Q-100 - Fr dear Fr: Why is it so apparent that the Catholic Church, and especially the new orthodox types of the Tim and Tay kind, seem to have a negative vision of the role of gay young people in the Church - are there any signs of progress?

Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful? A favourite song of Queen Anne. The song is available on YouTube dot com. Actually, there is an amusing story told by Papa Francesco about this subject. When he was flying home to Italy from Argentina and Brazil early on in his pontificate, there was a QnA session on board the plane and one of the journalists asked him outright how many gay officials were there working in the Vatican? The fresh new pope then responded by saying, "Well actually, judge for yourselves, there is nobody that wears a lamination card on their person saying I AM GAY - simply doesn't happen." This produced lots of chuckles among the other journalists. So not much airtime for the concept there - the new pope does not think that the issue is that obvious - orientation is a privacy matter for him. Therein lies some protection.

But funnily enough one of the chief innovators on this concept comes from your own parish, since Fr B pioneered a fresh new approach and outreach to gay young people in his confessional, and he began this approach by making a simple but subtle distinction between young people who were "gay", proud of the concept and promoting gay pride marches and gay official ideology, and young people who were simply "homosexual" and who did not wish to advertise the fact abroad on the streets. He pointed out that many young people belonged to category B and not category A in his experience of the ministry to young gay people. A useful and important distinction.

But responding to the Question more specifically, it is something of a truism that followers of Tim and Tay, and by this I do not mean Tim and Tay Swift, the go ahead young couple pioneering music that is ambidextrous, but rather followers of Tim Gordon and Taylor Marshall, the new orthodoxy kind, like to point out that many young people are "homosexual" but not "gay", following Fr B's distinction, but that they do not like to advocate for the genre themselves very much since the natural law status of the believer is an important check for them to the gay pride marches of the streets of NYC for example. It would seem that many of these brave new world young Catholics do not advocate for a compassionate response to the gay young person issue, having now become somewhat politicised by the marches for gay pride in the cities of America, but that is usually because they do not read the official pastoral documents of the Church Catholique in faraway Rome that advocate for a more pastoral response to the genre. So misunderstandings do occur. But officially the position is quite other. Some signs of progress, there are a few.

Only 0.1% of young people are officially registered as gay so it is not a huge pastoral question for the Church in our time, according to the Tim and Tay types of young go-ahead conservatives. Progress does occur from time to time, but the first thing is to avoid stigmatizing the genre among the brave new world of young Catholics in the avid world of youth ministry - these moderne young people  like to resist the notion of reducing a human person to his or her orientation - as our own Fr John of Oscott says it out, like reducing a mountaineer to his/her/their mountaineering equipment - the sexualisation of the human person is something that is often strongly resisted by the young youth ministry Catholics of the modern Church - this is a philosophical issue that is very much a strong position of Reason Unaided - not especially guided by Faith or Church actually - difficult to dislodge among young people in the very rational and philosophical Catholic youth ministries of the moderne era. But there are signs from church officialdom of greater compassion for this small minority, period. So some progress there.