 Heavenly Father, we invite you into this space and ask you to send your Holy Spirit upon us to bind us to our Lord Jesus Christ That every thought word and work of ours may begin with you and through you be happily completed Through Christ our Lord. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen. All right It's great to again. It's just such a joy to be with you all here this weekend And thanks for coming to this talk on restoring identity Pastoral accompaniment and same-sex attraction. So I'm gonna admit up front That Mark Hart called me about a year ago to do a life-teen conference And then after I did the life-teen conference I guess I passed the test or something and I got invited to the Steubenville conference and they said but father we want you to talk about same-sex attraction and And and that's not a talk that I typically give So I had to work with people who experience same-sex attraction And I know a lot of the people who are really good at working people with people with same-sex attraction And so I'm gonna draw from some of the stories that I've heard from them and the wisdom that I've gained from them And I'd imagine that you know people are here for lots of reasons, you know like how do we address this in the church and and There's been this like dialogue about the clergy abuse crisis and so that's kind of on everybody's mind And then like I'm sure people are wondering like why is a priest talking about this during this time, right? And that's always something that I have to start with is that you know we live in a really difficult time for addressing issues of human sexuality and That oftentimes is a church because of our own shame because of our institutional shame We can even feel like I don't have any room to talk about this right now I was with a couple of friends of mine who work for Covenant Eyes and they were doing They were doing and kind of an advising for an archdiocese and they were trying to get this archdiocese just to Have a weekend where they drew attention to the problem of pornography and gave some parents some resources Which is a really good thing. We have sort of special weekends in the church You know, we have a weekend dedicated to the poor a weekend dedicated to you know abortion As an issue. We should have a weekend dedicated to this issue because that's a major issue And so one of the priest raises his hand and he says well, I don't really feel comfortable talking about this right now We just had the grand jury report coming out and and I just don't feel like this is a good topic and and what immediately came to mind was the parable of or the story in the Gospels of This man that Jesus encounters who was deaf from birth and he has a speech impediment So he's been deaf from birth and he can't speak He can't speak and so he sort of has two spirits. There's the spirit of deafness and There's a spirit of muteness and then our Lord Puts his fingers in his ears and spitting touches his tongue and he says f-a-tha be opened Right f-a-tha and he cures his deafness and he begins to speak immediately praising God And I think that in the church today we have this spirit of muteness You know, there's this evil spirit of abuse and this spirit of corrupted sexuality and and the spirit That's been a result of the scandal, but but the more dangerous spirit is the spirit of muteness That keeps us from speaking the truth And so that f-a-tha prayer is Something that we always have to go back to over and over and over again when each of us were baptized The priests like blessed our ears and our mouth And he said the Lord Jesus made the deaf here and the dumb speak May soon touch your ears to receive his word and your mouth to proclaim his faith to the praise and glory of God the father Amen and our What we've been commissioned to do as a church is to preach the gospel in season and out of season And right now we're out of season Right, we're out of season, but we have to preach the gospel Right, because if we don't a lot of people are suffering because we're not preaching the gospel and and so this morning I Introduced myself during mass and I'm really grateful that I had the chance to do that because it cuts ten minutes off my talk and But I want to kind of just give you a little more sense of like how I got to be this Like priest who talks about the two most awkward issues at the student-vill conference So so the family I came from remember like my dad was married had three children my mom was married had two children I was born my mom died dad remarried had three more children and my parents divorced when I was in college But all of that gave me that sense of like wonder this sense of like God went through a lot of trouble to make me and if you went through all that trouble to make me must have had a reason and I started asking him that reason and so I was about seven years old when I first thought of becoming a priest and And I remember being in my bed and I was reading this children's Bible that I'd received from my great-grandmother for Christmas And and I was thinking about like I really wonder what I wonder what it would be like to know my mother Like I wonder what it would be like to sit at the table with her I wonder if Sarah feels different sitting next to mom than I feel sitting next to mom like she must feel different because she grew inside of her body for nine months and I just like really wanted to know what that was like and so I made up this logic And kind of like this, you know, I really want to meet my mother and my mother's in heaven. Therefore. I have to get to heaven So I guess I'll become a priest because all priests go to heaven, you know like That's how we think when we're young in high school, I got really involved in youth ministry and And I started to feel our Lord calling me to the priesthood after high school I went to study at the military Academy at West Point. I studied Arabic and Middle Eastern studies When I graduated I became an infantry officer in the army So I went to Fort Benning, Georgia and learned how to jump out of planes and became an Army Ranger went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky I had the top three lieutenant jobs that you can have as an infantry lieutenant. My career is soaring and my heart was broken Because at that time in my life, I felt like God wants me to be a priest But I'm stuck in this military service obligation Right, there's sort of this ideal of what my life should be but I can't attain it There's nothing I can do about it right now. I'm kind of stuck here And in my immaturity I resolved that tension just by drowning out the voice of God the best I could and the easiest way to do that is to Stay stuck in sin and the most expedient way to do that is to stay stuck in sexual sin Because Jesus says bless it or the pure of heart for they shall see God and he means it right and he means it and So like in my own life in college pornography was like a normal coping mechanism When I was in the army, it's kind of escalated to running towards a lot of bars and women and Nashville at a certain point I was dating a girl and she had a child and separated not yet divorced and she asked me to move in with her and and I remember when she asked me this just feeling like my heart sank and like kind of sick to my stomach and I was looking at Myself in the mirror and I was like who are you? What happened to you? And I went on this long drive to go see my brother in Florida and I was driving back and I'm crying out like Jesus What do you want me to do? And I heard him say pretty distinctly. I want you to be a priest stupid Like I've always wanted you to be a priest So I went to the Marian shrine at the parish I attended and I prayed the rosary and I just said Lord I'm gonna ask one more time and if the doors open they open if they don't open I'm not asking anymore Two days later my chaplain walks by chaplains. You know any way I could get out of the army early Go to the seminary maybe in ten years. I'll come back in as a chaplain and he says, oh, yeah The priest recruiter is gonna be here on Friday Just happened to be that week. So I meet with him and he says here's all the paperwork you need to fill out crap Now I actually have to do this So I fill out this paperwork and then another friend comes by and he introduces me to this person called a spiritual director and And so I started seeing this priest for spiritual direction and he was kind of an authoritarian sort of priest and and He wasn't in the military, but sort of acted like he was and he was very commanding and I remember I'm sitting down with me And he was like Sean, what does God want you to do? I think he wants me to be a priest. Good. So do I that means he does Is that in the rules of St. Ignatius? And then he asks me where and he's like, where do you want to be a priest? And I didn't know there were options I'm like, I'll probably go home to Michigan where I grew up and he just looks at me and he's like Michigan I don't know Michigan Lincoln. You should go to Lincoln. I'm thinking in my head like you should go to hell like Why would I want to go to Lincoln, Nebraska? It's like a cornfield. Um So I went to so that's how I ended up in Lincoln So I so I go to Lincoln to visit all the guys are just like these great guys and I entered the seminary 1999 I was ordained in 2005 Spent four years teaching theology of the body to high school students And then I went to the bishop to ask him to go back in the army in 2008 2009 because I always thought I was gonna be an airborne ranger Arabic speaking army priest and And the bishop was very kind and he was like, oh, you'll be great. You'll be great You'll probably be a general someday, but Right, but but I think you should go to graduate school and study marriage and family You can do whatever you want. I Think you should go to graduate school, right? So I went to graduate school so I went to the John Paul II Institute in 2009 and and studying there saved my priesthood I'm not gonna get into that whole story in this talk. It's in the next one but I came back in 2013 and and I started to like do presentations on theology of the body and And I'd gone through a lot of my own healing process and And what I found was a lot of people who needed healing I started showing up in my office and So I started doing presentations on pornography and then every kind of sexual brokenness started showing up in my office and And so I became kind of a person that like father my daughter wants to transition. What do I do? Father my high school student just told me he thinks he's gay. What do I do? Father of my husband's addicted to pornography. What do I do? You know what and one of the things in the background I think that we all have to think about is Like where are the spaces in our church that are ready to receive those people? You know, where are the spaces in our church that are ready to receive those people? You know, they came to me because I basically gave permission to everybody to talk to me about those things But do we give permission to everybody to talk about those things? you know, and and where are they supposed to go because there's so much shame that's attached to all of this and And that makes it very difficult to bring things out even to somebody's best friend You know even to somebody's best friend And so so that's part of the challenge is like as a church like where do we create spaces for that and spaces for accompaniment Pope Francis uses this image of the field hospital and And I I have great love for Pope Francis like I know sometimes people I don't want to get into all of that but When I think about Pope Francis like he's the first priest in my life who called an entire synod to talk about families like I grew up in and And I'm like so in a sense I feel like he actually cares about me And when I was there in St. Peter's when he was elected and he came out and he said like the first bonus era I was like wow he like loves everybody and there's something to be said for that and And and there's three things that he said that kind of resonate in my heart all the time He said smell like your sheep and his first homily that he gave to priests You know which really gave me permission to tell people who I am He says like always be mindful of the poor right and the poor are The people who feel like they have nowhere to go and To always preach the gospel first right to always preach the gospel first and that's the part that I want to focus on during the first part of this talk and And he has this quote the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and warm the hearts of the faithful It needs nearness and proximity. I see the church is a field hospital after battle It's useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol or about the level of his blood sugars You have to heal his wounds Then we can talk about everything else heal the wounds heal the wounds and you have to start from the ground up So it's useless to ask a seriously injured person if they have high cholesterol about the level of their blood sugars you have to heal their wounds and And when I think about what what have we done as a church about this sort of crisis that we're in and and since the sexual revolution and back in 1968 and on a Lot of times we're just talking about high cholesterol and the level of their blood sugars without going to the wound Now I went to visit an organization that does safe environment training So the safe environment training that you have to do to protect children in your diocese and and we went there and we said You know, we'd we'd really like you to produce curriculum for parents is because one of the common factors like the common factor in Everyone I see that has any kind of sexual brokenness any kind of sexual brokenness whether it's Pornography and masturbation same sex attraction gender identity issues like the common factor tends to be a lack of sexual education and early sexualization Right early sexualization early exposure to pornography somebody might have introduced them to sexualization like at a sleepover kind of exploratory play that was more like abuse than a exploratory play and A lack of education so they never really had a space to talk through those things with their parents when they're growing up and And so if one of the causes of abuse is exposure to pornography like groomers will show kids pornography to break down their barriers You know, it makes sense that they also have their boundaries broken by what they see online And so will you produce safe environment training that we can show to all of our parents because that we need to raise awareness about this And they came back and they said well, you know, we really think like we just need to teach kids to be virtuous But we don't need to talk about that And we just need a really good theology of the body curriculum, but we don't need to talk about pornography masturbation sexual attraction and anything like that and In a sense, we're just talking about high cholesterol and the level of their blood sugar is without going to the wound And I can stand up in front of a group of young people all day long and say Jesus loves you Yeah, but father if you knew what I did in my room between 11 p.m. And 1 a.m. Every day you would not be telling me Jesus loves me right now So until we're saying Jesus loves you even though or Jesus loves you even when Jesus loves you even though you have those kinds of thoughts and fantasies in your head We're not speaking it into the wound, you know, and And speaking it into the wound means we can't be afraid of the wound In a Morrisly tizia 291 Pope Francis wrote that although she constantly holds up the call to perfection and asks for a fuller response to God The church must accompany with attention and care the weakest of her children who show signs of a wounded and troubled love By restoring in them hope and confidence like the beacon of a lighthouse and a port or a torch carried among the people to Enlighten those who have lost their way or who are in the midst of a storm So the church must accompany with attention and care the weakest of her children who show signs of a wounded and troubled love Like who are those people? Oftentimes a Morrisly tizia gets immediately associated with divorce and remarried Catholics who come to the faith in the midst of a second marriage and whether or not they can go to communion and Certainly they show signs of a wounded and troubled love, but it also applies to the woman who was abandoned by her husband It also applies to the adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse It also applies to the ten-year-old who gets exposed to pornography on the iPod that his mom gave him for his birthday It also applies to the parent or the grandparent whose child or the grandchild is saying to them I Don't want to be a girl anymore. I want to be a boy and you're not allowed to talk about anything that happened in my life up until this point and Then there's just a lot of grief All right, there's a lot of grief and you know, you know grief is this emotion It's a real emotion But most of us don't like grief. We like anger Right anger is easier than grief But there's just a lot of grief and there's a lot of sadness in that and how what do we how can we walk with? all of those kinds of people and all of those kinds of places and I want to point out too that it says although she constantly holds up the call to perfection and asked for a fuller response to God So that means that we hold we hold to what we believe Right we proclaim what is true. We're not gonna change the church's teaching In order to make people feel better. So how do I hold what I believe and? also Walk with this person who doesn't live that way Because I think that's a really hard challenge You know, it's a really hard challenge Now do I go to my sister's wedding who got married outside the church and at one point? I was a young deacon and I was a deacon already and my sister got married and she didn't get married in the church And I got some advice and the advice was well you can't go because then you'd be like participating in that action and And I think I had this idea like oh if I don't go that will be like such a hurtful thing for my sister that she'll realize that she must be doing something wrong and Because of her relationship with me She's gonna somehow come to this conversion moment, and then she's gonna come back to the church I don't know anybody who actually has that story And it just caused a lot of pain for a long time And it caused a lot of pain for a long time and And so how do I? Prohold what is true and love that person at the same time, you know, that's the challenge and And and I'm hoping to just kind of give some indication or give some language or some things to reflect on to help us to To wrestle with that in our own in our own hearts You know an accompaniment is hard accompaniment means I'm gonna enter into your life where you are But it means I'm accompanying you somewhere Right, so I'm accompanying you to the truth Right because that's where we're going I'm gonna enter into your life where you are and walk you towards Jesus That's what it means So it doesn't mean I'm gonna walk I'm gonna enter into your life where you are and we're just gonna stay there That would be like the prodigal son story where the father just goes and camps out in the pigsty with the son And we're just gonna stay here But that's not what happens I think the son's moved to return to the father, but the father returned the father runs towards him Right the father runs towards him because he's always looking for him And he's like on the lookout for any indication that this person's open to me loving them right now In my favorite accompaniment story There was a girl who was introduced to me and she wasn't Catholic she had grown up Catholic until she was 10 and And I remember our first conversation So she was involved with a 12-step fellowship for people with compulsive sexual behaviors And she had heard about me and lots of people were talking about me and they're like, oh you should meet this priest And so she calls me one day and the first conversation went like this Yeah, everybody says I should talk to you But I don't know what the f you could possibly know about my life You're an effing Catholic priest and I hate the effing Catholic Church Do you want to go to coffee? All right, so we go to coffee And we're at coffee and she says yeah, so father, what do you say to people like me? Well, I usually start with John chapter 8 and the woman caught in adultery No, because this woman's caught in the very act of committing adultery, which means she's probably a prostitute How'd she become a prostitute? Probably like most people maybe she was abandoned when she was a child Maybe she was raped when she was younger and she doesn't feel really worthy of real love or real marriage Maybe her parents died tragically And she was abused by somebody or she was kind of trafficked by somebody But she came to the conclusion that the only value I have is my bodily value and the best I can do is go from man to man To man to man to man kind of makes some money along the way Take care of my basic needs, but she doesn't like her life She probably hates her life. She probably goes to bed at night wishing she would die And then one day all these men barge into the room they catch her in the very act of committing adultery They drag her out into the street. They throw it down in front of Jesus Big crowd of men gather around her Master this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Moses says we should stone her. What do you say? And Jesus just spends down and writes in the sand What is he right in the sand? I don't think it matters. I think he's going like hey look at my finger Because if I was that woman I would be looking down with this look of shame Trying to catch her eye He probably catches her eye for a minute She might make eye contact and look away And he stands up and he says whoever among you has no sin can cast the first stone Hey look at my finger and this time he catches her eye And she starts to notice that he looks at her differently than everybody else looks at her Everybody else is looking at her body Sort of confirming what she already believes about herself. I have no value except for my bodily value. I'm not worthy of real love I'm not worthy of real marriage But Jesus is looking into her And he's looking at her with love Then I imagine the crowd noticing this and thinking to themselves. How does Jesus look at her like that? I keep looking at her body. I'm thinking about what she just got done doing I want to kill her because she's a occasion of sin for me But Jesus is looking into her With love. Oh, yeah, Jesus also said whoever Looks at a woman with lust is already committed adultery with her in his heart And they start dropping their stones Until it's just Jesus and the woman and then our Lord stands up and he looks at her and he says woman has no one condemned you and she answers no one sir and The no one sir includes herself Right, then no one sir includes herself somewhere in the midst of the look of love She starts to see herself the way that Jesus sees her instead of the way the crowd sees her and And then our Lord can say go and sin no more And where does she go? She just goes after Jesus And she shows up at the Pharisees house and washes his feet with her tears and she's there at the crucifixion She's the first to discover the empty tomb. She's transformed by love and I finished this kind of talk this meditation This girl looks at me. I gotta go Sends me a text the next day. I hate the Catholic Church. I hate that you're a priest I hate that I like talking to you and then she started curiously coming to mass and Listening to the homily but she wasn't going to communion nothing like that But she was coming to mass every week and she was meeting people from our Newman Center She was going to the Newman Center and she starts going to RCIA classes and Lent rolls around and she wants to go to confession She doesn't want to go to communion She just wants to go to confession because she thinks confession might be helpful for her but communion would mean I'm all in Huh, that's actually what we believe right and so she asks about this and and And I was like well like are you going to mass every week? Yeah, like I have a well-founded hope that this is on the way So she went to confession during holy week three months later. If I decide to go to communion. Do you want to be there? Yeah, I want to be there Okay, 11 o'clock on Sunday She's text me on Saturday can't go through with it too nervous Okay, I've massed at six Six a.m. She shows up nice dress kneels down and receives our Lord and she's all the way back in the church But it took a year a Community But it took a year a community and a lot of f-bombs being dropped in my office and so like Where are those spaces in our churches? Where people are willing to give of their time in that way Where we can build a community around people who need a community? You know, I was talking to an amazing friend of mine, and he's been struggling with same-sex traction for his entire life and And he's done everything You know, he's read every Nicolosi book He had a spiritual father who was taking him out to do you know work in the shop and do man things He's been involved in some chastity books He went to this Protestant church and got involved in a group called pure desire Which was there to help him just with personal chastity Because he hadn't acted out with people, but he was still acting out with himself went there Started doing really a lot better. He just went to living waters training like he's doing all these things and and I asked him like So you've done all these things like what was helpful for you father like community is the biggest thing Having community was the biggest thing and and so building community around people is the biggest thing Right, which is hard for us because even like when I talk to family members oftentimes the family members They they don't they have their own like side of how they're understanding everything You know and sometimes when I'm talking to parents of somebody I'll say like do you have anybody to talk to you? No way Like is they need a community to Right, they need a community to So Morris letizia 293 the church's pastors are not only responsible for promoting Christian marriage But also the pastoral discernment of the situations of a great many who no longer live this reality Entering into pastoral dialogue with these persons is needed to distinguish elements in their lives They can lead to a greater openness to the gospel of marriage and its fullness and so when we're talking about this issue, too like there's a discernment of like the person in front of us So father Bochansky who's the executive director of courage? He He basically just says like I love you. Tell me your story I love you. Tell me your story and so like One of the first questions we ask is just like I think that I am I think I'm gay How did you come to that conclusion about yourself? Like I'm not going to tell you you're not I'm not going to tell you it's just trauma I'm not going to tell you it's just because your relationship. I'm just how did you come to that like tell me your story You know and I asked that question once of somebody like tell me your story How'd you come to know that and he said I've never really thought about that like nobody's ever asked me that before Right, which is really sad because that means like nobody's taken an interest in him and coming to know a story And there can be lots of things to discern there right lots of things to discern there and So like I meant I always asked because I'm comfortable asking like tell me your story of how you figured out that you thought you had same Sex traction or came to the conclusion that you have same sex traction my second story question today is tell me your porn story like tell me about your history of pornography use and I remember asking a certain person that and he couldn't answer the first question, but the second one he could and It was sort of I got exposed to pornography in sixth grade by ninth grade I started like watching gay pornography and I realized that was also causing excitement and arousal and Then like two years later. I came to the conclusion that I'm gay So that becomes a difficult space Right, I'm not gonna say every single person who identifies as same-sex attracted also has escalated pornography use, but Today a lot of young people I talked to when they when I asked them why they think they have same-sex traction They'll talk about the pornography they prefer and that's so they're like using pornography to discover something about themselves Which is another reason why like that's the apostolate that I spend a lot of time on Okay, because it's just causing confusion in psychosexual development And so I want to know about that I want to know about their family relationships I'd want to know if they had any trauma in their history Not because I'm gonna tell them like oh, that's absolutely because of that. I'm just gonna say you deserve Healing like you did you just that deserves to be healed And that deserves to be healed for you We all all of us deserve to have somebody listen to our story all of us Deserved to have somebody who will walk with us and if possible we all deserve to have somebody to help us to heal What needs to be healed in our hearts? and so if the church is a field hospital there's this need to triage in a field hospital and And so in the military we had field hospitals and we triaged and we said like you're gonna die We're gonna give you morphine You we can fix you up and you can help us help others and you we can help but it's gonna take a lot of work So we have these three groups of people in the church. There's three kinds of people too So there are families that live the situation of family life and fidelity to those values that constitute the foundation of the institution of the Family so we have faithful people in the church who've surrendered their life to our Lord and They're living the Christian life the fruits of the spirit are active in their life Right. We have like those people right. Hopefully you all are like those people Then the second group of people and this is from familiar's consortio paragraph one Others have become uncertain and bewildered over their role or even doubtful and almost unaware of the ultimate meaning and truth of conjugal and family life So we have doubters Doubters are people who maybe they go to mass, but they don't go to confession or maybe they're involved in their parish But they don't agree with the church's teaching in the area of sexual morality or they don't believe in the church's teaching about marriage so we have doubters and Then the third group of people are those who are hindered by various situations of injustice and the realization of their fundamental rights So injustices can be social injustices like in Italy where in order to get married You have to have a house in order to get a house you have to have a loan and in order to get a loan you have to have a house So Italian men live with their moms till they're 50 and Then you'll often see like a 50 year old Italian man and they're like 20 something Italian woman pushing a stroller through the city of Rome Right, so social injustice, but the other forms of injustice are like the same things we talked about Like a history of abuse a history of abandonment a history of divorce in the family Early sexualization those are all injustices and for those three groups of people. There's three ways that we transmit the faith Okay, there's three ways of transmitting the faith and Those three ways are brought out in this quote about preaching from Pope Francis where he says a beautiful homily a genuine sermon Must begin with the first proclamation with the proclamation of salvation There's nothing more solid deep insured than this proclamation Then you have to do catechesis then you can draw even a moral consequence But the proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives Today it seems the opposite order is prevailing So these three methods Pope Francis says they're also in the document catechesis a trudende on catechesis The first is the Chorigma, which is the first proclamation of Christ saving love Jesus Christ loves you He gave his life to save you. He's now walking at your side every day to enlighten strengthen and free you In Evangelic Audium, he says this first proclamation is called first Not because it becomes at the beginning and then can be forgotten or replaced by more other more important things It's first in a qualitative sense So everything we do has to start with the proclamation of the gospel Just that the simple proclamation of the gospel that Jesus Christ gave his life for you because he loves you At your worst moment He gave his life for you while we were yet sinners Christ died for us says Saint Paul Then we can do catechesis catechesis is when we explain what we believe in why and Then we can do doctrine and morals where we sit around and we talk about moral Consequences and consequences of actions and what if I have the intention of going to confession And I get hit by a bus. Do I go to heaven or hell? Right those are the kinds of things that we do in doctrine and morals we talk about the consequence of things We talk about social justice issues And so those correspond to those three groups of people because if you're a person who surrendered your life to our Lord and The fruits of the spirit are active in your life And you have given everything to our Lord and you are walking in the spirit every day You can sit around and smoke pipes and read Chesterton and the summa and have these high-fluten discussions about whether or not the Pope's Catholic All right You can do that but if if you're a doubter So you can do doctrine and morals the doubter needs catechesis the doubter needs catechesis the person who's they're coming to Mass, but they don't really believe everything the church believes they need an explanation of what we believe in why Okay, look apologetics goes in that category to write apologetics is really effective If you're talking to another committed Christian about why they should convert to Catholicism But if somebody's had an injustice in their life They need the karygma If somebody's suffering, they need the karygma the most committed daily mass rosary praying Altar society leading Catholic woman whose husband abandoned her last week Needs to know that Jesus loves her right now. She needs to know Jesus loves her right now and our Lord makes all things new There's so many people have these stories They go and talk to their priests. They just got divorced in the first meeting Well, remember you can't date until you get an annulment And give me a break. She doesn't want to date anybody. She doesn't want to see a man She just needs to know that our Lord loves her and it's gonna be okay And our Lord came to save what was broken and restore what was lost No, and so we fall into this trap of who am I talking to right now? So in areas of sexual brokenness that person always falls in the karygma category Right they always fall in the karygma category and when we address these issues oftentimes We've been trained about like how do we defend the church's teaching against same-sex marriage? And so, you know the arguments tend to be like teleological moral arguments Which means so if we look at our bodies we can know objectively that we have certain body parts that are ordered towards procreation and anytime we frustrate the end of that body part and we cut off its purpose Which is procreation then it's like immoral and it's against the natural law and that's why we're against Gay marriage or homosexual acts or masturbation or any of those things and it's a valid argument But it's not speaking into the wound Because the other side of things is that you were created for love and Something got distorted somewhere, but you're created for love when Jesus goes to the Pharisees and The Pharisees go to Jesus right and they say Moses says we can divorce our wives. What do you say? He says from the Moses allow that because of the hardness of your heart But from the beginning it was not so and John Paul the second news is that to launch his Catechesis on the theology of the body which starts with you were created for love and You were created first and foremost to have to receive love from God Right you were created first and foremost to receive love from God So this state of original solitude means I am perfectly content in myself with God and He is the source of affirmation in my life He's the source of all things and I'm content there and whether you're called to celibacy or marriage We're all called to be okay with God When we're called to marriage it means I'm okay with God But I'm gonna allow that to overflow to my wife or my husband And so all of us in our spiritual life we're trying to learn how to surrender our heart to our Lord and let our Lord be our comforter and So when somebody's struggling with their sexuality they're struggling with any sexual issue It always goes back to do you believe that our Lord is enough for you? And we all have a story of learning that our Lord is enough for us and Sometimes we're still learning that our Lord is enough for us and we can draw from that story you know when I got back from Rome our Lord had done some amazing things in my life and And I was working really hard. I was working like all day. I'm in my office from 8 a.m. To 10 p.m And I go home and I go in my room and I shut the door. I'm like it's father shawntime Watching Netflix Because I have a choice when I go home I can either watch Netflix or I can turn to our Lord and I can go to our Lord and I can say Jesus Let me just tell you about everything that happened today If I choose Netflix in that moment, it just means I think Netflix is more reliable than Jesus to take care of my stress It's not the worst thing in the world that I have to be honest about the fact that in that moment I think Netflix is more reliable than Jesus. Otherwise, I would pray and And so So this one day I just had this realization like Jesus wants my whole day. He wants my whole day Sean I want your whole day So I go back to my room and I shut my door Jesus. You're invited into my room with me right now We're gonna watch Netflix. I think because whatever we do we do with the Lord and so If it's not okay to watch Netflix with Jesus, then it's not okay to watch Netflix at all So Jesus, we're gonna watch Netflix and and so like that's that was my practice for a while and And then it was maybe like four or five months ago. I just felt more and more like like our Lord's calling me to surrender everything to him and and because of some things because I'm a really bad TV banger and And in one day I was like it was my day off but I forgot I planned a meeting and I was binge watching and I missed the meeting with somebody I care about and then I was like I just hit three addiction criteria right there and This is causing me problems. So I need to surrender this because I can't quit on my own I can't watch 15 minutes if I watch 15 minutes I watch 15 hours So I just like surrendered that and in that surrender like which means I cannot Do this on my own. There's nothing I can do to control it. There's nothing I can do to discipline myself There's nothing I can do to learn the virtue. I just can't do it I am powerless and I need God to do this for me surrender Since then I wake up in the morning with this desire to go to our Lord That I haven't really ever had before Like one day I'd like had nothing to do at 2 30. I was like I'm gonna go expose blessed the sacrament because I can Right like I would give a random hour of my time to somebody who walked in my office and needed me right now Why don't I give a random hour of my time to our Lord because he's just waiting and It it shifted something in my heart and I started to learn more of what it means to belong to him Right and it's my vocation to belong to him, but it's all of our vocation to belong to him Right and when we're asking somebody to live chastity for the rest of their life because they experience same-sex attraction They need to know it's possible to belong to the Lord Which means? Preaching that God is trustworthy and that God loves you and he loves you as you are like over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and In my own personal disposition is I usually think people lie to me Do you believe God loves you? Well, of course, I believe God loves me. I'm not really sure you do Because we can believe that in our left brain, but not in our right brain Right, you know academically that God loves you, right? But do you experience that can you rest in there's a 17 year old who came in to see me because his grandma made him and You know like father Jesus told me you're supposed to be my grandson spiritual director Okay, guess I better do it So he came in and he didn't really want to be in my office. He's just like staring at me like you know And so I just talked to him about anything, you know the fights he got in or he punched the wall at grandma's house or whatever About two or three months in I'm like, okay. I probably should start talking about Jesus You know Jesus loves you, right? Hey, he loves everybody. Oh No, you know, he loves you like your name Father he loves everybody As if to say God loves everybody and he only loves me because I just happened to be part of the everybody He sort of loves me because he has to It's like when my therapist asks me like do you believe I care about you? I'm paying you a hundred bucks to care about me Right and and young people today. They think everybody loves them because they have to Right, they think you love them because you have to Or I love them because it's my job to And it's a characteristic of Millennials and post Millennials It's just a characteristic of the culture at evangelization conferences about Millennials It's like Millennials think the only reason you care about them is because it's your job And so we have to figure out how do I surprise them with love and so I was like no He loves you. He loves you when your dad left when you were three I loved you when your mom's second boyfriend left when you were 11 He loved you when you did drugs in ninth grade. He loved you when you punched the wall at grandma's house last week He loves you Gotta go Comes like two months later is on my calendar one day and I was having one of those days you ever have like those bad days You know, I'm like, oh, I gotta go meet with that kid Okay, like I want to be a priest. All right, so so I go in and and I get to my office And there's him and grandma and two other kids like what they do started drug ring and And he comes into my office like father I went to mass last week and I went to confession I went to mass the week before and I'm gonna go next week and these are my friends and they want to talk to you So what happened like he started to believe what was said over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over Right and and that's how God loves us. He loves us relentlessly and so like when we're walking with somebody it's about loving them relentlessly right relentlessly and Finding a space to create communion You know and because we're really talking about conversion and facilitating conversion You know so the goal is to facilitate conversion and Divas in Missouri Cordia John Paul the second says the church professes and proclaims conversion and conversion to God always consists in discovering his mercy That is in discovering that love which is patient and kind is only the Creator and father can be the love to which the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ is faithful to the uttermost consequences in the history of his covenant with man Even to the cross and death and resurrection of the son conversion to God is always the fruit of the rediscovery of this father Who is rich in mercy? And so the charisma always takes the form of mercy. It means I'm always gonna love you even though Right, I'm always gonna love you even though and so so that's what the goal is like How do I always love you even though? But again, we're in this how do I keep the call to perfection? So the catechism is pretty clear about same-sex attraction right homosexuality refers To relations between men and women or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction towards persons of the same sex It has taken great variety of forms through the centuries in different cultures. It's psychological Genesis remains largely unexplained Basing itself on sacred scripture which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity Tradition is always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered They are contrary to the natural law They close the sexual act to the gift of life They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity under no circumstances can they be approved? That's what the catechism says so That means the church can't under no circumstances approve of homosexual acts and we oftentimes we make this distinction between inclinations or Attractions and actions Right attractions and actions Okay, and I have some other like distinctions I want to talk about later, but but I want to talk about this language of intrinsically and gravely disordered Because that language offends a lot of people I Think the primary reason I think that it offends a lot of people is we only use it when we're talking about homosexuality It seems Okay, like how many of you have ever heard anybody say homosexual acts are intrinsically and gravely disordered Okay, good. How many of you have ever heard anybody say publicly in a talk in a homily in a catechesis that Masturbation is intrinsically and gravely disordered Okay, a couple of you So I have a question about that because the catechism tells us about masturbation that According to the constant tradition of the church the church has been in no doubt That masturbation is intrinsically and gravely disordered But we don't seem to be informing people about this and I'm just Drawing attention to the fact that when we talk about the fact that certain things are intrinsically disordered Or that they are always grave sin We should be naming all of the things that the church says are always grave sin Right all of those things in that context Not like I'm gonna tell you nine times that homosexuality is intrinsically and gravely disordered and I'm gonna whisper in a corner That masturbation is also Right, it's just that's what we teach we teach that any sexual activity outside of the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman is immoral and That's what we teach. So I had a couple in our CIA once and they were like theater people and they had a lot of homosexual friends and They asked this question and they were really struggling with do they want to become Catholic and they came in and I started explaining this and nice And they were like wait, so the church things that like that. They say the same thing about masturbation and fornication and Yeah, oh Okay We're good with that You know, they were just good with that because it wasn't that we were targeting a certain group of people, you know, and And so the other catechism quotes the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible this inclination Which is objectively disordered constitutes for most of them a trial They must be accepted with respect compassion and sensitivity Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives And if they are Christians to unite the to the sacrifice of the Lord's cross the difficulties They may encounter from their condition. So one of Father James Martin's criticisms And I don't agree with his conclusions, but I agree with the criticism is that is that we Enforce policies and things like that with regard to people who might be employees who enter into a homosexual union But we don't enforce the same policy or standard for somebody who like is a divorce and remarried Catholic or for somebody who like has a pornography addiction that's discovered and so so we're not like So we're not consistent in the way that we're approaching things and we should just be more consistent in the way that we're approaching things And so we should be Speaking out on all these areas of sexual brokenness that need attention in the church Right that need attention in the church. That's why I do what I do in my diocese because the number of church-going Catholics who struggle with pornography and masturbation is probably statistically over half Or at least half There's a Christian survey. We've never done a Catholic one because I don't know if we want to know the answer but the Christian survey Came up with something like 60% of Christian men and 40% of Christian women seek out pornography at least monthly So we have this problem of sexual brokenness in the church and we should be addressing that instead of like Talking about the things that maybe don't touch our lives as closely Homosexual persons are called to chastity by the virtue of self-mastery They teach that teach them inner freedom at times by the support of disinterested friendship by prayer and sacramental grace They can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection. So So part of the way that we address this again is it was being consistent means like how are we raising chaste children? right because the stories that I hear today are Mostly stories of sexual brokenness that starts around 10 11 or 12 and By the time it ever comes to be discussed this person's been Experimenting with their sexuality for like six years or seven years or ten years All right, and so one of the preventative things is just like doing the kind of education Right and the kind of prevention work That will decrease some of those factors right not every single person with same-sex attraction has trauma but a lot of people have trauma and If if their trauma is treated sometimes it opens up something You know like I I work with somebody and they were watching Homosexual pornography all the time they have trauma their first test sexual experience was like the neighbor kid Experimenting with masturbation with the him when he was like six So that's his first experience of sexuality now. That's gonna have it an Imprint in his memory And it's gonna affect what he's sexually aroused by for the rest of his life What we're sexually aroused by is always related to firsts and worsts right first sexual experiences and worst sexual experiences and so So he he has this like realization that he might have some trauma and he gets treated for trauma doing EMDR is Imovement desensitization reprocessing it's about like stimulating left brain right brain left brain right brain And it helps you to integrate emotions and experiences And he did some EMDR and then he called me on the phone and he was like so So I'm not gonna say I'm cured, but like women are kind of more interesting than they used to be Right and and so so it's not something where he's not gonna be like I was cured or something like that but But it shifted something in him because he had trauma not everybody has trauma But but I think these are good differential diagnosis kind of things Right we've had that talk on transgender last night and mark your house as a Christian Psychologist who specializes in gender dysphoria and and so he says like the first thing is to do differential diagnosis And they're like if there's trauma it has to be treated. There's other family of origin issues They have to be treated like we have to look at all these other things that it could be Before we'll entertain the idea that it might be gender dysphoria right, which is really smart Because You know like I heard of a case of a girl who wanted to be a boy and then like Her life story like early-onset Administration early-onset administration is like a common experience sometimes for girls And nobody's explained to them that they're going to get their period and they're in third grade What do you think that experience is like I'm dying And if it's not it's if it's not explained to them and they can if they can't incorporate that then Like their association with being a woman Become something they want to dissociate from I'm not saying that's everybody, but it's a possibility right and and so that's why it's so important like tell me your story and Father Harvey when he talks about pastoral care of Persons with same-sex attraction He says this I'm not gonna read this whole thing The council he tends to resist the admission of being homosexual He hates the thought of it and thus to some extent hates himself in facing the fact of same-sex attraction people Thus need complete personal acceptance from the counselor that is affirmation of their worth as a person Regardless of past homosexual acts and regardless of their readiness to try Changing their way of life, so it's interesting right they need acceptance regardless of past acts and regardless of their readiness to change Right regardless of the readiness to change in this the counselor should not approve of any homosexual conduct Rather the point is to let the counseling know that the counselor cares Despite the conduct which cannot be condoned once the counselor realizes He has the trust of the person with SSA a plan of life should be proposed so like So he's talking about counselor counseling, but it also be a parent child grandparent grandchild priest Pristner like I can't condone this activity But I have to communicate my love in such a way that they're going to know that I'm going to love them Even if they keep up the activity and that's a really hard needle to thread It's a really hard needle to thread like I can't condone this, but I'm gonna love you even if you persevere in it and And that can be