The Church needs to change - but not in the way they all say

[Tab'le De'Bah-Rye]

I saw that overall tone too and I wasn't sure if it's due to the language or for real... But if the article is saying that its ok to have homosexual "civil marriage" I don't think that's the Church teaching. It goes right against what I read from a Pope on relation of Church and society. 

 

I have just started catechisis with the neo catechumens and bought this up and no the church is not against homosexual civil unions, it is against the church being forced to marry homosexuals. 

[beatitude]

That...you have done. 

 

No. She hasn't. She has consistently tried to describe how it feels to be a gay Catholic woman and the problems she has experienced as a result of unhelpful attitudes within the Church, and people who are quite happy to talk about homosexuality morning noon and night in other circumstances (just see the sheer number of threads about it on Phatmass!) suddenly start asking, "But why are you calling yourself X? Why are you making an issue of it?" instead of responding to the concerns she raises. It seems it's OK for straight Catholics to make 5,000 threads on whether homosexuality is something you're born with and why we should say SSA and not gay and all the rest of it, but the second a gay woman shares something related to her personal experiences in the Church, she's "making an issue of something that doesn't need to be an issue" - all because some people here don't happen to like the language she uses for her own self.

Edited July 16, 2015 by beatitude

[Papist]

No. She hasn't. She has consistently tried to describe how it feels to be a gay Catholic woman and the problems she has experienced as a result of unhelpful attitudes within the Church, and people who are quite happy to talk about homosexuality morning noon and night in other circumstances (just see the sheer number of threads about it on Phatmass!) suddenly start asking, "But why are you calling yourself X? Why are you making an issue of it?" instead of responding to the concerns she raises. It seems it's OK for straight Catholics to make 5,000 threads on whether homosexuality is something you're born with and why we should say SSA and not gay and all the rest of it, but the second a gay woman shares something related to her personal experiences in the Church, she's "making an issue of something that doesn't need to be an issue" - all because some people here don't happen to like the language she uses for her own self.

Nope. Every time someone uses SSA he/she gets talked down for being wrong, wrong as such person sees it. 

 

[Lilllabettt]

I wish you wouldn't use the word Sodomy to mean anal sex. It's accepted definition actually also involves oral sex. I don't know how old you are, but I assume if you're in these discussions, you're old enough to call it what it is.

 

So you assume the worst about anyone who suggests love and charity? So when I say that a more pastoral approach is needed, you're going to assume that I'm asking the Church to change something which She cannot? You're going to label me a heretic and heathen because I am gay and I am waving a flag about the treatment of people like me in the Church?

Forgive me for thinking that most unwise. Forgive me for thinking that a cowardly and un-Christlike approach.

 

So because there are some bad eggs, we're going to interrogate and crucify every person who is asking for love, kindness, and compassion? Forgive me for not thinking that an acceptable response. I'm going to call the essence of cow on that. Never once have I asked for the Church to change her ways. Never once have I asked you or anyone else to say it's okay for me to have gay sex. Never ONCE have I challenged the Church's teaching on sex and sexual morality. But I won't shut up. I won't stop pleading. And I won't stop calling out the essence of cow when I see it. Because I am no less deserving of compassion than anyone else.

 

oh my goodness (don't blasphemy). Maybe I walked away from the article seeing a call to compassion and not all the lurking wolves because I'm so desperate for someone to see that when I suggest a more "pastoral" approach, I'm not asking for approval to have all the gay sex I want. Can none of you let down your guard for one second? Can you not see that the Church is not going to crumble because some people do not yet understand in their hearts the sexual morality the Church teaches?

Do you not see how many people you are ostracizing by your paranoia? Do you not see how you fail to hear what people are really saying when you assign meaning to words that do not exist?

I'm suggesting (and have long suggested) compassion. Love. Kindness. Respect. Dignity. EQUALITY in treatment within the Church -- not in granting gay marriage but in how we are talked to, talked about, and included in parish life.

Take off the gloves and hold my HAND. Be Christ to me the way Christ was with the lepers.

SEE THAT WE ARE HURTING AND FIND IT IN YOUR HEART TO LOVE US, NOT ASSUME WE ARE TRYING TO CORRUPT THE CHURCH.

 

I'm not asking you to let croutons pass. I'm explaining the reason for the croutons.

