Can you be Catholic and an LGBT ally?

Dear friend, 

In short, yes, you can say you’re a catholic ally. 

If the worry is that if you call yourself an ally you misrepresent your self as a catholic, and if you call yourself a catholic you misrepresent yourself as an ally, please place that worry aside. 

Let’s talk about your conscience, from the Catholic perspective. In the Catechism it states:

1778 Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right. It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law:

Let’s dissect that. Your judgment of reason is to be an ally, someone who supports the journey of an LGBT friend. NOT to judge any part of it, but just to be present for it as any friend would be, just as they don’t judge your journey which is uniquely yours. The moral quality of being an ally and the concrete act of holding the hand of a friend(s) and supporting their equal ability and to use their conscience as they express love is a perfectly acceptable judgment of your and their God given reason. 

It says women is obliged to follow what is just and right. Do you see being an ally as being just and right? If you do, great. If you do not, I would ask yourself if the moral high ground you would appear to be taking is worth the friends you would lose who stand confused looking up confused as to why you’ve put yourself on a pedestal. And as you perfectly well know, the Church is not always current in its ability to recognize what is truth and based in sound science and reason. (crusades, Galileo, holocaust, etc.) Since the church has repeated the stance of ‘intrinsically disordered’ for many years, I would question how much effort they have expelled in honestly looking at the years of research and understanding that have passed since those two words were penned.

Even Ratzinger said not to silence your inner voice and that we are called to be a people of (informed) conscience. Again I would ask, how much has the Church done in the past years to inform itself as to the many complexities of human sexuality, gender, gender identity, etc? 

If your conscience says to be an ally, then natural to assume that you are recognizing that which is divine as the Catechism says. And I think anytime you can be a witness to love, especially when you can be an ally to two people who themselves are witnesses to love, what else can one see but the Divine (with a capital D)? 

So can you be a Catholic ally? Sure. Just because the institution where you find religious or spiritual solace has not caught up with how the Holy Spirit is providing us examples of beautiful love in her movements, does not make you less Catholic as you see your friend and her partner’s love as beautiful as an ally. As that ally, I would say you become more Catholic, in providing an example to the world of where our collective conscience needs to move, namely, to a place where we stand beside our LGBT brothers and sisters, admit that love is love, and maybe there’s something intrinsically disordered about not recognizing their love. 

I hope this helps. 

Love always, Adam