Vatican statement on same-sex marriage revives faith dilemma for LGBTQ Catholics in NC
The Vatican’s reaffirmation of its ban on blessing same-sex marriage has revived a faith dilemma for some LGBTQ members of the Catholic Church and their allies in North Carolina.
Some feel the decree forces them to choose — again — between leaving a cherished spiritual home or staying in an institution that says their relationships are sinful.
The decree, issued Monday by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, asks the question, “Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?”
The response: “Negative.”
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, responsible for spreading and defending the integrity of Catholic doctrine, then explains that proposals for the blessing of same-sex unions are being advanced in “some ecclesial contexts.” It doesn’t specify which contexts, but Catholic bishops in Germany have been debating theology around the issue in recent months.
While the church can bless LGBTQ individuals who adhere to church teachings, the decree says, it cannot bless same-sex unions because to the church’s understanding, God’s plan doesn’t recognize such a union as analogous to a marriage between a man and a woman.
“God Himself never ceases to bless each of His pilgrim children in this world, because for Him ‘we are more important to God than all of the sins that we can commit,’” the decree says. “But he does not and cannot bless sin.”
Not reflecting ‘more open spirit’
Pope Francis is quoted in the decree and assented to it, a marked departure from more conciliatory comments he has made since being elected in 2013. While some of his predecessors have said same-sex relationships are deviant and immoral, Francis has said the church needs to be more welcoming to its LGBTQ followers.
In a documentary released in October 2020, Francis indicated he favored legal civil unions for same-sex couples as an alternative to church-sanctioned marriage.
Chuck Small, a lifelong Catholic born in Chicago, raised in Indiana and living now in Raleigh, said the church’s assertion that same-sex marriage is not in keeping with God’s plan is not revelatory.
“There was nothing new in that document,” said Small, a high school counselor who worked for The News & Observer from 1993 to 2008. “Everything in that document has been church teaching. So when I say that I feel pain from it, it’s not pain from knowing that this is what the church said. It’s the way in which it was said, that seems not to reflect a more open spirit that I really felt Francis has shown in the past several years.”
Small said it’s important to note that while the document quotes the pope, it was not authored by him and uses language he has not used in public. For instance, in speaking of the LGBTQ community, Pope Francis has used the phrase “sexual orientation,” which Small said is an acknowledgment of the general scientific belief that sexual preference is the result of a combination of environmental, emotional, hormonal and biological factors. Monday’s decree also uses the phrase “sexual inclination,” which suggests that sexuality is a choice, counter to what most studies have found.
Blessing a same-sex marriage, the edict says, would effectively “approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God.”
Small, 57, is married to Tom Attaway. The couple, who have been together since 1992, traveled to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington state where it already was legal for same-sex couples to marry in 2014. The next year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage must be legal in all 50 states.
‘I don’t really care whether the church blesses my relationship with my husband,” Small said. “My relationship with my husband is between me and my husband and God. The church can have its opinion, but I won’t let it affect me and I don’t particularly care about it.
“What I do care about is the next generation of young Catholics. I don’t want to see the church enshrined as an irrelevant body of people with outdated, inaccurate and hurtful perspectives.”
Church membership and attendance have been on the decline in the U.S. for more than 20 years, according to polls. In 2018, the Pew Research Center reported that the Catholic church still was the largest single institution in the United States, claiming 51 million adults — about a fifth of the adult population — as believers.
Catholicism also had seen the largest net loss of followers of any religious tradition in the country, Pew said.
Small said he was in college when he realized he was gay, and one of the first dozen or so people he came out to was the pastor of the Catholic church he attended near the Indiana University campus in Bloomington.
“He gave me a fire-and-brimstone speech, and I left the meeting with him and I walked back to my dorm room and I just felt like, ‘I don’t belong in this congregation. I need to step away from it.’”
Eventually, Small said, he began attending a different Catholic church. He has belonged to the Catholic community of St. Francis of Assisi since moving to Raleigh in 1993. Participating in the ministries of the church and connecting to its fellowship of believers has helped him get through the most difficult times of his life, he said.
‘The church is the church’
He worries that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s stance against same-sex marriage and its language that is sometimes disrespectful of LGBTQ people may drive away younger believers forever, whether because they are LGBTQ or in solidarity with others.
Bishop Luis Zarama of the Catholic Diocese of Raleigh said the statement from Rome may have been disappointing to some because they saw the welcoming way Pope Francis relates to people as individuals and heard him endorse civil unions for same-sex couples and built “false expectations” that he also would support gay marriage.
“The church is the church,” Zarama said. “It’s a mother. The mother is looking for the best for the children. Sometimes love is a challenge. It’s nothing against the person at all. It’s how the church is keeping with the tradition and the value of married life, as man and woman, as the Bible says, with the purpose of procreation.
“The church is divine in one way, and it’s human in another way, you know?” Zarama said. “I think some people disagree with some of the teachings of the church, but the important thing is, how can we be humble and follow Jesus as Jesus wants us to follow him, not as we want.
“Sometimes we want Jesus to follow us,” Zarama said.
Randy Lewis, chairman of the board of directors for the LGBT Center of Raleigh, was ordained as a Baptist minister but left the church for a time because he’s gay.
“The lack of affirmation, the non-healing ministries that I was a part of, those were harmful to my psyche for a long time,” Lewis said. “I had a crisis of faith.”
Eventually, he joined the Unitarian church, and returned to the ministry. He expects to be ordained this fall and work as a community minister, not attached to a particular congregation.
In addition his work at the LGBT Center, Lewis said he worked for more than a year as a chaplain at the VA Medical Center in Durham. In both places has counseled people who felt rejected by their faith traditions because of their sexuality. Some were Catholics. Others were Baptist or United Methodist, denominations that also have been riven by arguments between conservative and liberal believers over what roles LGBTQ people can have in the church.
Reconciling spirituality and sexuality
Earlier this month, some conservative leaders in the United Methodist Church unveiled plans to split and form a new denomination, the Global Methodist Church, that would not recognize same-sex marriage., Christianity Today reported.
“There is a need for my work amongst the dejected and the disenfranchised,” Lewis said. He is planning to launch a support group called, “LGBTQ+ Spirituality: Healing from Fundamentalism.”
Lewis said, “So many people in our community have left their faith altogether because of things like this statement from the Vatican. It sets up this struggle of loving one’s faith community while being told at the same time that they are unworthy, or unlovable or unholy.
“That type of tear is at the fabric of one’s soul. I see the devastation it causes.”
Lewis said the question he is asked most often by the people he counsels is, “How can I reconcile my faith with my sexuality?”
“There is such a need and such a hunger for connection and affirmation,” Lewis said. “And the church, unfortunately, is failing. I like to say that if a church is not affirming, restorative and healing, it has become irrelevant.”
This story was originally published March 19, 2021 at 2:27 PM with the headline "Vatican statement on same-sex marriage revives faith dilemma for LGBTQ Catholics in NC."