unsettling in our own hearts. And so it's another one of those areas where Who's supporting the person who's trying to support? All right, that's why Anchorage does amazing work All right, Anchorage is a support group for family members of people who experience same-sex attraction They're really growing right now with family members of transitioning or transgender people and And it's just a support where like these people get me these people love me I can share with them what's going on in my life, and they're not gonna look at me like I have three heads And so that so they do really good work with that Living waters is a ministry that was started by Andy Kamisky and I really trust like everything that Andy Kamisky says about this So Andy was living a gay lifestyle in California in the 70s and 80s found himself in a Christian community and This so he was still acting out but he got into this household with these Christian guys and Being in this household was an opportunity for him to kind of hear the gospel preached in a different way and become curious about Jesus and he had a conversion and That led him to get some therapy and he's one person who it did Open up His interest enough that he got married to a woman and he has four children and he's been running this ministry for about 30 years I think and he converted to Catholicism maybe 10 years ago and So Andy has amazing resources on his website for like parents and how do you talk to your child and Like how do you navigate that space? There's a guy who works for him his name's Daniel who's become a friend and he has this whole story of Like same-sex attraction and cross dressing and being a drag queen pageant person And he hated himself and he was suicidal But everybody thought he was really happy because he told everybody he was really happy and he was like on his way to kill himself one day and the neighbor Just invited him to church Like this kind of movement of the spirit and invited him and he went to this church and he had this experience of God and and And it kept him from moving in that direction And and he's just had an amazing amount of healing and conversion in his life and in his heart But there was a space for him to experience that and so living waters groups are they're really oriented to be a space where you can experience that and And kind of and I also like what I like about them is they're structured around Anybody with any kind of sexual brokenness can come to the group. So it's not just same-sex traction. It's same-sex traction gender identity Pornography sexual abuse like whatever it might be like anybody with any kind of sexual brokenness and sometimes It's good for people to be around other people who have different flavors of sexual brokenness Because it becomes a place of opening up empathy You know another ministry I really like is Eden invitation Eden invitation was started by a couple of girls who would Say that they've experienced same-sex attraction in their life like they wouldn't say Their lesbian Catholics, you know, there's that's a different group But they've experienced same-sex traction in their life and they started Eden invitation because They just wanted it to be a space where they could go back to the roots of what it means to be a human to go back to the roots of what it means to be a human and To like go back to this fundamental reality that like I'm meant to be loved by God And I'm meant to be in relationship with God and in my attractions are my attractions and they're kind of out there But I need to learn to surrender them to our Lord in a community that cares about me And I really like those groups and encourage has been around for a long time, you know One of the encourage it operates a little bit differently in different places So I don't know but one of the weaknesses in the way that courage has worked in some places has been that like you have to be committed to living chastity before you go to the meeting and So it's it's not necessarily there's a purpose for that because it protects the group, right? Like it protects the group from any kind of like cruising or people who go there out of curiosity But it also it it not it maybe isn't a space for somebody who's just curious to show up All right, and and that's the challenge that I think we have is like where is the space in our church where somebody who is Experiencing this kind of brokenness. They're stuck in this kind of lifestyle. Where is the place where they can receive the gospel? Because they might not like mass isn't necessarily that place and we don't have a lot of kind of evangelization spaces in our churches where we do that You know, it's a challenge and I say the same thing about like What if a woman finds out her husband's addicted to porn is she gonna tell her women's Bible study group? And by your laughter from some of you you're telling me no way But is in our church a place where you should be able to tell anything to anybody You know and one of the challenges I always put out there when I'm talking to men's groups and other groups is like Would you be willing to say to the person next to you like if you had anything in your life that you like if you have anything in your life You can always talk to me You know, how do we make ourselves like a safe person for that? So we've got about 10 minutes left. I want to talk about the two distinctions because I think they're helpful So it's like four distinctions and it has to do with like inclinations and actions so So yesterday Ryan Anderson talked about the gender unicorn and there were all these different kinds of things on there and It's it's really ridiculous that we're teaching in that way to our young people But there's some things that he talked about that are realities that are real So so four distinctions that I found to be helpful our body an identity attraction and arousal Right, so our body is our body type. It's male or female. We were born with it. It's based on chromosomes Great, we all agree identity The world says it's like my deepest feeling about who I am And Identity is something that we have to grow into Right, it's something that we have to grow into and like I always say identity is received. It's not achieved Identity is received not achieved like masculinity, especially is received. It's not achieved So I grew up with weak masculine identity Like I was a kid who had more girlfriends than boyfriends when I was growing up like I didn't fit in with guys I fit in with girls Didn't feel comfortable. I didn't play team sports Didn't have a strong relationship with my dad like all of those things there was a period in my life where I questioned my orientation for a little while in puberty like and it's not Abnormal for people to do that during puberty because puberty you're a late bloomer somebody's an early bloomer You're just like, how does that guy have so many muscles and I am like, yeah It's a normal thing that happens and we should teach our young people. That's normal it's normal and But anyways, so I graduate high school I go to West Point So I'm like uncomfortable and groups of guys that are aggressive and I went to a place with 90% men Good job At the end I branched infantry and I'm always trying to do hard things Because I was kind of in pursuit of this masculine. I don't really I'm in pursuit of hard things So so I branched infantry and we had infantry barbecue night So infantry barbecue night is like nine roasted pigs two sides of beef 18 kegs of beer And we got our branch insignia pins, but we didn't pin them on our uniforms. We didn't wear shirts We just drove them into our chest And we ran around and we drank beer and we ate meat and we were men But none of that made me a man I was in ranger school It was the third phase of ranger school and at that point like half of the class has fallen out I'm still there and I have no idea how I'm still there. I'm like lost a bunch of weight I'm down to like a hundred and forty pounds and I'm like nobody's gonna want me And we got to get a new ranger buddies. What am I gonna do in? Dave Parks Who's way faster than me way stronger than me better officer than me walks up to me and he was like co-colle You'd be my ranger buddy and in that moment I never doubted myself my abilities my confidence Whether or not I'd be accepted by a group of men ever again All right, masculinity is bestowed when we're accepted by a group of men that we admire It's not achieved by doing a lot of different hard things and All of us have to go through that kind of like growing into our identity all of us feel more masculine or feminine than we did when we were 10 Right and so that that grows Right attraction is simply like admiration attraction is like what moves us to a person who's interesting Right, so you come to a conference and you see this group of people and they all seem to be having a good time And so you're like I want to I want to know who those people are and you kind of go over and you like hang out You're like, you know like last