numerous men with SSA who are married, and I am one. People always trot us out as examples of “conversion therapy”, but that is utter nonsense. For the most part, we were always attracted to women.

Realize that It is quite normal for children to be attracted to the same sex; usually boys think girls are “yucky” until puberty kicks in; so what happens between that stage and the pubescent stage can condition a young mind; as you said, you were exposed to bodies of men in magazines.

The idea that a boy interested in sports would spontaneously develop SSA because of looking at athletes is vanishingly low. The tendency to be attracted to men was already there; it’s just that the only images of men available to me were those magazine images.

Is your notion that all boys should be kept from looking at sports magazines for fear they might turn gay?

Also: I wasn’t attracted to boys in my class – THAT is normal pre-puberty. I was at the beginning OF puberty and I was finding adult men attractive. I think most boys in that particular situation end up experiencing SSA over a longer term period, not a quick transitional SSA.

 

[Gab123]

So what you’re saying then basically is that they haven’t prayed hard enough and/or not enough rosaries. You moved from associating negative thoughts to prayer, but if they just prayed hard/often enough, it will go away. Do I understand that correctly?

Yes. you have understood correctly. The key works for curving and shrinking any sinful attractions. For example, if you have an attraction to pornographic images, you can associate the reality that people are prostituting their bodies and exposing themselves for you to commit sin, whille they as individual persons were once innocent little children, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters of others, who have become chained and slaves of the devil, being used as tools to enslave you too, to offend God and cause your damnation. You can also imagine that they who you are looking at with pleasure could be your sister or brother; now all of a sudden the pornographic images are not seen in the same way. Then contrast the beauty of modesty and purity with the ugliness of vice and smut, and how you have been purchased at a great price by a suffering Christ, and how Christ call us to allow Him to transform us by allowing Him to kill our old selves so that we have a new self with a new mindset.

it’s a gradual process. obviously the power of sanctifying grace is supernatural, much like when God resurrected Christ’s broken body on the third day was a supernatural event. Grace is a supernatural medicine. as for the Holy Rosary, it has to be prayed while meditating on each mystery, not just say words; then we begin to imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise; and you saw the 15 promises I listed. these promises are from the Blessed Mother; but if you don’t believe in the promises, or the Rosary is uses as superstition , or you don’t believe in God or have little faith, then that’s another story.

The first step is to want to change, even while knowing that it is completely impossible for us to change on our own; like trying to grow a garden without the sun. sanctifying Grace is like the sun…

But the same basic principle is used to cut out bad habits; for example if you want to lose weight, associate negative thoughts with eating junk food and being gluttonous; if you want to quit smoking,associate negative thoughts to it; but the key ingredient is wanting to change and be willing to let go. That’s what Christ was talking about, dying to one’s self.

Now listen to this short talk By Fulton Sheen; he gets to the heart of it: LISTEN NOW
‘

 

[theCardinalbird]

Are you saying that I can pray the SSA away?

 

[DarkLight]

it’s a gradual process. obviously the power of sanctifying grace is supernatural, much like when God resurrected Christ’s broken body on the third day was a supernatural event. Grace is a supernatural medicine. as for the Holy Rosary, it has to be prayed while meditating on each mystery, not just say words; then we begin to imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise; and you saw the 15 promises I listed. these promises are from the Blessed Mother; but if you don’t believe in the promises, or the Rosary is uses as superstition , or you don’t believe in God or have little faith, then that’s another story.

I think we have to be very careful with these promises. Too many times they’re used to say, any time we don’t get what we want, it must be because of a lack of faith. Many devout people have prayed for many things and they have not been granted. If instead of homosexual desires, the object of the prayer was relief from physical pain, it would be very clear.

 

[Thorolfr]

You see, if you love somebody for who they are and want to be with them, by the time one is laying together in an embrace, and the female touches the peckerlatinus regions of the man, the excitement is built in the reproductive organ as it is enveloped with sensitive nerves designed to sexually become excited…

I still don’t think that manual stimulation is enough by itself. I think that a man still has to have something erotic in his mind or see something erotic for any excitement to build. And it’s not just humans, either.

In his book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), Stanford University professor of neurology, Robert Sapolsky, has a section in which he describes the reward system in our brains which relies on the neurotransmitter dopamine. One behavior in which dopamine has an important role is in sex. As Sapolsky notes, “Some rewards, such as sex, release dopamine in every species examined. For humans, just thinking about sex suffices.” He then adds an interesting footnote:

And, in a fact that hints at a world of sex differences, dopaminergic responses to sexually arousing visual stimuli are greater in men than in women. Remarkably, this difference isn’t specific to humans. Male rhesus monkeys will forgo the chance to drink water when thirsty in order to see pictures of - I’m not quite sure how else to say this - crotch shots of female rhesus monkeys (while not being interested in other rhesus-y pictures).

To get that dopamine going in the brain during sex, I think that men and other primates like rhesus monkeys need to see and/or be thinking about something erotic. And who knew that monkeys like porn, too.

 

[Thorolfr]

I think we have to be very careful with these promises. Too many times they’re used to say, any time we don’t get what we want, it must be because of a lack of faith. Many devout people have prayed for many things and they have not been granted. If instead of homosexual desires, the object of the prayer was relief from physical pain, it would be very clear.

That’s why promoting so-called reparative therapy programs to try and make people with same-sex attractions straight usually ends up damaging a lot of people while only a small number come out of these programs feeling that it helped them. Again, that’s why Alan Chambers made the statement that I quoted in an earlier post when Exodus International was closed down in 2013:

I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents.

Most people, I think, who come out of those programs suffer long term psychological injury and feel shame and guilt because they were unable to change. They feel that it must have been because they didn’t try hard enough or because God doesn’t love them. And these programs damage not only the people who go through them, but their families as well. A lot of these programs encourage the people in them to recount in group meetings all the ways that their fathers and mothers were responsible for making them gay because part of their ideology about what causes homosexuality is that it is a result of some sort of parental abuse. That’s not to say that no one who is gay was ever abused, but many haven’t been abused and people in these programs sometimes start to invent ways in their minds that they think that their parents abused them even when there was no abuse.

 

[Annie]

Even St Paul complained of the thorn God left him with.

God is not a vending machine and we will receive what God sees as best for our eternal souls, not grant us our worldly wishes.

What happens as we pray the Rosary devoutly over time is that our wills become more aligned with God’s, so what we pray for is what God wants for us: Thy will, not mine, be done.

 

[Annie]

I did not know all that about that organization and others. Thanks for explaining it.

 

[OsculeturMeOsculo]

Maybe? Some saints had the gift of perfect chastity like the Blessed Virgin Mary but she is special. If I remember correctly Saint Faustina received it. I think people don’t know how to pray well in order to get graces like this. Not to mention there are things like motives and perserverance and faith to consider.

 

[OsculeturMeOsculo]

Prayer is powerful.