According to a gay victim of the clerical sex scandal in Chile, Pope Francis told him, “You have to be happy with who you are. God made you this way.” It’s the conclusion reached by many Christians with same-sex attraction, whose stories share telling similarities.
They knew they were different at a young age. Throughout life, they struggled to hide their feelings and appear normal. After years of enduring rejection, low self-esteem, and depression, they learned to accept homosexuality as part of “who I am.” Eventually, they went public with their “true” identity.
Two StoriesIn an editorial for The Huffington Post, country music artist and professed Christian, Chely Wright wrote about growing up in rural Kansas. As a young girl, she developed a love for God through the influence of her Christian home and community. It was also as a young girl—aged nine, as she recalls—that she realized she was gay.
At age nine? When I was nine, I had some knowledge of the physiological differences between boys and girls, no knowledge of sexual orientation, and as for same-sex orientation … you’re kidding, right?
Nevertheless, over time Chely came to believe “that God had made me exactly as I was supposed to be.”
More familiar in Christian circles is Ray Boltz. After a two-decade career of no. 1 singles, gold albums, and Dove awards, Boltz tired of living “the lie.” The lie. Despite a 33-year marriage that produced four children, the Christian music superstar was gay. Says Boltz,
“I’d denied it ever since I was a kid. I became a Christian, I thought that was the way to deal with this and I prayed hard and tried for 30-some years and then at the end, I was just going, ‘I’m still gay. I know I am.’ And I just got to the place where I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Boltz talks of years in the hidden life, enduring depression, undergoing therapy, taking various psychiatric medications, and becoming suicidal. Then, on December 26, 2004, he disclosed the life-long secret to his family.
It was at that point, Boltz recounts “where I accepted my sexuality and who I was.” It was also the point where his marriage crumbled. (Within a year, he and his wife separated; three years later they divorced.)
Boltz eventually moved to Florida where, he says, he could be himself, free to date and live a “normal gay life.” “If this is the way God made me,” Boltz reflects, “then this is the way I’m going to live. It’s not like God made me this way and he’ll send me to hell if I am who he created me to be … I really feel closer to God because I no longer hate myself.”
Common to Chely Wright, Ray Boltz, and Christian gay advocates is the belief that our desires are fundamental to our essence, part of our God wiring. Since that is the way God created us, they reason, satisfying our desires is not only not sinful, but sanctified.
The truth is that while some desires come from God—the desire for transcendence, for example—others come from an unsettled combination of nature and nurture.
Orthodox Christianity holds that creation, as God made it, was originally good and later became corrupted by man’s rebellion. Today, the whole world bears the pathologies of a virus that has been infecting planet Earth for untold millennia. So, when a person claims that an unbiblical desire is part of “how God made me,” they are conflating dysfunction with design.
Form and FunctionAn axiom in architecture is “form follows function.” That is, the form, or design, of a thing depends on the purpose, or function, the designer intended it to serve. A John Deere tractor is designed for clearing and plowing fields. A Daimler Smart car is designed for high gas mileage and tight parking. Both products are perfectly engineered for their specialized purposes.
If, per chance, a person wanted to plow his field with a Smart car, or commute to the city in his tractor, it would be the desire of the owner, not the intent of the designer or the design of the product, that was disordered. Setting aside the moral arguments about same-sex desire, from physiological considerations alone, it is disordered because it is contrary to the function its “form” is intended to serve.
Human sexuality is uniquely designed to satisfy an essential biological purpose: reproduction. In a very real way, when a husband and wife come together they form a single biological unit through their “hand-in-glove” complementarity. It is a function that same-sex individuals are incapable of accomplishing. They can only transmogrify the sex act to indulge in sensual gratification.
Sex involves pleasure but, as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, that is no more the purpose of sex than it is the purpose of eating. In both cases, sensual enjoyment is the byproduct of functions that are indispensable to life and the continuation of the species.
Since form follows function, it is reasonable to conclude that God, as Master Architect, would not implant a desire within us that is inconsistent with our form and his purpose. What’s more, we can be sure that whatever causes same-sex orientation, even if it is ultimately traced to inheritance, it is not God, any more than he would be the cause of other congenital disorders, like club feet or cleft palates.
The book of Nature is clear: the “form, fit, and features” of a man and woman are complementary to fulfilling a basic function of life that no single individual, or same-sex pair, can. It’s a point that the Book of Scripture is clear on as well.
The Book of ScriptureIn the opening chapter of Genesis, God forms two types of creatures—male and female—born out of his desire to create and fill the universe. God could have given Adam a male “helper.” Instead, he gave him one whose design was such that, when joined with his in perfect fit, enabled them to accomplish the first divine command given to man: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Because of their harmonizing architecture, Adam and Eve were more than the sum of their parts. For when they came together, they became one; but in their oneness produced a third, and then a fourth. Such is the mystery of biblical math.
Same-sex couplings, by contrast, can never be unitive or multiplicative because they lack the complementary features to do so. Consequently, the biblical reproach of homosexual sex is not some religious relic proved false by modern science; it’s a timeless judgment against behavior that is contrary to our God-given design and purpose.
Jesus reaffirms the human design in the Gospel of Mark: “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one.”
