Homosexuality: Compassion not Sentiment

Let's face it. Much of the rhetoric surrounding the debate about homosexuality and same sex marriage is bound up in sentiment. For those of you who have forgotten, let me throw in my favorite quote from Flannery O'Connor here.

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

Instead of listening to the usual polemicists on both sides perhaps we ought to take a look at this interview with the director of Courage International, a Catholic apostolate which ministers faithfully to those with same sex attraction.  The more I think about this issue, the more I am inclined to listen to those who have demonstrated real compassion and ignore those whose compassion is largely theoretical. If chastity is part of the good news of the Gospel, then preaching sexual morality in isolation from the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ is a waste of time. Do you want to save souls or merely preserve public decency?

 

Approaching Homosexuality With ‘True Compassion,’ Not ‘Sentimentality’

Father Paul Check, executive director of Courage International, says that his organization has answers to the pastoral questions the Church has about providing a compelling witness to persons with same-sex attraction.

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You’ve mentioned severity, and that’s a real danger, but I think the real problem is “sentimentality.”

The wider-spread problem is that we have separated a thoughtful, compassionate response — a sensitive response — from the truth.

In the opening paragraphs of his last encyclical, the pope emeritus makes a distinction between “sentimentality” and “compassion.” He indicates that the former is a counterfeit and that compassion is something based on the truth. I think a question that all Christians need to ask themselves is something very simple: “Do I believe that chastity is part of the good news of the Gospel?”

I’m not sure how widespread that conviction is, especially in an age where sexual promiscuity (in many forms) is responsible for a lot of broken hearts, a lot of sadness, a lot of regrets, a lot of disappointment, pain, suffering. … Why is that? I think we, individually, can test our own conviction about whether chastity is a virtue and something that prepares us for fulfillment in a way that God, in his wisdom for our nature, is very intense for us.