Building Catholic Futures

Put Out into the Deep

Nov 5 2024

This week, we invite you to consider how you can help bring a BCF Mission Week to your diocese in 2025, and we explore the resonance of the Raising of Lazarus for our work!

Vision on the Ground!

What if every Catholic responsible for the care of souls already knew what it looks like for gay people to flourish in the Church? What if every priest, every parent, every educator, and every layperson out in the world knew the stories of multiple LGBT/same-sex attracted people living in harmony with the Church? What if there were gay people in the mix, open and well-known to the community, whenever Catholics worshiped, served the needy, or shared their faith?

BCF is working to select six dioceses to focus on in 2025. We’ll work toward a BCF Mission Week in each of these dioceses: a glimpse of what the Church can look like when gay people’s faith is nourished.

In each diocese, we’ll be looking for a coordinator on the ground who believes in our mission and vision. This person will help us develop relationships with the Catholic institutions and leaders we’ll be working with. A coordinator might start out with relationships in several different areas. For example, if you know that your parish priest and DRE, the head of the diocesan evangelization office, and several parents at your kid’s Catholic school are all interested in better serving and sharing the Gospel with gay people, you might be a terrific coordinator for your diocese. Or a coordinator might have a lot of trust and deep relationships in one institution: the seminary where you teach, for example, or the Newman Center where you became a Catholic.

As you may have guessed, we’ve got a “long list” of dioceses to winnow down. But we want your diocese on the board! If you’re in a position to be a coordinator in your diocese, let us know.

There is a future where every Catholic knows that gay people can flourish in the Church—because they’ve seen it. That future might begin in your backyard.

Bring BCF to Your Diocese

Lazarus, Come Out!

In this month when we remember our dead, and trust that Jesus can liberate us from our own graves of fear, shame, or bitterness, we think of BCF Witness Grant Hartley’s comparison of the tomb and the closet:

"The tears of Jesus give us permission to be “greatly disturbed” by our own encounters with death, which flies in the face of much conventional wisdom about death as a natural and necessary part of life. We are reminded here of what all of us know intuitively: the wrongness, the unnaturalness, of death. Our discomfort with it is not merely due to our naive optimism or rose-colored glasses; it is in tune with reality. Lazarus, and all the loved ones whom we have lost over the years, should still be alive. There should be no graves, no tombs. Death is not as it should be.

"And death not only appear to us at the end of our lives, but in devastatingly various forms throughout the length of our lives as well: the end of a season of life, of a relationship, of a community, of a dream—all “little deaths” that haunt us. And it is in this respect we can think of the closet as a representation of death: all the small deceptions it requires, all the words of vulnerability it demands to be swallowed rather than spoken, the fear and shame that casts out love and intimacy. The closet is a “little tomb” that should not exist. This, too, is not as it should be.

Prayer Requests

We invite you to pray for Eve as she prepares for her covenant of kinship, after the model of Ruth and Naomi. Eve suggests asking Our Lady Star of the Sea to pray that she and her partner may lead one another closer to Christ.

And from the BCF community:

Please pray for my friend Chloe, a new Christian, that she may deepen her relationship to the Church and her faith.

And please pray for Building Catholic Futures, that we may be faithful and fearless witnesses to God’s work in our lives. When you contact us, feel free to let us know how we can pray for you.

Thank You!

To learn more and get involved, you can send us a quick note via the Contact Us page at BuildingCatholic.org. And if you received this from a friend, and are not yet a subscriber, click Building Catholic Futures and fill out the Keep in Touch form to receive future updates.

And please prayerfully consider helping us meet the financial needs of BCF by using the Donate to BCF form at BuildingCatholic.org.

Duc in altum! Put out into the deep!

Eve and Keith

Building Catholic Futures

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