That would have been an opportune time for Jesus to be inclusive and expand marriage to other constellations of relationships (man-man, woman-woman, groups, human-nonhuman, etc). Instead, he expands the reach of the Law. (Evidently, he didn’t foresee the revelations of twentieth-century science!)
In a series of “You have heard … but I tell you,” Jesus informs his audience that not only is adultery wrong, even lustful looks are wrong. Notice that Jesus does not limit this teaching to married people, but to those who entertain desires for someone other than their spouse. Since there is no biblical provision for same-sex marriage, all unrestrained homosexual desire would also be, in Jesus’s judgment, sinful. (But then, Jesus probably wasn’t aware of modern insights from “personal experiences” either.)
All that said, as sinners, homosexuals are no different from anyone else. Each of us is grappling with our own menu of sinful thoughts and behaviors. The church is to be a place where we are neither affirmed in our sins (whatever they may be) nor condemned for them; but a place where we are joined together on the life-long journey of transformation, overcoming sin’s gravitational pull, if incrementally and incompletely, through the sanctifying grace of the Holy Spirit and the caring community of faith.
On the one hand, many moderns have embraced an autonomous view of reality: “I can do what I want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.” According to such relativism, homosexual acts are perfectly legitimate so long as they are between two consenting adults. In stark reaction to such subjectivism, many others embrace a moralism that easily turns venomous when it vilifies and demonizes: “Homosexuality is wrong because God said so” (and nothing more). The distinction between the homosexual condition and homosexual acts, if added at all, is added as an afterthought. This view, opposite that of autonomy, could be termed heteronomy, because God’s law is understood to be extrinsically and somewhat arbitrarily placed upon man with a seeming lack of concern for actual experience of the persons involved.
Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor (art. 41), distinguishes the Catholic moral outlook from these two erroneous positions. He labels the Catholic view a “participated theonomy.” If for autonomy there is no law, and if for heteronomy the law is to be followed because God said so, for participated theonomy the moral law is something friendly to our being, something built for our genuine fulfillment and for our authentic freedom. The law is not true because God commanded it; rather, God commands it because it is true. When we use our free will to align our lives with this truth, we possess authentic freedom.
What does this mean for the debate on homosexuality? It means that the truth about human sexuality is something that ultimately offers genuine freedom to the homosexual person, helping him to escape the slavery to his passions that resulted from the misuse of his free will. This is a truth that, with true compassion, reaches out to the homosexual person in his desperation. Although that person may not be aware of it, he is crying out for the truth. When the response from our culture is heteronomous and mean-spirited, he recoils, and takes false comfort in a worldview that espouses autonomy. The Church and society must offer the truth, and offer it in the right way, the way of participatory theonomy.
A Pastoral Context: Participatory Theonomy
It won’t do to start with a good logical argument, using the data of reason and revelation. Such arguments will occupy a central position in the overall Catholic approach, this article included, but only after a compassionate pastoral approach has laid the proper foundation. As Frank Sheed said somewhere, “Win an argument, lose a convert.” We must start with the human person in his existential experience. [1] The first way to do that is to be very careful with our terminology. Let us never use the word “homosexual” as if it defines a person. Let us use either that phrase “person with a homosexual orientation,” or “the homosexual person.” [2] To always use the word “person” emphasizes that we are speaking about someone who possesses an inviolable dignity. Even more importantly, let us never use the word “gay” in reference to a homosexual person. No one is gay. “Gay” is the (unfortunate) word foisted upon us for those who have chosen a particular lifestyle. Such a choice entails a misuse of one’s freedom, a misuse that puts the person in a desperate situation. There are ways out of this desperation—no one is constituted as “gay.”
A pastoral approach recognizes that “desperation” is precisely at the heart of the homosexual person’s experience. Often that desperation is hidden behind the cries of liberation of those who, misled by the gay rights movement, have “come out.” Often it is hidden by the false claims of that movement that “gay is normal” and by political activism. [3] We could respond to that boldness in kind, but far better to take the high road and see it instead as a cry for help.
Gerard J.M. van den Aardweg has shown how homosexual attraction is not just a variant on heterosexual attraction. It is something of a different kind, accompanied by symptoms of depression, jealousy and restlessness. [4] There is no evidence whatsoever that homosexuality is caused genetically, though there could be a genetic predisposition toward homosexuality. As Christopher Wolfe has noted, “. . . if [homosexuality] really were genetic, it would have almost certainly died out, or at least be continually declining. Homosexuals reproduce at much lower levels than the general population . . . . So if homosexuality were a genetic trait . . . it would be found in a smaller and smaller percentage of the population.” And, “. . . if homosexuality were genetic, then in all sets of identical twins where one was homosexual, the other would be, too.” [5] On the other hand, one cannot prove that the orientation is caused environmentally, but all the evidence points in that direction. [6]
That evidence turns out to be good news, freeing news. For with the right help, many people can repair their orientation, fully or to some degree. A fine book from Ignatius Press—The Battle for Normality by van den Aardweg—offers a “self-help” method, and an organization called NARTH (National Association for Reparative Therapy for Homosexual Persons) is committed to helping individuals find competent professional help.
