Where are Catholics to go to deepen their understanding of the “gay community”?Where can the “gay community” find spiritual support?
According to the July 2008 Orange County Catholic, the newspaper of the Orange diocese, they’ll find such understanding and support in Koinonia, “a community of gay and lesbian people and family and friends of gay and lesbian people” which meets at Orange’s St. Joseph Center, run by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange.
A couple, Laura and Tom (not their real names) discovered Koinonia when, over ten years ago, two of their six children, a son and a daughter, told them they were homosexual.
The couple remembers their children (the son in his late 20s, the daughter in her early thirties) saying they waited so long to tell them because “we thought you wouldn’t accept us.”
For Tom and Laura, there was no question about acceptance; “we know how wonderful they are,” Tom, a Catholic convert, said.
Tom and Laura then learned about Koinonia. Though they had some “gay friends and acquaintances,” Tom and Laura turned to Koinonia “to hear the stories of other parents and gay people,” said Tom.
Deacon Bill Cobbett who, with his wife Sylvia, were diocesan liaisons to the group for about five years, told the Catholic, “society has moved on from where it once was, but there are still lots of areas where gay people feel discriminated against, and the church is one of them. They feel marginalized because they don’t feel comfortable to reveal who they are.”
“We’re all to be treated with dignity and respect. That’s the church’s social justice teaching,” said Cobbett.
Cobbett, though still involved with Koinonia, is no longer the diocesan liaison to the group. The official liaisons are now Deacon Denis Zaun and his wife Peggy, along with Father Eamon O’Gorman.
Shawne Osterman, 42, has been attending Koinonia meetings with her husband, Randall Virus, for about a year.
The couple will soon be divorced, for Randall is homosexual.
Virus, who is looking to join the Catholic Church, “faced additional challenges from the church Randall had been attending with the couple’s daughters,” said the Catholic.
It was then Osterman found Orange’s Holy Family Cathedral, where she and her family were welcomed by the pastor, Fr. Don Romito.
Virus and Osterman have found support in such groups as the Straight Spouse Network and PFLAG (Parents, Friends, and Family of Lesbians and Gays), but Koinonia has helped, as well, said Osterman.
It “has just been one more branch of the loving and caring outreach that he [Virus] so desperately needed.”
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