In early 2015, our Archdiocese like many others was offered a 47-question open-ended survey in order to gather information about what people throughout the world understand about the Church’s teaching, her pastoral practice, current conditions, and the reality of marriage and family life. The survey was probably a poor translation, and the questions were ill-structured, so I ended up writing about 15,500 words in the one week window for completing it. I have chosen to share a few of these, here, as well, for your comments. I will quote the question, and what follows is my answer. I have edited the answers slightly for brevity, politeness, and clarity.
The last two answers to be reproduced here!
41. How can the Christian community give pastoral attention to families with persons with homosexual tendencies? What are the responses that, in light of cultural sensitivities, are considered to be most appropriate? While avoiding any unjust discrimination, how can such persons receive pastoral care in these situations in light of the Gospel? How can God’s will be proposed to them in their situation?
Experiencing same-sex attraction is a special case of the problem of chastity in a hypersexualized culture; it is not an essentially different problem, as a male and a female are still just that. What makes it a special case is the unlikelihood of successfully forming a family or freely choosing a celibate vocation—and for this reason, it is unusually likely that the person who experiences same-sex attraction will be severely tempted to despair. Inclusion among faithful families, particularly inclusion along with other singles and with celibates, will alleviate that despair. When the temptation to despair is daily resisted, the grace to practice chastity will be strengthened—and with the growth of the virtue of chastity, the overmastering nature of sexual desire and especially the influence of a hypersexualized culture should become less evident. In time, the freedom from a mistaken reduction of humanity to sexual experience should be discovered—and in some, this will be a more definite and glorious liberation to serve than even many married people will ever achieve; for some, it will mean a discovery that they were not born to be defined and limited by sexual desire, but to depend more fully on God’s grace and grow to serve Him in freedom. Those who have achieved that freedom—who are free from “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” according to those who know them well and those with expertise in spiritual formation under difficult circumstances—may well make first-rate clergy or members of religious institutes.
42. What are the most significant steps that have been taken to announce and effectively promote the beauty and dignity of becoming a mother or father, in light, for example, of Humanae Vitae of Blessed Pope Paul VI? How can dialogue be promoted with the sciences and biomedical technologies in a way that respects the human ecology of reproduction?
I don’t know, but I know that honest appraisal of the real empirical evidence in the hard sciences—not the routine statistical conflation of various nominal essences in the “soft sciences,” and not the popularizing ideological nonsense routinely touted as “science” in public discourse—yields many confirmations of what reason has long declared, and revelation more fully explained, about human growth and development. We have never been so well positioned to declare that a human being, “from conception to natural death,” is at all times a rational soul endowed with a unique creaturely dignity characterized by moral freedom that demands a just social order open to authentic spiritual formation and not closed against the prerogatives of revealed religion.