There is a way to abandon someone who has learned to dress themselves in love. It consists in never telling them the truth, in confirming them in everything, in applauding whatever draws them away from what God wants for them. It costs nothing, it looks good and is even applauded in public.
In recent decades, both inside and outside the Church, that has too often been the attitude toward men and women who experience same-sex attraction: leaving them in their wound and calling it respect. As if charity consisted in remaining silent. As if loving meant expecting nothing from the other.
Against that drift, it is advisable to read Created for Love: Same-Sex Attraction and the Catholic Church, by the American priest Michael Schmitz, published in Spanish by Bibliotheca Homo Legens.
And the first thing that surprises about the book is its tone. Because anyone expecting a settling of scores, a catalog of condemnations, or a manual of reproaches is fundamentally mistaken. Schmitz writes, in his own words, without a single line of personal condemnation. And yet—or precisely because of that—he does not lower the truth by a single millimeter.
Who is Father Mike
It is worth pausing on the author, because his name says much about the weight of the book.
Michael Schmitz—Father Mike to millions of Catholics—is a priest of the Diocese of Duluth (Minnesota), director of its Youth Ministry, and chaplain of the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
But his influence far exceeds those coordinates. He is the voice of «The Bible in a Year», the podcast with which he has guided hundreds of thousands of people through the entire Bible in three hundred and sixty-five episodes.
The numbers are hard to exaggerate. For much of the last five years, The Bible in a Year has topped the Religion and Spirituality chart on Apple Podcasts in the United States and is approaching one billion downloads. Its Spanish version, «La Biblia en un año», reached number one in the Christianity category in nearly fifty countries. In May 2025, he brought his tour to Constitution Hall, in the heart of Washington.
In a country where the Catholic voice competes in a saturated religious market, Father Mike is simply the most listened-to priest. When someone like that takes up the pen to speak about the most thorny issue of the cultural moment, it is worth listening.
The false dilemma
The heart of the book is an intuition as simple as it is liberating.
Schmitz maintains that people with same-sex attraction have been imposed with a «false dilemma»: a choice between two options in which, whichever one is chosen, one loses.
Either you follow your desires or you will be miserable. Either you satisfy all your impulses or you will be left alone. Either you unconditionally accept whatever someone else decides to do, or you hate and fear them.
That approach, the author denounces, is a deception.
And against it he launches the questions that disarm it: is there really no other path? Is it not possible to live the teachings of Christ and be happy? Is it not possible to love the person beside us and, at the same time, disagree with some of their decisions?
Schmitz answers yes, that a third way exists. And that third way is not his invention: it is exactly what the Church has been proposing for centuries and what so many have buried because it is uncomfortable.
Neither the reproach that expels nor the false kindness that abandons
Here is the key that makes this book a tool and not a pamphlet.
The Catholic response does not consist in confirming anyone in sin—that would be the false mercy of the one who abandons—but neither does it consist in the pointing out that humiliates and excludes. It consists in something deeper and more demanding: welcoming the person with respect, compassion, and delicacy, avoiding every sign of unjust discrimination and, at the same time, calling them, like every baptized person without exception, to conversion and holiness.
The Catechism formulates it precisely when it recalls that these persons are called to chastity and can, through prayer and grace, draw near, like everyone else, to Christian perfection.
Schmitz also dismantles the trap of exceptionalism. No one is exempt from the call to do God’s will; all of us, in one way or another, feel the temptation to think we are a special case, to say: “I know what the Lord asks, but my situation is different.”
Same-sex attraction is not, in that sense, a singular condemnation: it is one of the many ways in which every Christian is called to say yes to God in their concrete way of living. We are all in the same boat, even though each one rows their own crossing.
The authority of one who has accompanied
The book can afford this frankness because it does not speak from a distant platform.
Schmitz has accompanied for more than twenty-five years friends, family members, and young people who live this reality. He knows firsthand how many people have felt rejected, condemned, and unwanted within the Church, often because of a clumsy communication of the Gospel teachings.
And he admits, with uncommon honesty, that many members of the Church could improve the way they transmit the truth with love.
That is why the foundation of the entire book is a Gospel scene: the woman caught in adultery, whom Jesus does not stone, but whom he also does not leave unchanged.
«Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on do not sin again».
In that sentence the entire proposal of Schmitz fits. Not the condemnation that closes the door. Not the cheap absolution that leaves everything as it was. The love that tells the truth and accompanies. The proof that tenderness and demand can be held together, and that separating them is, almost always, a form of betraying both.
A necessary book
In a time when much of the debate has settled into the false disjunction between affirming without nuance or rejecting without compassion, Created for Love returns the question to its proper place.
It does not soften doctrine to make it presentable. It does not wield it as a weapon to be thrown. It presents it as what it has always been: a call for every man and every woman to live what they were created for. To love truly. Which is not to affirm every desire, but to order it toward the true good of the person.
The prologue to the Spanish edition is written by Monsignor Jesús Sanz Montes, OFM, Archbishop of Oviedo, who emphasizes how Father Mike addresses the matter with beauty, boldness, and truth.
Three words that well summarize the achievement of a book that does not avoid any difficulty and yet does not wound anyone. Precisely because the one who writes it has learned, in a quarter-century of accompaniment, that the hardest truth spoken with charity is always a form of hope.
Michael Schmitz, Created for Love: Same-Sex Attraction and the Catholic Church. Bibliotheca Homo Legens. Prologue by Jesús Sanz Montes, OFM, Archbishop of Oviedo. Available in bookstores and at homolegens.com.