Always Our Children?
If we’re all children of God, why doesn’t the church treat us better?
Recently, Pope Francis generated headlines by telling a group of parents that God loves their children.
Really?
As Gerard O’Connell reported for America:
[Mara Grassi] told Francis “We wish to create a bridge to the church so that the church too can change its way of looking at our children, no longer excluding them but fully welcoming them.”
Having listened carefully to what she said, Pope Francis reassured her, “The church does not exclude them because she loves them deeply”…
She said the pope, in response, assured her and the other parents present that “God loves our children because they are all children of God.” And when she requested that the church, too, should change its ways so that no one feels excluded, Francis reassured them saying, “The church loves our children as they are.”
Since the early days of his papacy, many have held out hope that Pope Francis is the long-awaited leader that the Catholic church needs to finally listen to the experience of LGBTQ people, to name the sins of heterosexism, and to fulfill its promise of inclusion, of love for all of God’s children and creation. I never shared that specific hope. When he was elected by the College of Cardinals, I felt a spark of hope that the church would return to the vision of the Second Vatican Council, to John XXIII’s wisdom to open the windows and to reconcile its relationship with the modern (now increasingly postmodern) world. When Francis took on a tone of humility and compassion when talking publicly about LGBTQ people, I hoped that others would follow this lead and, if not shift the structures and doctrines to recognize and integrate the full humanity and inherent dignity of queer people, at least be a little bit kinder.
It hasn’t exactly worked out.
In 1997, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops published a pastoral letter (Always Our Children: A Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children and Suggestions for Pastoral Ministers) to offer guidance and comfort to parents who are coping “with the discovery of homosexuality in their adolescent or adult child.” The letter frames the coming out experience as a “time of grace,” and offers pretty solid advice on how to respond in a way that demonstrates love for their children and that enables critical self-reflection. The bullet pointed conclusion includes a series of recommendations for parents and ministers with an emphasis on leading with love and compassion.
While there is nothing in the letter that suggests variation from Church teaching, I felt a significant shift in tone — a once cold voice adopted a tone of respect, suggesting an earnest olive branch offered in search of common ground. When I started working as a campus minister, teacher, and administrator in Catholic institutions, I returned to this letter frequently both for guidance and as a much-appreciated glimmer of hope that, someday, my personhood might be recognized in full by my church. Several years ago, I made the decision to leave Catholic schools because I couldn’t be an authentic and effective educator by leaving part of myself at the door on the way into work each day, but in a corner of my heart, I really miss the explicit religious context of my work — I miss being motivated each day by the mission to make known the love of the heart of Jesus. I miss sharing and helping students to cultivate their own spiritual practices. I miss walking alongside my students as they navigate their own personal, intellectual, and spiritual growth.
Recently, the Supreme Court fueled my hope with the Bostock v. Clayton County Georgia, ensuring employment protections for LGBTQ folks, and depleted it with Our Lady of Guadelupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, which affirmed that religious institutions could hire and fire as they will, protected by a now-expanded interpretation of the ministerial exemption. Again, seeking guidance and maybe a little bit of hope, I returned to Always Our Children. I’d hoped to find some solace, to find that the core of this letter, a spirit of dialogue and compassion, might still be active and restore a bit of hope, but I didn’t. Here’s why:
“All in all, it is essential to recall one basic truth. God loves every person as a unique individual. Sexual identity helps to define the unique persons we are, and one component of our sexual identity is sexual orientation. Thus, our total personhood is more encompassing than sexual orientation. Human beings see the appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart (cf. 1 Sm 16:7).”
So far, so good.
“God does not love someone any less simply because he or she is homosexual. God’s love is always and everywhere offered to those who are open to receiving it.”
Except in the form of employment, apparently.
In the decades since the letter was published, I have never seen representatives of the Church actually acknowledge the full personhood of LGBTQ folks, and the pattern of identifying, firing, and justifying their firing only affirms hypocrisy on this count. God may not love someone any less because of their sexual orientation, but the Church sure does.
“Christ summons all his followers — whether they are married or living a single life — to a higher standard of loving…Indeed God expects everyone to strive for the perfection of love but to achieve it gradually through stages of moral growth. To keep our feet on the path of conversion, God’s grace is available to and sufficient for everyone open to receiving it.”