There are a good number of theories about environmental causes, theories that have tested positively in clinical practice. These myriad theories all have a slightly different slant to them, but they also hold much in common and are in many ways compatible with one another. [7] At bottom, homosexuality seems to result from fragmentation within the child/father/mother relationship, and the deepest need of the homosexual person is to repair that fragmentation. As Joseph Nicolosi notes: “Realizing the true needs that lie behind our unwanted behaviors, we gain a new understanding . . . the reparative drive—the unconscious attempt to ‘repair’ masculine incompleteness—is the deepest transformative shift . . . [T]he client realizes: ‘I do not really want to have sex with a man. Rather, what I really desire is to heal my masculine identity.'” [8] I want to participate more fully in the meaning-laden nature that has been given to me, and which has sadly been distorted. Participatory theonomy, in other words.
Reparative therapy, however, should in no way be presented as a requirement for the homosexual person. It is an option. What is required is a noble effort to live chastely. Fr. John Harvey founded Courage, a vast network of support groups, precisely to help people in this task. It is important to realize that everyone has difficult struggles in life, and that we need one another to help handle them. We can make a basic distinction between the raw material each of us brings to the moral life, and the moral life itself in which we make good or bad choices. All of us are disordered in some way and to some degree in our “raw material”—sometimes psychologically, sometimes physically, sometimes spiritually. [9] These constitute objective disorders, one of which is the homosexual inclination. [10]
We are welcome to make prudent decisions about repairing our damaged raw materials, whether through therapy or medical intervention. But we all are aware that we cannot, this side of the Eschaton, somehow psychotherapeutically and medically engineer perfect raw material. That is a utopian illusion. We do well to mediate on St. Paul’s thankfulness to God for giving him a “thorn in his flesh” that made him constantly aware of his utter dependence on God. Then, we can take our damaged raw materials, make prudent decisions about which ones to repair, and live with the others.
In a certain sense, this perspective puts everyone on an even playing field. The homosexual person does not have a disorder that puts him in a separate category from other fragile and finite human beings. [11] We all have our respective crosses to bear—we all suffer from the primal disorder of concupiscence—and we all have the capacity to do as we ought, particularly with the grace of Christ. [12] “What is at all costs to be avoided is the unfounded and demeaning assumption that the sexual behavior of homosexual persons is always and totally compulsive and therefore inculpable.” [13]
Put another way, we really are free. This is not a “pretend” freedom or a “toy” freedom but the genuine article. A “let’s pretend” freedom would give us the nice feeling that we really do make some free choices, about what to eat and what to wear, for instance, but that when something really challenging is at stake we’re not really free. We could not be truly responsible for our actions, since the complexity of life renders such responsibility impossible.
From the opposite angle, when a large-scale challenge comes our way, the great gift of freedom cries out to be used, and used properly. Our human dignity comes from the proper use of our freedom (authentic freedom), especially in the midst of the more staggering challenges of our lives. These challenges must be faced with the damaged raw materials of our lives—homosexuality being one such instance. But regardless of the challenge, we find our true dignity in the midst of meeting it, right in the midst of that noble effort in aligning our lives with the natural law and with God’s revelation.
The next part of this article deals respectively with those two sources of truth. Both are eminently reasonable and sensible—friendly to our being—in the personalist perspective of participatory theonomy outlined here. Apart from that perspective, the arguments that follow will appear as extrinsic, heteronomous impositions that destroy the uniqueness of the individual person. Within that personalist perspective, these arguments can play an integral role in both reparative therapy and living chastely.
The Natural Law
In the contemporary debates on homosexuality, many are tempted to start with an appeal to divine revelation, whether understood from a Catholic or a Protestant perspective. But if you start there, you will rightly be criticized for “pushing your religion down someone’s throat,” which is disallowed in a political order like ours that prizes religious liberty. We are free to practice any religion or no religion, but we cannot violate the natural law, that moral law to which we are co-natured and which is accessible to reason. That is, we participate in this natural truth intuitively, and it makes eminent sense.
One hallmark of the Catholic tradition is that it prizes such arguments that take place on the level of reason alone. The important principle at work here, enunciated best by St. Thomas Aquinas, is that grace does not cancel out nature, but presupposes and perfects it. The data of revelation then both reaffirms the natural argument and adds additional data to it. That additional data, derived from the twin sources of revelation (Tradition and Scripture), is impressive and enriching, and fills in for Christians the full rationale for the teaching against homosexual acts. But even without that data, a good argument can be made based on the natural law.
Many people claim that “you can’t legislate morality.” A bumper sticker says, “Get your laws off my body.” However, our nation’s founding documents appeal to the natural law as the cornerstone of our political order (“nature and nature’s God”; “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”). We want lots of diversity in the U.S., but a fundamental unity on the principles of the natural law. “In God We Trust” is not foisting a religion on anyone, but rather reminding us that God has given us natures and the natural law for their flourishing. All good civil laws are based on the natural law. Bad laws are based on a different moral system, like relativism or utilitarianism. Either way, we legislate morality; the only question is which morality ought to be legislated. The new law allowing “civil unions” in Vermont is not neutral. It amounts to legislating a very specific moral code—sheer relativism.
