Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity

It is impossible to experience a person’s life, or to be compassionate, if you do not listen to the person or if you do not ask questions.

We would like before all else to reaffirm that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration, while “every sign of unjust discrimination” is to be carefully avoided, particularly any form of aggression and violence. Such families should be given respectful pastoral guidance, so that those who manifest a homosexual orientation can receive the assistance they need to understand and fully carry out God’s will in their lives (No. 250).

In my years of counseling and speaking with LGBT men and women, I have heard countless stories of cruel and heartless comments made by priests in homilies or in private conversations that betray the most hateful attitudes toward LGBT people. Over and over, I would hear the same question: “How can I stay in a church that treats me like this?

The movement for Jesus was always from the outside in. His message was always one of inclusion, communicated through speaking to people, healing them, and offering them what biblical scholars call “table fellowship,” that is, dining with them, a sign of welcome and acceptance in first-century Palestine. In fact, Jesus was often criticized for this practice. But Jesus’s movement was about inclusion. He was creating a sense of “us.

Is it right for people to critique others for their supposed un-Christian attitudes by themselves being un-Christian?

A prophet critiques a system by quoting its own documents, constitutions, heroes, and Scriptures against its present practice. This is their secret: systems are best unlocked from inside.

Our sexuality, in a sense, touches everything we do, including the way we love, even when the sexual expression of that love is neither involved nor even contemplated. So to call a person’s sexuality “objectively disordered” is to tell a person that all of his or her love, even the most chaste, is disordered. That seems unnecessarily cruel.

a parable “teases the mind into active thought.

It costs when you live a life of respect, compassion, and sensitivity.

True prayer wants others to flourish. If any still have a hard time praying for church leaders, they might use a prayer that I find helpful when I am struggling with another person. My prayer is to see that person as God sees him or her.

Compassion, perseverance, and forgiveness are all gifts.

In fact, respect, compassion, and sensitivity are undervalued gifts for dealing with conflict and disagreement in general, gifts that can be shared with the wider culture.

All Christians have access to the spiritual riches found in the Scriptures, which, after all, were written amid the spiritual turmoil and social conflicts of the writers’ times. We can learn from those who went before us.

Because people understand that the diocese is trying to help the members of that group feel more connected to their church, the church they belong to by virtue of their baptism.