LGBT Catholics: Defiant or Faithful?

People don’t stay Catholic because the people are perfect. Few communities understand this as acutely as LGBT Catholics. I spent the weekend at Georgetown University with three hundred and fifty Catholics who identify as LGBTQ or support LGBTQ Catholics through various apostolates and programs. The first night was mildly disorienting as people in habits and clerics mingled seamlessly with queer individuals as conference-goers introduced same-sex partners and shared coming out stories amidst questions of people’s home parish and what Catholic ministries they’ve served with.

Throughout the three-day conference, we shared stories in side conversations and in talks with the rhythmic consistency of the rosary, as if each account was a bead of a living meditating on the experience of queer Catholics. And as I listened to story after story, I couldn’t help but think these people have every right to leave the church, but they haven’t. I see some Catholics bristle at the comment that someone could be both gay and Catholic, citing a lax morality and an inability to remain faithful to church teaching, and I will not deny that many in that crowd did not agree with Catholicism’s teachings on sexuality. However, you would be hard-pressed to find a group that so clearly understood that faith was not rooted in some experience of a local parish but instead an encounter with Jesus and a conviction in the liberating truth of the gospel. That’s why these people chose to stay–despite hardships.  

I heard about a man who had to leave his dream job working in Catholic education just because of he is gay. A mother who listened to homily after homily from her parish priest berating the LGBT community with her bisexual daughter sitting next to her only to have her daughter say to her one day, “Mom, I just can’t go to mass anymore with homilies like that.”  I heard a priest share about how, as a seminarian, he underwent electroshock therapy in an attempt to make him straight. If you experienced what these people had, would you have remained Catholic? These people did. These people are faithful.

But it’s time we stopped defining faithfulness only in terms of what beliefs you do or do not ascribe to as if agreeing with a checklist of defined doctrines constituted a Catholic life. The call to conversion runs deeper than that. Faithfulness is also the gay Catholic who still shows up to his suburban parish every week without much young adult community and meets with parents to help them navigate their children’s coming out. Faithfulness is a mother who keeps showing up to mass every Sunday when her bisexual daughter won’t and befriended the priest and dialogued with him to help him understand why his words were so hurtful. Faithfulness is the seminarian who believed in his call to the priesthood and was not overcome by bitterness for how he was treated but instead has chosen to faithfully serve the church for decades. How much the church would be missing if these people had decided to leave.

The church would lose countless teachers and campus ministers, Catholics who create new young adult communities in their cities, and deans of student life who sit down with undergrads for coffee and share how they can develop a prayer life. The church would lose musicians and artists crafting new images and songs for their churches. We’d lose Bible study leaders and choir members and countless priests and religious. And I wish that for all the tension that exists around LGBT conversations, we could also honor and recognize the countless LGBT Catholics still in our pews who help keep the church alive. Queer people love Jesus, they love and serve the church, and yes, they love this part of their life.  

Are we defiant? Are we faithful? We’re both. We exist in a messy gray area while we try to remain faithful to the gospel we have heard—the gospel that says we are fearfully and wonderfully made and a gift in the eyes of God. We believe that we are good, redeemed, and loved. We believe the church is for all and want to remove barriers that keep people from encountering the love of God. We are Catholic. We are faithful. We are the church, too.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash