When I woke up Saturday morning to discover that Ireland legalized abortion I was heart-broken. The bloody nihilistic tide had finally extended its reach over the whole of Western Europe, Portugal remains with the most conservative abortion laws, but it is not completely illegal there either. The loss has historical and spiritual significance.
The conversion of Ireland changed the world — thanks to St. Patrick and others — and led Ireland to help save Western civilization in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. They preserved much of that civilization in their monasteries while also living the missionary spirit and evangelizing various areas of Western Europe.
The impact that Ireland had on what would become Christendom cannot be overstated. This is one of the reasons why it is so tragic that such a vibrant Catholic nation should succumb to the culture of death.
It is true that secularism is largely to blame, but we cannot overlook the deep pain the clerical sex abuse scandal caused the Irish people. There is a reason why it has become a cudgel people use to bludgeon us to death. Yes, this is unjust on their part because the vast majority of our priests and bishops were not involved and they have each worked diligently to live as another Christ to the world; however, we cannot pretend that it did not have a serious impact.
There is something that utterly devastates the world when a Catholic priest or bishop falls into grave sin, evil, and scandal. The world may not understand as we do the significance of the priesthood, but they know deep down that there is something different and other worldly about our priests. Our own culture is obsessed with Catholic priests, even as it attacks them in the nastiest of ways. Even as the world hates and reviles us, they deep down hope we are different and that our priests are different. They may want to see them fall, but when it happens it robs them of some kind of hope that they longed for in the deepest parts of their being. We cannot pretend that the sins of a small minority of our priests and bishops have not had a huge impact on the nations ravaged by the sex abuse scandal, a scandal that is still going on in various parts of the world.
If we also take an honest look at history, we can see where the modern Church has failed in her evangelical mission. She largely stepped out of intellectual discourse after the Enlightenment and left the West to move towards secularism until Blessed John Henry Newman wanted more for Catholic universities. While the West transformed, we largely disengaged until a revival of Thomism over a hundred years ago.
We cannot have a sentimental view of the Church or our faith. Anyone who has studied Church history will take their rose-tinted glasses and throw them in the trash where they belong. To love is to love the beloved with all of their flaws and we love the Church with all of the stains and failures caused by our brothers and sisters in Christ both in the laity and the clergy down through the ages. We are able to do so because in the end we know it is Christ who is the Head.
Sentimentality doesn’t convert souls and it does not come from a position of strength. We are at war. We’ve always been at war. This is a battle for the hearts, minds, and souls of every human being who has ever lived, is alive today, or will live in the future. The Enemy seeks to destroy us and drag us straight to hell with him and his demons. Moral therapeutic deism isn’t going to get us anywhere.
Christ told us the gate is narrow, this means we must live lives dedicated completely to Him. As Dr. Robert George stated a few years ago: “The age of comfortable Catholicism is over.” If anything, the legalization of abortion in Ireland should wake us from our slumber and complacency. The lands of Christendom have crumbled and now lie in ruins in the wake of secularism.
How do we fight?
The war begins in our own homes and families. Are we actively pursuing holiness and helping our children towards heaven? Are we as spouses living out this vocation faithfully? Are our priests living lives of deep prayer and heroic virtue? I think all of us can honestly answer that we fail repeatedly in our vocation. That isn’t the issue. We are going to fail and need to continue to rise again with Christ’s help. If we are actively trying, then we are on the path to holiness. We must truly desire to be a saint first and then we can begin on the journey.
The problem is in those Catholic homes where we view our faith journey as a one hour on Sunday obligation and that’s it. Our lives look no different from our neighbor’s. If asked, many people probably wouldn’t even realize we are Catholic.
We need to ask ourselves: How are we different? How are we living with Christ as the center of our lives? Are we a beacon of hope to the people around us who are trapped in the lies of secularism and all of the deadly philosophies that have ensnared them? People should be able to tell we are Catholic by the way we live our lives.
The Mass is the center.
The Mass is the center of our lives. According to Vatican II it is the “source and summit of the Christian life.” It is through the Mass that we are given the strength and grace we need to live our vocations and go out into the world to bring others to Christ. Moral therapeutic deism—the idea that we have to only be a “good” person—does not lead people to evangelize. It leads to apathy and complacency because everyone gets to heaven for being their own version of “good.”
Moral therapeutic deism has infected the Church and it is harming our evangelical mission. The Church still teaches that Christ is the only way even if she does not fully know who is considered inside of the Church by God at an individual’s death. That’s up to Him to decide. It’s up to us to draw people to Christ and to the Sacraments. The Church does not teach an individualistic carte blanche approach to religion.
Consider, each Sunday and at daily Mass we get to partake of the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The God of the universe who made us in His image and likeness out of a gratuitous act of love condescends to our altars in order to be our spiritual food. How could we not want to share that gift with ever single person we meet? God wants to feed everyone through the Holy Eucharist. He wants all peoples to come to the sacrifice and banquet of the Mass which is a foretaste of heaven.
We have this tremendous gift and we aren’t sharing it. Far too many of us don’t even see it because we are so focused on our daily duties and responsibilities. The Mass must be the starting point for all that we do. It is where we are prepared for battle.
Fighting the war.
A war requires heroic virtue and it requires summoning all we can into our reserves. That means holding fast to the Sacraments and receiving them frequently. It means being people of prayer and Sacred Scripture. It means actively asking God to make us saints and to be willing to endure what will be required of us. Not a single saint was made in comfort. Not one. The Cross is where saints are made. Pray and be ready.
The Enemy is cunning, vastly superior intellectually to ourselves, and hates us. He is actively trying to pull each one of us away from Christ. The one billion babies who have been murdered worldwide through abortion are the casualties of being “civilized” and being a “good” person. It is the smiling face of the demonic. Souls are being lost around us and we ourselves have often fallen into acedia or sloth. Sloth isn’t laziness. It is apathy or indifference to the spiritual. It is to seek the world over Christ. We all fall into it at times, but we need to recognize it when it strikes.
Acedia is often hidden by our desire for comfort. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI saw this danger when he proclaimed: “The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.” What does he mean by “greatness”? He does not mean worldly prestige or glory. He is not talking about power and wealth. He is talking about holiness. We aren’t made for comfort because we are called to be saints. We are called to the radical life of holiness, which means giving every single aspect of our lives to Christ in His service. Everything! Our children, spouses, friends, family, house, cars, all the goods we own, our job, our gifts and talents, our sexuality, our bodies, and our souls. We cannot hold anything back from Him, if we do, He will use trials to help free us of our attachments. It’s the only way we can become the beautiful, truly good, and holy person He created us to be.
Why am I writing about holiness in the wake of the Irish vote? I am writing about it because we possess the answer to all of the sufferings, woes, immorality, darkness, weakness, stupidity, and horrors of this world. We have Christ crucified and Risen from the dead. We have the answer that dwells in the depths of even the most hardened of souls. Holiness is how we transform the world and bring it to Christ. Those who hate us the most have often been hurt the most by the wickedness of those of us within the Church, including our priests and bishops. Those people need Christ just as much as we do.
We must always look to Christ in hope, even as we lose countless battles here on earth. One of my favorite quotes for times like these is from one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters: “Actually I am a Christian,” Tolkien wrote of himself, “and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory” (Letters 255).
We ourselves will fall daily and need to get back up. Battles are about small victories that lead to the ultimate victory. There is great evil in the world and it will largely maintain the upper hand, but the ultimate victory has already been won. Our job is to fight and in so doing attain our Crown of Glory along with countless other souls who persevered to the end.
Constance T. Hull is a wife, mother, homeschooler, and a graduate student theologian with an emphasis in philosophy. Her desire is to live the wonder so passionately preached in the works of G.K. Chesterton and to share that with her daughter and others. While you can frequently find her head inside of a great work of theology or philosophy, she considers her husband and daughter to be her greatest teachers. She is passionate about beauty, working towards holiness, the Sacraments, and all things Catholic. She is also published at The Federalist, Public Discourse, and blogs frequently at Swimming the Depths (www.swimmingthedepths.com).
