In his recent article ‘Where are the Simple Faithful’? Fr Anthony Archer wrote recently (May 1975) for New Blackfriars : ‘Opening the Church has allowed all sorts of groups to find their inspiration within the Church, for the gospel is a very potent source of new ideas’ (p. 203).
Anyone sufficiently in touch with the actual range of such post- Vatican II Catholic pluralism is aware of the fact that a growing Catholic gay movement is finding its place too on the scene. Impulses of the past few years have been particularly strong in Holland but perhaps even more so in America and Australia, where dignity and acceptance movements have recently joined hands to form an international fellowship of self-accepting gay women and men who profess openly their homosexuality and their Catholicism.
These groups are not so much interested in debate with what they refer to as straight-society. Primarily they are interested in reaching other Catholic homosexuals with their message of self-acceptance and their positive evaluation of responsible sexual relations between gay persons. The very label ‘gay’ is preferred to ‘homosexual’ since it implies explicit awareness of and positive willingness to accept oneself thankfully for what one is, rather than to go on bemoaning one’s fate as second-class citizens in a world of straight values and oppression.