Faces of the Future
An update on my big gay Catholic project
I’ve talked before on the substack about Building Catholic Futures, the project that I’ve been pouring my time and energy into lately. BCF launches publicly this week. I want to give you the bird’s-eye, Latinate version first, and then show you the faces of the people we serve.
Building Catholic Futures is a nonprofit equipping Catholic institutions to evangelize and catechize gay people of all ages. Institutions here includes the institution of the family! You can think of it as, “Everyone a young person or new Catholic might turn to in order to understand faith, love, their own identity, and their path in life.” Evangelize means to make possible an encounter with Jesus: Friend, Bridegroom, Love undestroyed by violence. Catechize means to bring an individual’s unique experience into contact with the Church’s wisdom. Uh, and just to finish this all off, gay people includes like bi people and people who prefer not to use labels and people who experience same-sex attraction and people who are trying to figure their deal out, and queer people even if you’re tenderqueer, and all the usual riffraff.
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We have three tracks: Futures, for people who serve the next generation; Journeys, for people who serve mostly adults; and Witnesses, for gay etc people who are interested in deepening their faith and becoming the role models many of us wish we’d had. But all of that is still just abstraction. Let me show you the real faces.
When I say “Futures,” I want you to picture a drama teacher in a Catholic high school who discovers that her room has become the unofficial gathering spot and refuge for lgbt+ and questioning kids.
Or an elementary-school teacher, who converted to the Faith and loves God, but feels torn between her responsibilities to the Church and to the children who have questions and needs she doesn’t know how to answer.
Or the father who remembers how hard it was for his brother to come out in the ’90s, and wants to know if there’s anything he can do to make sure his kids and their friends know he’s a safe person to turn to with their questions.
When I say “Journeys,” I want you to picture the priest who has heard the confessions of people who fear that even coming out as gay is a sin. Or who has flown on an airplane, in clericals, and heard the story of his seatmate, who misses the faith of her youth but feels that there’s no place for someone like her in the Catholic Church. Or the woman who teaches marriage prep, who gets more questions every year about “whether the Church has something like this for gay people.”
Or the head of the diocesan evangelization office, who hasn’t realized until now that gay people evangelizing in gay communities is even a thing! (BCF’s work intersects with the evangelization office, and the family life office, and the social justice office, and—for reasons we all know far too well—the pro-life office.)
And when I say “Witnesses,” I want you to picture someone who has been quietly faithful for decades, but hasn’t felt comfortable sharing their faith in secular settings or their experience of sexual orientation in Catholic settings.
And someone who was angry at the Church, and now feels like he’s done his grieving for the faith his parents taught him, but now the CNN headlines about the Pope saying gay couples can be blessed makes him wonder if he can come back.
And someone who has had a pretty normal and relatively untraumatized gay life, but has been shaken by a recent death in the family, and wants to pray and open some deep questions with people who understand where she’s coming from.
These are the kinds of people BCF serves. They may sound a lot like people you know.
Take a look, and see if any of the people we serve have your face.
1) Hi! I've been reading a lot of your essays lately and enjoying them. "Why They Call Us" contains an really acute outsider description of the ethic of responsibility I was raised with and the ways in which its focus on middle class "success" ends up unintentionally punishing the poor for trying to have a family, or as you say, "who are the poor allowed to love?" and though I am firmly pro-choice, I've been recommending it to a lot of people I know for that reason. I was interested to read about your new project. Providing role models and space to acknowledge one's identity without giving up the religion one is devoted to is important in all kinds of ways.
2) I was wondering if Faces of the Future planned to add a page on its policy on abuse prevention/safety policy to the website--not because we queer people are any more likely than anyone else to commit such crimes, but because you seem attentive to supporting those who have been hurt by the Church (in a different way), and as part of caring for victims and survivors going forward where in the past they were silenced. Having a public policy can be really important to dealing with any crisis that comes up in a way that upholds the survivors and makes them feel able to come forward rather than accidentally crushing them and. It's especially important for groups working with vulnerable people, as queer youth undoubtedly are both by age and with the current levels of homophobia and family rejection. By contrast, groups that don't acknowledge it could happen in their circles or be done by people they trust are badly placed to recognize and stop abuse. I don't think your outreach effort is going to have these problems more than any other mentorship program and this isn't about it being gay, but since you're working on how to improve Catholic outreach and support for a group that has had some really awful historical experiences, it could be a powerful statement to have a public policy on your website for the purpose of showing care for the vulnerable, supporting survivors, and empowering them to report any abuse, and helping make that open acknowledgement more common in Catholic groups and queer groups alike.
context: I'm not Catholic but my family who are or who left the Church grew up in a town where abuse in the church was an open secret. I respect the work you're doing within Catholicism and the above is said in the spirit of adding rather than detracting. This advice is derived from my past experience receiving the training for emergency room advocates for survivors of sexual assault and the policy is something I really think all orgs should have, but you happen to be starting up a new one now and seem like someone who'd be receptive to hearing and considering this.
I'm a 21 year old college student who is really passionate about this and really admires your work (and I've followed and admired it for a long time!) Is there a way I can get involved? I'm broke and super busy, but would love to somehow be active in this movement. Are you hiring? Do you have conferences? A Facebook group? What are some concrete steps to make an impact?