Advertisement How he is homosexual and how he is Catholic depend on how the terms are understood.
For Sinnett, who is president of Dignity U.S.A., an organization that supports gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons in the Catholic Church and society, the answers are clear.
“I was married to a woman,” he said. “I chose to be heterosexual and woke up later in life realizing that one cannot choose one’s sexuality.”
He calls his Catholic faith a gift from Jesus Christ that came to him through baptism and he accepted when he was confirmed as a young adult. He affirms his sexual orientation within this context.
“My homosexuality is a gift from God, and for me to deny that is to put me in a position of not loving God, not loving myself and therefore not being able to love my neighbor, including my own children and family,” he said.
That perspective is challenged by church leaders.
While Sinnett has been in Milwaukee this week attending the annual conference of Call to Action, a progressive Catholic group with about 25,000 members, many Wisconsin Catholic leaders have been speaking and taking action to support an amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution that would define marriage as between a man and woman.
At a Thursday press conference, Bishop Jerome Listecki, who leads the La Crosse diocese, quoted a document by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops titled “Between Man and Woman”: “The state has an obligation to promote the family, which is rooted in marriage,” he read. “Therefore it can justly give married couples rights and benefits it does not extend to others.”
Listecki said the church does not condemn the homosexual, but the homosexual act. He said that still leaves room for dialogue, for caring about the person and ministering to them.
“A lot of people think that the pastoral approach is an approach that says, ‘Well, I’ll sit down because I’m open to agreeing with you,’” he said. When you’re coming from the perspective of church doctrine, he said, the question is how to sit down and open a person to at least understanding church teaching.
“(One) can’t say, ‘I know what the church teaches and teaches clearly, but I choose to do this, therefore the authority lies with the individual,’” he said. “The door of the church is open, but there’s a realism. And that realism is, ‘Here’s what the church teaches.’ The Catholic has to take that and try to integrate that with the teachings in their own life.”
Listecki and the four other Catholic bishops who lead dioceses in Wisconsin released a letter in June supporting the marriage amendment. But not all Catholics agree with this position.
The Milwaukee Archdio-cese Priests Alliance, an organization of 140 priests, released a letter in which they express “fear that the amendment may be construed to deny rights and services” and that “gay unions is not a chief cause of marital instability.”
Nicole Sotelo, Call to Action’s acting co-director, said statements against homosexuality like that of the Wisconsin bishops are “against the grain of what Jesus himself spoke about in the Bible.”
She said she loved the Catholic Church, and that the Catholic catechism says a Catholic must hold to the primacy of one’s conscience, while informing that with church teachings, traditions, scripture and prayer.
“If one’s conscience calls one to disagree with the Church’s teachings, you must do that because ultimately it is about your conscience before God,” she said. “It’s part of Christian and Catholic tradition to use one’s conscience and to discern the right way to act. Even Jesus, for example, did not always agree with his religious leaders.”
Listecki likened the claim that authority lies with the individual to moral relativism.
“It’s the individual’s conscience,” he said, “but the individual’s conscience in seeing the authority and the objective truth of the Church and then reconciling that with themselves, with their own lives and integrating that with objective truth in their own life. The authority
doesn’t rest with the individual. The authority rests with the Church.”
Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or jorso@lacrossetribune.com.
