Fr Leonard E Dollentas
“If someone is gay and searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”
These words of Pope Francis have gone viral and sent shockwaves throughout the Catholic Church and the world in 2015. Many apparently regarded this statement of the Pope as ushering in a new level of “tolerance” within the Catholic Church. Though his words refer to priests with homosexual tendencies – that he would not judge them for their sexual orientations, the Pope was not suggesting that the priests or anyone else should act on their homosexual tendencies, which the Church considers a sin. He simply meant that homosexuals deserve forgiveness and should be treated with dignity. Those words were considered revolutionary and significantly generated a new paradigm to see LBGT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) persons in a new light, to understand them as human beings in need not only of compassion, but also of redemption.
DISTINGUISHING THE ACT FROM THE PERSON
Homosexuals are human beings with a different sexual orientation from the majority. Most people are heterosexuals; that means they are having emotional, romantic or sexual attractions to members of the opposite (hetero) gender (sex). Homosexuals are humans who are having emotional, romantic or sexual attractions to the same (homo) gender (sex). Women of this kind are sometimes called lesbians, and men are called gays. Bisexuals are looked upon with confusion (having emotional, romantic or sexual attractions to more than one gender). Bisexuality comprises, in some way, both homosexuality and heterosexuality.
Let us then recall the Church teachings on this concern. The Catechism of the Catholic Church condemns homosexual acts as gravely immoral, while holding that gay people “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity,” and “every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided” (2357-2358). “The Catholic Church holds that, as a state beyond a person’s choice, being homosexual is not wrong or sinful in itself. But just as it is objectively wrong for unmarried heterosexuals to engage in sex, so too are homosexual acts considered to be wrong.” (C Stewart, Gay and Lesbian Issues: A Reference Handbook, p. 184)
The Church teaching further states that “Homosexual persons are called to chastity.” While the Church opens this path of chastity to them, it also offers practical tangible help for achieving it.
THE TRANSGENDER ISSUE
“Transgender is a person whose gender identity is opposite the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth. They were assigned a sex usually at birth and based on their genitals but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves.” (https://www.definitions.net/Transgender) They undergo transition process to conform to their true gender. After transition, they normally blend into society, looking and acting just like any other man or woman. As regards transition of the transgender person, the Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, stated that: “Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason, man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.” (GS 14 par. 1)
When applied to transition process, the document implies that a person with Gender Identity Disorder or Dysphoria must accept their body as it is. Church teaching maintains that sexual reassignment surgery would be a serious sin.
A couple of years ago, Pope Francis held a private audience with a transgender man from Spain. After learning that his parish and local church officials rejected him after his transition from female to male, Pope Francis spoke to him several times on the phone and invited him to Rome. He described painfully his struggle as a transgender person: “During my transition from female to male, I was often confused with and mad at God. I didn’t understand why I had been born in the wrong body. This anger and confusion with how God had made me seeped into my daily life. I often wasn’t present to my friends and their needs, and I lost a sense of who and what mattered to me.”
When the transgender man asked if there was room for him in God’s church, Pope Francis embraced him, giving him the grace of assurance that the Church is not only open for him, also the Pope’s heart. Pope Francis was encouraging him that we are not defined by our sexuality, we are first and foremost a son or daughter of God and being His child is of greatest significance. In Amoris Laetitia, he explained that accepting our bodies as gifts from God is vital for accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father. The Holy Father unceasingly urges us that transgender people need to be helped by the Church to accept their own body as it was created.
PASTORAL CARE FOR THE LGBT CATHOLICS
Words may not be enough to heal the wounds many LGBT Catholics have suffered in the face of indifference and exclusion from the community and even from the church. Pope Francis’ words of healing should not only encourage sensible reflection, but tangible action among all Catholics. Fr James Martin, an American Jesuit priest who wrote a book on LGBT, said that there is still a hunger among LGBT Catholics for welcome from their own church and from their priests. Thus, the overarching theme of Fr Martin’s book is welcome, encounter and dialogue. In an interview about his book he pointed out that those who have an LGBT in their families also felt for a long time the desire to be embraced by the church.
Today, many Catholic communities reach out to LGBT individuals to offer a full welcome as possible, within the limits of the Church policy. In the Philippines, dioceses have come up with a pastoral care ministry taking care of the LGBT individuals and their families through education, advocacy, and support. In this program, family members are also given support in forms of counselling workshop on how to understand more the LGBT members of their families.
While renewed understanding and compassion is readily given to the LGBT, the Church is firm on the policy that does not approve of same-sex relationships, even committed ones.
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