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Sex and Catholics 3: Vatican II and Modern Specialists

October 20, 2017 Terence Leave a comment

Chris Morely continues his guest post series on Natural Law: Part 3

Vatican II and incorporating modern specialist expertise

In Part 2 we considered the male and female perspectives of Natural Law and the Church’s teachings on sexual morality, and recent learning from experts in evolution.

Here in Part 3, we move on to the Church’s stated position on considering outside expertise and some particular examples – insights from human psychology, secular liberal philosophy, and modern Christian moral theologians, including a Pope. We assess how well the Church’s sexual behaviour teaching copes with the various critiques and its response.

Vatican II

The 2nd Vatican Council directed the Church to look beyond its well established traditions and scriptural interpretations and take account of the expertise available from various fields of learning in the modern world, and use these external insights to review and update its teachings of the Truth, as appropriate.

However this directive appears to be ignored more than followed.

The Church’s most recent formal statement is the 1986 letter to the bishops on the pastoral care of homosexual persons, from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In paragraph 2, this tells us:

However, the Catholic moral viewpoint is founded on human reason illumined by faith and is consciously motivated by the desire to do the will of God our Father. The Church is thus in a position to learn from scientific discovery but also to transcend the horizons of science and to be confident that her more global vision does greater justice to the rich reality of the human person in his spiritual and physical dimensions, created by God and heir, by grace, to eternal life.

This is not a satisfactory response to the Vatican II instruction to learn from outside expertise. The key passage is: ‘we can learn from scientific discovery’ but our position means we can ‘transcend the horizons of science and .. be confident that [the Church’s] more global vision does greater justice to the rich reality of the human person in his spiritual and physical dimensions’.

In other words, we are correct already and simply don’t need to consider anything else or change our teaching as a result of any scientific discovery: “[the Church’s] more global vision does greater justice … “.

Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith office at the Vatican

Unchanged since 1986 but outside expertise moves on

While the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has not changed its position on the treatment of lesbian and gay people since 1986, much new information has been gathered on the history of homosexuality, its nature and causes, biblical and theological perspectives, and from the empirical sciences.

In many areas covered by the Congregation’s pastoral guidelines, Catholic culture has made major advances (Curb & Manahan, 1985 [14]; Francoeur, 1988 [15], 1989 [16]; Gramick, 1983 [17], 1988 [18]; Nugent, 1984 [19], 1992 [20]). Those are just the first eight years worth of publications from around the time of its publication in 1986, and very much more has been published since.

The tension between the unchanging formal fixed Church view of homosexuality and the changing worldview, is evident when John R. Quinn, Archbishop of San Francisco, replied to the Curia’s 1986 letter on the pastoral care of homosexuals, with clear frustration:

We cannot fulfill our task [as pastors and bishops] simply by an uncritical application of solutions designed in past ages for problems which have qualitatively changed, or which did not exist in the past. (Quoted in Gramick & Furey, 1988, p. vii) [13]

He was writing this from San Francisco as thousands of gay men in his city, significant numbers of whom were Catholic, already had HIV infection and were dying of AIDS, before any effective treatment was available. The world for lesbians and gay men had very significantly changed.

No change: a comfort blanket

Plainly the field of sexual morality is one where the Church is reluctant to incorporate external expertise and the weight of modern moral theological and scriptural opinion, preferring instead to keep its comfort blanket of familiar traditions and teachings wrapped tight round its fist.

Catholic theologians are vulnerable when speaking out on these themes: some have been disciplined and others have lost their jobs. Debate and scholarly exploration of ideas is inhibited and closed down. The Church gives little sign of active, responsive listening.

It would be a firm but accurate criticism to say that the Church is being disrespectful to lesbian and gay Catholics by apparently not listening and responding to the wealth of new information and insights available in the 25 years since 1986, contrary to her own Catechism’s instruction to be ‘respectful, compassionate and sensitive’ to lesbian and gay people (in paragraph 2358).

Now it is time to turn our attention to some of the secular experts’ work that ought to have an impact on the Church’s thinking and teaching about sexual morality.

Psychologically natural forms of human sexual expression
Among the disregarded modern secular perspectives is that offered by Thomas Nagel ¹, who denies Aquinas’s central presupposition, that in order to discover what is natural in human sexuality we should focus on what humans and lower animals have in common. Using this approach, Aquinas concluded that the purpose of sexual activity and the sexual organs in humans was procreation, as it is in the lower animals.

Aquinas considered animal behaviour so here’s a contented bonobo couple

Nagel, by contrast, argues that to discover what is distinctive about natural human sexuality, and so be able also to work out what is unnatural or perverted, we should focus instead on what humans and lower animals do not have in common. We should emphasize the ways in which humans are different from animals, the ways in which humans and their sexuality are special.

