Owning Our Faith, the recent released short documentary, is a bold attempt to influence people’s thinking on the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. Created by the mother church of the Paulist Fathers, it is the brainchild of members of Out @ St. Paul from St. Paul the Apostle Church in New York City.

If the film is any indication, Out @ St. Paul has little regard for the beauty of Catholic wisdom and instruction concerning homosexuality. No one here has fallen in love with Church teaching. Most believe it is in need of changing. One of two men who consider themselves “married” says, “We have to continue living here and being an example and encouraging other people to be that example, because that’s what’s going to change the Church.”

Taking a cue from the hymn All Are Welcome, there is much talk about acceptance. But soon it becomes clear that “acceptance” for them requires Church teaching on homosexuality to change.

A man named Matt says, “I think what’s interesting is that the Catholic Church probably thinks that it is accepting of gay people, because its message is: ‘Gay people exist, and we should love them and not discriminate against them.’ But because the Church also tells gay people, essentially, that they need to be celibate, what the Church is saying is: ‘You cannot live fully. You can be gay, but you can’t live that life.’ And so that inherently is discriminatory.”

In an interview with HuffPost Live, the documentary’s producer, Larry Holodak, said, “All of us [in the film] have, I think, a vested interest in continuing to live out our faith and to continue to prod all of the different teachings in order to gain more acceptance.”

He explained, “Acceptance, for me, is an outcome that basically moves us further forward,” adding that “when Matt was talking about full acceptance, it’s easy to understand how not being afforded the sacrament of marriage has an impact on how you think about your life and specifically how you think about your life as a Catholic.”

As I watched the film, I was filled with sadness. Like the subjects of the film, I, too, live with attractions to the same sex. For a time I shared my life with a man, with whom I hoped to spend the rest of my life. I, too, found the Church’s requirement to live out a chaste life arbitrarily discriminatory and unreasonable.

But with the passage of time, I came to realize that the only path to peace for me — and for all men and women who live with attractions to the same sex — is the path laid out by the Church. For me, an essential part of owning my faith, and what ultimately led to my return to the Catholic Church, was realizing that the call of chastity is not discriminatory, but an invitation to true joy, peace and fulfillment that is impossible when living outside of the Church’s teaching on human sexuality.

I share the story of my journey to this realization in a different documentary than the aforementioned one. In Desire of the Everlasting Hills, I and two others tell the story of how God led us back to the Church after living our lives in homosexual relationships. Like the Prodigal Son, we found that life was truly better in our Father’s house. Where we once believed, as Matt did, that the Church tells people like us “that we cannot live fully,” we know that the words of Christ are true and faithful. He came so we “might have life and have it more abundantly.” We now say as the Psalmist says, “I will never forget your precepts; through them, you give me life.”

Those of us featured in Desire of the Everlasting Hills and our brothers and sisters in the Courage apostolate know the “truth that sets us free.” The invitation to chastity the Church proposes liberates us to true freedom. If many people in the world today — like the participants in Owning Our Faith — misunderstand this truth, the only answer is for the Church to teach it more clearly and more insistently, not to change her teaching to accommodate changing social mores. 

The truth that human beings, and human sexuality, are made with a plan and a purpose is as old as humanity itself, and the teaching cannot change without changing what it means to be human. 

When those who teach in the Church, as well as those who experience same-sex attractions, bear witness to this truth, we invite every person to the joy and peace that God has always wanted for us, in our relationships with him and with one another.

Daniel Mattson lives in the Midwest, where he has a career in music.

He is featured in the Courage International’s documentary Desire of the Everlasting Hills.

and is often invited to share his testimony to clergy, schools and parishes.

He blogs at Letters to Christopher. Other writings may be found at Joyful Pilgrims.