Catholic Church should apologize to gays - but not for the reason you think.
When I was a conflicted and scared boy growing
up within the confusing confines of the post-Conciliar Church of the 1970s, I
needed someone, anyone, to teach me and to tell me that Jesus wanted to be more
than just my friend, that He wanted to be my Savior – that He wanted to save me
from myself. I knew, even from a young age, that something was going incredibly
wrong within me – I was terrified and I needed help. However, the Jesus they
offered was a mere historical figure; a guy who meant well, but who was dead
and distant; he was the hippie-Christ from “Godspell” in a Superman shirt –
with the Bible as a superhero comic-strip.
When I was teenager, quickly swerving towards
homosexuality, a few noticed, but did nothing to help. At school, a sort of
pandemic relativism was extolled as an individual rule of life: custom-made for
every human person on earth. The detached Jesus from my youth cared little
about our daily drudgery or our personal proclivities.
On the verge of accepting my homosexuality, I
was told by a Catholic priest that I needn’t worry as every homosexual is born
gay; he sent me on my way with a socially responsible warning about the dangers
of unsafe sex.
In the near devastation of AIDS, and my own
worsening realization that gay wasn’t what I hoped it would be – the sole
Catholic presence in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood was the hotly
affirmative parish of Most Holy Redeemer. Although the priests who were stationed
there kindly buried the lifeless and wasted bodies of our friends, in an age
when few were willing to do so, they confused a compassion for the sick and the
dead with a total renunciation of any semblance to Catholic teaching about
homosexuality. They wanted to be our friends, not our Fathers.
Perhaps it was only for a few passing moments,
after a losing another friend or once again waking up in the early-afternoon
and realizing I just filled the toilet bowl with blood, I decided to walk away
from gay, but a priest I turned to for advice tried to soothe my concerns and
bolster my current lack of faith in the gay gene by assuring me that I was
where I belonged and in gay is where I should stay. And, I did just that.
Years later, the blood was overflowing onto the bathroom floor and I could no longer deny that my stubborn allegiance to the gay dream was turning into an endless nightmare that I would eventually never awake from.
For some reason, that I cannot fathom, I again
turned to the religion of my childhood. I prayed that things had changed,
because now – no one would convince me that there was any reason for staying in
gay; but, I wanted help.
Only, very little had changed. I arrived on the
doorstep of the Catholic Church, a broken and bruised man – yet, I was told
again that I was gay.
Nevertheless, I somehow persevered and the
Lord Jesus Christ delivered unto me – not one, but three courageous priests.
For the most part, these men had been difficult to find; as, they were
primarily the semi-dismissed and even persecuted priests that were almost
summarily rejected by both their dioceses and their prospective religious
orders. But, I instinctively knew that they were good men of stout heart and
dauntless spirit. And, they guided me – and were Fathers to a lost and lonely
man who was still a lost and lonely boy.
Years later, I thought back to the many
friends I had known and lost: the earnest and always searching ex-Catholic who
acknowledged the radical waves of volatility in the gay lifestyle, but stayed
because he repeatedly read Fr. John J. McNeill’s book “The Church and the
Homosexual;” the inexplicable Sunday-Mass going “gay” Catholic who remained
steadfastly gay and looking for mister-right at his church-approved LGBT
ministry group-meetings in the Oakland Diocese; or the cautious and
conservative Midwesterner who heeded the advice from the pastor at the local
San Francisco Catholic church and settled down with one guy. Today, all of them
are dead.
In addition, the Church should apologize for
prolongedly tolerating the likes of: Fr. John J. McNeill, who said that the:
“Homosexual orientation has no necessary connection with sin, sickness, or
failure; rather it is a gift from God to be accepted and lived out with
gratitude…
Human beings do not choose their sexual orientation; they discover it
as something given;” also Sister Jeannine Gramick, who was forbidden by the
Church to publicly minister to homosexuals after a nearly 20 yearlong inquiry,
only – the renegade Sister moved from one religious order to another (her
current home – the Sisters of Loretto, have been under the shadow of a 2008
Vatican investigation that is still ongoing) while she continues to give
lectures and even debate and meet with various US prelates to discuss her
views; lastly, the Church should also apologize for priests like Fr. James
Martin S.J. who
repeatedly stresses that homosexuals are “born that way.” He has also gone out
of his way to make Catholicism extremely attractive to those in the “gay”
lifestyle who may be looking towards the Church for answers: “Officially at
least, the gay Catholic seems set up to lead a lonely, loveless, secretive
life,” Martin said.
To US Catholics, the Church should also
apologize for the travesty that is the USCCB document “Always Our Children.”
Issued in 1997, the text is still shocking for its gross generalizations and
unwillingness to even briefly grasp the intrinsic desperation and depravity
found in the modern “gay” lifestyle; in addition, the document also openly
condemns those with same-sex attraction to a lifelong imprisonment within
homosexuality:
“…it seems appropriate to understand sexual orientation (heterosexual or homosexual) as a deep-seated dimension of one’s personality and to recognize its relative stability in a person…Generally, homosexual orientation is experienced as a given, not as something freely chosen.”
In
retrospect this is less surprising as the three main consultants for “Always
Our Children” were the self-outed priests James Schexnayder, Robert Nugent, and
Peter Liuzzi; Schexnayder is from the Diocese of Oakland and founded the
dissident gay advocacy group the Catholic Association for Lesbian and Gay
Ministry; when “Always Our Children” was being prepared, Nugent was also being
investigated as part of the same review that was looking into the ministry of
Jeannine Gramick – like his cohort Sister Gramick, he was similarly “silenced”
in 1999; Liuzzi was for many years the head of the LA Archdiocese Ministry, he
who once stated: “…the church believes that homosexuality is an inherent
trait.”
The idea of homosexuality as something “given”
(by whom?) not “chosen” is directly drawn from McNeill; how a philosophy from a
man who wrote the following could make its way into a document from the
Catholic Church boggles the mind:
“If all one is
capable of is a solitary act of masturbation, then that masturbatory act,
undertaken with gratitude to God for the gift of sexual pleasure, is good sex.
Even better sex occurs when two wounded humans reach
out to each other to share mutual sexual pleasure in a ‘one night stand’.”
To this day, in his presentations entitled
“Safe Catholic Schools: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Challenges,”
Schexnayder continues to peddle the “born gay” theory to Catholic school
administrators and educators (see below).
These men, like the hapless priests who tried
to “counsel” me, wanted to keep “gay” men and women “gay.” Through their
pastoral ministries – they confirmed homosexuality in all those with same-sex
attraction that they came in contact with. They did it to me – and to countless
others.
And, with them telling us all the time that we
are “gay,” where do they think we will eventually end up?
Yet, these are only the most prominent figures
within the sinister pro-gay Church within the Catholic Church – there are many
other ministries and pastoral programs, operating inside every major diocese of
the United States, which openly promote homosexuality as an authentic and
viable lifestyle.
Recently, during one of my several outreaches
to the “gay” community in San Francisco, I spoke with a young Catholic “gay”
man about my life after homosexuality; we discussed how and why I left gay and
the contentment and happiness I experienced when I embraced chastity. He
immediately said, “Oh no, but that is not what they tell us at Most Holy
Redeemer.”
Therefore – Dear Pope Francis: apologize for
bad catechesis, for bad pastoral programs, for bad priests, and for the
apathetic Bishops who do nothing to correct them. As for the long dead who
passed from this life, far too young, because no one ever bothered to tell them
the Truth – no amount of apologizing will ever bring them back.
