The dispute over how to deal with homosexual Christians continues to cause conflict in churches around the world. The Anglican Church is threatened with schism because of this. The World Council of Churches (WCC) has also been trying for years to mediate between its liberal and conservative member churches. The World Catechism of the Catholic Church calls for homosexuals to be treated with respect and tact.
The major denominational families deal with the ie differently. The World Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church states: Homosexual acts are "not in themselves in order" and "in no case to be approved" because they violate the natural law of the transmission of life. And: "Homosexual people are called to chastity," it continues. Catholic reform movements have been campaigning for years for a positive evaluation of same-sex love as well.The senior representatives of the Orthodox Church speak out unambiguously. Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II. Spoke out in strong terms against "homosexual propaganda" before the Council of Europe last year. Homosexuality is a sin and must not be advertised. Faithful people could not recognize homosexual relations, added Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad Kyrill, head of the church's foreign office in Moscow.The treatment of homosexuality is also controversial within the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). Especially from bishops from Africa – similar to the Anglican Church – homosexuality is not accepted. The LWF president, Bishop Mark S. Hanson, recently warned that ies of human sexuality should not lead to divisions within the worldwide Lutheran communion of some 68 million Christians.The Bible clearly condemns homosexuality. In the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans it says: "Therefore God gave them over to shameful passions (…) In the same way, men have also left natural intercourse with women and have burned with lust for one another and have disgraced man with man and have received the wages of their aberration, as it had to be, in themselves. And as they have esteemed it nothing to know God, God hath given them up to a perverse mind, that they should do that which is not right."Theologians today emphasize that biblical authors judged based on the circumstances of the time and the knowledge available to them at the time. In biblical texts, homosexual behavior is seen exclusively as an element of the "religiously alien and threatening, but not as a way of life for people who consciously profess the Christian faith," according to a church statement.However, the public blessing of a homosexual relationship in a church service is widely rejected in the Protestant churches in Germany. Groups such as the Ecumenical Working Group Homosexuals and Church (HuK), on the other hand, demand the "full participation of lesbians and gays in church and social life".This Saturday, a new Protestant bishop will be elected in Schleswig-Holstein. One of the candidates, Provost Horst Gorski of Hamburg-Altona, is gay. In the run-up to the election, therefore, there was criticism from an evangelical group.