Thus Nagel argues that human sexuality, whether strictly procreative as required by Aquinas, or expressed in various other ways, is explained by human psychology. For it is human psychology that makes us quite different from other animals, and hence an account of natural human sexuality must acknowledge the uniqueness of human psychology. We have been created with and have evolved with proportionately massive brains compared with all other animals, and this makes us quantitatively and qualitatively different and our human psychology is expressed in distinctly human sexual behaviours.

Aquinas and the Church have ignored these brain and psychological differences from animals.

Mutual Attraction – Nagel argues that psychologically healthy sexual relations have both mutual interest and mutual arousal

Mutual sexual interest and arousal
Nagel therefore proposes that psychologically healthy natural human sexual interactions, are all those in which each person responds with sexual arousal to noticing the sexual arousal of the other person. In such an encounter, each person becomes aware of himself or herself and the other person as both the subject and the object of their joint sexual experiences. If mutual arousal and interest is not present, Nagel describes this as perverted, or in Aquinas’s terms, unnatural.

Psychology, not organs, not bodily responses
Nothing in Nagel’s psychological account of the natural and the perverted refers to bodily organs or physiological processes. That is, for a sexual encounter to be natural, it need not be procreative in form, as long as the requisite psychology of mutual recognition and arousal is present. Whether a sexual activity is natural or perverted does not depend, in Nagel’s view, on what organs are used or where they are put, but only on the character of the psychology of the sexual encounter.

Thus Nagel disagrees with Aquinas that homosexual activities, as a specific type of sexual act, are unnatural or perverted, for oral and anal sex may very well be accompanied by the mutual recognition of and response to the other’s sexual arousal.

Thomas Aquinas 1225 – 1274

Thomas Aquinas emphasised the sin in homosexual acts

The change from Aquinas’s judgemental natural law response to every activity that is not strictly procreational, toward an amoral psychological account such as Nagel’s, represents a more widespread modern trend. Aquinas’s moral or religious judgments are replaced by acceptance of behaviours as part of the normal range of human sexual expression, or by medical or psychiatric judgments and interventions. ²

There is no requirement for the Church to accept the specific sexual behaviour conclusions Nagel reaches (mutual interest leading to mutual arousal, whether married or not, followed by any consensual sexual behaviour), but there is a need to address his insight that exploring the perspective of what is different, special and unique about people compared with animals is illuminating. We have a highly intelligent human psychology not found in animal-kind. What does that mean for considering what are appropriate sexual behaviours and relationships for humans? Does it not suggest that human sexual behaviours are likely to be more complex and nuanced?

Could not Nagel’s insights be combined with the unitive, and consensual sexual behaviour be acceptable if that is within a marriage or the lesbian and gay equivalent?

Secular liberal sexual philosophy
Modern secular liberal sexual philosophers now emphasise the values of autonomous choice, self-determination, and pleasure in arriving at moral judgments about sexual behavior, in contrast to the Aquinas tradition that justifies highly restrictive sexual morality limits by reference to Natural Law, God and scripture as the source of those limits.

The secular liberal finds nothing morally wrong, or non-morally bad, about either masturbation or homosexual sexual activity. These might be ‘unnatural’ in the sense of being solitary or less common, but in many if not most cases, they can be carried out without harm being done either to the participants, or to anyone else.

For the secular liberal, anything done voluntarily between two or more people is generally morally permissible. A sexual act would be morally wrong if it were dishonest, coercive, or manipulative, and Natural Law theory would agree with that. However Aquinas would instead start by saying that anything that is not marital vaginal sex open to procreation is fundamentally wrong because it is ‘unnatural’ and against God’s purpose, and no amount of good intentions or other justification can ever eradicate that fatal flaw in any alternate sexual activity.

Modern liberal Catholic moral theologians and others
Modern liberal Catholic moral theologians such as Todd Salzmann and Michael Lawler ³, and Sister Margaret Farley [4], and Dr James B Nickoloff [5], Bishop Geoffrey Robinson [6], James Alison [7], and Joshua Allen [8], all put a high moral value on consensual sexual activity only within committed permanent relationships, whether heterosexual marriage, lesbian and gay marriage, or lesbian and gay civil partnerships. Within such committed relationships, the emphasis is not on particular sexual acts and what body part goes where, but far more on its unitive value, consent and doing no harm.

commitment

Contemporary liberal Anglican, Episcopal and other liberal Christian moral theologians generally share this moral restriction on the use of human sexual faculties to those within committed permanent relationships.

In contrast, contemporary orthodox and evangelical Christian theologians are doctrinaire with tradition and biblical interpretations, decidedly hostile to any homosexual expression, and strict about limiting sex to within married heterosexual relationships, and they oppose adultery and divorce.

It is notable that a great deal more effort is put into condemning any homosexual activity whatsoever, than ever appears to be the case in relation to the much more frequent moral misbehaviours of heterosexuals which demonstrably harm others, such as adultery and divorce. In psychological terms this looks like a near pathological anti-homosexual obsession, scapegoating and displacement.

Oftentimes the Magisterium and others within the Catholic Church lurch into this same condemnatory response to homosexuality, forgetting their Catechism duty to treat lesbians and gay men with ‘respect, compassion and sensitivity’. Condemnatory sermonising that disregards the Catechism instructions on respect, compassion and sensitivity does not engender respect for the Church among those hurt by this. Frank acknowledgments of error and apologies for the unnecessary offence caused are decidedly rare and this is also un-Christian. Expecting lesbians and gay men to always turn the other cheek in the face of such Church misbehaviour is unreasonable. Such mistreatment, especially when repeated, is psychologically damaging to mental health and well-being.

Aquinas-lite, a contraception OK variant of Natural Law
Natural Law is still alive and well today among some contemporary philosophers of sex, even if the details do not exactly match Aquinas as now taught by the Church. John Finnis [9] [10] comes very close to a traditional Catholic or orthodox evangelical position. He does not require all vaginal intercourse within marriage to be open to procreation, so contraception is acceptable to Finnis.

However he invokes God and argues that only vaginal intercourse within marriage avoids ‘disintegrity’. Only in marital vaginal sex, as intended by God’s plan, do the couple attain a state of genuine unity: ‘the orgasmic union of the reproductive organs of husband and wife really unites them biologically.’ He says ‘all extramarital sexual gratification’ is morally worthless, even if it is vaginal intercourse within a committed relationship, because the body is then just a tool of sexual satisfaction and, as a result, the person undergoes ‘disintegration.’ ‘One’s choosing self [becomes] the quasi-slave of the experiencing self which is demanding gratification.’

This is almost indistinguishable in practice from Aquinas. This is Aquinas-lite, ignoring Aquinas’s expectation of vaginal sex being for procreation and the contraception ban in In Humanae Vitae. Finnis appears to have conceived this framework to justify maintaining the hegemony of the current orthodox Catholic and evangelical Christian vaginal intercourse-only model for marriage. Finnis’s language is marginally different to Aquinas: ‘disintegrity’ and ‘disintegration’ being his terms to condemn all other sexual activity in place of Aquinas’s ‘unnatural’ or the 1986 letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faiths’ choice of the word ‘disordered’. It doesn’t feel any less damning to have that Finnis’s choice of words applied to you.

Love’s the thing
Pope John Paul II, wrote a sexual morality text book as Karol Wojtyla [11], and said that allowing oneself to be used sexually by another makes an object of oneself, and consent alone is not enough for this to be morally acceptable. ‘Only love can preclude the use of one person by another’ (p. 30), since love is a unification of persons resulting from a mutual gift exchange of their selves.

Note, however, that his idea that a unifying love is the key component that justifies sexual activity (in addition to consent) has an interesting and ironic consequence: gay and lesbian sexual relations should also be permissible if they occur within loving, monogamous homosexual marriages (which is the position advocated by the theologians Patricia Jung and Ralph Smith [12]).

unifying love

However at this point in any discussion, defenders of the view that sexual activity is justifiable only within heterosexual marriage (such as Finnis and Wojtyla), commonly resort to Natural Law to rule out homosexual marriage, and to God to rule out all homosexual activity.

This only works if their Scripture interpretations are sound. Demonstrate that traditional scripture interpretations against homosexual sex are unsound, as many scholars have, and they’ll try a flip to quoting Church Tradition. But as many scholars have shown, there was no continuous Christian tradition of homosexuality being a sin, until shortly after St Thomas Aquinas arrived and made it so. The homosexuality is an ‘unnatural vice’ tradition is late (over 1200 years after Jesus) and it was invented, and it stands tottering on shaky Natural Law foundations. [There is a continuous Church tradition of some kind of sexual sin from the earliest days. Sorry I distorted what I meant to say. See Terence’s comment at the end and my response. And Part 4 includes the history of the sexual sin in some detail, and describes how Thomas reinforced this and codified it in the Church’s theology.]

So the holes in the Catholic Church’s defence of its current Natural Law and sexual morality teaching are becoming really obvious. When the Natural Law arguments are under significant sustained critique, they turn to what they say ‘God says’ to rescue their argument. Impasse is often reached soon after this: if you don’t believe (as a secularist), or you’re a Christian who sees the loving Jesus of the Gospels welcoming all people including lesbians and gay men especially when in committed unitive relationships in place of a punishing God, or if you don’t accept the Church’s interpretations of scripture, there is impasse.

Changing Church views

There are signs and sounds of creaking tectonic plates that indicate the Catholic Church is tending to be less dogmatic than it has been in the past and is edging towards finding a fresh way to represent the Truth in its teaching. Terence has posted about how the Vatican hasn’t officially repeated the ‘intrinsically disordered’ phrase recently; and about the nuanced language coming from the Archbishops of Westminster and Southwark in the pastoral letter about civil gay marriage, and in the Archbishop of Westminster’s recent reconfirmation of the Soho Masses pastoral ministry for lesbians and gay men.

Significant moral theologians of all sexualities have continued to voice concerns about the Truth of the sexual morality teaching from the Church.

1943 hanging sign in the South of the USA for the segregated waiting room for coloured people

Human cost of waiting

However while waiting for these tectonic plates of sexual morality teaching to shift, the human cost, which is born by lesbians and gay men and not the Church, is significant. We should remember that slaves continued to suffer too in the very slow repositioning of the Church on the slavery issue. The Church should avoid imposing a similar lengthy human cost on further generations of lesbians and gay men.

There has been around 750 years of pain so far since Thomas Aquinas facilitated the first declaration that homosexuality is a sin. The Church’s continuing strictures are significant pressures that reinforce and give authority to lesbian and gay discrimination in law and other mistreatment, they encourage the avoidable spread of HIV/AIDS, and they provoke suicides, especially among lesbian, gay and questioning teenagers.

Sinful delay

It has been suggested by theologians that the Church can sin. Sins against slaves and against lesbians and gay men, for not working with due speed to resolve these issues, should be on the Church’s and Magisterium’s conscience, as should those relating to failures to effectively address clerical child abuse. Failing to effectively address clerical child abuse scandalises the world and is a cause of further doubt to Catholics and the world that the Church is speaking the Truth about the proper expression of human sexuality, when the Magisterium’s own involvement in and response to clerical sexual abuse has been so wanting and disordered.

Next Time: Part 4: More holes and weaknesses in Natural Law exposed

Next time, in the final segment, we’ll consider a further range of experts, referenced in Stanford University’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s chapter on Homosexuality and Natural Law. We will conclude with a detailed examination of Thomas Aquinas’s homosexual deception, where he suppressed elements from Aristotle, and mis-stated others, and became a prime cause of the Church making homosexuality a grave sin for the first time.

Further Reading and References

For a thorough study of the approaches to Human Sexuality by the Catholic Church, this is particularly useful: Catholic Culture and Sexuality, by Robert T Francoeur, 2005.

It contains a section ‘Dealing with Homosexuality’.
Robert T. Francoeur, PhD, is co-editor of the international award-winning Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (Francoeur & Noonan, 2004a), compiled by 280 experts reporting on all aspects of sexual attitudes, values, behaviors, and relationships in 62 countries on seven continents. Trained in Catholic theology, human embryology, and sexology, Francoeur is also recent editor of the Complete Dictionary of Sexology (Francoeur, et al. 1995.and Sex, Love and Marriage in the Twenty-First Century (Francoeur, Cornog & Perper, 1999).

¹ Nagel, Thomas. “Sexual Perversion”, in Alan Soble, ed., The Philosophy of Sex, 3st edition. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997, pp. 9-20. http://www.iep.utm.edu/sexualit/#H10

² Soble, Alan. Sexual Investigations. New York: New York University Press,1996. (chapter 4)

³ Salzmann, Todd and Lawler, Michael. “The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology” Georgetown University Press, 2008 http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/sexual-person

[4] Farley, Margaret. “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics”, Continuum, 2006
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/623342.Just_Love

[5] Nickoloff, James. “ ‘Intrinsically Disordered’ :Gay People and the Holiness of the Church” Bannan Institute, Santa Clara University, 2009 http://www.scu.edu/ignatiancenter/faculty/fellowships/upload/f_09_Intrinsically-Disordered.pdf

[6] Robinson, Geoffrey. “Christian Basis for Teaching on Sex: Sexual Relationships: Where does our Morality come from?” Address to New Ways Ministry Conference, March 2012 http://www.bishopgeoffrobinson.org/Christian%20Basis%20for%20Teaching%20on%20Sex.pdf

[7] Alison, James. Theology as Survival: an interview with James Alison by Brett Salkeld, 2012 http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng67.html

[8] Allen, Joshua. Gay Marriage, Natural Law, and Civil Law: Understanding the Locus of Debate; De Libris Arbitrium, Center for Morality in Public Life, January 2011 http://www.cfmpl.org/reviews/2011/01/20/gay-marriage-natural-law-and-civil-law-understanding-the-locus-of-debate/

[9] Finnis, John. “Law, Morality, and Sexual Orientation” Notre Dame Law Review 69:5 (1994), pp1049-76.

[10] Finnis, John and Martha Nussbaum. “Is Homosexual Conduct Wrong? A Philosophical Exchange,” in Alan Soble, ed., The Philosophy of Sex, 3rd edition. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997, pp. 89-94.

[11] Wojtyla, Karol [Pope John Paul II]. Love and Responsibility. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981.

[12] Jung, Patricia, and Ralph Smith. Heterosexism: An Ethical Challenge. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1993.

[13] Catholic Culture and Sexuality, by Robert T Francoeur, 2005.

[14] Curb, R., & Manahan, N. (Eds.). (1985). Lesbian nuns breaking silence. Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press.

[15] Francoeur, R. T. (1988). Two different worlds, Two different moralities. In J. Gramick & P. Furey (Eds.), The Vatican and homosexuality: Reactions to the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the pastoral care of homosexual persons.” New York: Crossroad.

