Catholic Church Denies Funeral For Local Gay Man...maybe

[cmotherofpirl]

[quote name='Ice_nine' timestamp='1310192956' post='2264881']
I don't know why I'm about to do this, but what the hell I got nothin much better to do. Stevil, if I bore the hell out of you, my apologies.



The Church has never declared anyone's soul to be damned. That is something She just cannot know or confirm.



Yes, but people (especially those with aversion to religion) have a misunderstanding of what "judge not lest ye be judged" actually means. For example, if a girl or a woman walks around with barely any clothes on in an effort to garner lustful attention from men and I shake my head and maybe even *gasp* tell her she shouldn't be walking around advertising all of her parts, people would shriek at me and tell me "Don't judge her, how dare you! You have no right!"

The thing is I'm not judging [i]her[/i] I'm judging her actions. God has revealed to us that certain actions and thoughts [i]are[/i] sinful, and thank God He did otherwise there would be mass confusion. So for the good of everyone's eternal soul it is a merciful and responsible thing to inform people when they commit sinful, and spiritually dangerous actions. Likewise we should try to avoid hypocrisy by maintaining the same standards for ourselves.

I'm not trying to beat you over the head with the dichotomy between "actions" and the person behind them, but it is important. That's why you see it emphasized in every other post. For something to be a mortal sin (a sin worthy of damnation) three requirements must be met: grave matter, full consent, and full knowledge.

Now in 95% of the cases the first requirement, grave matter, is something that onlookers can determine. Skipping Mass is a grave issue. Fornication is a grave offense in the eyes of God, likewise stealing food from the poor. Christians can, and absolutely should, inform and correct people when we [i]know[/i] what they are doing is inherently wrong.

The second requirement, full consent, is not something we can tell all of the time, but most of the time we can. For example, if you have no transportation to get to Mass, even though it's still a severe issue, God will not hold you responsible for things that are beyond your power.

It's the last one, full knowledge that something is evil but still doing it anyway, that Christians cannot determine and probably shouldn't even speculate on. It is impossible for us to know the condition of someone's soul. Maybe a woman who strips for money (an action that is objectively evil) was abused as a child and developed a substance abuse problem while dealing with a host of other complications. It's possible that these things cause a poor formation of conscience and she honestly does not see the evil in what she does. It is also possible however, that she knows beaver dam well what she's doing is evil but just doesn't care. This is strictly between her and God, and something which an onlooker cannot determine.

But still we must educate that these actions do cause grave damage to one's spirit and places the soul in a precarious position. It would be unjust to say "well maybe person x isn't aware of how much evil they are committing, and he/she isn't gonna listen to us anyway, so let's just let it slide."



A funeral is not a sacrament just to be clear. Immediately after death the person faces judgement. Either the person enters heaven, in which case they don't need any more help from us (although we still need theirs!), the person enters hell where prayers cannot help them, of the person undergoes purgation of the soul. Now in this case it [i]is[/i] beneficial to pray for the soul of the deceased to assist them throughout this process which, someone correct me if I'm wrong, is the main purpose of a funeral mass. But not having a funeral mass does not mean that no one can pray for his soul. On the contrary, we all should!



So in essence you feel that relativism, individualism and "live and let live" is the right way for society to go. You are free to do so, but I and Catholics in general have a fundamental disagreement. We believe the Catholic faith is beneficial not only to the individual but for society as a whole. The sin that people engage in privately is in fact all of our problem. It damages the spirit of members of the human family who we are called to love and help achieve salvation. This causes a problem for the individual and for the community at large, whether people recognize it or not does not change the reality.

So basically we have two very different ideas about what is best for the individual and society as a whole. Now it's easy to say that Catholics are pushing their morals onto an unwilling public, but if you examine what you believe you would realize that you are doing the same thing. Your philosophy that people can do whatever the hell they want so long as they don't harm anyone else (what constitutes actual harm even differs from person to person) is not a philosophy I accept. So when you try to consign religious people to a strictly private realm because you think it's better for society, you are forcing your ideology, one I vehemently oppose, onto me and my Catholic brothers and sisters.

We genuinely feel that Catholic morality is ideal for both the individual and society. Catholic faith [i]requires[/i] action in the public realm and to consign it to only the private realm is nonsensical. You believe religious non-interference and personal autonomy is ideal for the individual and society. We disagree of course, so these and other ideologies clash as people try and fail to build a better society, with different schools of thought prevailing at different time periods. Both sides duke it out for spheres of influence and take tallies at the end of the day. That's just life.



What's wrong with calling a spade a spade? The sadomasochist community is a group of people that perform sinful and unnatural acts. I can't think of any other communities that celebrate their sexually deviant behavior other than the gay community (does not include all people who are "gay") btw). Oh just kidding, the adult film community is another one that the Church teaches against.

So we can't single out a group of masturbators because, afaik, there is not a community that has formed around that vice. It's something a lot of people do yes, and it's something gravely disordered, but is there a large group that has rallied around masturbation and formed communities over it? Likewise bestiality, there may be some fringe groups who celebrate sexual acts with animals, but for the most part people recognize how effed up that is that the Church doesn't need to come out and preach against it. You have sex with your dog, chances are you're gonna be outcasted by secular and religious people (unless you're in Peter Singer's camp).



A lot of times this "hate" you speak of is a two-way street. Yes we have gay people that are victimized by religious people, which is terrible, but often a small number of people violently shove their sexuality in the faces of religious people. This incites disgust and rage, which in turn can cause hate, which can lead to gay people being victimized, which can lead them to become resentful, which can lead them to force their sexuality into public view. It's a snowball effect really, but it's not something that can be traced to one root cause. Not all gay people are huddled in a corner helpless and brutalized. Sure some, maybe many, are. But there are gay people who fight back with aggressive ideology.



Intolerant, yes. Hateful, not in the slightest.



This is an interesting question that I think is quite complicated to answer, but it would help to look at history, anthropology and psychology with even just a laymen's understanding.. For people to be singled out, there has to be a distinguishable and perhaps visible group or community. Like I was saying earlier there are no communities revolving around masturbation or even communities that revolve around eye color, so we don't single out blue-eyed people as we do with people with dark skin, nor do we single out the masturbators as we do the gays.

So now the next question is, how did this group form in the first place? In using race as an analogy, skin color was not an issue before 1300 (or so?), or before the advent of imperialism and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Certain events happen etc etc, African people are looked upon as inferior, fast-forward a few hundred years and communities have formed around a visible physical trait so on and so on, in the last century eugenics was looked at as a legitimate science that consolidated the "reality" of race!

Now this is a gross oversimplification of the race issue, but you get my point. For thousands of years of human history skin color didn't designate you to a specific group and didn't gauge your value or determine an individual's traits. At a certain point that changed for whatever reason. As a result people were herded into identifiable groups, making derision more efficient and easier overall.

Fast forward to today and the overwhelming consensus in academia is that race is actually not a solid genetic reality and that skin color has no correlation to intelligence or personality traits, but rather the similarities and characteristics of certain races are more so part of a cultural phenomenon. Now it would be nice if we could say "race doesn't exist oops, let's just erase those couple hundred years of history and start fresh!" because at this point in time, longstanding communities have developed around skin color and ethnicity to the point where they have their own subculture. And the myth of race as something rigidly framed within the chromosomes of an individual still prevail only compounding the problem. No matter how many scholarly articles come out confirming that race is really a myth, it's still something used by people to define themselves.

I think the issue of homosexuality has some similarities (some major differences too don't get me wrong). Sexually deviant acts have been around for pretty much all of human history, and I am under no illusions that homogenital sex is some modernist invention. The ancient Romans and Greeks engaged in sodomy quite frequently. However this idea of a person being gay and the idea of a sexual-orientation is a recent movement in history. For thousands of years, despite the fact that homogenital acts took place and in some cultures were commonplace, not a single community revolved around people who preferred homosexual acts. If you find one that formed before the 1800's, please do inform me, it's just in my leisurely studies I have not found any.
Throughout all of church history, up until this time period, Christians who struggled with an inclination to homosexual acts or those who actually engaged in homosexual acts despite trying to battle the temptation were not looked upon any differently than those who struggled with other vices. This tension between religious institutions and homosexuals (although this is an anachronistic label) did not exist for centuries. They were not segregated from the rest of poor and lowly sinners, and were not a collective target of derision. So what happened?

At the turn of the 20th century this changed. Some people want to point the finger at Freud, and I guess he's the easiest one to blame, but basically this idea emerged that pretty much all of our interpersonal relationships are governed by sexual impulses. You love your mother or your sister? That's because you want to have sex with them, so ergo if you love your male friend, you must subconsciously want to have sex with him, obviously. Again this is an oversimplification of classical Freudian psychology, but I think it's the beginning of homosexuals becoming a cultural group. All of the sudden people (more so men than women) began to have this anxiety that their affinity to members of the same sex may have some subconscious sexual motivation behind it. It scared people to think that perhaps there was something concrete within the psyche that oriented oneself sexually to the same sex. So now there was more anxiety about actions that could be interpreted as qwerty, i.e. if two men hugged each other that may be interpreted as gay so men who wanted to affirm their "heterosexuality," would avoid such displays of affection.

Over time I would imagine the rift between "gay" and "straight" people began to slowly emerge from this paranoia. Every action can now be scrutinized for underlying sexual implications, people wanting to avert attention from themselves start to point towards other who exhibit qwerty behavior and deride them out of insecurity (oldest trick in the book right?), while some people resign that they must be homosexual on the inside based on how society interprets their actions that frankly have nothing to do with sex. Somehow a community of outcasted "homosexuals" forms, and perhaps as a survival mechanism they find comradery and solidarity in one another.

Amongst all of this, the church maintains that homogenital acts are evil and disordered. The main problem now is that, like never before, it has become an identity issue. People now see sexual-orientation as a rigid formation within a person's psyche that is pre-determined and unchangeable. So when the church says homosexual acts are wrong it can be perceived as an attack on someone's personhood, even though it is not. That's the reason for all of this tension. And then of course along the way there were many people, both religious and secular, that made personal attacks on people who identified as gay because humans do shiitake mushroom things to each other sometimes.

That's my theory. Sorry it's so long-winded. I'm not an expert by any means and I'd like to study it more, but I think it's a workable foundation to answer your question.

In addtion to all those other reasons I just blabbered on about, I think much of it has to do with the gay community wanting their behavior to be validated by all of us as something normal and acceptable. Not every sexually deviant community is demanding that the public accept them or grant them legal rights that revolve around their deviant behavior. The only comparable group I can think of, in terms of demanding legal rights for illicit sexual behavior, would be perhaps the porn industry which the church is very vocal against. They are not "singled out" in the same what that gays are though.




It's rather condescending to tell someone what they believe in, especially when you think the whole premise of religion is bogus. It can come off as insulting to tell a practitioner of a religion how one should follow a religion, when you don't follow it. It's sort of akin to me thinking I can tell a computer technician what he's doing wrong because hell I'm on the internet all the time and it seems to me like he's messing something up.

I am not personally offended, but some people would be.

Likewise, I apologize for the long post.
[/quote]

[Ice_nine]

[quote name='Ash Wednesday' timestamp='1310207903' post='2264917']
I think people misunderstand what it means if the Church chooses to not hold a public funeral for someone. It's something that I long misunderstood myself.

The Church used to be a lot more frequent about exercising their rights to deny someone a public funeral mass -- a lot of Catholics could easily be denied a public funeral mass. (The key word here is *public* mass, not private, which nobody would be denied.) I think the problem is they have become so lax in it over time, the rare times the Church actually does exercise that right, people have become socially conditioned to take it the wrong way and interpret it as lack of compassion or picking on someone and they fail to understand that the Church in theory would be doing it out of care and concern for many souls so they aren't scandalized. But I guess, sadly, by and large, much of the Catholic population has been scandalized and led astray already.
[/quote]

Sad, but true

[Norseman82]

[quote name='Jesus_lol' timestamp='1310185990' post='2264840']
It is also an age old way to concede defeat in an online discussion, by invoking hitler or the Nazis, as per [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law"]Godwin's Law[/url] which is based on the logical fallacy of [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum"]Reductio Ad Hitlerum[/url]
[/quote]

I reject your premise for the following reasons:

1) Wikipedia is not a true encyclopeia, as it is editable by anyone in the general public that can log in.

2) If you've ever taken a course in logic, [i]reductio ad absurdem[/i] is a valid logical method.

3) Christ spoke in parables - examples that were known to people of His time. Unpleasant as it may be to some, Hitler and the Nazis are well known examples to people in this day and age, and the comparisons may in fact be valid. In such a case, it is not the person who invokes the use of the Nazis as an example who concedes defeat; rather, it is the person who takes imaginary offense at the mere notion of the use of Nazis as an example who has conceded defeat, unless they can either:
a) Disprove the logic in the example
b) Show how the example does not apply to the discussion at hand.

In the case mentioned in this thread, it is indeed a valid comparison, since the subject has to deal with public funerals that may cause scandal due to the public lifestyle of the deceased, whether it be a homosexual public living in defiance of Church teaching, a member of the Mafia, or a prominent Nazi.

Capisce?

Classy enough for you?

Edited July 9, 2011 by Norseman82

[stevil]

Thanks Ice_nine for your well considered and very interesting post in response to mine. It has given me much to think about.
I am not going to pick it apart, but there are just two items I feel compelled to respond to.

[quote name='Ice_nine' timestamp='1310192956' post='2264881']
Now it's easy to say that Catholics are pushing their morals onto an unwilling public, but if you examine what you believe you would realize that you are doing the same thing.[/quote]
I feel my position is different in that the Catholic push is with regards to enforcing rules onto me personally with regards to my behaviour about myself where as my position is a push against enforcing religious based rules onto others. In this way I am happy for you to be a practicing Catholic and for you to live your life by the Catholic rules if you so choose, but I am against your desire to impose the rules that you belive in onto others. In this way I feel i am fighting for freedom and I feel you are fighting for control.

[quote name='Ice_nine' timestamp='1310192956' post='2264881']
It's rather condescending to tell someone what they believe in, especially when you think the whole premise of religion is bogus. It can come off as insulting to tell a practitioner of a religion how one should follow a religion, when you don't follow it.[/quote]
Condescending, yes, no doubt. This is why I have been seeking these answers from a group of Catholics on this forum rather than making them up myself. I am not getting the answers I had hoped for so I will not be taking this path when in confrontation with Catholics on this issue.

[kujo]

[quote name='Norseman82' timestamp='1310244830' post='2265053']
I reject your premise for the following reasons:

1) Wikipedia is not a true encyclopeia, as it is editable by anyone in the general public that can log in.[/quote]

Oh stop it! Wikipedia gets tossed around on Phatmass all the time! And you can't just "edit" the pages without full approval of Wikipedia's gigantic staff of fact-checkers.

[quote]3) Christ spoke in parables - examples that were known to people of His time. Unpleasant as it may be to some, Hitler and the Nazis are well known examples to people in this day and age, and the comparisons may in fact be valid. In such a case, it is not the person who invokes the use of the Nazis as an example who concedes defeat; rather, it is the person who takes imaginary offense at the mere notion of the use of Nazis as an example who has conceded defeat, unless they can either:
a) Disprove the logic in the example
b) Show how the example does not apply to the discussion at hand.

In the case mentioned in this thread, it is indeed a valid comparison, since the subject has to deal with public funerals that may cause scandal due to the public lifestyle of the deceased, whether it be a homosexual public living in defiance of Church teaching, a member of the Mafia, or a prominent Nazi.[/quote]

It is absurd to try to argue against allowing the family of a deceased man, who happens to be gay, to hold a Catholic funeral service in his honor by [b][i]comparing the situation to burying Adolf effing Hitler![/i][/b] If you can't see that, then you've got some serious soul-searching to do. Logical fallacy or not, you will win over [b]no one[/b] with this argument. I'd wager that there are people reading this board right now, who might very well [i]agree[/i] with the Church's stance on this matter, who are shaking/smacking/palming their heads right now thinking "God, that is NOT a good way to convince people of the rightness of the Church's cause."

[Vincent Vega]

[quote name='kujo' timestamp='1310324699' post='2265380']It is absurd to try to argue against allowing the family of a deceased man, who happens to be gay, to hold a Catholic funeral service in his honor by [b][i]comparing the situation to burying Adolf effing Hitler![/i][/b] If you can't see that, then you've got some serious soul-searching to do. Logical fallacy or not, you will win over [b]no one[/b] with this argument. I'd wager that there are people reading this board right now, who might very well [i]agree[/i] with the Church's stance on this matter, who are shaking/smacking/palming their heads right now thinking "God, that is NOT a good way to convince people of the rightness of the Church's cause."
[/quote]
You are the only one who has brought up Hitler, who has no bearing on this situation (his family was Catholic, but he never received the sacraments). If you really take such exception to considering anyone who had affiliation with the Nazi party, feel free to substitute "Ted Kennedy" for "Joseph Goebbels". (Also, I'm fairily certain you never gave me a real answer to the question I posed.)

[kujo]

[quote name='USAirwaysIHS' timestamp='1310326311' post='2265409']
You are the only one who has brought up Hitler, who has no bearing on this situation (his family was Catholic, but he never received the sacraments). If you really take such exception to considering anyone who had affiliation with the Nazi party, feel free to substitute "Ted Kennedy" for "Joseph Goebbels". (Also, I'm fairily certain you never gave me a real answer to the question I posed.)
[/quote]

Havok brought up Hitler, and Norseman picked up on the analogy as well. J_lol mentioned it, giving it more momentum. This was my response to it. I also believe that it is equally redonkulus to draw the same analogy with Goebbels and Ted Kennedy, though of a smaller order with the latter.

My opinion, no matter what nefarious historical figure you bring up, is going to be consistent--if they were baptized Catholic, and their families wanted them to be buried in a Catholic cemetery after having a Catholic funeral mass, they should be allowed to do so without persecution by the local bishop. The only people who would care about that sort of thing are on Phatmass. The other 5.9999999 billion people probably wouldn't even think about it, much less arrive at the conclusion that the Church was condoning homosexuality or the holocaust.

[Jesus_lol]

[quote name='kujo' timestamp='1310326779' post='2265413']
Havok brought up Hitler, and Norseman picked up on the analogy as well. J_lol mentioned it, giving it more momentum. This was my response to it. I also believe that it is equally redonkulus to draw the same analogy with Goebbels and Ted Kennedy, though of a smaller order with the latter.

My opinion, no matter what nefarious historical figure you bring up, is going to be consistent--if they were baptized Catholic, and their families wanted them to be buried in a Catholic cemetery after having a Catholic funeral mass, they should be allowed to do so without persecution by the local bishop. The only people who would care about that sort of thing are on Phatmass. The other 5.9999999 billion people probably wouldn't even think about it, much less arrive at the conclusion that the Church was condoning homosexuality or the holocaust.
[/quote]

just wanted to point out that my mentioning of it was mainly incidental to me saying that Havok and Norseman are arguing their points most incompetantly.


when people bring up Hitler out of nowhere on an internet forum, it is basically the same as when the other guy in a shoot out throws his gun at you because he has ran out of ammunition.

