And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love

I almost left the Catholic Church last week after reading the Vatican’s bulletin banning priests from blessing gay unions.

I decided to stay and to use my voice to encourage progress and the kind of equitable evangelization I know it will someday achieve.

Here is what I want to say to the people I love and admire in the LGBTQ community:

You are fearfully and wonderfully made, just as the Bible tells you.

You and I know that Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, walked this earth for 33 years and never once mentioned anything about homosexuality or transgenderism. Rather, he told us all that “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second [is] like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Boy, if we could achieve that whole call to love our neighbors as ourselves we’ve been hearing about for two thousand years, what a world this would be.

Meanwhile, we live among humans, mostly good and well-intentioned but, by definition, flawed. So, we recognize inconsistencies and unnecessarily hurtful proclamations in the world all around. When we do, I believe it is our duty to stand up for both our neighbors and for standards of good and moral behavior.

In some ways, the Catholic church is one of the most charitable in the world. My church is a site for Loaves and Fishes, a program of Catholic Charities, that served 14,327 warm nutritious meals to Fox Valley residents in 2020 despite COVID-19 challenges with supplies and delivery.

The church supports global missions and some of the finest educational facilities in the world.

In other ways, though, the church binds itself to troubling mortal barriers, especially in regard to gender and sexuality. Defining marriage, as the most recent bulletin does, as “the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life” has always seemed problematic to me. Not all heterosexual couples who marry in the Catholic church are biologically or psychologically open to the transmission of life and many same-sex couples are.

So, this criteria by which the church is effectively shunning LGBTQ members whose stable relationships demonstrate “positive elements, which are in themselves to be valued and appreciated,” as the bulletin states, is inconsistent and unkind.

That same bulletin states that “God loves every person and the Church does the same”[2], rejecting all unjust discrimination.”

So, I think the hang up here is on the word “unjust” and I call upon the Catholic Church to reexamine its definition of that word.

We Catholics have been singing, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love” since Father Peter Raymond Scholtes wrote it following the second Vatican Council.

It’s a catchy little tune, easy to sing and often used as a recessional, to send people out those church doors full of spirit and good intent. The third verse goes like this:

We will work with each other, we will work side by side;

We will work with each other, we will work side by side;

And we’ll guard each man’s dignity and save each man’s pride.

And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love

Yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

It would be nice if we could live those words as well as we sing them.