What exactly is the natural law argument against homosexual behavior? A number of points must be kept in mind. First, we must emphasize that the natural law is, in a sense, within us. It is not an extrinsic imposition. Rather, it is a truth placed in our being by the Creator, allowing us to participate in the wise plan of the Creator—hence, “participatory theonomy.” Second, we shouldn’t think of the natural law as first and foremost identical to our biological laws. The “nature” in natural law is our human nature. The laws of our biological nature turn out to be very significant in grasping the natural law, but they are not the sum total of the natural law. If they were, we would be reduced to animals who must follow their biological instincts. Instead, the natural law makes use of biological laws, but it personalizes them, in that it sees the deep personal meaning that is hidden in our biology. The encyclical Veritatis Splendor speaks of anticipatory signs and rational indications inhering in our biology. [14] As persons, we are capable of “mining” this deep personal meaning that inheres in the body. Animals can’t do this, which is one reason we can euthanize animals—they can’t discover and freely align themselves with the deep personal meaning that lies within their “biological clock.” Human persons can. We discover our dignity in so doing. That is why the slogan “death with dignity” is so inappropriate.
It is just as inappropriate for the homosexual person to “do what he wants with his body.” The body speaks a language that we must listen to; we either live the truth or live a lie. The human generative faculties are not built for homosexual types of acts, and such acts cause serious disease. This gives us a big hint, [15] written on our biological nature, that there is a profound meaning to our biological heterosexuality. Personal meaning is bound up with biological facticity—an integralist view of the person as opposed to a separatist view. The integralist view sees the person as a unity of body and spirit, whereas the separatist view sees the person as standing over and against the body, the body representing raw material that can be manipulated according to the individual dictate. According to the separatist view, I can treat the body just as I see fit—no transcendent meaning inheres in it.
Our generative faculties carry twin personal and transcendent meanings within them. The language they speak to us is that, if we are to live in accord with our dignity, we must use these faculties to express permanent love (the unitive meaning) and to create children (the procreative meaning)—in short, bonding and babies. Homosexual acts sever this all-important link between the unitive and the procreative meanings.Precisely because of this connection, contraception, adultery and fornication, as well as new birth technologies like surrogate motherhood and artificial insemination, also violate the natural law.
Consider the unitive meaning. When we rule out permanence, we are treating the other as disposable rather than non-substitutable. Only a permanent (as well as exclusive) union befits or is commensurate with the dignity of each spouse. A permanent and exclusive union states boldly that the other is not an object that can be replaced or substituted, but a person of inviolable worth. When a couple makes the commitment of marriage, they say to one another, and their conjugal acts say to each other, “You are irreplaceable to me” and “Only to you will I give my whole self.” Divorce or adultery or serial polygamy, then, stand as statements that the partner isn’t irreplaceable after all. And in so saying, the inviolable dignity of the other is violated.
Why can’t two committed homosexual persons have this permanence? Consider: why is it that in heterosexual marriage, violations of permanence are the exception rather than the rule, while in homosexual partnerships, violations are the rule rather than the exception? This is not to say that heterosexual relationships are immune from such fragmentation; numerous heterosexual persons lead lives just as promiscuous as many homosexual persons. But when heterosexual persons fragment the unitive aspect, they are simultaneously arbitrating against the procreative element, using contraception, or at least acting with a contraceptive mentality, or resorting to abortion. Better for them to say, “We shouldn’t be having babies together, so we shouldn’t be uniting sexually with each other.” Permanence and procreativity go together, heterosexually.
Homosexual acts by their nature arbitrate against the procreative dimension. (Note the natural law argument presented here is just as critical of contraception as it is of homosexuality.) In both cases, the conjugal act is turned into a different kind of act; the generative faculties are used in a way contrary to their natural inextricably connected ends of unity/procreativity. In short, permanence is driven by procreativity. When children are ruled out, the unity of the two turns inward upon itself instead of opening outward. Homosexual relationships do not have the character of permanence because this particular reason or end for permanence is missing. It is true that permanence is a value in and of itself, but it is a value connected to procreativity.
Couples who struggle with infertility are poignantly aware of how intrinsic the procreative dimension is for their own commitment. They are profoundly honest in listening to and responding to the language of the body, and hence are courageous witnesses of that language. Listen to them: they tell us that profound permanent unity, valuable in itself, is connected to children. Some factor from the outside, beyond their control, prevents them from having children. But their permanent unity is a procreative kind of unity, their conjugal acts are procreative kinds of acts. (In this sense, their progeny is procreativity itself.) They could turn to the new birth technologies, but here too they listen to and affirm the language of the body. The conjugal act, profoundly unitive, is a procreative kind of act, and the gift of the child is to be profoundly linked to the spouses’ incarnate gift of self in that conjugal, not merely copulatory, act. Infertile couples can shock us out of our complacency, our tendency to think of the child as a right. They know supremely what we tend to see dimly, that the child is a gift. That’s how God works through human nature, and that nature itself is a gift of the Creator—hence, we say that bodily nature speaks a transcendent language to us. The infertile couple sees this giftedness all the more poignantly through the lens of their pain, and hence more boldly than others they proclaim the truth of participatory theonomy. The homosexual person likewise can profoundly proclaim participatory theonomy: marital friendship is itself a great gift, not a right. The fallen condition—which is the root of all disorders—is said to be somewhat of a felix culpa, a happy fault; the distortions that result from it make us more aware than ever of the giftedness of nature. Our fallenness alerts us to and orients us toward participatory theonomy, the voice of God speaking through nature, a voice deeply respective of our personal dignity.
Data from Divine Revelation
Thus far we have focused on the natural transcendent meanings that inhere in the body, particularly in the generative faculties. Revelation—Scripture and Tradition as interpreted by the Magisterium—takes us a step further by placing the male/female relationship in a liturgical context. A properly ordered heterosexual relationship is a liturgical event because it is a mirror image—a sacrament—of the covenant between God and mankind, between Christ and the Church. Many biblical texts point to this imaging (Hosea; Isaiah 62:4-5; Jeremiah 7:34, 31:31; Psalm 88:26; Mt 9:15; John 3; Ephesians 5:32; Revelation 21:2) The unity of the spouses images God’s permanent and exclusive unity with his people, and the procreativity of the spouses images God’s generosity, particularly the outpouring of his own Trinitarian life into our being (grace). In short, the body speaks the language of the covenant. Since the covenant between God and man culminates in the redemptive work of Christ, sacramentally re-presented in the Eucharist, there is a close reciprocity between marriage and the Eucharist. The Eucharist is marital (God marries his people) and marriage is Eucharistic (a sacrament of the covenant). The language of the body is not only natural, it is also sacramental.
It is due to this profoundly personal sacramental meaning of the body that we find a consistent teaching about homosexuality in the Bible (Gen 3; Gen 19:1-11; Lev 18:22 and 20:13; 1 Cor 6:9; Rm 1:18-32; 1 Tim 1:10) and throughout the Catholic tradition, wherein this teaching is infallibly taught by the ordinary universal episcopal magisterium. But again, homosexual acts are not wrong because of this consistent pattern of teaching; rather, this pattern is consistent precisely because homosexual acts are not friendly to our nature. Our very being partakes in God’s loving plan, and his law, rather than being capricious and heteronomous, reflects that plan. The Judeo-Christian tradition must be articulated through the lens of participatory theonomy.
It is in this context that the arguments of John Boswell and others are best met. They argue that there is no ethical condemnation of homosexual acts in the Bible. Rather, the condemnations must be seen in the light of ritual impurity—homosexuality is condemned because of its use in cultic worship practices, as found in Canaanite religions and then imitated in ancient Israel. The best way to meet Boswell’s argument is to grant for a moment that the Old Testament prohibitions refer to idolatrous worship practices, that homosexual acts are wrong because they are used liturgically in false worship of false gods and goddesses. That’s just the point—homosexual acts are, in a sense, in and of themselves “liturgical” acts, inextricably reflective of idolatry. These acts are wrong precisely because they are “inverted sacraments.” Just as the ethical conduct in an ordered marriage images the covenant, so too the unethical conduct of homosexuality is a false image for the covenant, or images a skewed understanding of man’s relation to God. The reason why sexual practices are used culticly (sacramentally) is precisely because that ordered or disordered ethical activity itself is an image of the true or false relationship between man and God. In response to Boswell, then, we can say that the Old Testament does not condemn ritual usage of homosexuality, leaving other uses to the side. Sexuality speaks a “liturgical” language, and thus to condemn the ritual usage of homosexual acts is to condemn homosexual acts in themselves. Most importantly, the condemnation is not a heteronomous end in itself; it points us, along the route of participatory theonomy, to the full sacramental/liturgical outgrowth of respecting the natural language of the body.
The Societal/Legal Dimension
The homosexual rights movement asks, “Why can’t you just let us do what we—consenting adults—want to do? How does that harm you?” Any criticism of homosexuality is presented as tantamount to unjust discrimination. You are suddenly committing a crime as heinous as racism or sexism. The answer to this objection must be made from within the framework of participatory theonomy.
Although it looks like we are speaking of freely chosen activity between consenting adults, that is only half the picture. Anyone who succumbs to activity contrary to the natural law does not, in a certain sense, really want to do so, and hence he does so “involuntarily,” using that word in the deepest sense. Of course the person has free will, and his act will be voluntary in the sense that it stems from that will. But he is using his free will wrongly, not in accord with his nature. This wrong use is in the context of his disorder—hence, the sense of desperation. He feels he wants to act contrary to nature, but he doesn’t need to; it is not in his best interest as a person; it can’t make him authentically free. That is why we say to our friends, “You don’t really want to do that” right at the moment they are “voluntarily” doing something contrary to their nature as persons. Participatory theonomy shatters the illusion by which we tell ourselves, “Consenting adults can do what they want, as long as its voluntary and as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.” It isn’t authentically free, and it is profoundly harmful.
The rewards society offers to married couples must be seen in this light. As Michael Pakaluk notes: “Because the friendship of marriage results in children, and it is a burden of sorts to raise children, and because society benefits greatly if this is done well, it is usual for society to separate out the friendship of marriage from other friendships, to give it special recognition, and to award it distinctive benefits.” [16] If society were to give similar benefits to homosexual persons, then it would have to give the same benefits to any sets of friends that so desired them! Instead, society tries to protect what is in everyone’s realbest interests.
To grant a special set of rights to homosexual persons would work against those real interests. Crimes violating the legitimate rights of homosexual persons are intolerable. “But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational eruptions increase.” [17]
As the saying goes, no one has a right to do what is wrong. “What is wrong” is that which is unfriendly to our nature, that which short-circuits our full participation in the meaning-laden nature given to us as embodied human persons. The homosexual person may initially recoil at the perspective presented here, but that is because he easily confuses human nature with what “feels natural” or what “comes naturally”—in his case, the powerful desire to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same sex. He is only following the cue given by secular culture, which has bombarded him since adolescence with the view that human fulfillment is tied to whatever form of sexual “satisfaction” “comes naturally.” By habitually following what “comes naturally” he has used his free will wrongly, and has become enslaved. The path out of this desperation, toward authentic freedom, comes in participating in the caring plan that God has built into his nature, and participation made possible by the shining grace of Christ who has “set our freedom free from the domination of concupiscence.” [18]
[Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Catholic Dossier (March/April 2001) and was first posted at CWR on September 22, 2017.]
[1] The strategy is analogous to that of the pro-life organization CareNet. Their research found that the excellent arguments offered by the pro-life cause for the personhood of the human fetus did not meet the existential situation of many women considering abortion, who perceived the unborn child, despite his personhood, to be a threat to their lives.
[2] This is the suggestion of Fr. John Harvey, a genuine modern-day hero when it comes to genuine care for homosexual persons. His most recent book is The Truth About Homosexuality: The Cry of the Faithful (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996).
[3] In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association reversed its designation of homosexuality as a disorder, under pressure from the National Gay Task Force. See Elizabeth Moberly, “Homosexuality and Hope,” First Things 71 (March 1997), 30-33, at 30.
[4] William Main, “Gay But Unhappy,” Crisis (March 1990), 32-37, at 36. This is an excellent summary of van den Aardweg’s insights. His most accessible book for the laymen is Homosexuality and Hope (Ann Arbor: Servant Books).
[5] World, May 20, 2000, 51-54. See the work of Jeffrey Satinover,Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), especially chapter 5 on twins.
[6] Jeffrey Satinover, “The Biology of Homosexuality: Science or Politics?” in Christopher Wolfe, ed., Homosexuality and American Public Life (Dallas: Spence, 1999), 3-61.
[7] See Fr. John Harvey, The Truth About Homosexuality, chapter 4, for an excellent overview of the many practitioners.
[8] “The Cause and Treatment of Homosexuality,” Catholic World Report (July, 1997), 51-52.
[9] See the excellent chapter in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity called “Morality and Psychoanalysis.”
[10] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, no. 11. Hereafter PC.
[11] This realization might play an important role in reparative therapy itself, as a central antidote to the sense of “self-pity-become-neurotically habitual” that some theorize is one of the central causes of the disorder. See Main, “Gay But Unhappy.”
[12] PC, no. 11.
[13] PC, no. 11.
[14] See Veritatis Splendor, nos. 47-53, the pope’s response to those theologians who claim that Catholic teaching regarding sexual morality succumbs to a brute biologism whereby moral laws are automatically spun out of mere biological laws. The heart of Catholic moral teaching does not fallaciously deduce a moral “ought” from only a biological “is.”
[15] As Richard John Neuhaus notes (“Love, No Matter What,” in Wolfe,Homosexuality, p. 245), most people are disgusted, in an intuitive and pre-articulate way, by “what active homosexuals do.” So too are many among the 2 percent of the population that is homosexually oriented. (The 10 percent figure from the earlier Kinsey Report was fallacious.)
[16] “The Price of Same-Sex Union,” Catholic World Report (July, 1997), 49. Also see Family, Marriage and “De Facto” Unions, Pontifical Council for the Family (2000).
We often hear that religion is a very private matter. It’s a nice sentiment. It’s inclusive and non-judgmental. And nice non-religious people are really quite pleasant to be around. Catholics can be nice people too. We drive to work to nice offices—I walk to work from a nice rectory—and we return to our households with a nice “live and let live attitude.” And nice people keep religion to themselves, aside from a pious bumper sticker or two.
The other day I found myself pondering a WWII photograph. It’s a famous picture, maybe you’ve seen it. A German soldier is about to execute a Jewish prisoner and the body of the prisoner will soon tumble into a mass grave. About a dozen soldiers are looking on. The facial expression of the executioner is not particularly cruel but it is matter-of-fact. The face of the prisoner, a split second before the soldier would pull the trigger, is angry and defiant. The prisoner doesn’t look like a very nice man.
I zoomed in to view the faces of the bystanders. They are all soldiers, but they could have been people like you and me. I didn’t see expressions of horror. I didn’t see any of them averting their eyes. Nobody is weeping or expressing distress. And if any of them are praying they are keeping their religion to themselves. Individually, they look like they could be very nice people.
A couple of soldiers appear curious and attentive. One is stretching his neck to get a better look. Others seem to be bored. But all eyes are on the scene of the impending execution—a bullet in the back of the head. There’s a time for war, and there’s a time for peace, and there’s even time for entertainment. And this is high entertainment in the execution of Jews in the midst of the prison camp boredom. Taken as a whole, I saw sheep.