[16] Francoeur, R. T. (1989). New dimensions in human sexuality. In R. H. Iles (Ed.), The Gospel imperative in the midst of AIDS: Toward a prophetic pastoral theology. Winton, CT: Morehouse Publishing.

[17] Gramick, J. (Ed.). (1983). Homosexuality and the Catholic Church. Chicago, IL: Thomas More Press.

[18] Gramick, J., & Furey, P. (Eds.). (1988). The Vatican and homosexuality: Reactions to the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the pastoral care of homosexual persons.” New York: Crossroad.

[19] Nugent, R. (Ed.). (1984). A challenge to love: Gay and lesbian Catholics in the Church. New York: Crossroad.

[20] Nugent, R., & Gramick, J. (1992). Building bridges: Gay and lesbian reality and the Catholic Church. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications.

Chris Morley’s complete series on natural law

Sex and Catholics: the problems in Natural Law (queeringthechurch.com)
Sex and Catholics 2: Gender perspectives and Evolution (queeringthechurch.com)
Natural Law, Pure Reason and Vatican Jargon. (queeringthechurch.com)
Terry Weldon on Catholic Magisterial Teaching about Human Sexuality: Animal Considerations (bilgrimage.blogspot.com)

Catholic_Church, Sexuality and gender, Theology

More Weaknesses in Natural Law (Sex and Catholics 4)

October 20, 2017 Terence Leave a comment

Natural Law: Part 4

More Holes and Weaknesses in Natural Law and the future for sexual love
Part 1 dealt with the Natural Law.

Part 2 considered the male and female perspectives of Natural Law and the Church’s teachings on sexual morality, and recent learning from experts in evolution.

Part 3 considered examples of the world’s expertise in science and learning relating to the Church’s sexual morality teaching and assessed the Church’s teaching in the light of these critiques, and its response.

Now in this final section, Part 4, we consider more expert criticism of the use of Natural Law and Church’s sexual morality teachings about homosexuality. We critically assess what is called “New Natural Law” and its treatment of homosexuality. We conclude by examining Thomas Aquinas’s Homosexual Deception, and how this reinforced the Catholic Church’s treatment of homosexuality as a grave sin. The Church now needs to reassess whether it is transmitting the Truth about sexually expressing love in human relationships.

Natural Law and Homosexuality

Natural Law and Homosexuality are discussed in Stanford University’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy and this finds significant holes in the Catholic Church’s defence of its current Natural Law teaching. It’s clear that when Natural Law can’t defend the Church’s teaching it falls back on what it claims ‘God says’ to rescue the argument. We hear from some fresh contemporary experts, ones we did not meet in part 3. ¹

Sterile marriages and homosexual relationships

The Church makes procreation the ‘natural fulfillment’ of marriage, but this denigrates sterile marriages where one or both partners is infertile, and also devalues vaginal sex within marriage after a woman’s menopause. Yet vaginal sex within sterile and post-menopausal marriages is not morally wrong and the Church agrees these marriages are perfectly valid and acceptable. Why, people reasonably ask, is homosexual sex in the same context wrong (in a long-term committed relationship, such as a civil partnership, or lesbian or gay marriage)? ²

The Natural Law response to any suggestion that sex within lesbian and gay marriages and civil partnerships should be allowed, is to defend the Church’s teaching by saying that while vaginal intercourse within a sterile marriage is potentially procreative (considered in itself), sex within same-sex relationships is never potentially procreative. ³

But is this biological distinction also morally relevant and persuasive, and in the way that Natural Law theorists assume?

Is this relevant and persuasive?

The Vatican and other orthodox Christians have no alternative left but to resort to tradition and interpretations of scripture to try to support natural law; they must respond that it’s because ‘God said so’ and only (even if just theoretically) procreative vaginal sex within a heterosexual marriage is ‘natural’ and ‘ordained’ by God.

Saying sex can only ever be within a heterosexual marriage because ‘God said so’, is not a Natural Law argument, it’s just based on interpretation of scripture. If you are secular, or don’t accept those scripture interpretations, that’s unpersuasive.

The Natural Law defence is particularly flimsy, because this says that the only permissible sex Natural Law ever permits is vaginal sex; but the key procreative part is irrelevant for infertile or post-menopausal couples. Asserting Natural Law to restrict sex to vaginal only appears really weak; this is more a matter of Church tradition, based on Aquinas’s reasoning.

If you insist it is from Natural Law, that requires a simplistic and particularly restrictive doctrinaire view of Natural Law that has been adopted by the Church and rigidly adhered to.

When the couple are infertile or post-menopausal, the Church attempts to include the theoretical procreativity as well, but that is an appeal for a miracle. [This happened only once in the New Testament. Barren and elderly Elizabeth, the wife of Zechariah, nonetheless had a miraculous son, John the Baptist. Zechariah was visited and informed of this by an angel (Luke 1, 6-7, 13-15)]. The Church doesn’t teach post-menopausal women or infertile couples to expect a miracle of procreation, as a justification for having vaginal sex.

The Church refuses to allow assisting fertility with things like IVF. Natural Law is behind that.

Loving unions and secular Natural Law
Secular Natural Law theorists, when they consider infertility or post-menopausal marriages, waver and oscillate. On the one hand, they want to defend an ideal of marriage as a loving union wherein two persons are committed to their mutual flourishing, and where sex is a unitive complement to that ideal. Yet that opens the possibility of permissible gay sex, or of heterosexual oral or anal sex, all of which they want to oppose.

Reductive fallback on procreation
So secular Natural Law theorists then must defend a version of human sexuality which seems crudely reductive, emphasizing procreation to the point where literally a male orgasm anywhere except in the vagina of one’s loving spouse is impermissible, like orthodox Catholic teaching. Then, when accused of being reductive, they move back to the broader ideal of marriage.

Secular liberal ideas in modern natural law
So secular Natural Law theorists have now made significant concessions to mainstream liberal thought. In contrast to medieval times, most contemporary secular Natural Law theorists argue for little or no governmental intervention in sexual activity, and do not believe the state should attempt to prevent all moral wrongdoing.

Secular justification of discrimination and lesbian and gay exclusion
Some secular Natural Law theorists still argue against homosexuality, and some even argue there should not even be any anti-discrimination legal protection for gays and lesbians in areas like employment and housing; the most extreme have even served as expert witnesses in court cases and produced expert opinions for the courts in cases disputing the legal rights and protections of lesbians and gay men.

Natural Law Homophobic Tweet from a Coffee Shop

Where does this aversion to homosexuality come from, especially where this is also used to justify unequal treatment and discrimination? If the person is secular, then they can’t call on religion or its traditions for an explanation. Their gay aversion can only be based on a very simplistic heterosexual vaginal penetration view of sex, as proposed by Aquinas; anything else would allow heterosexual oral / anal sex and that makes excluding lesbians and gay men illogical. The only other possible explanation for such a restrictive conception of acceptable sex is secular homophobic prejudice. In the 21st century, for secularists to argue Natural Law only permits vaginal heterosexual sex is simplistic, anachronistic, and medieval, in the face of scientific studies of nature showing the biological abundance of diverse sexual behaviour patterns and the blurring of gender roles.

Catholic teaching forbids unjust discrimination
The Catholic Church certainly opposes ‘unjust’ discrimination against homosexuals, and states clearly that a homosexual orientation is never a justification for this.

ooops! Do what the Church says not as I do, please people

The Stanford Encyclopedia says some secular Natural Law theorists, like the Catholic Church, argue against allowing gay and lesbian marriage equality, and it cites Gerard V Bradley [4] and Robert P George [5]. However it is clear neither of them are secularists arguing a secularist view; both are Catholic authors arguing a Catholic case.

Gerard V Bradley is a Catholic working at the Notre Dame Law School and contributed his essay to the Catholic Social Science Review. Robert P George wrote his essay “‘Same-Sex Marriage’ and ‘Moral Neutrality’”, using Catholic Natural Law and religious arguments. There is a detailed critique and summary of his essay here. There is nothing new here: both use arguments we have heard before in the Pastoral letter from the London Archbishops opposing lesbian and gay marriage, but these pieces are written for an academic audience.

The “New Natural Law” and homosexuality
Stephen J Pope has written an ethical analysis and critique of the Magisterium’s arguments against same sex marriage, which appeared in Theological Studies 65 (2004). [7]
This lengthy extract below is very helpful in critically understanding current Catholic Natural Law in relation to homosexuality:

Natural Law, Homosexuality and Roman Catholicism book

“The central concern of the natural moral law in relation to the state’s civil law is, of course, justice and related notions of human rights, fairness, equity, and the common good. The state does in fact “legislate morality” in some sense, but, as St. Thomas Aquinas held, the civil law cannot and should not enforce the entire natural moral law. [8]
The Magisterium does not advocate the civil law should make illegal all “homosexual activity”. The Magisterium restricts itself to preaching this activity is wrong, both inside and outside the Church.

New Natural Law
There are a variety of ways of interpreting natural law within Catholic theology, but the “new natural law” theory presents the most visible school of Catholic ethics engaged in the public debate over same-sex marriage.

The “new natural law theory” works from a key premise:

“In voluntary acting for human goods and avoiding what is opposed to them, one ought to choose and will those and only those possibilities whose willing is compatible with integral human fulfillment.” [9]

Individuals may never legitimately attack a “basic good,” including the “marital good.” [10] According to “new natural lawyers” Gerard Bradley and Robert George,

“Marriage, considered not as a mere legal convention, but, rather as a two-in-one-flesh communion of persons that is consummated and actualized by sexual acts of the reproductive type, is an intrinsic (or, in our parlance, ‘basic’) human good; as such, marriage provides a non-instrumental reason for spouses, whether or not they are capable of conceiving children in their acts of genital union, to perform such acts.” [11]

“Homosexual acts” are thus not ethically permitted because they are incapable of attaining this “one flesh unity”; in fact, “homosexual acts” merely create the “appearance” of true sexual intimacy.” [12]

The “new natural lawyers” in effect maintain that the “good of union” cannot be pursued unless the couple is also “open to procreation.” [Contraception is unacceptable].

