Courage and Outreach: Why We Need Both Ministries in the Church

Faithful pastoral care of same-sex-attracted Catholics is more than educating them on an orthodox sexual ethic. It’s about helping people encounter Jesus and welcoming them into the life of the Church. Within that comes conversations about the life we’re called to live. Without Jesus and the church, all that talk of chastity falls flat.

In the past ten years, I’ve been involved with the major national Catholic organizations geared toward individuals who experience same-sex attraction (SSA) and the LGBTQ+ community, most notably Courage and Outreach. And a recent article from the National Catholic Register sharply compared these two apostolates, pitting them against each other—the faithful versus the unorthodox. But this article missed the point. Both Courage and Outreach are essential for the Catholic Church to support LGBTQ+/SSA communities fully: Courage provides a path for those seeking to live according to traditional Church teachings on chastity, while Outreach offers a welcoming space for those who feel marginalized. For a church we call universal, we need both.

Courage was founded in 1980 by Archbishop Terence Cardinal Cooke in New York City. Rooted in the 12-step process of Alcoholics Anonymous, its primary goal was to help individuals pursue a life of chastity. This attitude continues today, with chastity, an active life in the church, and pursuing good friendships as the organization’s central tenets. What Courage does very well is create a space for Catholics who are ardently seeking to follow the Church’s teachings on sexuality and provide a specific space to share their struggles. However, I’ve found the organization does little to integrate this experience into the broader church. It can give the impression that homosexuality is only to be talked about in special contexts with the right people.

In contrast to this, Outreach was founded in 2017 to reach out to LGBTQ+ individuals who felt rejected and unwanted by the Catholic Church. It started as a book by Father James Martin, who discussed in Building A Bridge what it would look like to foster dialogue between the Catholic and LGBTQ+ communities. It is intentionally an apostolate working to welcome those who feel unwelcome and provide a spiritual home for these people who are seeking to know God. It’s about ecclesial community and spiritual connection. Therefore, the critique of the NCR article that Outreach fails to lead with preaching the Catholic Church’s teaching on sexuality is correct.

Despite these sharp differences, I’ve needed both organizations at different times. When I was first talking about my sexuality with people, I turned to a chaplain in Courage. He provided a place for me to begin exploring my same-sex attractions. Joining a local Courage chapter connected me with other SSA Catholics and helped me feel less alone in my struggles. But after coming out, I no longer had a larger Catholic community that I felt I could call home. Courage certainly was no longer a fit, and a combination of anger and hurt kept me from engaging with Catholics until about two years ago.

As I slowly started returning to my Catholic faith, I found myself suspicious of most Catholics, fearful of who was going to reject me and who was going to start debating me. I still wanted to be Catholic, but I knew that I wouldn’t fit into the traditional Catholic molds. That is until I went to the Outreach conference this year. There, I was surrounded by many Catholics who were sitting in the same tension I was. I left that conference with the overwhelming feeling—I want to be Catholic; this is a church I want to be a part of. This isn’t the story of faithful or unfaithful apostolates; this is the story of two organizations trying to help people know God.

Courage is not a starting point for an LGBTQ+ individual who is exploring or returning to the Catholic faith. Similarly, Outreach is not designed for Catholics with same-sex attractions who need serious support living out a life of chastity. Yet, in the debate around orthodoxy, the discussion can often be unhelpfully narrowed down to whether or not the organization is vocal enough about the Church’s teachings on homosexuality. But faithfulness is more than sexual ethics. Faithfulness is welcoming people into the life of the church. Faithfulness is providing a space where they can experience the love of the Father for the first time in years. Faithfulness is creating a family of God where all are welcome, and the admission is not an ascent to a moral code but a desire to pursue a life with Jesus.

I know this is hard. We want things to be black and white. We want to say Courage is faithful, and Outreach is dissenting. Or, Outreach is the way forward, and Courage is outdated. But I can’t. I can’t say that because I know how both have loved and supported me in my life of faith. And I would be foolish to dismiss the numerous people I know who can attest to the beautiful ways both organizations have helped them tremendously. There is room for both; we need both. Instead of making this a choice of one over the other, can we see the good in each of them?

Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash