February 11, 2014

The following excerpts are from the article “Courage head sees Christ in Pope’s ‘non-judgment’ remarks” written by Kerri Lenartowick and published on the Catholic News Agency website: … “I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that anything our Holy Father is saying now is inconsistent with 2000 years of Church teaching, so I would hope people could be at peace and at rest about that,” said Father Paul Check, executive director of Courage International. …

Perhaps most difficult to understand is the Catholic position concerning “the (homosexual) inclination or the desire or the attraction,” noted Fr. Check. “This the Church terms, ‘objectively disordered.’ Those words are difficult words to hear, they can fall very hard on ears and understandably, but the phrase objectively disordered does not apply to a person.”

“It means that the desire or the attraction in an erotic way, for a romantic, sexual encounter, relationship with a person of the same sex – that that desire is out of harmony with our human nature as we have been created by God, when we look at the complementarity of the sexes and the procreative power of the sexual faculty.” …

“Every heart is made for fulfillment in Christ: some hearts just don’t know that yet, or haven’t been told that yet. Or haven’t found a way in which they can move past some of the preconceptions and the misunderstandings and even some of the very real hurts that may have happened,” he explained.

Thus, rather than the gospel message itself being changed, Fr. Check believes Pope Francis is offering a new emphasis on methodology. …

Returning to another of the Pope’s remarks in which he described the Church as a “field hospital,” Fr. Check added, Courage is “like a wing in the Church’s hospital. We are one of the rooms where those who are wounded by sin in a particular way can come and receive healing.”