All not welcome in Church

By James Servino

Have you ever noticed who is at your table? Or who is denied from your table?

Just before Santa Clara's spring break, I traveled to Minnesota for a national symposium called "Outward Signs: Lesbian/Gay Catholics in a Sacramental Church."

This was the sixth time New Ways Ministries brought female and male religious leaders and laity together to discuss homosexuality and Catholicism.

The goal of the symposium was to explore the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church and where those sacraments are being denied to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics, their families, friends and allies.

In the past few years, LGBTA (including allies) Catholics have been denied the Eucharist, held suspect in religious orders and denied full communion. This runs counter to the example of Christ and Catholic Theology.

The central traditions of our Catholic Church are the sacraments, and embodied in the Eucharist is the summary of our faith. Today is Holy Thursday -- the feast of the Last Supper where Jesus welcomed all to the table. This ritual is an opportunity to bring the worldwide church together in every language, culture and socio-economic status.

I came out as a gay Catholic before I came to Santa Clara, but the unity of those identities has only been bound together by the love and acceptance of those around me. As a senior political science and religious studies major, I have studied concepts and ideologies that can empower and inspire people, while disenfranchising and persecuting them at the same time. It is within this tension that the experiences of so many people of faith who struggle with their identities are defined.

As a gay man, I have often felt the understandable skepticism and frustration of my friends who wonder why I would subject myself to affiliation with a Catholic community that often ostracizes and persecutes its LGBT members and neighbors. As a cradle Catholic who has been raised with a faith that breathes life into the world around me, I cannot deny my Catholic identity any more than my identity as a gay man. The Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has even declared that homosexuality is a part of God's creation. But the caveat for this crumb of faith is that LGBT persons are called to live a chaste life without acting on their orientation. Indeed, it is crumbs that many Catholics are living on today.

And at times it is not even crumbs. In the symposium I attended, the 400 religious leaders and 100 parents, friends and allies of LGBT Catholics were denied the celebration of the Eucharist. The local bishop of Minnesota denied the Eucharist because he feared allowing the Eucharist to be celebrated by those affiliated with the LGBT community would set a contradictory precedent to his understanding of Church teaching. This was the first time in the history of the New Ways symposium that a sacrament was denied to its participants.

With lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics outwardly denied sacraments in their own communities, what does it mean for a church that seeks to be inclusive, universal and Christ-like? Women are still denied the right to be celebrants at the Eucharistic table -- another example of how we are being exclusive about who is welcome at the altar.

Can Catholics recognize Christ in the neighbors or the members of our own house? At a Jesuit and Catholic university, are we welcoming the strangers among us? We are bound together and must seriously look at the tables before us to discern who we are inviting to join us at our tables and who we are excluding.

The mystical body of Christ is central to Catholic theology with the writings of St. Paul; he describes a living Christ in the diverse persons of the Church and how we are all distinct parts of that body -- regardless of differences.

St. Paul illustrates the dichotomy of unity and otherness by declaring that the foot cannot say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the bodyâ?¦ The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of youâ?¦ On the contrary those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor." We are all the mystical body of Christ, and we need each other.

We need to ensure room in our neighborhoods, classrooms, houses, pews, families and our hearts for each other because we are called to union and communion with each other, as we are.

James Servino is a senior political science and religious studies double major.