A Lutheran pastor in Minneapolis who opposes homosexuals being allowed to lead congregations says he is attracted to men but says he’s not a hypocrite because he never acted on his urges.

The Rev. Tom Brock told The Associated Press on Monday that he has known for many years that he is attracted to men. He says he is still a virgin at age 57 and doesn’t consider himself gay because he hasn’t acted on his attraction.

Brock’s sexuality became an issue after a gay magazine reported on his membership in a support group for Christians battling same-sex attraction. Brock was put on leave while a task force at Hope Lutheran Church looked into the matter.

Hope Lutheran’s executive pastor says the task force found Brock credible, and he was back in the pulpit on Sunday.

No one is saying Courage CANNOT footnote the idea of secular therapy for an individual. That’s a given. It’s taking that footnote and making it coincident with chastity … a necessity.

Courage is no longer allowing the individual their own discernment regarding SSA. That’s the point. If you want to belong to Courage, you cannot espouse even the thought of questioning the mixing of the secular and the religious. I’ve been branded pretty much a heretic for even questioning NARTH support by Courage.

The etiology of SSA according to NARTH is constantly pervading every meeting, every publication, every Conference of Courage.

Courage has been given one mandate only by the Catholic Church and that is to help homosexuals achieve chastity … by its 5 Goals … none of which speaks of SSA etiology. The Catholic Church is not a democracy even for Courage. Courage is putting itself in the dangerous position of being suppressed by Diocesan or Vatican authority. The Catholic Church, regardless of its current scandals, is seldom reckless enough to associate itself with ‘theories’, and would be loathe to have anyone speak in its Name, otherwise.

No one is saying Courage can footnote the idea of secular therapy for an individual. That’s a given. It’s taking that footnote and making it coincident with chastity … a necessity.

I have found this site to be one of the best sites anywhere for fair, kind, sometimes spirited, discussion on the topic of sexual orientation. I think Warren is to be commended for offering all of us this opportunity. I am grateful for this.

When posting, I try to be courteous, and objective. I suspect often, I fail. For that, Warren is not to blame.

“…why don’t they pay for the “treatable therapy” they espouse.

There must be some personal responsibility for ones program. Courage allows for the individual to make their own discernment regarding their SSA, based on what their conscience is calling them to, within the context of living a chasted life. That is so much more progressive than what the APA is currently promoting. The APA does not have the final word on SSA and neither do those who promote the “gay is wonderful” agenda. It does not work that way for everyone and the sooner this is recognized on this site the more open the discussion can be.

Confidentiality and 12-Step Groups:

The only confidentiality observed in 12-Step groups is one of a gentleman’s agreement, of sorts. My AA grand-sponsor made it clear to us that this confidentiality of AA is not like the ‘seal of confession’ or a lawyer-client privilege and would not stand under a court of law request.

Further, Bill W. (Bill Wilson) one of the co-founders of AA, broke his anonymity repeatedly in newspaper articles, magazine interviews, radio broadcasts contrary to the 12th Tradition in AA.

I don’t agree with the behavior of this journalist … he used devious means to gain attendance to this group, and thereby gained his schadenfreude moment. All this was contrary to ethical behavior. If the journalist was alerted that Brock was visiting gay bars, etc. that would be another matter entirely.

The funny thing about Courage and the Catholic Church vs. Exodus Ministries is that usually the Exodus Ministries’ ‘therapies’ are often ‘free-of-charge’. Courage is actively promoting throughout their ministry, the non-Catholic, secular, for-profit organization NARTH and its ‘theories’ … always minimizing as much as they can, any physiological, biological, hormonal influences for SSA. Fr. Check, the head of Courage, is on record as stating the following: “Homosexuality is treatable and preventable.”

My question for the Catholic Church, largest and wealthiest Church in the World, why don’t they pay for the “treatable therapy” they espouse.