On May 25, Irish citizens will vote on a referendum on whether to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution. The Eighth Amendment, which bans abortion except when the life of the mother is at risk, is the last vestige of Catholic Ireland to be enshrined in law. The fact that it has survived so long is testament to the strength of the Church’s foundations in that verdant island. The Catholic Church has so totally conditioned attitudes toward abortion in Ireland that in order to smash the Eighth, abortion proponents have had to construct a parody Church—complete with false but plausible doctrine and a false but plausible history.
A false account of the Catholic Church’s historic stance on abortion has been in circulation for decades. There is an astroturf anti-Catholic organization, “Catholics” for Choice, funded by plutocratic foundations, dedicated to its dissemination. Legislators use its briefings, news programs interview its spokespersons, and advertising campaigns carry its expensive posters. A devious blend of fact and fiction, the false history of the Catholic Church and abortion goes like this:
The Catholic Church has not always totally condemned abortion. In the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas speculated that male embryos became ensouled at 40 days and female embryos became ensouled at 80 days. The Church came to prohibit abortion only in the nineteenth century.
This lie is peddled frequently by Patsy McGarry, the religious affairs correspondent for the Irish Times. McGarry has written: “The Catholic Church’s current position on abortion was established only 143 years ago, in 1869[, when] Pope Pius IX outlawed abortion from the moment of conception.” On another occasion, McGarry wrote: “For the greater part of its 2,000 year history until 1869, [the Church] taught that no homicide was involved if abortion took place before the foetus was infused with a soul.” Again: “Some of the greatest theologians in the Christian tradition … taught that ensoulment took place at ‘quickening,’ when the mother detected the child move inside her womb for the first time.” All this sounds plausible. But it is a tissue of half-truths and falsehoods.
The Catholic Church’s total and constant prohibition on abortion dates back to its earliest days. The Didache, which dates from the first century, contains a stern admonition never to murder a child, born or unborn. As to the notion that abortion before “ensoulment” was considered licit by the Church: The notion of delayed ensoulment was based on the erroneous biology of Aristotle and a mistranslation of the Old Testament (Exodus 21:22). And no one in Aquinas’s day considered it an argument in favor of early abortion.
Aquinas, like Sts. Augustine and Jerome before him, opposed abortion without exception. Lacking modern medical knowledge, these doctors of the Church did not construe abortion before animation as homicide in the strict sense—but they condemned it as a grave wrong and as akin to homicide.
At the heart of the false history of the Church is the appeal to medieval speculations about the ensoulment of the fetus. This is the reddest of herrings, for ensoulment has never been a teaching of the Church. The utility of the theory in canon law was a matter of separating a gravely sinful action—early abortion—from an excommunicable sinful action—later abortion.
Hence, from 1591 until 1869, the penalty of excommunication applied to abortions procured on an “animated foetus”—that is, a fetus more than 40 days old in the case of males, more than 80 in the case of females. In 1869, Pius IX imposed the penalty of excommunication for abortions procured at any point, from conception onward. Prior to 1869, however, abortions procured prior to 40 or 80 days had still been considered gravely sinful. As St. Basil put it, “the woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder; with us there is no hairsplitting distinction as to its being formed or unformed.”
The “ensoulment” myth is an example of false history and one well suited to our times—disseminated by the mendacious and relied upon by Catholics who want to have their cake and eat it too. Its persistence tells us a great deal about modern preoccupations, and nothing at all about the past.
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).
In today's news story about a sex abuse victim's understanding of the personal counsel of Pope Francis (Chilean abuse victim: Pope said I should be happy as a homosexual), we have Juan Carlos Cruz quoting the pontiff as saying: "God made you like that and he loves you like that and I do not care." I do not intend to argue that this is what Pope Francis actually said, nor to clarify what Pope Francis must have meant if he said it. We cannot know either of these things.