I'm telling you why faithful Catholics are waiting for the shoe to drop whenever somebody starts talking about the need for the Church to be better to gays.

You as someone who has no goal of getting the Church to change her teaching, are in the extreme minority of people who talk about the need for the Church to change. And everybody knows that. It is most certainly not a "few bad eggs." Most of the eggs, straight and gay, are rotten on this issue.
 

As as faithful Catholic 99% of the time when I am confronted by someone who wants to talk about the Church and gays, it involves the other person arguing that the Church's faith should change. 99% of the time that is what I have to respond to. 99% of the time that is what pastors find themselves addressing. Not the handful of faithful people who need support but the legions of parishioners, gay and straight, who do not understand the Church's teaching on marriage and sexuality and want the Church to change her beliefs.
 

You are privileged in a way as a gay Catholic, because you have instant credibility with the majority. When the majority talks to you about the wrongness of  Church teaching, you can say "I'm gay, I'm Catholic, I'm living it, shut the h-e-double-hockey-sticks up." 

That is not the experience of most faithful Catholics, because the vast majority of us are straight. Maybe because of that you do not understand the experience of  straight faithful Catholics vs the culture on this issue. The Supreme Court just legalized gay marriage,  facebook, offices, and grocery stores are all rainbows of celebration, and you are frustrated that faithful Catholics have a siege mentality.  Well. Sorry.

 

99% of the time the "hey Catholics, support gay people" article is written by someone who wants the Church to (eventually at least) change her teaching. IDK when I read an article that starts like that I'm wondering the whole time, is this person like 99% of folks who write these articles and think the teaching should change? Or are they a believer who is striving to challenge their readers to be better Christians?  If there is nothing in there, no sentence affirming the Church's teaching, I tend to assume they are one of the vast majority who speak about this -- they do not believe in the Church's teaching, and everything they write is apart of an agenda to change that teaching. So I am not real interested in nodding along to anything they say.
 

Maybe the solution is for more orthodox people to talk about this and try and drown out the heterodox, or at lest give them some decent competition.

I'm not saying this is how it should be, but it is how it is. Outside Catholic Bubble World, anyway.

Edited July 16, 2015 by Lilllabettt

[Credo in Deum]

@franciscanheart: As my sister in Christ, what can I do to help you and others who identifty as homosexual, feel less lonely in the Church? What steps can I take to help support you so that we both have a relationship where we help each other while on our journey of faith? I'm not asking this to be condescending either.  I sincercly want to know, so I can help do my part as your brother in Christ.  I apologize if my ignorace and actions have made you feel alone in your struggles. This was not my intention. Please help me, help you.   

Edited July 16, 2015 by Credo in Deum

[Era Might]

No. You have reduced the power of sex to ego fulfillment and navel-gazing. People are self-involved and that's why marriage doesn't engage and fascinate them. Love, other-centered communion, is the meaning of life and sex. The love between old married people gets old only when they are stuck pouring their love into their bodies. Then their bodies get old and their love gets old. Married love is supposed to ascend. The point of the journey is to ascend from the joy of possessing a spouse, to the joy of self-gift to a spouse, to the joy of husband and wife offering themselves, united, to God. All of it in sex. Being spiritually capable of experiencing these things is (normally) the work of a lifetime. It is an unfolding mystery the answer to which married people do not possess until they reach heaven. There is nothing boring about it. Navel gazing, putting the emphasis on "self-knowledge" "discovering yourself"  --- these things are dead-ended activities. Turned inward, people's thirst for union can never be satisfied. Turned outward, the desire cannot be satisfied but it can be purified. It can be made greater. See the difference?

I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying (it's very Platonic lol, I'm reading Plotinus at the moment). But the problem is that the more you ascend, the more disincarnated you become...that's the essential problem (or ideal, depending on your philosophy) with Platonism, the goal is to ascend away from the body. Self-knowledge, ultimately, means detachment...which is why sages become celibates and escape from the world. I do reduce sex, to a certain extent, to self-knowledge, because ultimately the goal of life is death, and the end of love is separation...even in Christian theology, ultimately, you are working toward heaven where they neither marry nor give in marriage. This idea of sex and marriage as a spiritual "ascending" is too abstract for the real world, I think...it's the kind of conception of sex that works for philosophers who don't have sex lol. In the real world, I think sex is more about abandonment and desperation to an Other. The sex act itself never satisfied, it's a rising crescendo that reaches a point of pleasure, and then falls, only to be satisfied again in another sex act. People have to go back and back, not because they are working toward an ultimate ascending, but because sex provides real, bodily contact with an Other in this world. I happened to read a poem yesterday by Nikki Giovanni that captures this well (I believe she's a lesbian, just as an aside):

