St Francis was one Catholic male who seemed to get the androgynous aspects of Jesus's teachings.  He was not your typical heterosexual male--much to his father's frustration.

Over at America Magazine Father Jim Martin asks "What is a Catholic response to gay suicide?"  The Catholic response, at least as it is espoused by the Magisterium, is to continue to demand that gays stay in the closet, stay silent, and stay celibate.  If gays are willing to do that they are welcome in the Church even as our  Pope continues to maintain that gays are disordered in their very nature.  Catholicism for a gay person is a lose lose situation in that you can't win for losing until you die.  The most hope Catholicism offers is to somehow avoid despair while your priests fill your parish reading table full of KofC literature that refers to you as a sodomite and your straight peers are allowed to bully the crap out of you.

The one aspect I don't get about Catholicism's obsession with correct heterosexual sex and correct gender roles are the actions and teachings of Jesus himself.  I don't think Jesus was teaching precepts that underscored heterosexual male gender traits.  In fact, I think He was teaching just the opposite.  He wasn't teaching dominance. He was teaching connections and cooperation.  He wasn't teaching that rational thought was the end all and be all of humanity's intellectual capacity.  In fact it seems He made many of His parables intentionally difficult to understand via rational logical  thought processes.  They encourage counter intuitive solutions which is one reason they were rejected and/or misunderstood by His male followers.  He didn't teach life as a competitive game, nor bless the pursuit of wealth and political dominance.  In fact He taught that one must work to become a cultural loser in order to become a spiritual winner.  He didn't propagate His own genetics nor demand any woman to take care of His every whim.  In fact, the temptations in the desert were all about rejecting what the dominant male heterosexual culture considered markers of success. 

In Jesus's Church, at least one that more reflected what He actually taught, gay men and all women would have a much higher place in the scheme of things because Jesus's teachings are more faithfully reflected in an androgynous world view.  What the Church has now is a sexually based 'gender complimentarity' which places straight males as the dominant force.  Jesus was teaching a far more androgynous spirituality which called for the blending of both rational and emotional/intuitive approaches and had very little to do with sexuality. 

Not surprisingly current psi research is demonstrating that the most effective practitioners of psi phenomenon are androgynous in terms of gender intelligence.  They are both rational and emotive/intuitive.  Gays are over represented in their ranks, especially amongst males.  This is a fact that also shows up in many religious cultures and spiritual systems.  The so called 'third gender' is over represented in the ranks of healers, shamans, and mystics--just as it is in the Catholic priesthood.  Think there might be a message here?

What do I think would be a good Catholic response to gay suicides?  We might try recognizing the fact that heterosexual males are the least genetically adapted to understand or accept what Jesus was on about.  Then we might ask ourselves why we have placed our souls at the mercy of the very men who are least likely to really understand the teachings they teach us--especially the parts about compassion and non judgment.