After the war many of the soldiers probably lived happily ever after, allowing for the pain of reconstruction. In time, what they witnessed and what they did likely became distant memories. Perhaps they could take comfort in saying to themselves that at least they did not pull the trigger. Or they pulled the trigger with reluctant necessity. Life in the close quarters of Army barracks can be uncomfortable if there are divisive and polarizing views. Disrupting the process wouldn’t be nice. It’s nicer to have unity in the community, as spectators, allowing the cruelties of war to go without comment.
After pondering the picture for about ten minutes, I averted my eyes. As I said, the image isn’t particularly horrifying. The soldier had yet to pull the trigger, but I had a thought that became difficult to bear. The more I pondered the faces, the more I was able to see my own face among those soldiers. I saw the faces of my parishioners among them as well. Except for the angry face of the prisoner, they looked like nice people and we’re nice people. We are also sheep.
Catholics make up only 25 percent of the U.S. population. And most of us live as if religion is a very private thing. It’s nice to have unity in the community. So it’s tempting to suggest that we good Catholics had nothing to do with the moral collapse of our culture. It must have been somebody else, those people. We didn’t pull the trigger. We’re not executioners. We’re nice people. And we belong to the flock of Jesus.
But if Jesus the Good Shepherd defines his flock, one would think that 25 percent of our culture would be recognizably Catholic. So what went wrong? Maybe too many of us are huddling in the barracks of our workplaces, our families. Pretending that if we have our families in order—a continuing holy imperative—we need not busy ourselves with the plight of our neighbors. Families, like religion, we may insist, are very private things.
Or maybe we’ve reduced our faith to a spectator sport. So we look on with fascination as others pull the trigger. Because expressing disapproval wouldn’t be nice. And we might be accused of hate for identifying and opposing sinful behavior. A few of us—Catholics in very high places—are actually pulling the triggers, executing the enemies of progress. Regardless, the gunshots coming from the camps or the smoke belching from the ovens somehow happen without us. Religion is a very private thing. And it’s not nice to be divisive.
In truth, we are all visible members of a flock of sheep. The defining flock is either the polite company of our social or political circles or the flock of Jesus. What we believe is observable, verifiable, and points to our shepherd, whoever he or she is. So our religion and our morality really are not private. And our professed Catholic faith indicts us when we really belong to another flock.
Except for Confession, the Catholic faith is not at all private. And the Catholic faith is not a spectator sport. The Good Shepherd directs and defines us because we are the valuable sheep of his flock. We are his witnesses. Our job is to be nice and faithful sheep, but when there is a conflict, to cluster around the Shepherd, to be truly faithful in the face of adversity.
At the moment we still have the freedom in this country to punch back—even beyond a pious bumper sticker or two—and to reclaim our membership in Christ’s flock. A few modest suggestions:
Risk alienating friends and family by using words like fornication, adultery, sodomy, immorality, and perversion when the subjects invariably come up at social gatherings.
Write your pastor or bishop and asking him to replace his use of “transgendered” with “surgically mutilated”—and while you’re at it ask him never to use the word “gay” except in quotation marks.
Write monthly letters to the editor (wherever) pushing back on the Sexual Revolution.
Cancel cable TV and let people know why (other than saving a few bucks).
Take on your Congressman for his pro-abortion and pro-“gay” voting record and don’t let up when you fail.
With Jesus as the Good Shepherd, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” (Mt 10:28)
Before his death in 2012, Cardinal Carlo Martini eerily called himself an “ante-pope,” a “precursor and preparer for the Holy Father.”
Martini was the leading antagonist to Popes John Paul II and Benedict—a Jesuit famous for groaning that the Church was “200 years behind.” In Night Conversations with Cardinal Martini, he cringed at the “major damage” caused by Humanae Vitae. The Church spoke “too much” about the sixth commandment and sin. He said legal abortion was, ultimately, “positive.”
For Martini saw himself as a dreamer who kept us “open to the surprises of the Holy Spirit.” Hadn’t the prophet Joel said that your sons and daughters would prophesy and your old men would dream dreams? The old cardinal dreamed of young “prophets” who’d criticize the Church and a “strong middle generation” who’d effect “changes.”
Martini said that in “preparation” for the 2005 papal election, he and others discussed the “new answers” that the next pope would “have to give” on sexuality and Communion for adulterers. For Martini was the leader of the St. Gallen “mafia,” the anti-Ratzinger group that wanted a “much more modern” Church under Cardinal Bergoglio.
According to Austen Ivereigh’s The Great Reformer, Cardinal Bergoglio quoted Martini frequently and was introduced by him to the Gallen group after the two Jesuits reconnected in 2001. Cardinal Bergoglio placed second in the 2005 conclave, amidst a “dramatic struggle.” The group reportedly ceased meeting the following year, and Martini—long sick with Parkinson’s—died in 2012.
But in a fiery last interview published immediately after his death, the ante-pope burned with disdain.
The Church was “tired,” its rites were “pompous,” and he who had dreamed of a “young church” now stared at countless ashes. How he wanted the embers beneath the ashes to burn! Where were the men who burned for the spreading of the “spirit”? Where were the men who would preach “discernment” and carry the Eucharist to those in “complex family situations”?
