02 February 2023, The Tablet

A Church teaching with shaky foundations

There is a widespread feeling, not just among gay Catholics, that the Church’s traditional teaching on homosexuality is unsatisfactory. Pope Francis seems to think so, judging from an interview he recently gave to a journalist. And the cardinal he appointed to a key position in the preparations for the forthcoming synod in Rome has explicitly said so. Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, relator general for the Synod on Synodality and President of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union, has said: “The sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct.”

In his interview, Pope Francis called for an end to the criminalisation of homosexuality wherever it occurs, and asked Catholic bishops throughout the world to oppose it. This is consistent with, and logically follows from, the Church’s repeated opposition to the persecution of homosexuals and its defence of their human dignity. 

But this is precisely where one of the chief difficulties with the traditional Catholic position arises. It is problematic – if not contradictory – to stand up for the dignity of a gay person of either sex while deploring what it is about them that defines them as gay, namely their desire for intimate personal relationships with others of the same sex. This is part of their identity, and it is a relational identity. Is the imperative to find love – however defined or expressed – a crucial aspect of human dignity that also deserves respect? Given how important warmth and intimacy are known to be to a person’s emotional and mental health, it would seem so.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church declares that, “basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered’. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved” (2357).

This is problematic in every sentence. “Grave depravity” is not an accurate or fair summary of all the relevant biblical texts on homosexual acts. They do not address what is now understood to be an inborn and lifelong orientation, an erotic attraction towards persons of the same sex, and, equally significantly, away from persons of the opposite sex. Homosexual acts are usually seen in Scripture as perverse wilful choices, often involving the exploitation of young men by other men with money and power. Homosexuality manifested in stable loving relationships between equals, as modern societies generally encounter it, is not what the Bible texts are addressing. The very term “homosexuality”, as a permanent disposition, is a relatively modern concept. 

 

According to Cardinal Basil Hume, “The word ‘disordered’ is a harsh one in our English language. It immediately suggests a sinful situation, or at least implies a demeaning of the person or even a sickness. It should not be so interpreted … It is used to describe an inclination which is a departure from what is generally regarded to be the norm.”

But the word “disordered” goes further and deeper than Hume indicates; it implies an inclination to a specific kind of sin on top of that “original” inclination to sin in general, common to all fallen humanity. It is no wonder that gay Catholics often report struggling with an existential kind of rejection, even self-hatred, which is not only cruel but very damaging both to the body and the soul. Many eventually defend themselves by rejecting not their sexual identity but the Church itself. Some, we know, unable to reconcile their love for the Church with what it teaches about homosexual desire, have even been led to take their own life.  

The Catechism’s assertion that homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law brackets them in the same class as the use of contraceptives by married heterosexual couples, a Catholic doctrine that has become something of a dead letter. In any event, the use of natural law to base binding and invariable rules of conduct has dropped out of favour in Catholic theological circles. And the Catechism’s assertion that homosexual relations “do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity” is contradicted by the evidence. Moral teaching based on outdated stereotypes is flawed.

 

Cardinal Hume’s great contribution was to recognise that many gay relationships are stable, deep and loving, and he went on to declare that “love between two persons, whether of the same sex or of a different sex, is to be treasured and respected”. To love another person, he went on, “is to have entered the area of the richest human experience, whether that love is between persons of the same sex or of a different sex”. 

Yet what if such sexual acts, as the most intimate part of a loving relationship, do actually increase the depth of the love between the persons involved, of whatever sex? Is God then presumed to be disapproving? Hume’s proviso was that God’s laws must always be respected, which he believed meant that sexual acts had to be limited to marriage, and to be in every circumstance “open to the transmission of life”. He never explains why.

This is where Cardinal Hollerich re-enters the argument, for he claims that the Catholic traditional teaching against contraception and homosexuality regarded any wasting of the male seed as parallel to abortion. Until the biology of reproduction was understood, it was assumed that the seed contained a potential human embryo which needed to be planted in a woman’s womb, and therefore must not be discarded – as it would be in a sex act between men, or a sex act using contraceptives between men and women. 

It is notable that these traditional arguments against homosexuality and contraceptives have no relevance to sex between women, yet Catholic lesbians are covered by the same condemnatory language as gay men. This may be because Catholic sexual morality is male-orientated, and in its ignorance of female sexuality it overlooks the sexual experience of half the human race. 

It also overlooks another neglected element in Catholic moral theology, the presence or absence of victims. It took the Church a long time to notice that the sexual abuse of children often left its victims damaged for life; it has not yet absorbed the fact that homosexual acts between consenting adults are usually victimless. Against whom are they trespassing, therefore? Is God alone offended by homosexuality, when it is, as Pope Francis says, part of a God-given nature? Is the Church quite happy about all this? It seems it is beginning to doubt it, which may be the beginning of wisdom.