Shortly after his appointment as Archbishop of Sydney, Archbishop Fisher spoke with Radio National commentator Noel Debien on a range of subjects. Here he discusses the Church’s approach to people with same sex attraction.

Noel Debien: Sort of related to that was another issue that was discussed in the Synod and that is the approach to gay and lesbian people. We’ll of course, your taking on Sydney. Sydney’s known in the world for a parade among other things of course. What’s your message to families out there because Catholic families have kids who turn out to be gay or lesbian, people find out related to them or associated with them. … What’s your message to families about this issue that came up at the Synod?

Anthony Fisher: Again I think the presentation of the Synod in the general media was this was a source of huge division and in the end they couldn’t come to an agreed text. In fact I think there was huge agreement and it was on this level, we all know and love people of same sex attraction. This is not something alien to the experience of the Church. This in fact is there in everybody’s families or workplaces or friendship groups whether or not they’re aware of it. So what’s our attitude to that to be? Well, these are children of god. If god loves them then the Church has to love them, we have to love them, it’s as straight forward and clear as that. The Church loves people with same sex attraction and that has to be made clear and sadly I think it often hasn’t been made clear historically. That’s the starting point, the question then becomes well these people often are struggling in one way or another, struggling to live the Christian life, struggling for acceptance and respect in society, struggling with their own identity, struggling to form healthy relationships and so on. How can we be in there helping and again I think there was a high level of good will and determination to be in there helping and to be a Church that says to every human being and that includes brothers and sisters with same sex attraction, we are a Church for you. We want you in the Church, we want you in the Church active, engaged and struggling with the rest of us to live the Christian life as fully as possible. When you come in the Church we’re gonna set the bar high for you like we do for everybody. It’s not going to be oh there’s two classes of Christians here, there’s the ones that can aspire to sanctity and the second rate ones that you can’t expect much of. No we’re going to set the bar high for everybody in terms of living the Christian life but no one is shut out of that, we want everyone in. Now I want Sydney, in all its diversity to know that about the Church. The Church is there for everyone, it will set high ideals for us all and it has various ways of for helping us when we fail but it is there for everyone, it’s a group of sinners seeking to be saints.

Noel Debien: Ron and Mavis Pirola, they grabbed headlines round the world. They were reported on and Ron and Mavis are not wafty left wing progressives, they’re not at all, they’re right at the centre of the Church those two. They caught attention when they said we’re talking about some friends of ours who have, you know, a son who’s gay and who has a boyfriend and you know, do we invite them to Christmas dinner or not, and there are kids there. Now that was a dilemma that they proposed. They didn’t actually answer it, if you look at it. They said ‘what do we do?’

Anthony Fisher: And I think Ron and Mavis were speaking for that, that angst, that good willed Christians and other good willed people around the world feel that we want both to hold onto our ideals and we want to love people, we want to support people in their struggles and how do we do both at once and so they posed it as a question and I think that it’s a question that again the Synod felt very intensely. It was not a case of some people saying, that’s not really an issue we don’t care about that but how you both proclaim the wonderful rich wisdom of the Christian tradition about sexuality, marriage, commitment, affection and so on and at the same time deal with people who are struggling to live that, how you encourage them rather than shutting them out. That’s the struggle that Ron and Mavis Pirola were identifying and I think we all feel intensely.

To read the full transcript or listen to the mp3, visit ABC