Bishop William Byrne’s Dec. 6 guest column “A message of welcome to the LGBTQ+ community” is disingenuous in the extreme. He and a group called Catholics for Inclusion have met “to discuss how the Catholic churches in our area can become genuinely welcoming to all people.” The answer is a no-brainer: Roman Catholic priests must cease teaching their flock that homosexual acts are sinful.

According to the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church homosexual acts are “acts of grave depravity” that are “intrinsically disordered.” It continues, “They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” Regarding homosexuality as an orientation, the Catechism describes it as “objectively disordered.” Is it any wonder that Catholic homosexuals feel unwelcome and excluded?

It is not enough for Bishop Byrne simply to keep mum on the Church’s teachings; he must repudiate them. He must publicly spell out, perhaps in a second My Turn essay, why Catholic theology on the subject of human sexuality is in error. Jesus’s teaching in Matthew is apropos: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam in thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote in thy brother’s eye” Unless Bishop Byrne is willing to be proactive in this way, his plea for ‘inclusiveness’ is so much pious hypocrisy.

Wallis Reid

Leyden