This morning I received an email notification with which I was informed that a new user had chosen to follow the new blog of Gay Project http://gayproject2.wordpress.com/.
I went to read the blog of this new user http://gayeverday.wordpress.com/ the author is a 20 year old guy who will discuss issues related to the relationship between homosexuality and faith. Many topics covered by this guy are actually fundamental to the lives of gay men. Clearly his point of view is closely tied to religion, seeking to reconcile religion and homosexuality, as a lot guys do or try to do.
This post aims to highlight the eyes of people who do not live in Italy about the problem of reconciling homosexuality and religion as seen in Italy, that is in a country where Catholicism is formally dominant, homophobia is still prevalent and issues of homosexuality are not even minimally treated in education.
In Italy, a young gay man who feels Christian sooner or later has to take note that the official position of the Catholic Church and the documents of the Holy See always radically condemn homosexuality. The Church considers homosexuality as “grave depravity”, “sad consequence of rejecting God,” “lack of normal sexual development”, “pathological constitution”, “intrinsically evil behavior from the moral point of view.” St. Pius X, in his Catechism of 1910, ranks the “impure sin against nature” as second in seriousness only to voluntary murder, by the sins that “cry out for vengeance before God” (Catechism, n. 966). I wrote several posts (in Italian, but I plan to publish them soon also in English) on the weight that Catholic education has on the growth of a homosexual guy, I cite here only one post already published in English.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly states that it is the duty of the homosexual person to live in total chastity, which means radically eliminating even masturbation considered as a grave sin.
Beyond these official determinations of the Catholic Church, many guys who feel gay but also feel believers seek in various ways to reconcile what seems irreconcilable.
It should be emphasized that in the Catholic Church itself, eminent personalities use completely different languages and show deep respect towards homosexuality really considered as a form of love.
Recently died Cardinal Martini, a person of very enlightened mind not only in this but in many other areas. After the death of Cardinal I opened on the Gay Project forum a discussion about his books and his positions. Here you can read the discussion in English
All posts showed a deep respect for the man and his ideas. Remains, however, that Cardinal Martini has been a courageous voice very isolated, I would say a voice heard more by non-believers rather than by the Catholic community.
Frankly, it is not credible that the Catholic Church will change its position or maybe this process will take a long time. The fact remains that I see frequently guys strongly perplexed by the fact that what makes them happy is actually always presented as depravity, as mental illness or as a sin. For this reason, many young people, in full consciousness, decide to separate from the Church and begin to live their religion on their own looking for a true reconciliation of homosexuality and faith.
On Gay Project forum many guys believers have tried to show the way and the results of their inner search. The problem is serious and I think it is extremely interesting to see how it is dealt with in other countries with very different traditions.
_______
If you like, you can join the discussion on this post on Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=18
No comments:
Post a Comment