Why I'm Still Catholic
On Belonging, Beauty, and Belief
Not long ago, I sat next to my mom in a crowded restaurant on a Friday night, and I told her my whole story. I told her the truth about my sexuality, the questions I’ve been asking, the relationship I’m in, and the life I’m beginning to imagine for myself—a future that includes love, honesty, integrity, and somehow, in a way that’s not entirely clear yet, my Catholic faith.
She listened with a smile and tears in her eyes. She gave me a big hug. And then, on our way home, she asked me something I wasn’t expecting.
“Why don’t you become an Episcopalian? They accept gay people. They would still let you be a priest.”
It was such a simple, practical question. It carried no judgment. It even made sense, from a certain point of view. But I hesitated, unsure how to respond.
It’s not that I didn’t understand the appeal. Not that I think less of those who do take that path. I hesitated because something deeper stirred in me—something stubborn and quiet and not entirely rational.
I’ve been Catholic now for thirteen years. I spent nine of those years in seminary formation, immersed in the spirituality and culture of the Church. My sense of God, of grace, of beauty, of prayer, has all been shaped by Catholicism. To leave wouldn’t just mean leaving a set of doctrines or an institution. In a real way, it would feel like leaving myself behind.
And yet… it’s complicated. I’m a gay man. I no longer believe what the Church teaches about homosexuality. I don’t believe my sexuality is a disorder, or that my capacity to love another man is sinful, and having rejected these conclusions, I find myself questioning other elements of Catholic moral teaching, too. (As one priest memorably put it, “You’re pulling a loose thread on a sweater, and you don’t know yet whether the whole thing is going to unravel.”)
I do believe the Spirit is still leading the Church into deeper truth, but we’re not there yet. And the liminal space in-between can feel like a lonely, aching place.
So why do I stay?
This post is my attempt to answer that question. Like my last post, this will be more of a theological reflection than an argument, a kind of apologia, in the spirit of St. John Henry Newman: a word written not to convince or persuade you, but to make better sense of the path I’m walking.
If I could sum up my reasons in a few words, they would be these: I stay because I belong in the Church. I stay because she is beautiful. And fundamentally, I stay because I still believe.
Belief and Belonging
The Church is a family. That’s more than a nice idea or metaphor; it’s a theological reality. In the words of the Catechism, “the Church is nothing other than ‘the family of God.’”1 Through the Sacrament of Baptism, we were each adopted as sons and daughters of God the Father, made part of the Body of Christ, His Son.2
This belonging doesn’t depend on merit or agreement. It’s not conditional on holding the right beliefs or following the right practices. It’s not the kind of thing you can cancel, like a subscription service. It’s something closer to the kinship we experience in our families of origin: something given, not chosen, irrevocably, forever.
This is one reason why I stay, even if I disagree and find myself in tension with teachings the Church continues to hold. Even when I feel the pain of how those teachings have harmed me and others like me. Even as I wend my way through treacherous waters, caught between the Scylla of remaining in priestly ministry and the Charybdis of leaving. Even if my very existence as a gay priest complicates my standing in the eyes of the dicasteries of the Vatican or the Code of Canon Law.
At the end of the day, I still belong. Not because I say so, but because God says so. Because God claimed me on the day of my Baptism, marked me as His own, and placed me within this communion—not as a guest, but as a son.
And here’s the thing: even if I did leave the Church—whether by some kind of formal, public act or a slow disaffiliation—I think I would still belong, in some mysterious, indelible way. We still belong to our families, even if we don’t talk to them, even if we move away, even if the relationship becomes strained and distant. You carry them inside you. You remain part of them.
The Church is no different. Too often, we speak about the Church only in institutional terms, but the Church is more than the hierarchy, more than her doctrines and institutions. She is the People of God, the Body of Christ, the Bride of the Lamb.3 And that people includes saints and sinners, faithful and doubting, straight and queer. It includes me.
When I say “I belong,” I don’t mean I’m always comfortable here. I don’t mean I’m at peace with every part of Catholic life and culture. On the contrary, I find my relationship with the Church becoming more complicated the further I go down this path of deconstruction. But I do mean that my relationship with the Church is something more than intellectual assent or moral conformity. It’s deeper, thicker, stronger stuff than that. It’s a relationship of origin and identity. It’s something sacramental: an invisible grace made visible, over time, in flesh and sacred story.
So I stay because I already belong. And I stay because I believe that belonging, that unearned, indelible communion, is itself part of the good news of Jesus Christ.
Culture and Conversion
More than a set of propositions, Catholicism is a culture: a way of life, a rhythm, a grammar of being and belonging. And like any culture, it forms not only what we believe (the content of faith), but how we believe. It shapes our instincts, our symbols, our religious imagination, the way we pray and relate to God.
