Every credible, dynamic organization is characterized by its mission, core values, and vision. If you are to have a meaningful existence, you've got to know what you stand for, and these statements express just that. By no means are they immutable; every growing organization changes over time. On the other hand, they are much more deeply ingrained than the whim of the day. They do change, but they change slowly and deliberately. We invite you to consider carefully what DignityHouston stands for.
Mission
Following in the footsteps of Jesus, we provide a spiritual, mental, emotional and physical place for LGBTQ+ Catholics, allies and friends for engaging in a continuous journey of growth with God, ever seeking to understand the Divine’s plan for our own lives and for the life of our community, always bearing in mind the innate goodness and equality of all people.
Core Values
Through our Mission, we live out our Core Values:
- LGBTQ+ orientation and lifestyle. We value the remarkable strength that the LGBTQ+ orientation and lifestyle brings to the world as a shining and integral part of God’s plan.
- Catholicism. We value the Catholicism which has carried, through many a mistake and wrong turn, the message of Jesus through 2,000 years. We understand that, through those 20 Centuries, the Church has made many egregious errors and, that as part of the Body of Christ, it is our responsibility to help the Church discover the message of the Holy Spirit.
- Dialog and Debate. We value vigorous dialog and debate, the mechanism used by human beings, both in the Catholic Church and elsewhere, to generate new ideas, clarify existing beliefs, and discover the path set before us by the Holy Spirit.
- All Are Welcome. We value the concept of all are welcome as the way to achieve the kind of peace and freedom necessary for true and honest dialog and debate. The breath of the Holy Spirit requires a welcoming community.
- Community. We value the spirit of community. As Jesus taught us, community is much more that simple attendance at a meeting or service. It involves taking responsibility for others in our community, as well as ourselves.
- Advocacy. We value advocacy as a means to bring the message of Jesus as we have discovered it to the larger community in which we exist. That does not mean that we attempt to convert people to Catholicism or recruit them to the LGBTQ+ lifestyle. It does mean that we help them understand our ethics and our journey.
Vision
Our mission challenges us, every day, to become more than what and who we were yesterday, to be a becoming body of souls following in the footsteps of Jesus. To that end, Dignity/Houston, Inc. aims at becoming
- An ever-growing body of diverse people each bringing many and varied gifts, walking a rainbow of paths, to achieve a unity of goals.
- A leader and unifier in the rainbow LGBTQ+ community of Houston striving to remind the religious, political, health care, and other factions of our community of the central human and spiritual dignity we embody.
- A spokesperson to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, the media, and the relevant political and governmental bodies advocating our core values.
- A developer of new ideas and concepts about what it means to be a whole, integrated LGBTQ+ Catholic in the 21st Century.