While many of us believe Pope Francis is an amazing example of what it means to be truly Christian today, that should not prevent us from acknowledging that the Catholic Church he leads is shamefully flawed in many ways.
One of them is the fact that it is the largest institutional supporter of homophobia in the world.
Official Catholic teaching says that homosexual acts are “always violations of divine and natural law.” The church does not teach that homosexual desires are in themselves sinful, but acting on them is.
In other words, the Catholic Church does not condemn homosexuality. It condemns homosexuals for acting on natural desires for intimacy, love, and marriage.
This may be worse than the Protestant propaganda that claims to love the sinner, but hates the sin. The Catholic Church has put itself in the position of accepting homosexuality, but rejecting homosexuals.
That is why the fine edge distinction Catholicism tries to make between orientation and behavior ends up promoting homophobia among its members. They may be told homosexual urges are not sinful, but what they see and hear is that no gay couple can receive the sacraments of the Church, a statement as clear as Catholicism can make that gays and lesbians stand outside the love and grace of God.
To argue that this doesn’t promote homophobia is to be guilty of the sin of intentional ignorance, a sin, by the way, that is hardly benign. Homophobia has done and is still doing immense harm, especially to gay and lesbian teenagers.
My wife and I are reading two books on parenting teenagers by psychiatrist Michael Bradley. He documents the stunning pain and suffering gay and lesbian teens regularly experience in a culture believes the false teaching that homosexuality is a life-style choice rather than the genetically determined orientation it actually is.
Because of who they are gay kids are ridiculed, ostracized, beaten, bruised, and even killed. Of course the Catholic Church and Protestant Christians condemn such acts, but they refuse to accept the role they play in creating the attitudes and environment that foster them.
You cannot claim innocence for the damage a fire does that you started.
Homophobia is as bad as racism, and has done the same damage to gays and lesbians racism has done to minorities.
But society has yet to recognize homophobia for the social evil it is, at least in part because official Catholic teaching provides a theological justification for it.
The Church cannot teach that expressions of homosexual love are “unnatural” and “a violation of divine law” and at the same time ignore that fact that homosexual adults and kids are being treated unkindly and unjustly because of that teaching.
It seems to me that those of us who believe Pope Francis is the right man of God for this time must also acknowledge that he is the head of a Catholic Church that is, indeed, the largest institutional promoter of homophobia around the world.
And our gay and lesbian family members, friends, children and grandchildren are paying a terrible price because of it.
That is why I feel compelled to do precisely what Pope Francis asks all of us to do.
I will pray for him.
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