Sometimes, in more hardcore Catholic circles, the phrase “cultural Catholicism” is treated as a kind of punchline, as if those “cultural Catholics” were somehow shallow or their faith less sincere. But for me, the culture of the Church was deeply attractive to me from the earliest days of my conversion, and it has been a source of deep formation, beauty, and healing.
The “smells and bells” of the liturgy, the stained glass and incense, the psalms chanted in darkness, the feast days and fasts, the writings and icons of the saints, the mystical poetry of the liturgy—I could go on, but suffice to say that these, for me, are not just accretions or optional expressions of the faith. They are the Catholic faith, embodied, in the flesh.
For me, this Catholic “sacramental imagination” has become the deep substructure of my whole spiritual life. Through it, I’ve come to know the God who meets us not just in ideas, but in matter: in oil, water, bread, wine, fire, ash, song, gesture. God speaks in silence, but also in symbols, in seasons, in sacraments.
As a seminarian and now a priest, I’ve spent years steeped in this culture, celebrating the sacraments, praying the Divine Office, learning the language of the Church’s tradition. Some might find this kind of training dull—and sure, there were plenty of days where I mumbled my way through Morning Prayer or dozed through a droning deacon’s interminable homily. But there were also moments—quiet, luminous, sometimes heartbreaking moments—when I truly encountered the living God. Moments of deep healing, radical mercy, being known and loved in ways I could never have imagined.
These encounters have all come to me through the prism of Catholic culture, of sacrament and symbol: lying prostrate in the dark before the sanctuary, sitting in a sunbeam after receiving the Host, or kneeling in adoration before a golden monstrance, the air around me thick with incense and my face hot with silent tears.
To walk away from the Church, for me, would feel like abandoning something much more important than institutional membership. It would feel like cutting myself off from the very wellspring of grace.
Of course, this Catholic culture I’m describing is far from perfect. At its worst, it can be rigid, narrow, clericalist, even cruel. But like any culture, it can grow, mature, and be renewed. And I want to be part of that renewal—not from the outside, but from within. After all, the Church is always reforming, and conversion is an ongoing process of gradual change. The Catechism puts it this way:
“This endeavor of conversion is not just a human work. It is the movement of a ‘contrite heart,’ drawn and moved by grace to respond to the merciful love of God who loved us first.”4
That love reached me through the culture of the Church. It still does. And I’m not ready to walk away from it just yet.
Faith and the Sacraments
I don’t just stay because of beauty or belonging, though. I stay, in the end, because I still believe.
I believe the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ. I believe she is, in the words of the Second Vatican Council, the “universal sacrament of salvation.”5 I believe she is sustained by the Holy Spirit and guided—albeit sometimes in spite of herself—toward the fullness of truth.
And I believe in the sacraments. With all my heart.
The sacraments are not magic, and they’re not just human rituals. I believe they are the ordinary means by which God stoops down and touches creation, how He enters the mess of human life and sanctifies it from the inside out. At the altar of sacrifice, bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. The fount of water becomes the womb of spiritual rebirth, oil becomes the means of bodily and spiritual healing, and our fallible flesh becomes the dwelling place of glory.
This is what the Catechism calls “the sacramental economy”—God’s own chosen means of communicating grace in space and time:
“The sacraments are ‘powers that come forth’ from the Body of Christ … They are ‘the masterworks of God’ in the new and everlasting covenant.”6
“The Church, in Christ, is like a sacrament—a sign and instrument of communion with God and of unity among all men.”7
Again, this is not just poetic language for me. It’s deeply personal. It’s why I became a priest. To lift up ordinary things and trust that God will make them holy. To stand at the altar and say: “This is my body. This is my blood.” To live the mystery of transformation, not only in symbol, but in my own flesh.
And it’s why, despite everything, I still trust the Church’s core claims. Not because I think she gets everything right—especially not her current teaching on homosexuality—but because I believe she still carries the seed of divine truth. I believe she has the capacity to grow into deeper fidelity to Christ, because Christ has not abandoned her. The Spirit still breathes through her and makes all things new.
Yes, I reject certain teachings. Not casually. Not carelessly. But because I believe those teachings are inconsistent with the deeper truths the Church holds and proclaims: the dignity of the human person, the meaning of love, the nature of conscience, the transformative power of grace. I reject them precisely because I believe the Church is capable of more.
In a strange way, this, too, is why I stay: because I believe the Church is still becoming who she is. She is Ecclesia semper reformanda. And I believe the sacraments are not static, like ancient icons, but dynamic, living manifestations of grace, calling the whole Body of Christ into deeper participation in the mystery of His love.
