Building a Bridge:
How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity

by james martin, s.j.
harperone, 150 pages, $19.99

Is sodomy a sin? Perplexed readers of Fr. James Martin, S.J.’s latest book will want to put the question to him, if only to understand why he felt it important to write at all.

Fr. Martin describes his project as that of reflecting “on both the church’s outreach to the LGBT community and the LGBT community’s outreach to the church.” From the outset the encounter is framed in political rather than pastoral terms. The term “community” in the phrase “LGBT community” is borrowed from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and in its present employment the word corresponds to no discernible social reality. One does not find among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people—taken as a collectivity—distinctive commonalities of religion, nativity, culture, recreation, or fellowship. Their shared interests are political; they are aggregated not as a true community but as something like a caucus. It is noteworthy that Fr. Martin voices his wish that his readers understand the LGBT acronym expansively as LGBTQA—that is, to include “questioning or queer, and allies.” The word “ally,” designating not sexual appetite but political allegiance, gives the game away.

The truth is that the Church, as Church, has no pastoral interest in the LGBT bloc apart from her concern that those who compose it be protected from sin contemplated and rescued from sin committed—precisely the same concern she shows for everybody else. That is to say, the Church is concerned with the prospect of salvation and damnation, and persons with a propensity for a particular sin engage her pastoral solicitude in the degree that the sin is grave and the propensity stubborn. She wants us to get to heaven.

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