But I do want to use this now-famous sound bite as a teaching moment. For by themselves, these assertions easily admit of a profoundly evil understanding, one all too common in our own time. Without context and interpretation, assertions like this can stifle the awareness of the need for conversion (such as we see repeatedly in the letters of St. Paul, for example). And so they can do great harm.
In his book Why I don't Call Myself Gay, David Mattson reports that he could not find any sort of progress or peace until he recognized that his fundamental identity was that of a beloved son of God, not a bundle of desires. We already know that Pope Francis places great emphasis on God's love as truly constitutive of who we are as persons. We can see as well that there is a way to interpret the quotation in the previous paragraph that is absolutely true and good. Consider the following understanding:
God loves you. He has loved you into existence. He knows that you are same-sex attracted, and He permits you to feel that attraction only because this particular suffering can help you to turn ever more to Him — to grow into an ever-greater bond of love with Him. We do not know all of the causes of same-sex attraction. But we do know that God permits us all to suffer and struggle in different ways because every form of suffering, with our own precious cooperation, can help us to turn to Him, to depend on Him, to confide our lives to Him. This is a response of our own sacrificial love to God's sacrificial love.
In relying on Him, we will enable Him to increase His Presence in our lives, in our very selves. And so God loves us even in and through whatever is broken in us, whatever needs healing, whatever needs to be perfected through grace. In the name of God's Church, I too love you in this way, for I have God's sacramental life within me, and all who experience this life can love as God loves. I love you in your experience of your own crosses, just as I love God in my experience of my own crosses. For it is by accepting our crosses, and embracing again and again the will of God, that we grow into union with Him, and so into eternal life.
Now that is a long restatement of a central Catholic idea which is proper to the counseling of all sinners (that is to say every one of us). But in the form reported by Juan Carlos Cruz, it is subject to a series of potentially deadly misunderstandings — misunderstandings which any good Christian will take great pains to avoid. Here they are:
God made you like that
This is true of our genuine imperfections only if we are speaking of God's permissive will. The Jews in the Old Testament frequently speak in this way, as in "God hardened Pharaoh's heart." But what this means is that, after the Fall, God permits all kinds of disorders to affect us, including fairly serious physical, intellectual, psychological, and affective disorders within our human nature, challenges to our integrity as persons that we experience more or less continually.
But this does not mean that the "way we are" is a license to sin. The person who has anger management issues does not thereby have a license to fly into a rage, though his affective disorder may mitigate his guilt. The person who suffers from what we call kleptomania does not have a license to steal, though his psychological disorder may also mitigate his guilt. In the same way, the person who experiences same-sex attraction does not have a license to engage in sexual activity with a person of the same sex, although once again the disorder may mitigate the degree of guilt involved in his or her falls from grace.
When we say "God made you like that", we must not mean that God does not regard the disorders we suffer as disorders. This expression must not be taken to mean that God creates, intends, or blesses our rage, our theft, our sexual sins.
God loves you like that
This statement is true only if we are acknowledging what should be a challenging Christian understanding of love. God always loves us in His infinite desire that we might return that love, and so draw into union with Him. But sin frustrates that love, because it directly opposes Who God is. God's will is that we become perfect as He is perfect, fulfilling our lives in the only way we can be fulfilled, in Him.
Sadly, insofar as we refuse God's will, we choose evil. Evil is the absence of good, and choosing it is to choose nothing over something. It is to reject love. It is to prefer our own radically proud isolation; it is to prefer the absence of God. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem," cried Our Lord, "How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!" (Mt 23:37; Lk 13:34)
When we say "God loves you like that", we must not imply that God actually loves "that", if "that" includes not just our suffering and our struggles but also our sins.
And I do not care
Clearly we ought not to love someone less because that person's particular faults are less congenial to our own personalities than some other faults would be. It is a weakness of our nature to find it easier to love people who sin in ways we do not find "so bad", but it isn't part of the logic of Christ to succumb to this weakness. In this sense, when it comes to loving another person, a good Catholic does not care in the least what particular habitual sins characterize that person's life.
