Why has it been so difficult for the Catholic church to reach out to LGBTQ people?

Text by James Martin* SJ taken from Recognition of LGBTIQ+ Persons in the Church, Booklets, no.185, Cristianisme i Justícia, Barcelona, ​​September 2022, pp. 2-5.

Why has it been so difficult for the Catholic church to reach out to LGBTQ people? Why does the church lag so far behind secular organizations, and even other churches, who have made this community feel more welcome?

And why is the church so slow to try to help and protect a group of people who are often at risk of harassment, beatings and violence? Why is it so hard for Catholics to see LGBTQ people as beloved children of God?

Now, this is not the case everywhere in the world. Some Catholic dioceses, parishes and schools sponsor vibrant ministries to LGBTQ people, where they feel welcome in what is, after all, their church, too.

And as more Catholics are open about their sexual orientation and feel less embarrassed by the way that God has created them, more families are affected. And as more families are affected, more parishes and schools are affected. All this means that there is a greater desire for more welcome.

Another small but important influence has come in the families of bishops and priests, whose nieces and nephews are more likely to “come out” to them than even a few years ago.

This enables bishops and priests (as well as brothers and sisters in religious orders) to see LGBTQ people not simply as categories or stereotypes, or even as theological categories who have an “objectively disordered” sexuality, but as people, as individuals, as family members. With such small steps towards greater understanding and love, the church moves ahead.

Also, in the past few years, Pope Francis has taken some small but significant steps regarding his own outreach to LGBTQ people in the church. First, the Holy Father has appointed many cardinals, archbishops and bishops who are more welcoming to LGBTQ Catholics.

Second, Francis himself has spoken warmly about the need to welcome LGBTQ people in the church, in various venues. (In fact, he is the first Pope ever to use the word “gay” publicly.) Finally, he has written encouraging letters to Catholics who minister to LGBTQ Catholics around the world (including myself). Taken together, Pope Francis's efforts have made LGBTQ people feel that the church is more of a home for them.

But there are still places where LGBTQ people come in for the severest criticism from church leaders (both clergy and lay), who consistently label them as “sinners.” In some places they are made to feel unwelcome in parishes, fired from positions at Catholic institutions, and even denied the sacraments.

The label of “sinner” is especially offensive since all of us are, in one way or another, sinful. None of us is perfect, all of us sin, and all of us need forgiveness and repentance. But no other group is treated with as much contempt, even when their lives are not fully in conformity with church teaching.

For example, many married couples today use birth control. Yet when I give talks to married couples, no one asks, “Why are you speaking to sinners?”

Likewise, many students in colleges and universities are sexually active, which is also not in conformity with church teaching. And yet, again, when I give lectures to college students, no one says to me, “Why are you speaking with sinners?”

It is only the LGBT person who is labeled as such. With almost every other group, even where many people in the group are not living fully in accord with church teaching, people treat them with respect, assume that they are following their consciences and welcome them into the church.

Why is that? Mainly it is because we know them. We know married couples who may be struggling with the teachings on birth control but who, we know, are using their consciences as best they can to help them come to a moral decision.

Likewise, we know college-age students and know that they are trying their best to live a moral life. We know these people, we love them, and so we trust them. We see them in the complexity of their lives, as we see ourselves in the complexity of our lives.

The same is not true for LGBTQ people, who often remain unknown, mysterious and “other” to many people in the church, including many church leaders. They are not individuals with consciences, trying their best to lead loving lives, but stereotypes and categories. So they are rejected, excluded and condemned.

The key is the “Culture of Encounter” that Pope Francis often highlights: coming to know people as friends, in their “joys and hopes” and “griefs and anxieties,” as the Second Vatican Council says in its beautiful document Gaudium et Spes.

Indeed, the “joys and hopes” and “griefs and anxieties” of all people, says the church in that document, are the joys and hopes and griefs and anxieties of the “followers of Christ.” Why? Because “nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.” In other words, the church is close to all people.

Yet it is closer to some people than to others. Naturally, we are close to those whom we know. This is one reason for the church to reach out to LGBTQ people, so we can come to know them, love them and accompany them.

This is the church's task today. More fundamentally it was Jesus's mission: to reach out to all those who felt neglected, excluded or marginalized. Jesus did this repeatedly in his public ministry: reaching out to a Roman centurion, a Samaritan woman, a tax collector named Zacchaeus. All people who, for different reasons, were on the margins. A Roman centurion was not even Jewish.

A Samaritan woman with a strange sexual history, ostracized by her own people. And a tax collector colluding with the occupying power of Rome, most likely hated by his fellow Jews. Yet Jesus reaches out to them and reminds his disciples that these are not stereotypes or categories, these are people.

Thus, reaching out to those on the margins—and there is no one more marginalized than LGBTQ people in the church—is not only the task for the church, but the ministry of Jesus himself.

Pastoral outreach, then, to LGBTQ Catholics is not simply a fad, or a passing trend, or even something responding to “pressures” from the culture, but a constitutive work of the church and a mission that finds its ultimate roots in the Gospels.

* James Martin. Jesuit. Writer and editor at America magazine. In 2017 Pope Francis appointed him consultant to the Vatican Secretariat for Communication. His book Building a Bridge (2018, HarperOne), in which he explains how the Catholic Church and the LGBTIQ+ community can establish a relationship of respect, compassion, and sensitivity, sparked an intense debate within the church. In 2021 a documentary about his LGBTIQ+ ministry, also called “Building a Bridge,” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival (New York).