Fr John Harvey who started Courage sure has. One of his more memorable ones was “homosexual tendencies may be a symptom of a problem of delayed adolescence.” In Harvey’s book, Homosexuality & the Catholic Church, he quotes Dr. Elizabeth Moberly who said that a homosexual orientation depends upon “difficulties in the parent-child relationship, especially in the early years of life.” And Harvey went on to say, “Moberly singles out one underlying principle: that the homosexual man or woman suffers from a deficit in his or her relationship with the parent of the same sex, and that there is a corresponding drive to make good this deficit through the medium of same-sex or homosexual relationships.”

You are absolutely correct. Courage has basically joined itself at-the-hip with NARTH. You can check out their 2010 Conference Brochure online and note that a significant number are psychologists, many secular. In fact, the current President of NARTH, Dr. Phil Sutton is a Workshop Speaker:

1:30 pm – WORKSHOPS:

+ Dr. Phil Sutton “Right Questions, Wrong Answers? Speaking the Truth in Love to Common Experiences Leading to Unwanted SSA”

Every mailing I receive from Courage is mainly ‘advocating secular therapy’, and secondarily addressing chastity.

Eddy… I was wondering if you have any documentation or links re Courage being in ‘avid support of NARTH’. I’m suspecting that people have made the mistake of equating Courage with Exodus or Ex-Gay and then made connections and assumptions based on that erroneous equation. Although I haven’t been in touch with Courage for years, I cannot imagine them actually making psychological pronouncements.

Fr John Harvey who started Courage sure has. One of his more memorable ones was “homosexual tendencies may be a symptom of a problem of delayed adolescence.” In Harvey’s book, Homosexuality & the Catholic Church, he quotes Dr. Elizabeth Moberly who said that a homosexual orientation depends upon “difficulties in the parent-child relationship, especially in the early years of life.” And Harvey went on to say, “Moberly singles out one underlying principle: that the homosexual man or woman suffers from a deficit in his or her relationship with the parent of the same sex, and that there is a corresponding drive to make good this deficit through the medium of same-sex or homosexual relationships.”

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Pehaps most telling is this that Fr Harvey had to say about homosexality, via Moberly:

….according to Moberly’s understanding, attraction to persons of the same sex is not pathological. In fact, it is the drive to restore the disrupted attachment to “a (parental) love-source of the same sex” and thus “is not a problem, but rather the attempted solution to the problem.” What is pathological is the early hostile detachment from a parental figure of the same sex, but one can repair, as it were, the deprivations of the past through the cultivation of celibate same-sex friendships.

Now if that isn’t a neo-Freudian/Nicolosian view of homosexuality, I guess I don’t know what is. Furthermore, in their pamphlet Homosexuality and Hope the Catholic Medical Association lays out a litany of neo-Freudian laspes in childhood for which they put the blamee on homosexuality.

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Yes, Courage doesn’t always seek to put people in psychotherapy and would happily have gay and lesbian Catholics be chaste. But within the ministry and the Catholic professional support for the group, Nicolosian ideas are well entrenched.

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Townsend, a reporter, made this statement to another newspaper in an attempt to justify the validity of his infiltrating the confidential support group. Just as we hold ministers to a higher standard when it comes to morality; we ought to hold reporters to a higher standard when it comes to presenting the facts.

He cited quite specifically what he claims they ‘fully rejected’. I’m thinking it goes beyond ‘mistake’…either the group fully rejects it or they don’t. Even if Pastor Tom and the priest who was the group leader support that notion, it doesn’t explain the charge of ‘fully rejected’. To be blunt, I’d suspect that the 1973 declassification never came up in the group but that Townsend took their use of the word ‘disorder’ and ran with it. (Townsend’s personal agenda in his self-defense piece was to portray the group as quacks. What better way than to say that they reject what the APA has said.)

Yes, I’ve heard the claim that many feel that the reclassification of homosexuality was in response to activism and a gay agenda. I happen to believe that myself. HOWEVER, the issue most of us have is not that they stopped classifying it as a mental illness–most of us don’t see it as a mental illness either–but that they did a complete ‘about face’ and said that it wasn’t a disorder at all–that the only disorder was if you had a dissonance with your homosexuality.