“Are we afraid? Fear instead of courage?” he cried.
As Ivereigh notes, Cardinal Bergoglio could soon be heard quoting the jeremiad, telling the embers to burn beneath the ashes of a Church that kept Jesus “tied up in the sacristry.”
Months later, the “Martini Pope”—as Sandro Magister puts it—now reigned. Pope Francis soon praised Martini as “prophetic”—a “father for the whole church”—and hailed his agenda of “focusing” on synods. In 1999, Martini “had a dream” of hurtling the Church into “permanent” synodality—that is, permanent revolution. The decentralized, “synodal” Church would foment changes on marriage, sexuality, penitential practice, priestly celibacy, women in the Church, ecumenism.
So at the rigged Synod on the Family, one Gallen alumnus, Cardinal Kasper, pushed for Communion for adulterers and another—who had told a king to legalize abortion and a sexual abuse victim to seek forgiveness—waxed poetic about “the womb of mercy.” A leading Martini disciple, Archbishop Bruno Forte, drafted the interim report on the “positive” aspects of sins against purity—and later laughed that Pope Francis had promised to “draw out the conclusions” for Kasper’s proposal because speaking “plainly” would’ve made a “terrible mess.”
Cardinal Baldisseri—who, according to The Rigging of a Vatican Synod?, was overheard explaining how he’d manipulate that synod—calls this year’s synod on young people a “continuation of the subject of the family.” He says the youths bemoaning Church “prohibitions” via web surveys and Facebook will marvelously prophesy what Christ wants to “cut out.”
“As in the days of Samuel and Jeremiah, young people know how to discern the signs of our times, indicated by the Spirit,” the synod’s preparatory document intones. That text, as Matthew McCusker shows, is pervaded with Modernism, which heretically claims that doctrines come from “experience” and thus must “evolve.”
Modernists—as Pope St. Pius X warned—hold that “truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.”
At a pre-synodal planning seminar with Baldisseri, one young prophet invoked her sage “experience” to lament how “closed” the Church is to those with “radical” views on issues like transgenderism. In other remarks published by the Vatican, she extolled a fourteen-year-old who “need[ed] to create her own religion to find one that is welcoming.”
Another young prophet announced: “The pope asked us to ‘make chaos,’ that’s precisely what we’re doing.”
Indeed, Pope Francis had urged the young—specifically “agnostics,” those “estranged” from the Church, and “atheists”—to “criticize” the Church in fulfillment of Joel 3:1-2. “‘The old will dream dreams, and the young will prophesy,’ namely, with prophecies they will take concrete things forward,” he explained.
He was quoting Martini once again, for the ante-pope had dreamed all this, too. Grandiosely invoking Joel in Night Conversations, Martini presaged that the “things we are waiting for” would gust in “via the uninhibited qualities of young people.” The Church “can’t teach young people anything.” It “can only help them to listen to their inner master.” Being taught by the young is a new “pastoral principle.”
They were Martini’s “glowing coals”—“working to save the world” with their leftist politics, forging new “beginnings” with their “less inhibited approach to sexuality.” Were they “still interested in criticizing us, the Church”?
For their sake, Martini had dreamed of a pope who’d admit Humanae Vitae’s “mistakes”—a pope who wouldn’t need to retract the encyclical because he’d just “write a new one.”
In 2014 Pope Francis was asked if the Church could “take up again” the topic of contraception, for “Cardinal Martini believed it was now time.” He replied that “it all depends on how … Humanae Vitae is interpreted”—and now one of his top theologians, a Pontifical Academy for Life member, says some circumstances “require contraception” under Amoris Laetitia.
Other members of the deconstructed pro-life academy defend aborting children and say we’ve evolved past that wispy term “intrinsically evil” because Pope Francis says “time is greater than space.” The new dean of the similarly subverted John Paul II Institute—who wrote books with Martini and organized a radical “shadow synod”—sits on the commission set to “re-interpret” Humanae Vitae on the sly.
“If it gets too peaceful in the Church,” the ante-pope taught, just recall Christ’s “desire to throw a flaming torch of inspiration onto the earth.”
So once the ante-pope’s torch has burned into Humanae Vitae, burned into the very notion of intrinsic evil, the permanent revolution will blaze forward. It will show us why Martini called Luther a “great reformer” and said “you cannot make God Catholic”; why next year’s Amazon synod will crusade for married priests and women deacons; why the Germans are letting some Protestants receive the Eucharist and a respected Vaticanist says an “ecumenical mass” is being readied; why Pope St. Pius X cried of the Modernists: “What is there left in the Church which is not to be reformed according to their principles?”
Then, like some strong and ominous wind, it will sweep aside the ashes to unveil the ante-pope’s “utopia,” where everyone ends up “transparent and accepted by everyone else.” Then the prophets will cry, with the dreamer, that “the times are long gone when the Church could talk you into having a guilty conscience.” Then the sons and daughters will prophesy that—according to the logic condemned by Ven. Fulton Sheen—there is no Hell, no sin, no judge, and no judgment and so evil is good and good is evil.
Then it shall be as the old ante-pope had dreamed.
That is why we must pray and make reparation and speak out, now.