We are all "poor sinners", yet we are all loved by God so much that He sacrificed His only begotten Son to free us from bondage to sin. We are supposed to be astonished by this love, and to be startled into an unguarded movement of love in return. But there is no room for complacency. Too easily does the expression "I don't care that you are tempted by this particular sin" become an expression which is entirely different: "I don't care if you sin". This is grotesque. This is the word of Lucifer, the so-called Angel of Light, pretending that he knows what it means to love.
Therefore, when we say, "and I do not care", we must not mean "I do not care if you sin". For when we truly love anyone, their sins must fill us with unspeakable sorrow. This is the sorrow of the agony in the Garden, the sorrow of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It is the sorrow we are supposed to feel more than any other sorrow — the sorrow which cuts us more deeply than anything else in this weak and weary world.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
Almost one hundred years ago the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote The Second Coming. It is a strange nightmarish poem. It tells of events that are both seen and unseen, of an ominous elemental horror that is imminent, one that “slouches” from its centuries-old hibernation towards Bethlehem to be “born.”
Last Friday, May 25, 2018, the citizens of the Irish Republic voted to remove the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, Article 40.3.3. On a turnout of just over 64 percent of the electorate, 66.4 per cent voted for repeal of the Eight Amendment while 33.6 percent opposed it. This voting pattern, with minor variations, was consistent across the country.
In a moment of insight, following a referendum in 1983, the Eighth Amendment had been inserted into the constitution to safeguard the rights of the unborn. Through it, Ireland had effectively banned abortion. The decision to remove this constitutional safeguard now opens the door to legislation, which many suspect will usher in one of the most permissive abortion regimes in the world. News of the speed with which the current Irish government wishes to enact the necessary legislation in favor of abortion is as telling as it is alarming.
The result of the referendum comes as no surprise. The political establishment—all the leaders of the various political parties, plus many within these parties, especially the opportunistic and the ambitious—mouthed platitudes about “doing the right thing.”
The media seemed especially in favor of repealing the Eighth Amendment. The State broadcaster, Raidió TeilifÃs Éireann, like so many media outlets, went through the pretense of being a neutral forum for both sides to debate and put forward their arguments. The underlying hostility to the pro-life side could not be hidden though. The Irish Times, Ireland’s newspaper of record, also attempted to give column space to both sides, but it, too, seemed half-hearted in this. It was not just the paper’s editorial stance, which, given its liberal credentials, was always going to be pro-abortion, but rather the ways in which the pro-life case was portrayed in the newspaper’s pages. That portrayal was endlessly associated with religious imagery even though the pro-life campaign was a secular movement. Instead, a certain impression of Irish pro-lifers was deliberately constructed and then conveyed—of fanatically religious men telling women what to do with their bodies. It was a deliberate ploy. In reality, the pro-life campaign was fronted by women who were just as professional, independent, and articulate—perhaps more so—than their counterparts calling for repeal of the Eighth Amendment. This fact was, however, conveniently overlooked in media reports.
Of course, it was never going to be a fair fight. The intervention of Google and Facebook at a decisive moment in the referendum debate proved that. Since the Irish media effectively prevented the pro-life campaign from putting its argument across to voters, the pro-life message was heavily dependent on new media to reach that constituency. The crucial period for the intensification of its campaign was two weeks away from polling day. This was the very moment when Google and Facebook pulled the plug—banning in various ways advertising on the forthcoming referendum. The move came at a time when the pro-abortion side had been complaining hysterically of being out-gunned and out-witted on social media by pro-lifers, no doubt sensing their “Yes” campaign was faltering as the polls began to narrow. Momentum was now with the pro-life campaign. A pro-abortion source openly admitted that it was at this point that “pressure” was applied to the tech giants. In any event the “pulling of the plug” on pro-life Internet advertising was a devastating blow to the “No” campaign, thereby crippling its ability to reach voters directly.
