You can be sure World Youth Day organizers had one thing on their minds when they sat down to plan the Toronto-based event — making sure the Catholic celebration didn’t coincide with Toronto’s Pride Weekend, one of the world’s largest celebrations of sexual diversity.

Imagine the public relations fiasco organizers would have faced if World Youth Day pilgrims had accidentally stumbled upon this year’s Pride parade just as the float from Woody’s passed, featuring well-built, well-oiled male dancers baring almost all for the crowd. Even worse, imagine what would have happened if the pilgrims had liked what they had seen!

The Catholic Church’s official position on homosexuality is clear. A homosexual orientation may be unavoidable, but homosexual behaviour is unacceptable.

In 1986, the Catholic Church went so far as to say that homosexuals are disordered, when it wrote in its Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexuals that “although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil, and thus, the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”

In another part of this document, the Church argues: “As with every moral disorder, homosexual activity prevents one’s own fulfilment and happiness by acting contrary to the creative wisdom of God.”

In other words, a person’s happiness and fulfilment is linked to their ability to create something when they have sex. And the only thing created by sexual acts, according to the Church, are children.

Anyone who has ever had sex with someone they cared about will know this is just plain wrong. Heterosexual sex may (sometimes) produce children, but all sexual acts, heterosexual and homosexual acts, have the potential to create a level of intimacy that didn’t exist to begin with.

There is a very good reason why we treat our girlfriends or boyfriends, wives or husbands, differently than we treat our friends.

Being sexually active with someone allows us to reach a level of intimacy we can never have with friends.

The Catholic Church must realize there is more to sex than procreation.

If it is able to do this, it will understand that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and straight persons are all having sex for the same reasons.