This is an interesting segment. Sandwiched between affirmations of human dignity, rights, and freedoms, the Bishops take a moment to recognize the potential for sinful behavior in all people and remind that all unmarried persons are called to chastity, that “sexual intercourse occur only within marriage between a man and a woman,” and that sexual intercourse “must be open to the possible creation of human life.” The Bishops don’t open this up for debate; instead, they imply that they are not targeting homosexuals, that they are only reinforcing the teaching for all God’s children. “One’s total personhood is not reducible to sexual orientation or behavior,” the segment concludes. However, I’m not aware of a persistent pattern of heterosexual sinners being purged from Catholic institutions.
“Respect for the God-given dignity of all persons means the recognition of human rights and responsibilities…It is not sufficient only to avoid unjust discrimination. Homosexual persons ‘must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity…The Christian community should offer its homosexual sisters and brothers understanding and pastoral care.”
Respect. Compassion. Sensitivity. Pastoral care. Well, to a point. The same paragraph reaffirms the Church’s “right to deny public roles of service and leadership to persons, whether homosexual or heterosexual, whose public behavior openly violates its teachings.” Yes, be one of us. Commune. Contribute to the life of this community. Explore the mysteries of revelation. Make God’s love known in the world. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God…until you hold up a mirror to our hypocrisy, until we don’t like what we don’t understand, until we’ve drawn a line to define the mind of God.
The ultimate failure in this message is its starting point: the Bishops seek to reaffirm Church teaching and to comfort parents and priests who don’t know how to respond. Nowhere in this letter do the Bishops recognize that the Holy Spirit might be working through queer folks to demonstrate the ways that the teachings and practices of the Church must adapt or change. This would not be a unique phenomenon — the teachings of the Church have responded to and advocated for people on the margins of society for centuries. In the 19th century, the Church addressed the destructive impact of industrialization on human dignity and society at large. In the 20th century, the Second Vatican Council sought to open the windows and air out the Church, emphasized the role of the laity, and recognized that there is truth and wisdom outside the Church. As the Civil rights movement emerged, lay and religious Catholics excavated a forgotten layer of the Gospels and uplifted equity and justice as primary concerns of a Christian community, as central to the work of establishing God’s reign. The experiences of the poor, of workers, of racial and ethnic minorities have challenged the Church to transform its practices and informed the theology of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Why is it so hard now to look to the lived experiences LGBTQ people, a group that is marginalized, that is targeted for hate, persecution, and violence just for the fact of being born the way God created them? Why is it so hard to ask, what is the Holy Spirit trying to show us? What do I need to see and hear?
The letter ends with a coda “to our homosexual brothers and sisters.”
“Though at times you may feel discouraged, hurt, or angry, do not walk away from your families, from the Christian community, from all those who love you. In you God’s love is revealed. You are always our children.”
Twenty years ago, I chose to read this conclusion as heart-felt and loving; I chose to maintain the hope that was seeded somewhere deep in this letter; I chose to emphasize the ways that some people responded to this letter by actually choosing love and inclusion, ignoring those who sought some form of institutional purity. I believed then and I believe now that people’s worldviews are shaped more by relationships than letters, and Christians will come to understand that God’s creation is much more complex than humans can recognize and much more diverse than an ancient system of logic can affirm. Eventually, the Church’s teachings on sexuality will acknowledge that there’s more to procreation than making babies. Eventually, people like me won’t have to work so hard to remind others that in us, God’s love is revealed.
But today, I read it very differently. At the experience of feeling discouraged, hurt, or angry, the bishops dare to tell us “do not walk away.” They dare to remind us, as if we didn’t know, that our lives reveal God’s love. They dare to claim us as their own, as their children.
Mara Grassi seized the moment of meeting Pope Francis not to gawk at the man who stands in the shoes of the fisherman, to ask for a blessing, or even to ask for a selfie. She seized the moment to give him an opportunity to listen to their experience, to name the sins of the church, and to lay the first stone in a bridge to welcome the people who had once been pushed away. She gave Francis an opportunity to follow her example of not wanting or praying or forcing her child to change but to find a new way of looking at him, to find a new way of seeing and understanding and loving God’s creation. She even gave him the words to use — “the church too can change its way of looking at our children, no longer excluding them but fully welcoming them.”
And he responded, “The church loves our children as they are.”
Elegantly, gently, and lovingly, Pope Francis dismissed the lived experience of her child, of queer people. Elegantly, gently, and lovingly, he put the stone down and shut the doors, as so many of us who had been pushed out, waited to reenter.
So I turn to the words of Jesus.
“Whatever town or village you enter, look for a worthy person in it, and stay there until you leave. As you enter a house, wish it peace. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; if not, let your peace return to you. Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words, go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.” (Matthew 10:11–15)
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of me shaking the dust from my feet.
