Speak credibly about questions important to LGBT+ people.
When LGBT+ people perceive an inherent conflict between Catholic faith and their experience of sexuality, they often respond with ambivalence, doubt, or fear. They will remain with the Church if they encounter Catholics who value the good, the true, and the beautiful in their longings and can even illuminate these elements by the light of the Church’s wisdom.
Nourish especially other LGBT+ people who serve as mentors, advocates, and co-laborers within the Church.
There are few, if any, well-known people who are both openly gay and seeking to live obediently as Catholics. LGBT+ people will remain with the Church if they find trustworthy mentors and co-laborers who can help them find both self-acceptance and fidelity to the Catholic way. They will respond eagerly when they are recognized as potential disciples and leaders.
Explore the ways Jesus’ story and the lives of the saints reflect LGBT/SSA+ people’s experience.
Most people have heard a lot about the “no’s” of Scripture and Catholic teaching, but know precious little about the “yes’es” offered to people with a minority experience of love, friendship, family, and sexuality. LGBT+ people will grow in faith when they connect their stories to the stories of Jesus, the saints, and contemporary gay Catholics.
The Church is an ecology in which many ways of living the Gospel sustain one another. Yet gay and same-sex attracted Catholics often hear only a "vocation of 'no'."
Catholic images of “the good life” include the well-known vocations of marriage, priesthood, and religious life as well as lesser-known life paths. Many LGBT+ people live out the Church's wisdom when they answer God's call in unexpected ways, such as lasting friendship, lives of service, and intentional community.
Show your confidence in the Church’s offer of a peace the world cannot give and forms of flourishing that the world does not yet know.
Catholics are used to hearing about gay people’s lives in the contexts of sexual morality or social justice. These are essential parts of our faith, and they keep many LGBT+ people in the Church, at least for a time. But LGBT+ people have needs, hopes, and strengths that go beyond cliched ideas of “what gay Catholics are supposed to be like.”