The feeling of alienation homosexuals within the Catholic Church feel and lessons that can be learned from acceptance of all people was the topic of a lecture Tuesday night in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union.

As a part of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Ally Alliance’s National Coming Out Week, Sister Jeannine Gramick, a Roman Catholic nun who co-founded the New Ways Ministry, lectured about the reconciliation that must happen between the Roman Catholic Church and the LGBT community.

Gramick herself has been the subject of controversy in the past, as her position of advocacy for the gay community has placed her directly at odds with Catholic officials.

She was permanently prohibited by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from doing pastoral work in the gay and lesbian community while teaching at the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

“The place of the LGBT in the church organizations is front and center,” she said. “The place is right out there.”

Gramick spoke about the integration of the gay community into the church as having a two-pronged effect. Those in the church community must first search inside themselves and become more “mature Christians,” and those in the gay community must “stand up and say that ‘this is my truth and I need to proclaim it.'”

“The place the LGBT person has to reach is to become a mature Christian and make their own moral decisions,” she said.

Gramick said those wishing to bridge the gap must first look at the teachings of the faith community and take wisdom from them.

Next they must look into the Scriptures themselves and realize that even “Jesus didn’t do what the religious authorities told him to.” Then take those Scriptures out the cultural context in which they were written in and put them into a modern frame of mind, as most anti-gay Scripture-based arguments are quoted with the cultural and scientific contexts of 2,000 years ago, Gramick said.

“Basically, we are who we are and that’s the way God made us, and God is good,” she said.

Gramick’s involvement in advocating for the gay and lesbian community started in 1971, in a time long before the concept of homosexuality was commonly known, when she met a young gay man who felt alienated not from God, but from his “spiritual home.” Gramick slowly began to hold “home masses” with gays and lesbians in Philadelphia, which shaped her actions later in life while she was teaching as a school sister at Notre Dame.

While at Notre Dame, the Vatican became cognizant of her advocacy work in the LGBT community, and formally investigated her three times over a period of two decades. Finally, in 1999, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, a group that included current Pope Benedict, put pressure on Notre Dame to make Gramick “find another ministry.”

“It’s not easy to go against a higher authority,” she said of her decision to leave Notre Dame.

Gramick is now a large Catholic advocate for the LGBT community, and was the subject of a documentary called “In Good Conscience.”

One student who attended the event came away with an interest in achieving an equilibrium through understanding.

“It was interesting, because I’d heard about her work before this because I attended a Catholic high school,” said Alyson Peeler, junior in history. “We were very open about the matter there. It just makes me mad when people use their faith to justify their own prejudice.”