Mags GarganGay Catholics don’t exist in the abstract, we are there in the pews, writes Niall Guinan
It is not my intention in this article to attack Catholic teaching. I am not a moral theologian and am not so confident as to think that I am sufficiently qualified to argue against teaching that has been unchanged for millennia. I would just like to write about my own personal experience and hope that, reading this, those in the Church who still harbour some prejudice might be a bit more welcoming and other gay people, who have fallen away from the Church, might perhaps, even if they disagree with some of what the Church teaches, reconsider their place within it.
I vaguely remember the first thoughts that went through my head when I realised I was gay at the age of 12. Among them was the media’s caricature of Pope Benedict XVI in particular and the Catholic Church in general as a source of harsh, negative judgment, especially on matters relating to human sexuality.
I believed that there was no way that I could be gay and Catholic, and that one of the two had to change.
Throughout puberty, I prayed for a miracle, that I would some morning wake up and suddenly start fancying girls and everything would be alright; that I could, like C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy, simply ignore my Faith’s teaching on homosexuality as something which didn’t concern me. The miracle that I dreamed about, that I wanted so desperately, did not take place.
Lke many other gay people, I spent the next few years reading Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and other prominent atheist authors convincing myself that God did not exist. Despite my goal to “be myself”, being so aggressively hostile to religion was about as far from my real self as I could get.
Depression
It did, however, take quite some time and a serious bout of depression before, on a sunny day in my second year of college, I knelt before the statue of St Therese of Lisieux in Clarendon Street church in Dublin and realised, like St Augustine, “thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee”.
I realised that God did not answer my prayer for deliverance from same-sex attraction because he wants me just as I am. St Therese puts it perfectly when she writes: “If all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty and the fields would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues.” God loves diversity.
Coming back to the Church, I was surprised at two things: first, the fact that my fellow Catholics really couldn’t care less what gender I was attracted to, and secondly, the negative response I got from some other gay people for my decision to embrace my Catholic faith.
This experience is not, of course, confined to me. Paddy Manning, a gay man well-known in social media who has a position on same-sex marriage which differs from the prevailing group-think, was subjected to online death threats after publicly expressing his views.
Such extreme reactions, thankfully, only come from a small minority of ‘liberal’ activists.
I have come to realise that the Church is not the enemy of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The Church is not hateful and negative but loving and infinitely positive.
It is, as New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan has said, a “big affirming yes to life” exemplified by the ‘yes’ of the gentle Queen of Peace who was so clean of hate that love himself became man and embedded himself in her womb.
It is unquestionably true that the Church has, at times, failed in showing Christ’s compassionate love and for many gay Catholics. It still sometimes fails to do so. The Church must do more to reach out to us. In particular, Catholic schools should be at the forefront of the battle against the cruel evil of homophobic bullying which is ruining so many young lives.
For Catholics, All You Need is Love is not merely the title of a song by The Beatles but the truth that lies at the centre of our lives. Love is what the Gospel is all about. St John of the Cross tells us that “in the evening of life, we will be judged on love”.
One spirit
As we are all part of “one body, one spirit in Christ,” gay Catholics must not be excluded from this saving love, the love that is expressed most perfectly in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the sublime sacrament of love which is the Eucharist.
In the sacred liturgy, Christ “lifted up” draws all of us, regardless of our sex, race, sexual orientation or other characteristics to himself so that, like Dante at the end of his Purgatorio, we may be “reanimated, like new plants that are renewed again with leafage ever new, pure and prepared to mount from star to star”.