Yet, the final polls, the weekend before the vote, showed the gap between “Yes” and “No” was still narrowing, but now not as fast to affect the result. Effectively, the momentum for life was lost. By then, the media blitz turned to the Irish voters living abroad who were considering returning home. This prompt from various quarters was not an impartial act to encourage the Irish democratic process but rather part of a strategic move by the “Yes” side that was banking on the Irish returning to vote for abortion. Virtually every story covered by Irish and international media outlets seemed to tell of a young female professional intent on flying home to Ireland to vote “Yes” so that she could be “proud” of her country, before doubtless turning round and getting on the first flight back to wherever she had flown in from.
Sometimes, during the last weeks, it seemed that the people of Ireland—some at least—had entered an alternate universe. An example of this was expressed in The Irish Times final editorial about the referendum:
The Eighth Amendment describes a world that never existed—a place of moral absolutism, religious certainty, good and evil, black and white—and locks us into that illusion in perpetuity. To remove it is merely to reflect the world we live in.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this is a “world” in which some now choose to live: where the death of a child is something to be “celebrated,” a sign of “progress,” a mark of “compassion.” In these past weeks, one looked on in dismay as this ancient Catholic nation exchanged its present for a future where a mother’s joy was transformed into a tormented look of guilt, a child’s smile into a funeral veil, a truth for a lie.
So let it be.
Ireland has chosen between life and death. Death it shall have. The fallacy that a liberal abortion regime solves anything will soon become apparent to Irish citizens. The mother’s pain and suffering from abortion shall still remain. The shame and trauma of having delivered an aborted child are not erased as easily as the pro-abortion campaigners make out when they blithely talk of a “medical procedure,” one seemingly as slight as having an ingrown toenail removed. Above all, in the coming days and years, what will haunt that land is the memory of the missing generations denied life by the stroke of a pen that in the hand of some became a scalpel.
Those who campaigned for abortion have got what they wanted: the advent of Irish abortion facilities. Ireland shall soon commence the same sad slide into the abyss as that of her neighbor Britain. The public money funnelled away from medicine in order to provide the tools and the means to administer death will not be insignificant. In spite of what politicians say, medical staff will be pressured into taking part in procedures contrary to the Hippocratic Oath. The idea of conscience, like the idea of the sanctity of life, will be yet another casualty at the hands of Irish abortionists and their fellow travelers. Eventually for some, abortion will become a convenience, despite all we have heard about “hard cases.” In particular, Down syndrome children and their families must view with dismay this vote for “compassion”: knowing that in Britain 90 percent of unborn children with Down syndrome never make it beyond the womb. And behind it all, the global industrial complex of abortion providers sit sharpening their implements with glee, as yet another market is opened to them by their friends in the Irish political establishment who no doubt will be rewarded with campaign contributions and appointments to positions in boardrooms of these multi-nationals.
Two years ago, the Irish state made great play of the 1916 Easter Rising. That Rising was a rebellion by a group of revolutionaries who tried to overthrow British rule in Ireland. At various state-sponsored commemorations, contemporary politicians talked of how these rebels had won for today’s Irish citizens the freedoms they enjoy, as well as the other things politicians say when trying to cover themselves in the mantle of past glories to offset their present deficiencies.
In 1916, hopelessly outnumbered, the Irish rebels hoisted a new flag as they proclaimed the Irish Republic. They also read out a proclamation, one that is framed on walls of Irish homes up and down the land. It says the following:
IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God …We hereby proclaim the Irish Republic …
The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally…
The recent vote for the death of untold numbers of Irish children, who should be “cherished” not annihilated, was not only an attack upon Ireland’s Catholic past but also upon the Republican ideals that founded the modern Irish state.
Having negated her past, both religious and civic, now Ireland enters into the “brave new world” she seems to so ardently desire.
And so, in the distance, coming to meet her from a desert waste is a Spiritus Mundi. “This rough beast,” with its gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun, slouches towards Ireland to be born, with its hour come at last.
