Ummm no, all you have to do is confess every day/week and promise not to do it again, lather, rinse, repeat. So you get all the guilt and all the forgiveness. Win/Win. That’s what being Catholic is all about.
Damn, ninja’d by not reading all the posts.
Evangelical is so much better–no confession, and you’re just “saved”!
I suspect that it IS.
I’m an ex-Catholic, not due to sexuality (I’m straight), but for countless reasons. Being homosexual, IMO, would be the easiest reason to break ties. You can be gay, love God and Jesus, but not be tied to an organized religion so easily-- especially one so demanding as the RCC.
I agree and I’ve told people in my church what our beliefs are. Now everyone is welcome but we have rules on what is and isnt sin and we are not going to change because you disagree. We are not Unitarians.
To digress slightly (since this has nothing to do with gays), we had Catholic friends in Switzerland. They were pretty laid back Catholics, but they went to church every Sunday. One day the wife started telling my wife that the one thing she couldn’t put up was the holier-than-thou pope (this was 20 years ago). My wife looked at her and said, “There is a word for you, Gertrud: Protestant.” But they were raised as Catholics and not about to change.
That is NOT consistent with what I was taught in 14 years of education in Catholic schools (up to and including one year of university).
Here is what I was taught:
There are mortal sins and venial sins. If you die with an unforgiven mortal sin, you go straight to Hell. If you die with a venial sin you go to Purgatory. For how long? Nobody knows exactly, but there are stories suggesting that century-long stays are possible. Purgatory is not really less awful than Hell, apparently. People there suffer enormously. The only thing that makes it much better than Hell is that you eventually burn off all your guilt and can then be admitted to Heaven.
Homosexual acts are regarded as a mortal sin. You die with one of those acts on your soul and it’s an eternity in Hell, period.
You CAN get forgiveness for a mortal sin in confession, but that does not just wipe the slate clean. A forgiven mortal sin sort of becomes downgraded to a venial sin. It is kind of similar to having a murder charge diminished to a manslaughter charge. You still have to serve your time for manslaughter.
So for every time a gay man and his boyfriend have sex, even if they have confessed every single time, there may be years (or even centuries?) of suffering in Purgatory. Every quickie, every slow and lazy act of sexual intimacy, all of it will have to be paid for with incredible suffering in Purgatory if each act has been confessed and forgiven.
And what if the gay man has just had sex but has not confessed it? HELL!!!
Your contention that you can just “confess every day/week and promise not to do it again, lather, rinse, repeat” is seriously flawed, because forgiveness of sin depends on a genuine act of contrition and a *sincere desire *not to do it again. If you have a boyfriend waiting for you at home, if you continue to share bed and board with this person, it is difficult to imagine that your contrition is genuine. And if your contrition is not real, your sin is not really forgiven! So you still die with dozens or hundreds of mortal sins on your soul (depending on how randy you and your lover were). It’s HELL for you!!!
It is doctrinally and logically impossible to be actively homosexual and also a member of the Roman Catholic Church.
Hey, if you can accept transubstantiation and the other Eucharistic miracles you have enough intellectual flexibility and/or credulity to believe anything.
Stranger
Suppose that you believe that the only way to escape eternal damnation for your sins is Christ’s salvation in the form of the holy sacraments provided by the Catholic Church, and that the truthfulness of this belief is not up for negotiation.
Suppose, additionally, that you are gay, and that the truthfulness of this belief is also not up for negotiation.
Which, then, is the more logical course of action; to abandon the Catholic Church, and in so doing to condemn your soul to eternal damnation; or to attempt to find a way to reconcile your knowledge of who and what you are with your knowledge of what Christ, through the Church, intends you to be?
I am not, as I’ve stated, a Catholic or a Christian myself, but if I were, it seems to me that the latter would be the wiser step to take than the former.
This is incorrect.
You’re correct in your first sentence: making a good confession does indeed lead to forgiveness of the sin.
But purgatory is not about forgiveness for sins, but penance for sins. Tho who die with their sins forgiven but imperfectly purified will experience purgatory. See the Catechism of the Catholic Church § 1030.
Venial sins, and mortal sins that have been forgiven but not subject to sufficient temporal punishment and penance, are what are burned away in purgatory.
Now, it’s certainly possible to die and go straight to Heaven, but it’s not simply a matter of an up to date confession and last rites.
As as additional point of interest: the number of posters here who confidently assert some claim about the Catholic Church’s doctrine or belief, and are wrong in some meaningful way, is quite interesting. But since the board is about fighting ignorance, I am pleased to have a chance to correct these misapprehensions.
The Monsignor may be thinking something along these lines…
[QUOTE=The Sopranos]
Paulie: You didn’t go to hell. You went to purgatory, my friend.
Christopher: I forgot about purgatory.
Paulie: Purgatory–a little detour on the way to paradise.
Christopher: How long do you think we’ve got to stay there?
Paulie: That’s different for everybody. You add up all your mortal sins and multiply that number by 50. Then you add up all your venial sins and multiply that by 25. You add that together and that’s your sentence. I figure I’m gonna have to do 6,000 years before I get accepted into heaven and 6,000 years is nothin’ in eternity terms. I can do that standing on my head. It’s like a couple of days here.
[/QUOTE]
On my online dating profile, I wanted to make sure everyone knew I was sexually active, so I made sure “incontinent” was prominently visible.
Still not getting any replies, for some reason. 
It’s about as interesting as the specific details about the afterlife and spiritual mechanics that religions claim to know. I imagine it’s very freeing when designing your doctrine to not be held to any falsifiable statements.
Re the OP: It sucks for this Charamsa dude but really what did he expect would happen?
That is odd. I would think those into water sports would lap it up.
Well, I of course argue that no one “designed” the doctrine with an eye towards avoiding falsifiable statements.
But it’s not that.
It’s as if were were discussing the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, and someone claimed that Mystic Mandolinder was a character class. That’s factually inaccurate, even though D&D itself is not an accurate description of reality. You see the difference? You claim that the Church’s core beliefs are fiction. That’s fine – but you cannot argue that they do exist as codified, factual rules, regardless of whether they reflect some description of the natural universe.
With the Catholic Church you know what you’re getting. It’s in the Book. Expecting anything different is just foolish.
Indeed. That has been gay Catholic author/blogger Andrew Sullivan’s justification for why he continues to stay in the Catholic Church. And, to be fair, the Protestant churches that now affirm homosexual marriage were indeed changed by people within those churches and it did indeed take a while and some were cast out of the denomination (of course the Catholic Church takes forever to change anything). So there is somewhat of a blueprint and hope for what they are attempting to undertake.
The trouble is that those rules have changed in the past, so we have no reason to expect them to continue forever unchanged now.
That’s why the “falsifiable” point comes up. You can’t point to anything that those rules are based on. They’re unfounded. They come from loose talk by conferences of authorities…and they can be changed that way.
The Church used to have “factual rules” that led them to put people to death for espousing heresies. They don’t do that any more.
We have every right to hope they’ll make similar changes regarding other modern moral issues.
ETA: If enough D&D players run Mystic Mandoliner characters, then it becomes a character class by description if not prescription. TSR, wisely, would follow the trend and publish “optional rules” to accommodate this. They’ve done this a large number of times in the past! (I speak as a long-time contributor to Dragon Magazine.)
Always a palm out needing greased.