What about “Dignity” and “Courage”?

The international organization called Dignity teaches that homogenital sex is okay in a loving relationship. That’s contrary to the current mind of the institutional Church. As many say, Dignity is an association of Catholics, not a Catholic association. Admittedly, I have never gone to the trouble of checking them out.

The international organization called Courage (in Britain, EnCourage) urges chastity and adherence to Church teaching. I’m a member, though nowadays I tend to resolve a scheduling conflict with the weekly Catholic Worker liturgy to the detriment of the Courage meeting. Our Toronto group is tiny, comprising on a good night half a dozen guys, and no girls at all. Why this should be, I cannot really say. The Archdiocese is by no means hostile to Courage, and parish priests seem as a rule to be brave enough to let our small posters appear on their parish notice boards. Maybe Toronto is voting against us with its feet. Maybe, on the other hand, we are up against nothing more sinister than the general alienation and impersonality of big-city Toronto, where people tend to worry about matters more mundane than theology.

There’s also an online version of Courage, which offers some silliness, but some honest and true things too. (I recall, among the honest things—let me make some details deliberately fuzzy—the person who was out of work and saw the real gates of perdition opening: not the prospect of paying the rent by flipping burgers or pumping fossil fuel, but the prospect of something along the lines of cruising for “tricks,” or stripping in a bar, or tending a porn shop, or selling phone sex from his apartment. I seem to recall that someone else was able to reply that he had himself been there, had himself done that, had found the lifestyle to be a portal to things like cocaine.)