[Norseman82]

I originally gave the example of the Mafia, not the Nazis (for those who actually read the thread), and only came to Havok's defense. However, seeing how some of the youngsters here are squirming over Havok's Nazi analogy, now I'm truly curious. If you believe it is wrong for the Catholic Church to deny a public funeral Mass for a homosexual publically living in sin, would it also be wrong to deny Hitler or Goebbels a public funeral Mass? I'm really intereested in finding out what youse think.

[stevil]

[quote name='tgoldson' timestamp='1310169699' post='2264746']
This question doesn't make sense to me. What is your understanding of sacraments?
[/quote]
Yeah, I'm not really sure what they are actually, I thought they are rituals representing some sort of spiritual life cycle. I just looked it up and have interpreted t a bit, hopefully not in an offensive manner. Funeral service isn't one of them.

Baptism is a birth of sorts,
Eucharist could be likened to a journey of life
Reconciliation is the ability to get back onto life's path when one invariably strays and gets lost.
Confirmation is like hitting puberty representing spiritual growth into an adult?
Marriage, is a union with a mortal partner
Holy orders is to become a spiritual leader and servant of god
Anointing of the sick is spiritual healing and final acceptance of death.

I had a discussion with an Orthodox person a few months ago and he was telling me that a woman who had to terminate her unborn because it was life threatening and her life needed to persist because she had other children, well this woman was allowed to terminate the pregnancy but was not allowed to partake of eucharist until she had performed penance for her sin of terminating the baby. I guess this gave me the view that witholding a sacrament can be seen as a punishment, making the person feel as an outcast within their community as others can participate but they cannot until they have redeemed themselves as worthy.

[Vincent Vega]

[quote name='stevil' timestamp='1310368405' post='2265675']
Anointing of the sick is spiritual healing and final acceptance of death.
[/quote]
No - one not need be dying to receive anointing of the sick (one of the reasons they "changed the name" from last rites).

[kujo]

[quote name='Norseman82' timestamp='1310362132' post='2265663']
If you believe it is wrong for the Catholic Church to deny a public funeral Mass for a homosexual publically living in sin, would it also be wrong to deny Hitler or Goebbels a public funeral Mass? I'm really intereested in finding out what youse think.
[/quote]

[quote name='kujo' timestamp='1310326779' post='2265413']
My opinion, no matter what nefarious historical figure you bring up, is going to be consistent--if they were baptized Catholic, and their families wanted them to be buried in a Catholic cemetery after having a Catholic funeral mass, they should be allowed to do so without persecution by the local bishop. The only people who would care about that sort of thing are on Phatmass. The other 5.9999999 billion people probably wouldn't even think about it, much less arrive at the conclusion that the Church was condoning homosexuality or the holocaust.
[/quote]

[Papist]

[quote name='stevil' timestamp='1310150801' post='2264557']
And totally yes, the topic of this thread is about the church's response to a gay man.
[/quote]
I see it as a gay man's response to the Church as the root of the fuss.

[CatherineM]

Denying a sacrament isn't a temporal punishment. It is a recognition of a truth, that the person isn't entitled to one. Sacraments aren't rights, they are privileges. The reason I equated this to a non-veteran asking for a military funeral, or a non-mason requesting a funeral at the masonic hall, is because asking for a Catholic funeral when you haven't led your life as a Catholic, is just as silly. The sacraments of reconciliation and anointing are how we "rejoin" the club. They are easy, and given when asked for by a fallen away Catholic. He didn't ask, because he didn't want.

[kujo]

It comes down to a difference of opinion on who the funeral is for: the family or the deceased.

I maintain that it is primarily for the family, and that denying them the ability to bury their loved-one in a Catholic milieu in the name of avoiding "scandal" sounds an awful lot like public relations 101 to me. It's like whenever an athlete or celebrity does something stupid/criminal and all of their endorsements deals dry up. At the end of the day, it's a mass--which is the ultimate form of prayer-- [i]in honor[/i] the deceased, [i]for[/i]their family. No matter how nefarious the person, or public/private the sin, it's no matter--we all need prayers.