IN ONE OF THE most important church documents in recent years, Pope Paul VI wrote that the preaching and teaching of the Christian message always entails a twofold fidelity: "fidelity to the human person, and fidelity to the word of God." I find this principle helpful in offering this article on the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality.

For me as a priest living and working among young people, "fidelity to the human person" translates into concern for persons as individuals. Students who walk through the doors of St. Paul's or the Catholic Student Center are not homosexuals or heterosexuals, but individual persons. When one of them says "Father, I'm gay and having a difficult time knowing where I stand with the Church" or "My roommate is homosexual and I'm confused about what to say or do" the first and most basic thing that needs to be addressed is this person, his pain or anger, her confusion or bewilderment. The church's teaching on this is clear: people with homosexual or heterosexual orientations are persons with an equal God-given dignity. Persons who deserve respect and understanding, honesty and insight. What does this mean concretely?

From my perspective, respect means assuring individuals of their value and worth, against society's tendency to classify or stereotype. My faith compels me to hold to this value and worth of persons especially in the most complex and controversial of situations. From a Catholic point of view, persons are not good or bad because they are homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual or whatever classification people invent. A person's sexual orientation is not the key to their value. The key is God's love for them and their capacity to share that love. Sexual morality has to do with how we understand, accept and direct our love.

Understanding means helping persons clarify their view of themselves and what is truly important in life. To achieve such understanding I don't find it accurate or worthwhile to speak or refer to someone as "a homosexual" as if this were the core of their identity. I'm not talking about denying their orientation but of enabling them to accept and deal positively with their sexuality (which is more than feelings and attractions) in the context of their whole identity as persons. This is not easy in a society and a university subculture which often equates emotions and attractions with love and genuine relationships.

Understanding a homosexual man or woman involves looking at some questions for which neither the Church nor human sciences have final answers. What causes homosexuality? Can a person change his or her sexual orientation? To persons I know--both "gay" and "straight"--these are not the critical questions. They want to know what real, lasting, and fulfilling relationships are about. Are they possible? And, for the person of faith, where and how does God speak to their life situation?

This brings me to honesty and insight--to what "fidelity to God's word" means. As a Catholic and a priest, I approach the search for life's most important and ultimate questions within a community that turns beyond itself for answers that are "more fully human." As a believing community, the Catholic Church holds to particular meanings and values for human life. We see these as flowing from our nature as persons created by God. On the basis of its scripture and ongoing tradition, the Church sees the meaning and value of sexuality itself in the context of human relationships that are committed in love and open to the creation of life. It sees the sexuality of man and woman as one way--not the only way--of one individual relating to another who is the spiritual, emotional and physical complement to himself or herself. It judges sexual activity as good and meaningful when, in the context of marriage, a man and a woman nurture their love through intercourse which expresses this full complementarity and an openness to the creation of new human life. Outside of such a context, genial activity departs from its full and integral meaning. The Church views this as wrong because it contradicts the meaning of human sexuality that ultimately derives from God.

This truth as I perceive it, this insight into sexuality, is one that some people find difficult to accept or understand. Most of us who strive to accept and embrace it admit that it is not an easy truth to integrate into our personal lives or explain to the world around us. Consistent with the Christian command "to love in truth and in deed," we struggle as single and married people, as heterosexual and homosexual people, to find ways to help one another and those beyond our community of faith to discover the meaning and value of sexuality in ways that are sensitive and yet true to our faith, contructive and yet challenging to our times.

I say this with no small awareness of those whose efforts to live faithful to God's word and to their human personhood face enormous hardship: not only homosexual people but the many single, married and divorced men and women whose circumstances or conditions in life make it difficult if not impossible to experience the full sexual expression of human love. It is in these, as in other ways that we confront our incompleteness or woundedness as persons, that we turn to God and our community for another kind of love that we believe is more than, but never less than fully human.

REVEREND JOHN E. MACINNIS has a doctorate in theology from the Gregorian University in Rome and has served as Catholic Campus Minister at Harvard and Radcliffe since 1981.