Today’s readings for the second Sunday of Advent set forth a vision of radical welcome and hospitality. They remind us of the eternal promise that the coming Christ makes all things new. We can trace this promise, this new world order, through Isaiah, the Psalms, Paul’s Letter to the Romans and Matthew’s Gospel. Today we continue to prepare the way of the Lord, recognizing that inviting Christ into our lives means turning the world on its head and having an open heart for all that is to come in the coming kingdom.  

On the other side of the liturgical year, we encounter the Cross, which is always looming even as we prepare for the birth of Christ. All Catholics are called to identify and find counsel in the cross. This is an undeniable tenet of the faith. Yet, church teaching inappropriately counsels LGBTQ+ Catholics to identify their sexuality with the cross. In this season of Advent, I offer that the birth of Christ is the appropriate place for LGBTQ+ Catholics to find welcome and rest in hope. The rootedness of Isaiah reminds us that a “bud shall blossom…the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb”.  This form of radical welcome and reversal of oppressive structures speaks to both the societal and personal work of coming out and living as an authentic LGBTQ+ Catholic. 

In Homosexuality and the Counsel of the Cross (2004), Paul G. Crowley, SJ unravels church teaching that LGBTQ+ Catholics should employ Christ’s crucifixion as a model for how to live out their God-given sexual orientation. He summarizes, “In the face of gay Catholic  existence, the Church in Vatican teaching currently offers a stark spiritual counsel: to join one’s sufferings, whatever those may be precisely as a gay person, to the sufferings of Jesus on the Cross and to live a life of sexual renunciation…focused on a blending of those sufferings attendant upon this condition with the Passion of Christ.” (504) Crowley recognizes that the teaching leads LGBTQ+ Catholics to the crucifixion of desires for same sex love. The institutional church offers LGBTQ+ Catholics the cross as a model. Full stop. 

Crowley points out that the “specificity of application” in Church teaching is deeply troubling. It misses out on a, if not the, central component of the Cross – “a suffering love freely accepted and leading toward love”. (508) Counseling LGBTQ+ Catholics to unite their sexuality to the cross creates a “dual-track” for heterosexual and LGBTQ+ Catholics, as if God the creator would create intrinsic suffering (linked to the gift of sexuality) for some but not others. It “presumes a state of celibacy, but does not explain how this can be achieved by someone who does not freely choose it, who does not know a vocation to it.” (516)  One cannot be born into a vow. Institutional church teaching creates a prison for LGBTQ+ Catholics, with no hope other than a life of denial and aestheticism. 

Crowley rightly recognizes that suffering is a part of life for LGBTQ+ Catholics, yet he points out that the suffering of the Cross leads to new life. Church teaching that the Cross is the end of the road for LGBTQ+ Catholics denies us resurrection and joy; we know that the Cross isn’t the end of the story. Crowley recognizes that Jesus’ Cross was an unwarranted punishment and Christ would never knowingly send his children there without the hope of something more, without a whole lot of love and joy on the other side. Today, we celebrate the coming birth, the coming hope, which comes to fruition in the eternal life and hope of the resurrection. This is the joy in which LGBTQ+ Catholics should find themselves and should be counseled to identify with. We remember, also, Paul’s entreaties of “endurance and encouragement” as they can be a much needed life raft for LGBTQ+ Catholics. Paul calls us to “think in harmony with one another, in keeping with Christ Jesus, that with one accord you may with one voice, glorify God.”

Reflect on a person you care about in the LGBTQ+ community (maybe that person is you:) Reflect on the qualities you love in this person, what makes them who they are. Remember a time you have observed or learned that this beloved person was made to feel “less than” or was discriminated against, maybe even a time when you had thoughts of judgment or believed them different. 

In your mind, affirm this person for being who God made them to be, wrap them in a warm blanket that does not only tolerate, but celebrates who they are. How might your “endurance and encouragement” affirm this person and celebrate who they are. How might your voice or actions help you to become the one “calling out in the wilderness” of their loneliness or pain, to remind them that they are a beloved child of God, to invite them to the birth of new life with Christ.

Along with Fr. Robert Nugent, Sr. Jeannine Grammick founded New Ways Ministry in 1977, at a time when “you could not even say the word gay.” She was recently interviewed recently in America Magazine, after Pope Francis sent her a letter celebrating her 50 years of ministry to LGBTQ+ Catholics. When they first founded New Ways, Grammick and Nugent traveled around the country. She remembers that they were “mostly in mother houses of women’s communities or retreat centers…women religious were the first ones in the church to move on the issue of homosexuality.” As a Catholic nun, she was often the first welcoming face many LGBTQ+ Catholics had ever seen in the Church. She walked unafraid alongside LGBTQ+ Catholics, preaching not only tolerance, but acceptance and love. In the late 1990s, Grammick was notified by the Vatican that she was no longer allowed to minister to LGBTQ+ Catholics. Despite these threats to her work and personal vocation, she said she vowed to “continue to tell not only my story with the Vatican, but my story with L.G.B.T. people. I needed to continue to advocate for them because they had no advocate in the institutional church.”  She went from being silenced by the Church to being celebrated. She is truly a modern day John the Baptist, “a voice crying out in the desert”. She shared that her “hope for L.G.B.T. Catholics is that they all feel welcome and comfortable in any parish in the world. That they might feel just as much a part of the church as anyone else.” 

The Tyler Clementi Foundation “was founded by the Clementi family to prevent bullying through inclusion and the assertion of dignity and acceptance as a way to honor the memory of Tyler: a son, a brother, and a friend.”  Tyler was a college student at Rutgers University when he took his own life after cruel cyber-bullying and harassment from his roommate. The Tyler Clementi Foundation works with civic and religious institutions to create and foster atmospheres of acceptance and safety for LGBTQ+ youth. They invited Catholic bishops to sign the “God is on Your Side” statement and published it on their website. Their “True Faith Doesn’t Bully” campaign invites communities of faith to examine their teachings on LGBTQ+ people by recognizing and rejecting “religion-based bullying” of LGBTQ+ persons in their congregations and communities.