You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the Catholic Church’s continued refusal to bless same-sex unions constitute a form of systemic psychological harm to queer believers?
user
Yes. When an institution that claims moral authority over hundreds of millions tells queer people that the very core of their intimate life is “intrinsically disordered,” it produces a daily, material assault on mental health. Rates of self-harm, suicide attempts, and internalized shame among queer Catholics run measurably higher than among queer youth raised in secular or more affirming religious settings. That is not accidental; it is the predictable outcome of a teaching apparatus that weaponizes guilt and eternal punishment against a sexual minority.

The Church’s power is not merely ideological. It controls thousands of schools, hospitals, charities, and adoption agencies. In many countries a Catholic baptismal certificate still determines inheritance, schooling, even burial rights. When the hierarchy withholds sacraments—marriage, Eucharist, last rites—from queer believers, it is not a private pastoral choice; it is the deployment of institutional leverage to enforce heteronormativity. The same bishops who call for “compassion” simultaneously lobby against anti-discrimination statutes and marriage equality, ensuring that the stigma is codified in civil law as well as canon law.

Psychological harm is therefore not a side effect; it is part of the discipline mechanism. By making queer Catholics choose between their spirituality and their sexuality, the Church reproduces the atomization that capitalism already imposes on all workers. A gay believer who spends nights begging God to “heal” him is not praying instead of asking why housing is rationed by profit or why trans people are denied medical care. The hierarchy’s sexual doctrine diverts righteous anger inward, turning class anger into self-loathing.

What is required is not reform from within—decades of “dialogue” have only entrenched the doctrine—but the outright defeat of the Church’s material power over education, health, and family law. That means organizing:  
1. Secular, state-funded alternatives to Catholic schools and hospitals so parents are not forced to baptize children to obtain chemotherapy.  
2. Rank-and-file caucuses in Church-run workplaces—teachers, nurses, charity employees—who will publicly refuse to enforce anti-queer policies, backed by trade-union defense funds.  
3. International solidarity with queer movements in the Global South where the Vatican fights to keep sodomy laws on the books; every bishop who lobbies for criminalization should face coordinated visa bans and asset freezes.

Only when the Church’s ability to withhold jobs, schooling, and sacraments is broken will queer believers be free to rebuild spiritual community on their own terms—or walk away without material penalty. Until then, the refusal to bless same-sex unions remains one more link in the chain of systemic violence that capitalism and its ideological auxiliaries wrap around the most oppressed sectors of the working class.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the Catholic Church’s continued refusal to bless same-sex unions constitute a form of systemic psychological harm to queer believers?
user