SSA Saints: To Canonize or Not to Canonize?

Ron Belgau sends this along:

Why the Church and the World Need Celibate Gay Saints

Excerpts:

“If the Church wants to speak credibly about homosexuality it must be prepared to speak “in the first person,” just as it has recently made an effort to teach the truth of Christian marriage by canonizing married saints and encouraging first-person experiential accounts of living out the Church’s teachings on marital love.”

“Christians need role models to whom they can relate if they are to successfully pursue holiness, and gay and lesbian Christians are no exception to this. This is why the Bible provides us many examples of holy men and women from Noah to the Apostles, whose lives Scripture exhorts us to study and imitate (Heb 13:7). This is why Christian tradition has bequeathed to us so many colorful lives of the saints, to show us that every kind of person can become holy.”

Meanwhile, Terry Nelson over at Abbey Roads thinks it’s a bad idea.

My personal inclination is to side with Ron Belgau’s post, but that’s just me.  Ultimately, it a question the Church will have to haggle out with input from the people affected by the attraction.  I just think that having some role models of saints who lived chastely with SSA would be a help for those striving with it, particularly when those trying to do so keep hearing from the Purely Pure Spiritual Police that even their attempts to live faithfully are not enough.