night. We're in the speakers room, and I've never met Christophanic before and I was just like I'm gonna go stand by him Maybe he'll say hi Right like he's attractive And so I want to go stand by him because I want to like I want to be friends with him Right, that's attraction attraction requires admiration Right it's it requires admiration admiration is when somebody's better than me at something and I just want to learn from them And I want to be around them admiration's normal But what's required somebody's better than me at something My my hypothesis is that we're raising children in a world where everybody's the same And so they're not allowed to admire and they don't have a vocabulary for it And they're misinterpreting admiration for Attraction or sexual attraction So attraction is just that arousal is just sexual arousal. It's a biological function. It just happens Right like what is like if you're a 12 year old boy, what does arousal mean? It's mourning That's it It doesn't have to mean anything other than that it doesn't mean that you're attracted to something It doesn't mean that your identity is something it means it's mourning, right? I'm saying this in a kind of a funny way because most of us aren't teaching our young people that All right, it just has to do with a blood flow to our genitals which happens and so So what sexual attraction is when you have admiration plus arousal So what is happening today in our culture? And this is why all of these issues are connected is that young people are seeing pornography before puberty Then they're experiencing arousal Then they're misinterpreting arousal all arousal as sexual arousal that's supposed to lead to something And then they're basing their ideas of attraction on what they're aroused by And then they're attributing their identity to what they're attracted or aroused by And everything's getting like it's going from the bottom instead of I'm receiving my identity from the Lord I'm trying to navigate and figure out my identity based on this experiment that I'm doing about sexual attraction and arousal Okay, which means we need more better consistent sexual education and a safe place for kids that's questions You know one of the guys that I've worked with he had an amazing shame reduction exercise when he found a sex education website And he started learning that some of the things he experienced about his body when he was growing up were normal He always thought he was a freak All right, he always thought he was a freak But he was started learning that they were normal and so like all of those things ended up being helpful for him You know all those things ended up being helpful for him And but these are like scary conversations because basically what I just said is like when we have somebody with same-sex attraction in our life I love you tell me your story, and I have to be a person who's safe enough to receive their trauma story To receive their sexual history story to find out if they had good sex education growing up Maybe I have to hear about some of their acting out behaviors. I Have to tell them Jesus loves them even though they're doing those things I have to tell them I love them even though they're doing those things That means I have to have an incredible amount of personal freedom Right I have to have an incredible amount of personal freedom and to be able to refer people to places to get help If they need help, but also to like how to build a community around them You know the first stop is our families and we all know that people who have these kind of things in their life They believe they're unlovable and so when they talk to you their goal is to get you to confirm that Anybody have like anybody like that in your life I Believe you don't love me. So when we talk my goal is to get you to confirm that for me and The best thing that we can do is surprise them by not confirming it, you know, and sometimes it's like a well-placed Unsolicited I love you, you know one of the contradictions that we experience in our society is that people with any kind of sexual brokenness They don't believe that people love them. And so they try to get they try to force you to love them I'm gonna pass a law that says you have to love me All right, I'm gonna make it illegal for you to disagree with me That person's never gonna feel unsolicited love If that's the case Right, we can't feel unsolicited love if that's the case Okay, so that just gives you a few things to sort of think about we're almost out of time There's one question back there we do and so like that Dynamic that I described when I was in the army was somebody supplying what my father should have given me And so we do when we have a lack of fatherhood in our society So then the question just becomes like who's going to step in and supply that for people right like Like yes, we have a lack of fatherhood in our society because those people didn't have a father and those people didn't have a father And so like if we're really converted then Then there's a ministry that's in your local community where you go father your priests You know if there's anybody who needs a mentor. I'm willing to be that person for them Right, but all of that takes time. Yeah, okay, so so what I say in that situation is this I can understand how you would say the Catholic Church isn't very caring because we actually don't have very many ministries for them and that's true, right like do you like Does your parish? Have information about what to do if you experience same-sex traction and how the church is there to help you So yes, the church teaching is that I love the person, right? But we haven't done a good job with our pastoral action So we we lose our grounding if we start saying well if we don't just agree with them like the right and And so so but what can you do about it? I just sent somebody go get trained in Living Waters training because I want to be able to have more resources for people And so but when we get into that and they say that well, yeah, you're right And I would say you're right about the fact that we don't have those ministries available We really should there's some ministries. Let me tell you about them and what people are doing within the Catholic Church Because then we can show them. Yes, like we are doing something Yeah, what how am I I think I'm pretty good why in Canada For same-sex traction Okay, that's really good question. So a couple of things and they're gonna kick me out of here really soon Like I just want to affirm you for asking him how long he's known that and Finding out more about a story and That kind of drives home the point that conversations about these things about like sexuality in general and rebutted like those things have to start When kids are like seven eight nine on on the integrity restored website integrity restored calm We have some resources for sex education there And that would be education for like talking to a kid when it comes to like That Decision to go to a wedding or not go to a wedding. That's a it's like a rub, right because you I Don't know your relationship with your son and how it's gonna impact that relationship, right? So Right, so so that has to be discerned like the Again like Where is he out with his faith? Is he like wanting to be in the church or not want to be I'm just I can't turn this into a counseling session I'm just gonna throw some things out so Where's he out with his faith is a consideration then? Like you're also like showing approval for an unjust state law by going to the wedding Right and that's that's kind of the language that the church uses about gay marriage is that it's an unjust social structure because the purpose of marriage is for the good of the state and it changes the meaning of marriage by allowing marriage between two people of The same sex because it eliminates like that point of a future, right? So but that has to do with cooperating in an unjust state law and then there's your relationship with your son So like father check who used to be in charge of the courage apostolate and you could look up courage and courage and see if There's a chapters in Canada Encourage is really good and there's some online Encourage meetings as well and I would say go to living waters comm or it's desert stream org and look up Andy Komisky stuff He's really good Yeah, I mean like that's gonna be up to him. All right One more and then I got to run to my other talk. Yeah, you're right Mm-hmm, right. It's really necessary and there's not a lot of this or things like Go Go back and try to like Change your world, okay In the name of the father and of the son of the Holy Spirit and man heavenly father We ask your blessing upon all of these your sons and daughters and just continue to Fill the space in our heart that you have prepared for us this weekend and through the intercession of the blessed Virgin Mary St. Joseph and all the saints may Almighty God bless you the father the son and the Holy Spirit and man Thank y'all God bless