Last month, Italian priest Don Mario Bonfanti
shook the Catholic Church on Coming Out Day when he announced that he
was gay. This situation obviously presents a potential dilemma for an institution like the Church.
More importantly, however, it presents an important opportunity for the Catholic community to live up to its promises of love.
It is time to move past the kind of empty rhetoric that we have all experienced this election cycle and truly begin to love our neighbors. That means loving them for who they really are, not who we believe they should be.
When asked to comment on Bonfanti’s announcement, Paul Ross, FCRH ’15, said, “It doesn’t bug me at all. I see nothing wrong with it.”
David Emami, GSB ’15, shared a similar sentiment.
“I’m okay with it,” he said. “Is he a good priest?”
Emami is right to be more concerned with Bonfanti’s performance as a priest.
If Bonfanti is being a good spiritual leader for the members of his congregation, then that is all that matters.
Furthermore, I challenge my fellow Catholics to evaluate and potentially amend their definitions of what a good spiritual leader does. A good spiritual leader empowers the members of his or her community to be who they really are.
“When you go to talk to [any other] priest, [presumably] he’s attracted to women, so there’s no real difference talking to a priest who is attracted to men, as long as his life is devoted to God,” Marc Alibrandi, FCRH ’15, said.
While it is true that Bonfanti does not act upon his sexual attraction to men, which ultimately means he is not sinning, Catholics should reject this defense of Bonfanti in favor of a better, more loving one.
Bonfanti, and every other homosexual man or woman for that matter, are people, and they too are created in God’s image and have human dignity.
One hundred twenty years of Catholic social thought is based on the idea that human dignity is bestowed by God, yet we deny members of the LBGT community their full humanity.
We deny them the ability to be fully themselves. There is no justice in that.
One of my personal mentors, who just so happens to be gay, once told me “Gay people have two birthdays; the one when they came into this world, and the one when they become who they really are.”
That really resonated with me, and I hope that it does with you too. As a straight man, I am afforded the ability to be who I am without fear of stigma or rejection, but not everyone lives with the same comfort that I do.
“There’s no reason that him being gay and him being a priest have to be mutually exclusive,” Ross said.
And there is no reason to say that being gay and being a Catholic have to be mutually exclusive.
With that, I want to reinforce the call for love in the Catholic Church.
In order to truly love someone, you have to step outside of yourself.
We cannot continue to hold other people to our own personal understanding of what is “natural,” because what feels natural to us may not to someone else.
We must welcome members of the LBGT community as who they are, and not only as who we wish for them to be.
Just as in art, the beauty of our society and our world is a product of all of the different and great people in it, and the contrast that they create.