Everyone is welcome.
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If that is true, why do some people feel the need for a very 'special' welcome? The call of Christ is all about conversion - he welcomed sinners and ate with them - but his welcome included demands to change, to repent and convert; go and sin no more - and he himself made that possible. That is how he acts through the Church today - he welcomes us to repentance and provides his real presence in and through the sacraments to help us do that; especially the sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist - in that order - to lead us on the narrow way of change.
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Fr. Landry.
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Landry praised Cardinal O’Malley’s strong June 22 statement for acknowledging that “gay pride” is “incompatible with the Church’s teachings.” But the priest lamented that the cardinal’s attempts to distance the Mass from the “gay pride” theme “sadly haven’t succeeded,” and that supporters of the event have used “coded language” “to communicate that supporters of the gay agenda do not have to worry about being made to feel uncomfortable.”
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Landry argued that the cardinal was right to resist pressure to cancel the Mass completely, saying “no pastor worth his sacred oils is trigger-happy to eliminate the possibility for people to come into Christ’s presence.” However, he said, there is a need to ask of such themed Masses “whether they encourage implicit or defiant rejection of Christ.”
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“Faithful Catholics seek to welcome everyone with the warmth of a brother and sister but also to call everyone to conversion with the humility of a fellow prodigal,” he wrote. Thus, he said, “parishes who are aware that parishioners are unabashedly engaging in practices contrary to the practice of the faith and who do not strive ... to help them eliminate whatever in them is leading them to sin, are culpable of the worst type of pastoral malpractice.”
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“Their behavior, no matter how they spin it, is inconsistent with genuine Christian love.”
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In a second column, Landry recalled the difference between a person and the behavior choices that may be destroying them: a distinction that is key to understanding the Church’s “true acceptance” of homosexuals, whose “sexual desires are neither co-extensive with ‘who they are’ nor constitute the fundamental basis of their identity and dignity.”
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“True love means, obviously, that we don’t condemn them for the behavior that disfigures their identity, but it does mean that we try to help them to change their behavior to align it with the love of God and true love of others,” Landry said.
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“The only adequate Christian response to anyone is love,” he added, “but this love can never remain a shallow hospitality that fails to help the person recognize and respond to the rather conspicuous ways Christ is challenging him to turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel.” - LifeSiteNews
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Real change is conversion.
