In 1986, my Dominican community in Oxford organized a conference on the Church and AIDS. I was moved by the love, courage and resilience with which gay Catholics responded to this crisis and what wonderful gifts they bring to the Church. A few years later, I was invited sometimes to preside at Masses for gay and lesbian Catholics in London. When ministry to that community was adopted formally into the mission of the Archdiocese of Westminster, Cardinal Murphy O’Connor asked me to continue.
These Masses are just like any others. Gay people do not need a special liturgy. Because so many feel rejected by the church, they need a community in which they are sure of a warm welcome. Sexual orientation should not be central to anyone’s identity. This lies in our capacity to love and so enter into the mystery of God’s boundless love.
Cardinal Basil Hume wrote: “Love between two persons, whether of the same sex or of a different sex, is to be treasured and respected. ‘Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus,’ we read (Jn 11:5). When two persons love they experience in a limited manner in this world what will be their unending delight when one with God in the next. To love another is in fact to reach out to God who shares his lovable-ness with the one we love.”
The challenge for gay people, as for everyone, is to learn how to express love appropriately, respecting each other’s dignity as children of God.
The challenge for gay people, as for everyone, is to learn how to express love appropriately, respecting each other’s dignity as children of God.
Protestors often gathered outside the church, denouncing us for rejecting the Church’s teaching. We do not. I am convinced of the fundamental wisdom of the Church’s teaching, but I do not yet fully understand how this is to be lived by young gay Catholics who accept their sexuality and rightly long to express their affection.
This cannot be just through the negation of desire. For St. Thomas Aquinas, our passions are the driving force of our return to God. Our desires are God-given. Desire needs education, purification and liberation from illusory fantasy. But in all desire there is a yearning for what is good and for God. The commandments are given not to deny our desires but to point them towards their true end. They are the gateway to freedom. Israel was given the Ten Commandments to form her for friendship with God and ultimately with the one who said to his disciples, “I call you friends” (Jn 15:15).
We shall better discover this desire to be healed and made holy through conversation with mature gay Catholics who have experienced the journey into serenity and happiness. The synodal way is to talk with people, not just about them. “Realities are more important than ideas” (Evangelii Gaudium 231). Church teaching is already developing as it becomes refreshed by lived experience. No longer are gay people seen just in terms of sexual acts, but as our brothers and sisters who are, Pope Francis believes, to be blessed.
We shall better discover this desire to be healed and made holy through conversation with mature gay Catholics.
My intuition is that most gay Catholics in mature, committed relationships usually move beyond much interest in sex anyway. What they seek most of all are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. There is no law against such things” (Gal 5:22-23).
The welcome of gay people is seen in some parts of the Church as evidence of Western decadence. But the Church must fight for the lives and dignity of gay people who are still liable to capital punishment in 10 countries and criminal prosecution in 70. They have the right to live. And Catholics from other continents, who struggle to understand our pastoral outreach of gay people, have gifts which the Church in the West needs, often a deep sense of Ubuntu, “I am because we are,” and of the divine life of all creation. They challenge the “culture of death” which haunts the West. The Body of Christ needs all of our gifts. We are bearers of the Gospel to each other.
This article first appeared in L’Osservatore Romano, on Sept. 19, 2024. It is published here with the permission of the author.
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