I don’t believe the Church is perfect, but I do believe she is holy. She is set apart as God’s chosen instrument to be the place where heaven and earth meet. And I want to be a part of that meeting, even if the path is full of paradox.
Excursus: The Marian and Petrine Dimensions of the Church
When I speak of the Church, I often find myself speaking in terms of structures: bishops, dicasteries, catechisms and canon law. That’s the Church most people see first, after all. We examine her and see the institutional, hierarchical reality, the Church of authority and governance, teaching and discipline.
The great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar calls this the Petrine dimension of the Church, referring to St. Peter, our first Pope.8 But Balthasar also insists that this is not the Church’s deepest identity. At her heart, he argues, the Church is not first Petrine, but Marian. She is not first a teacher, but a listener. Not first an authority, but a lover. Not first the one who speaks, but the one who responds, saying yes:
“Before Peter’s office and ministry, there is Mary’s fiat, Mary’s pure and total receptivity. The Church, like Mary, is first called to receive the Word, to treasure it in her heart, and to give it flesh.”9
This Marian dimension is a constitutive part of the Church’s identity. Indeed, if we grant Balthasar’s premise, it is the sine qua non of her divine foundation. The Church is not just an organization. She is a person, the Bride of Christ, the one who receives His love and returns her own.
It is this Marian heart that gives life to the whole body. Without it, the Petrine dimensions loses its orientation. It becomes self-referential, rigid, clericalist, even violent and reactionary.
Much of my tension with “the Church” is really with the Petrine dimension of the Church, in its various expression. I am thinking here of teachings and policies that feel defensive, abstract, and dehumanizing, of hierarchs who speak about people like me as if we are problems to be solved rather than persons to be loved.
And yet, even here, I do not give up hope, because I believe in the Marian dimension of the Church. I’ve seen her in the quiet witness of holy women and faithful priests. I’ve seen her in communities like those of the Missionaries of Charity, where the Eucharist is cherished and the poor are loved. I’ve seen her in those who choose to listen first, who treasure what they don’t yet understand, and who trust the Spirit to speak in the silence.
This Marian dimension is the soul of the Church. And I believe that the Petrine dimension must be reformed—never abolished, but better adapted to serve the Marian. All the Church’s structures and teachings must be at the service of love. This, surely, is what Balthasar meant when he wrote that “the Marian is the ecclesial principle itself, the Church’s person, her original and abiding essence.”10
To stay Catholic, for me, is to remain close to Mary, to let her way of being-with-Christ shape my own. I hope that her contemplative, receptive, courageous heart will one day be fully reflected in the Church that bears her name.
Faithfulness in Tension
In conclusion, let me say this: I don’t stay because it’s easy. In some measure, perhaps, I stay because I know love isn’t easy, that faith isn’t certainty, and that tension doesn’t necessarily have to be neatly or quickly resolved. Sometimes, tension is just what fidelity feels like under pressure.
It would be simpler, in many ways, for me to walk away. To find a community where my dignity and my love aren’t up for theological debate, where I wouldn’t have to hold this ache in my chest every time I hear words like “disordered” or “intrinsically evil.” Where my vocation, my prayer, and my love could be seen and accepted as an integrated whole.
But I’m not looking for what’s simple. I’m looking for what’s true.
And the truth is: I still love this Church.
I love her because she taught me to pray. Because she gave me the Eucharist. Because she opened my heart to beauty, mystery, and grace. Because she introduced me to saints who burned with the fire of divine love. Because she showed me a God who suffers with the world and transforms it from within.
I love her even when she doesn’t know what to do with me.
That doesn’t mean I love her blindly. Love never means silence in the face of injustice. Love means showing up, again and again, and telling the truth. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
Faithfulness, for me—for now—means staying in the tension. It means living in the painful, liminal space between what is and what could be. It means lifting up my life, my questions, my longing, my love, as an offering, and trusting that God, who makes bread into His Body, can make even this holy.
I stay because I still believe that “the Holy Spirit dwells in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful, as in a temple … guiding the Church in the way of all truth.”11
So here I am, and here I remain. Not because everything is fine, but because I believe in the One who is still at work. Because I believe the Church is still becoming what she truly is, and I want to be part of that becoming.
This is not the faith of my early conversion. It is smaller now, stranger, more complicated, and more luminous. But it is still mine. And I am still here.
Still Catholic.
Still gay.
Still beloved.
Still believing that the Church can become more fully who she already is in the heart and mind of God.
And I’m still offering all of this to the One who makes all things new.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §1655.
CCC, §1265.
CCC, §781, 787-796.
CCC, §1432.
Vatican II, Lumen gentium (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1966), 48.
CCC, §1116.
CCC, §775.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, trans. A. V. Littledale (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986).
Ibid, 209–210.
Ibid, 212.
CCC, §797.