The “new natural lawyers” recognize that the law should neither simply legislate the entirety of the moral law, nor outlaw all sexual acts such as contraception or fornication that violate the “marital good.” The purpose of civil law is to secure the conditions that “favor, facilitate and foster the realization by each individual of his or her personal development.” [13]

New Natural Law: The State should do what it can to discourage gay life: Finnis

Finnis argues that the state has a “compelling interest in denying that homosexual conduct—a ‘gay lifestyle’—is a valid, humanly acceptable choice and form of life,” and that it ought to do “what it properly can . . . to discourage such conduct.” [14] Since the government is a teacher and the law has a pedagogical function, neither government nor law can remain “morally neutral” with regard to social institutions as important as marriage and the family.

Thus in some settings a government could be perfectly justified in imposing legal restrictions on “the advertising and marketing of homosexual services, the maintenance of places of resort for homosexual activity, or the promotion of homosexualist ‘lifestyles’ via public education and public media of communication,” [15] and so forth.

Objections to “New Natural Law”

The “new natural law” theory is vulnerable to two objections. First, it fails to build a logical case for its claim that accepting the ethical legitimacy of any and all “homosexual acts” necessarily implies that one regards sexual activity as nothing more than the pursuit of individual self-gratification. [16]

Its sweeping ethical condemnation of all intentionally non-procreative sex is excessively monolithic and undifferentiated.

As legal scholar Stephen Macedo points out, it is

“strikingly simplistic and implausible to portray the essential nature of every form of non-procreative sexuality as no better than the least valuable form.” [17]

The same habit of gross over-generalization is exhibited in its claims about gay people. It is a reductionistic exaggeration to epitomize the behavior of every gay person as driven by a “promiscuous, liberationist ‘gay lifestyle,’ which rejects all sexual restraints and value judgments.” [18] If this were universally the case, there would in fact be few gay activists lobbying for same-sex marriage. Gay people are more diverse, and in morally relevant ways, than is recognized by the “new natural law theory.”

Second, the “new natural law” argument does not take into account the concrete experience of gay people. Here it replicates the Magisterium’s oversight. It attempts to justify its position on the basis of a deductive argument and abstract philosophical analysis, but it cannot avoid making claims of a predictive nature about the real world, how people will act in it, and the probable consequences of their actions on their communities. This empirical dimension is especially important when considering moral arguments against same-sex marriage.”

You Can’t Predict or Generalise about Lesbians and Gay Men: Britons of Distinction: Alan Turing, Gay Hero

Continuing evolution of attitudes and moral responses
We are still going through a period and process where attitudes and thinking about lesbian and gay marriage and behaviour are evolving and developing, in both secular and Christian moral philosophy. Both are heatedly debated in the USA, far more so than in the UK.

The significantly shifting public attitudes to lesbian and gay marriage illustrate sharply this ideological flux and the tension between liberal and conservative orthodox opinions. The tide has turned and is running generally, in most of the developed and nominally Christian world, in support of lesbian and gay rights and acceptance.

Thomas Aquinas’s deliberate deceptions about Sodomy [19]
As the conclusion to this series, it’s time to look into Thomas Aquinas’s homosexual deception, and how this reinforced the treatment of homosexual behaviour by the Church as a serious sin. This was referred to in the first post on Natural Law, when I described St Thomas Aquinas as a naughty deceptive moral theologian, because he buried and distorted some key passages in Aristotle to suit the Church’s historic hostility.

The background is that the Church has fairly consistently taught that some kind of sexual behaviour, which the Church now says are homosexual acts, was a serious sin (‘homosexual’ was a word only invented in the late 19th century); this is based on Romans 1: 26–27. St Paul’s words are taken together with passages in Leviticus which are understood to be also about homosexual acts.

But Leviticus was actually condemning other things. One was breaking a major Jewish and middle eastern social taboo by being inhospitable to your visitors and guests (Lot and his wife did this). Reform Jews see in another of Leviticus’s warnings: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination”, a warning against temple prostitution, of Jews adopting the idolatrous fertility cults and practices of their Canaanite neighbours.

St Paul had been a strict Jew who actively persecuted the early Christians, converted but remained an authoritarian character. What he was actually condemning (in Romans 1 26) was the sexual abuse of male power and privilege: sexual acts by a more powerful, higher status male, imposing sex on a younger, lower status male. Among Greeks this was typically a youth who lived with an older man as a pupil and apprentice, learning to be a good adult male citizen. Among Romans, Paul was condemning higher status males imposing themselves sexually on their male slaves.