 

We are not lovers 

because of the love 

we make 

but the love 

we have

We are not friends 

because of the laughs 

we spend 

but the tears 

we save

I don't want to be near you 
for the thoughts we share 
but the words we never have 
to speak
I will never miss you 
because of what we do 
but what we are 
together

I think we are always alone, even when we have a relationship with someone else...and what makes a relationship beautiful is not that it abolishes solitude (what is death but a final entrance into solitude), but it gives us someone to walk with in our solitary journey. Sex is focused on this world, not in our ascent. It's focused on this world, of course, in the copies we leave of ourselves (children), but it's also a profound statement about the fact that we don't want to be alone, we don't want to die (don't the French call it "the little death"). We cling to another person in desperation, and through that clinging we discover ourselves in our solitude...which is why we can become mature about sex once we have self-knowledge, because we no longer cling to it as a child does his mother's breast.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make in the context of this thread is that I don't see "unnormal" sex as unnormal. I think gays and lesbians and non-married heterosexuals are seeking the same things as everyone else when they have sex...they are seeking a port in the storm. But the real growth comes when we see ourselves for who we are...IMO, that's the only way I can make sense of celibacy. Who can endure a lifetime of celibacy, such as homosexual Christians have to endure? Or even monks and nuns and other ascetics? It is only bearable, IMO, not by abstract notions of ascending to God, but self-knowledge...not sacrifice to a future, but peace in the presence that we are one and nothing, we are part of the solitude of everything, and we must ultimately abandon ourselves to that nothingness. I don't think this is necessarily at odds with Christian theology, because I think St. Paul was essentially making the same point when he advised the married to live as unmarried, the sad to live as though not sad, the rich to live as though they have no possessions. Sex is part of our enslavement to this world...and I don't say that disparagingly, but just recognizing it for what it is...we do not want to be alone.

Edited July 16, 2015 by Era Might

[MarysLittleFlower]

I have just started catechisis with the neo catechumens and bought this up and no the church is not against homosexual civil unions, it is against the church being forced to marry homosexuals. 

from what I understand this is not the Church teaching and the Church is against civil unions too... Can someone respond? My understanding is that its a condemned view that the state should be able to decide morality or marriage without the Church. Here's a quote from the CDF no less... The CDF can officially speak for Church teaching more than any catechesis program that can make mistakes : 

This is why the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its document entitled Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons (3 June 2003) and approved by John Paul II, sets down that "respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions." https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/can-a-catholic-support-civil-unions-to-prevent-gay-marriage? 

Am I right anyone?

Edited July 16, 2015 by MarysLittleFlower

[Era Might]

Just an addendum to my previous post, the self-focused nature of sex can be seen in the fact that the more similar two people are, the better sex they have. This includes similarities like beliefs or personalities, but also similarities in the sense that one provides what the other lacks. Supposedly in Greek mythology Zeus feared that humans would be too powerful so he divided them in two and condemned them forever to look for their other half (male and female). Sex is always about self-wholeness. And the people who have indiscriminate sex probably have no idea who they are, they have no self-knowledge, and sex is just a way of confirming that they exist, that they have a body and actually exist in this world, though they have no idea who they are and cannot find themselves in another person. If you take two people who have nothing in common and put them in a legal marriage, they may have sex, but they lack self-knowledge in it...and perhaps that is an "ideal" of sex, there is no personality, simply abandonment to a greater process and ideal. But why do we admire old married couples who have been married for 50 years? It is not because of their bursting personalities, but because they represent stability and sacrifice...worthy things, but that is also very de-personalizing. These people become abstract "man" and "woman," and that's what life and marriage is for much of humanity and history, you play your part, fill your role, and you die. Maybe I'm too influenced by the emergence of personality in the modern world...no doubt, I am, though the Greeks had higher ideas of romantic love than that (which included homosexuality).

