Gay Pride: A Catholic Perspective

Pride is not arrogance, as many would typically understand it. For someone who identifies with the LGBT community, pride means to be fiercely unashamed that love is love. As gay and Catholic, pride is to dance with conviction that God’s love liberates us from the shame that diminishes our life as God’s beloved community. It is to “boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31) whose radical commitment to God’s mercy and justice led this Son of God to be in solidarity with the outcast and marginalized, even to the point of death on a cross.

Pride means to be amazed at the wild creativity of the Spirit of Christ who lives within and breathes among us, beckoning us toward newness in life as a beloved community in the here and now. Jesus’s injunction to us not to be afraid is a call to stand without shame as living witnesses of God’s unconditional love for all. There is no place that God will not go, and it is precisely this widening outreach and radical inclusivity of God’s love that the gospel challenges us to embrace with pride – unashamed.

– Alfred Pang
Excerpted from "Celebrating Pride in the
Shadow of Orlando: A Catholic Reflection
Bondings 2.0
July 3, 2016

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Theology of Gay Pride
• Gay Pride: A Celebration of True Humility
• Dan Furmansky: "Why We Have Pride"
• Gay Pride as a Christian Event
• Catholic Priest Explains Why He Intends Participating in Gay Pride
• Quote of the Day – March 6, 2011
• Catholics Make Their Voices Heard on LGBTQ Issues
• Remembering and Reclaiming a Wise, Spacious, and Holy Understanding of Homosexuality
• Gay People and the Spiritual Life
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Toby Johnson
• The Gifts of Homosexuality
• Same-Sex Desires: "Immanent and Essential Traits Transcending Time and Culture"
• "I Will Dance"

Image: Michael J. Bayly (from Catholics for Marriage Equality MN's 2012 series of Lenten prayer vigils at the chancery offices of the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis).