Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

I saw an article today reporting that the University Catholic Center at the University of Texas at Austin was starting a “Gay and Lesbian” support group.  This was confirmed on the Center’s website.

Now it is not clear from the report what this support group will entail.  They interview the Paulist priest who will be leading the group, Fr. Ed Koharchik, who provides some interesting statements as reported by UT’s student newspaper, The Daily Texan:

“We want to provide a safe place for young people to talk about this issue – how does it fit in with the Catholic Church teachings?” said the Rev. Ed Koharchik, associate director at the center. “Whether one is gay or straight, it’s morally neutral.”

In recent weeks, the center has promoted the support group, whose purpose is to shed light on the “misconstrued teachings of the church” with respect to non-heterosexual lifestyles, Koharchik said.

“It’s about this group of people and how to stay within the teachings of the church and yet still identify as being of that orientation,” said Michael Jungwirth, a Middle Eastern studies graduate student. “It sounds reasonable.”

Now what he means by “morally neutral” I suppose depends upon what he means by being “gay or straight.”  Unfortunately, using those terms succumbs  to the mistaken notion that same sex attraction has some ontological basis rather than being a disorder that requires healing.  Fr. Koharchik seems to recognize that the terms refer first to a life style.  In other words, they are forms of behavior.

The comments from the student sound promising I suppose.  It is important to stay within the teachings of the Church.  However, I am not all that confident about Fr. Koharchik’s understanding of Church teaching if some of his interviews have been correctly reported.  For example, in an interview with the Daily Texan, published by Politico before the election he is said to have claimed that social issues like immigration and the death penalty were just as important as abortion…Catholics are not single issue voters.  Some additional comments:

Koharchik said he hopes to deter Catholics from breaking off their relationship with God due to their sexual orientation. He said he wants community members to know that sexuality is not tied to an individual’s personhood and that linking the two together could “cut off awareness to goodness.”

Now this is a troubling, deficient anthropology.  If he said this, he really should learn John Paul II’s theology of the body.  In fact, one’s sex is constitutive, in part, of personhood.  One is male or female and cannot be a human person without being so.  Sex difference establishes the structure by which the individual person exercises his personhood.  The claim attributed to Fr. Koharchik introduces a dualism into the person not unrelated to the body-soul dualism of our post-Cartesian Western culture (often mistakenly attributed to Platonism some would argue).  Teaching young people who are confused about their sexual identity because of some pathology that their sexual identity is not part of who they are as persons is not the solution.  In fact, they will recognize that this is false.

Rather, one needs to help them better understand how in fact their intuition that their sex is an integral aspect them as persons, is in fact valid.  The fact that they suffer from an interior conflict between who they are and how they feel is something they do need to understand.  Otherwise, I do not see how they will ever be able to understand why the Church teaches as She does, that they cannot act on certain inclinations.  If they are given to think that this great drive in their lives is something completely unrelated to them as persons and so acting upon it is sinful then this will appear to be an arbitrary, unfair, and impossible demand…something they already, no doubt, feel.

I am further discouraged by the resource that they have chosen as their guide; the problematic, notorious document released by the NCCB a few years back:

Among other pastoral recommendations aimed toward church ministers, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops suggests in its pamphlet, “Always Our Children,” that religious entities “help to establish or promote support groups for parents and family members” of gays and lesbians.

This document had the overall affect of saying “yes you are gay but you ought not to act upon it.”  A ridiculous proposition from any perspective.  I do hope that the following authentically expresses the teachings of the Church

Koharchik’s goal for the support group is to encourage a chaste lifestyle for every person and to encourage members to “live morally good and make proper decisions.

If the way Fr. Koharchik has been represented in the Daily Texan is an accurate portrayal of his thinking, I am concerned that his group will foster more hurt and confusion among those already suffering from such a difficult disorder that attacks the very center of one’s personal identity.  I recognize that it is possible that they are using terminology that they consider pastorally necessary (the fact that they seem to have asked for the Austin Diocese’s support might support this possibility) but it is also possible that they are getting into something that they are not qualified to do.  I would have to ask why they would not draw upon an already existing and successful program like Courage rather than going it alone with an approach that, as the reporting suggests, is in danger of bearing doing more harm than good.