LGBTQ+ Ministry Is a Form of Nonviolence

Robert Shine

Today’s scripture reflection is by Robert Shine (he/him), the executive director of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace, a part of the global Catholic peace movement. Bob previously served at New Ways Ministry from 2012-2024, including many years as Bondings 2.0’s Managing Editor. He is a co-author of A Home for All: A Catholic Call for LGBTQ Non-Discrimination, and has degrees in theology from The Catholic University of America and Boston College. He can be reached at shine@paxchristifund.org.

Today’s liturgical readings for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time can be found by clicking here. 

“There are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

These words of Israeli minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir about Palestinians have not left me in the month since he voiced them. They are brutal and raw, and breathtaking in their honesty. We exist in a world awash in violence, Israel’s genocide against Palestine being but one such instance. And yet, violence is often papered over with euphemisms and subterfuge. Rare is it that someone of prominence so forthrightly stakes their position out that human dignity is optional.

That rawness can be a mirror: such attempts to strip a person’s dignity are common to all of us, as we deem some lives of greater worth and negating others’ entirely. We do it daily, though, quieter and more circumspect than Ben-Gvir. We may not realize we are doing so, or we may even build an architecture of denial. LGBTQ+ Catholics are well-attuned to this truth. For decades, the message of too many Church leaders—and sometimes the Catholics in the pew beside us—has been that our worth is less.

People tinker with just how worthy another person is. The worst violence erupts from a binary: these people are human, these others are not. More commonly, we create spectrums on which to place others. LGBTQ+ Catholics are, like all people, created in God’s image and likeness. Yet, presently we are placed on a spectrum, somewhere between the divine image of God and disposable by government execution. In a global church, queer folks exist at different places on this spectrum based on their differing local contexts. While we can debate where the church universal situates us right now, it is indisputable that in civil society, our hard-fought rights are imperiled.

The parable in today’s Gospel passage, in which Jesus tells us of a landowner who pays workers equally regardless of the hours they labored, rips up such judgements from their root. There is no spectrum of worthiness. Human dignity is not negotiated, and it cannot be negated. Our wages—God’s grace—are paid out in full, to every person, without qualification. To exist is to be dignified, to have innate rights, to be worthy of all which is good. Parables can confound us; today, this one reads very simply to me.

In today’s reading from Isaiah, we hear: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says [God].” Looking around it is clear God’s thoughts and ways are still foreign to us. Despite God’s best efforts, the divine language and logic revealed to us is too often a horizon beyond our grasp. I suggest that Gospel nonviolence gets us closer. It demands we love enemies, pray for persecutors, respond to evil with good, lay down our lives, beginning with the admission we are equals, equally-graced by God with dignity.

In early September, I attended the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence’s first global conference in Rome. More than 100 grassroots practitioners, Catholic leaders, scholars, and Pax Christi International members attended. Since leaving New Ways Ministry, my work with Pax Christi has been to promote Gospel nonviolence. We ask Catholics and the institutional Church  to adopt nonviolence, not only as a tactic for social change, but as a spirituality and way of life closely modeling Jesus’ own.

Queer Catholics are ever-present for me in this nonviolence work, in no small part because I am one. But we rarely frame LGBTQ+ ministry as practicing nonviolence, and we should. For how else can we describe what LGBTQ+ Catholics and our loved ones do when we respond lovingly to an institutional church that harms us far too regularly? It is nonviolent resistance to keep showing up for Mass, claiming our place at the table. It is nonviolent noncompliance to refuse to hide our relationships or to express our gender inauthentically. To dialogue, to encounter, to welcome, to care for, and, yes, to reject dehumanization, or even to leave the church—all of this is active nonviolence being practiced effectively by our community. 

Today’s readings lead us to reject the logic of dehumanization, ceasing our efforts to define a person’s worth. We trade these false ways for the divine logic of inclusive, nonviolent love. That is the only path forward if we are to really attain justice, inclusion, and peace. 

But, how we live this out is complicated. Consider reading up on Gospel nonviolence and you will hopefully see the parallels I do with LGBTQ+ ministry! But, for a simpler image, I end with words from Padre Guilherme, a priest known for his electronic dance music,  that have also stuck with me: 

“The message is always: Look to the dance floor. You see respect, you see something always beautiful. If this is possible for people so different to be dancing together, why can we not live like that in the world?”

—Robert Shine (he/him), September 20, 2026