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Question

Dear Father Angelo,

I am a young girl who recently reached the legal age.

I recently discovered a gay friendship. It is a very sweet experience, intense, fullfilling.

I would like to live like this always. I just don’t understand why it is so difficult to be accepted.

I send you my best greetings.

Priest reply

My dear,

1. I bet that the first not to accept this relationship of yours are going to be your parents. And the reason is simple. Instinctively, they see that a relationship like this is a dead end, it doesn’t have any future.

Your parents look far. They are trying to project your actual situation in thirty, forty, fifty years…..

They would see you as two sterile, old spinsters, who are together and act like husband and wife, but without children, without grandchildrens, without a future, and who don’t have kids to live for, to hope for, to fight for.

2. You might say: “It is my life. If I think this relationship is gratifying to me, why should other people tell me that I should behave differently…..Why would they not accept me in my inclinations and my aspirations…

Because it is about the wrong inclinations.

Human sexuality has its own intrinsic meaning. It is structured for the procreation and this requires the union of two different sexes, created to complete each other not only in the genital aspect, but also in the psychological and spiritual one.

Now, the physical union of two homosexual people is forced, it is not real, a distortion of the objective meaning of sexuality.

3. The pleasure tied to the physical union is a pleasure of genital order, and that is linked to the transmission of life. But in this relationship, there is not even a shadow of the transmission of life. The erotic involvement might be very strong, but it is void of its primitive meaning. It appears to be self-serving. And therefore ineffectual.

4. The heterosexual individuals who want to live well their own sexuality abstain from sexual intercourses before marriage because they know that these relations express a total and fruitful donation.

Now, before the marriage the donation is not complete, because it reserves the right to express the finality of consent. It will be given only on the day of the marriage, after a long preparation.

The homosexual people bypass the stage of chastity.

To them chastity, as abstention from relations, is meaningless, even more so because, already from the start, is excluded the possibility that those actions might be the cause of a life altering event.

5. Likewise, also the spouses, within the marriage, if they consider a parenthood able to convey to their children everything that is necessary for them to face life, they are willing to accept a particular abstinence to space out their births. Or are forced to do it because of an imminent birth or one that just happened.

In the homosexual relationship this aspect of chastity is obliterated. They know that they are not risking anything because there is no prospect for a pregnancy.

6. Neither can be said that the situation of homosexual people would be similar to those of an infertile couple. Because in this second case there is the complementarity of the sexes. Furthermore, to them the lack of children is painful since in their souls’ disposition there is the will to risk, not only for one child, but for many as well.

7. Applies to homosexual relationships as well what God said through the voice of Saint Paul: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God; that no man transgress, and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we solemnly forewarned you. God has not called us for uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you” (1 Tess 4, 3-8).

8. “That each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor…God has not called us for uncleanness, but in holiness”. Everyone is called to this commitment, also the married couple, also the homosexual people.

9. Particularly for the homosexual people there is something that aggravate the situation. Saint Paul says that homosexuals act so “to dishonor among themselves their own bodies”.

There is an evident perversion in the Creator’s plan, written in the structure and the mission of sexuality itself.

For this reason Saint Paul talks about dishonor, degrading passions. (Rm 1,26).

He further says that “God gave them up to debased mind and to things that should not be done” (Rm 1, 32).

10. You tell me that only recently you discovered this relationship. I tell you to immediately and definitely give up this friendship, that it is not a true friendship the one in which one’s body is dishonored.

It is not true friendship that dishonors and degrades God’s plan.

Just like it is not true friendship the one that kindles with infamous passions, blinds and approves who behave in this manner.

11. It is necessary for everyone, for the homosexuals also, to pay attention to the demon of impurity. As the great master of spiritual life of the fifth century said: “One must look out for the serpent head (Gn 3,16) that is as soon as the dangerous thoughts appear through which he tries to crawl within our soul. If we welcome the head, that is the first stimulus of the thought, we end up to welcome the rest of the serpent’s body, that is our consent” (Kassian, Filocalia, I, p.130)

This is all: in the impurity with your own body, in the fornication, in adultery, in the homosexual relations. Every slip is a dam that breaks apart and you become a flood victim.

12. Therefore, immediately cut off everything and live according to God.

You’ll realize soon enough that you have been saved by the flood that could destroy the best of all your energies, those that one day will bring you to become a bride, to become a mother and a grandmother, to become “ a fertile vine in the intimacy of your home” and that is within the Church and for the Church.

I gladly assure you of my prayers and I bless you.

Father Angelo