How should Catholics respond to Pride Month? Joe Heschmeyer offers guidance on balancing truth and love when engaging with LGBTQ+ issues. Learn about the Church’s teaching on homosexuality while emphasizing the dignity and worth of all individuals. Discover how to promote authentic Christian values in a world often marked by division and misunderstanding.
Transcript:
I’m not a brand new Catholic. I’ve been practicing the faith, but lately I’ve really just gotten into trying to learn more about it and just trying to
Grow. Praise God, spiritually. Beautiful. Tessa, thanks. I’m excited. Yeah,
We’re catch it. We’re going to catch it. Yeah,
I think we count that. We count. That is it. Yeah.
Thank you. So my question is, it’s L-G-B-T-Q month and I don’t know as a Catholic how we might differ from other religions and denominations on how we react in this kind of environment. And what’s the best way, what does the doctrine say? What are we supposed to follow as Catholics in regards to this kind of environment?
Yeah, no, it’s a very good question. I mean, the general principle is that we’re called to present the truth and love. And one of the things that takes a great deal of wisdom and prudence is knowing what truth thing means to be conveyed. Sometimes that true thing is the church’s sexual morality, that someone is denying it by word or deed and they need to be confronted with it. Other times. That true thing is the fact that God loves the person because they may not believe that and that the church loves that person and that you love that person because they may not believe that, and it may be that they need to be given the truth about their own humanity, that God’s love for them is something deeper than their sexual predilections, that who you are as a person is something much deeper than who you’re attracted to romantically and sexually, and that your life matters at a much deeper level.
And that’s the stuff that you should be more fascinated by, interested in celebrating, if you want to put it that way. In terms of what the church has had to say, paragraph 2357 and 2358 of the catechism of the Catholic Church talk about, or actually in 2359, so 23 57, 58, 59, talk about homosexuality and kind of how to have a Catholic response to it and is to avoid unjust discrimination, but also calling people to chastity and doing so in a loving way. So I have friends with people who have same sex attraction and desires, but it’s not the defining feature of who they are. They’re more than that. And all of us are more than our sexual desires and anyone, whatever those desires are, who reduces themselves to that is doing a serious injustice to themselves. So that may be a message that needs to be stressed to show that this is not a matter of hating the person or who they are. It’s a matter that believing who the person is infinitely more important because they’re a son or daughter of God and they’re made to share eternal glory with God. They’re not just an animal looking for a mate or something like that. They’re worth more. And that message is, I think, one that is not being preached by corporations proclaiming pride month and frankly not being preached by people who are sometimes responding to pride month in cruel and nasty ways, that there is a space for an authentically Christian third way.