Bill Cork notes that the University of Notre Dame web site has this page promoting Solidarity Sunday, “annual event each Fall semester that highlights our community>A commenter at Bill’s site is a student at ND and relates the following email he received from Campus Ministry:
Prayer cards with rainbow stickers will be delivered to the Campus
Ministry Commissioners in the residence halls on Friday, October 7. We make the following suggestioins:Instead of leaving prayer cards in the back of the chapel, place them as appropriate at the ends of pews or on chairs.
Recite the prayer together after the post-communion prayer, if the presider so wishes.
Nice way to use the Mass to push this particular agenda.
I wonder if the prayer card will quote from St. John Chrysostom’s sermon on the Letter to the Romans in which he says about sodomites ” But when God hath left one, then all things are turned upside down. And thus not only was their doctrine Satanical, but their life too was diabolical.”
Dom wrote:
“Yes, I know the Catechism teaches that we are to love the sinner and hate the sin, but why is this the sin that gets special treatment.”
It’s not the sin that’s getting special treatment, it’s the people who are gay and lesbian. And the reason for the special treatment is that in many places (certainly a place like Notre Dame) gay and lesbian people are treated with less than Christian charity.
Do you think that Notre Dame is not concerned about its “Fornicating and Beer-Binging Students?” It is indeed. It’s one of the few schools which still forbids co-ed dorms and maintains parietals that are enforced. Student drinking at ND is and has long been a serious concern of the Student Affairs Office and Campus Ministry. Of course, students who fornicate and drink too much are seldom made fun of, excluded socially or thought of in terms of grave sin, instrinsic disorder and perversity.
I’m grateful to Dom for linking us to the ND Standing Committee webpage. There you will find the whole of Catholic teaching on homosexuality, drawing largely from the Catechism and Always Our Children. No watering down here and it certainly doesn’t “smack of an ideological agenda at odds with the Churchentity.
How can one be Christian and be “gay”?
I can understand how one can struggle with perverse sexual desires and be Christian. But to label oneself as “gay” is to identify with desires to engage in acts that are deeply offensive to God.
A Christian with perverse sexual desires prays to God to be freed of them. He would certainly not share this sad fact with others without a good reason much less expect others to accept them as good.
Gays do not want our compassion. They want us to accept their lifestyle as normal.
It is not. Charity requires us to say it.
“students who fornicate and drink too much are seldom made fun of, excluded socially or thought of in terms of grave sin, instrinsic disorder and perversity.”
There is nothing intrinsically disordered or perverse about fornication. It is simply a grave sin. Sexual intercourse is good. Sodomy is intrinsically evil. It is good for people to desire sexual intercourse. God made us this way. It is bad for people to desire sodomy. We must pray to be healed of this desire.
Michael, Dom, Charles S and Charles W:
It seems from your responses that any effort to treat gay and lesbian persons with “respect, compassion and sensitivity” is interpreted as pandering to or accepting of sinfulness. Or perhaps you really do believe that hammering home “instrinsic disorder and grave depravity” is how we show respect, compassion and sensitivity.
I thought the fact that the ND site includes such full representation of church teaching would make some impression here but I see that it doesn’t. It’s what you call for and decry when it is absent, but even it’s present it isn’t, apparently,enough.
I’d debate this further but I’m not sure which bishops and which bishops’ statements and which parts of church documents you buy when you shop in your episcopal cafeteria. I’m not unaware of my own biases and emphases. Do you see yours? Or, like Bill O’Reilly, do you believe that you live in a perfectly true, no-spin zone?
“There is nothing intrinsically disordered or perverse about fornication.”
Yes, there is. It is unholy and can seperate the soul from God for all eternity. It is disordered and base because it is an act of violence against love.
“Sexual intercourse is good”
Only if it is an expression of love in the sense of making a gift of one’s entire self to one’s spouse in union with God. Remember, only God is good.
It is not good for people to desire sexual intercourse for the sake of mere pleasure. It is good to love God who gifts us with his love and with the ability to offer oneself to another in union with Him. This is good and beautiful. Lust is violent and ugly. It is a disordered act against the beauty and dignity of the human person in that it violates their divine right to be loved and replaces it with the violent act of being used as an object of pleasure or selfishness.
“God made us this way”.
No, God made us to love and to be loved.
“It is bad for people to desire sodomy.”
It is bad to desire anything that is unholy. It is unholy to desire to be the object of lust or to lust after another for one’s selfish pleasure.
Yes, we certainly must pray to be healed of such unholy desires. It is better to love our neighbor and to give them the truth even in suffering.
God Bless,
Isabelle