[MarysLittleFlower]

@franciscanheart: As my sister in Christ, what can I do to help you and others who identifty as homosexual, feel less lonely in the Church? What steps can I take to help support you so that we both have a relationship where we help each other while on our joirney of faith? I'm not asking this to be condescending either.  I sincercly want to know, so I can help do my part as your brother in Christ.  I apologize if my ignorace and actions have made you feel alone in your struggles. This was not my intention. Please help me, help you.   

@franciscanheart I'm wondering this too.. Credo said what I wanted to say but better. You are our sister!

Edited July 16, 2015 by MarysLittleFlower

[franciscanheart]

 

Nope. Every time someone uses SSA he/she gets talked down for being wrong, wrong as such person sees it. 

 

 

The thing is this, Papist: You asked me why I needed the quantifier. But in this case, someone was already using a quantifier -- just one I don't like. So I asked if it would make her uncomfortable to use one I prefer, one that doesn't sound like I've the plague. Your response? Why do you even need to clarify?

Do you see where that wasn't helpful? We were already describing a circumstance -- one that is personal to me -- and I was asking about this person's choice of language. I didn't tell her never to use SSA. I didn't tell her she was wrong to address it that way. And amazingly, she was mature enough to say, "Hey, if that's what you like, cool. I will do that."

You, though, had to make an issue of it. You had to attack the fact that I don't care for being described as "having SSA". As only your second post in the topic, it was more than a little aggravating.

 

No. She hasn't. She has consistently tried to describe how it feels to be a gay Catholic woman and the problems she has experienced as a result of unhelpful attitudes within the Church, and people who are quite happy to talk about homosexuality morning noon and night in other circumstances (just see the sheer number of threads about it on Phatmass!) suddenly start asking, "But why are you calling yourself X? Why are you making an issue of it?" instead of responding to the concerns she raises. It seems it's OK for straight Catholics to make 5,000 threads on whether homosexuality is something you're born with and why we should say SSA and not gay and all the rest of it, but the second a gay woman shares something related to her personal experiences in the Church, she's "making an issue of something that doesn't need to be an issue" - all because some people here don't happen to like the language she uses for her own self.

Thank you.  

[Nihil Obstat]

I have just started catechisis with the neo catechumens and bought this up and no the church is not against homosexual civil unions, it is against the church being forced to marry homosexuals. 

from what I understand this is not the Church teaching and the Church is against civil unions too... Can someone respond? My understanding is that its a condemned view that the state should be able to decide morality or marriage without the Church. Here's a quote from the CDF no less... The CDF can officially speak for Church teaching more than any catechesis program that can make mistakes : 

This is why the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its document entitled Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons (3 June 2003) and approved by John Paul II, sets down that "respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions." https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/can-a-catholic-support-civil-unions-to-prevent-gay-marriage? 

Am I right anyone?

The Church is also against homosexual civil unions, because such unions represent a legitimization of inherently evil behaviour.

[MarysLittleFlower]

 

The Church is also against homosexual civil unions, because such unions represent a legitimization of inherently evil behaviour.

That's my understanding too..

 

Edited July 16, 2015 by MarysLittleFlower

[Papist]

The thing is this, Papist: You asked me why I needed the quantifier. But in this case, someone was already using a quantifier -- just one I don't like. So I asked if it would make her uncomfortable to use one I prefer, one that doesn't sound like I've the plague. Your response? Why do you even need to clarify?

Do you see where that wasn't helpful? We were already describing a circumstance -- one that is personal to me -- and I was asking about this person's choice of language. I didn't tell her never to use SSA. I didn't tell her she was wrong to address it that way. And amazingly, she was mature enough to say, "Hey, if that's what you like, cool. I will do that."

You, though, had to make an issue of it. You had to attack the fact that I don't care for being described as "having SSA". As only your second post in the topic, it was more than a little aggravating.

 

 

Aggravating indeed.

[Lilllabettt]

Sex does not in itself give graces, though it can leave one better disposed to receive other graces. That being the case I would be willing to characterize sex like a sacramental in a broader sense. Not a sacrament though.

 

I could get behind "sacramental." I guess my initial intention was to use "sacrament" in terms of its non-technical definition. (e.g., In religion studies the literature will refer to Hindu, Jewish, Islamic "sacraments.") Probably not a prudent choice when I'm using very technical language to talk about the Catholic understanding of sex.

Edited July 16, 2015 by Lilllabettt

[franciscanheart]

Aggravating indeed.

What good do you intend to bring about by antagonizing me about this?