We only hear his condemnation about sex with other males. Sex with a woman would be the sins of adultery and fornication (sex outside marriage) which were bad, but not publicly shameful in Paul’s eyes.

St. Paul also instructed women to always cover their heads in Church, but the Catholic Church chooses to ignore that and now keeps quiet about it.

There was no such thing as ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homosexuals’, as we understand these in the Greek or Roman world at the time. Despite the claims usually made, and the wording of the translations commonly quoted, what St Paul was really condemning was male power abuse, through the sexual use of vulnerable males.

There was no culture of male couples preferring sex with each other, to sex with a woman; refraining from marriage to have a male partner was alien. So in religious and secular writing from this time and later, the references are always to acts, never to a “sexual orientation”, nor to “homosexuals”, which are modern concepts.

Both Roman and Greek pagan society vehemently derided and stigmatized behaviours such as male effeminacy, any adult Roman male citizen being penetrated by another citizen, or by anyone of a lesser status, particularly by a slave. The early Church inherited these pagan hostile attitudes and these linked into Judaic prohibitions in Leviticus. So early writings by Church fathers describe same-sex acts as sinful, and St Chrysostom in the 4th century described same sex acts as worse than murder. This condemnation of same sex behaviour continued in later centuries.

Saints Sergius and Bacchus

However, the historian John Boswell disagreed strongly with this account, and referred to the same-sex Church ceremony of adelphopoiesis, which united two people of the same sex as “spiritual sisters/brothers”, and Boswell argued this gave Church blessings to romantic and sexual unions. Others point out that the ceremony’s words say that it was not a carnal union, and that the union was a ceremony creating “blood-brothers”, and that is what the pictures of Saints Sergius and Bacchus together are depicting. However Saints Sergius and Bacchus were both referred to as erastai in ancient Greek manuscripts, the same word used to describe lovers. We won’t ever really know for sure because it was so long ago and we can’t know what happened in or out of bed.

Boswell, in his essay The Church and the Homosexual, attributes Christianity’s denunciations of “homosexuality” to a supposedly rising intolerance in Europe throughout the 12th century, but the historian R W Southern disagrees: “the only relevant generalization which emerges from the penitential codes down to the eleventh century is that sodomy was treated on about the same level as copulation with animals.”

St Thomas has his say on homosexual acts [6]

It was shortly after this, in the middle of the 13th Century, that Thomas Aquinas produces his work where he distorted Aristotle, to support the Church’s condemnation of same sex acts.

Thomas Aquinas is responsible for the ‘sodomy delusion’. In a crucial passage of his major work Summa Theologiae (III, q. 31, 7) he falsified the material which he borrowed from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (VII v 34, 1148b).

In this, Aristotle had explicitly stated that sexual attraction to males (venereorum masculis) could be motivated either by nature (natura) or from habit (ex consuetudine).

In his commentary on this Latin translation of Aristotle, Aquinas dutifully reported Aristotle saying that acting on an attraction to the same gender could be ‘natural’: “from the nature of the physical constitution which [certain people] have received from the beginning” (ex natura corporalis complexionis quam acceperunt a principio).

But when he came to write his theological masterwork, the Summa Theologiae, he suppressed the fact that acting on one’s homosexual nature can be ‘natural’, and instead bluntly asserted that what is contrary to human nature (id quod est contra naturam hominis) may “become connatural to a particular human being” (fiat huic homini connaturale).

“Connatural” here does not mean “inborn” but applies to feelings that have fused with your personality, to be “second nature”. So Thomas is saying ‘unnatural homosexual behaviour’ can become ‘second nature’, which is not what Aristotle had said at all. So Aquinas fiddled his sources to fit the Church’s rules, to reinforce the Church’s teaching about same sex sin. He was writing a major theology book for the Church. If you did this at university now, you’d risk being failed for serious misrepresentation of your sources and academic deceit.

Later he manages another fiddle by adding something Aristotle never said, that “such corruption can be…for psychological causes” (quae corruptio potest esse…ex parte animae). Aquinas claims this involves “intercourse with animals or males” (in coitu bestiarum aut masculorum), which neatly fits the Church’s sin agenda by deliberately paraphrasing the Christian notion of sodomia (which then included both bestiality and any same sex behaviour).

Homosexuality as a theological problem
So Aquinas strongly reinforced homosexuality as problem for Christian theologians, who have, ever since, kept up the tradition that erotic attraction to one’s own sex is a choice that becomes second nature and therefore must be condemned as deliberate, unnatural, abnormal and pathological.

Aquinas gave the condemnation of same sex acts a proper scholastic context, making it a standard in moral theology and the Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church, and this helped legitimise homophobic criminal laws and social discrimination for the last 750 years.

His authority appears unchallengeable, because the Council of Trent in the 16th century declared him a ‘Doctor of the Church’. The Church will want to avoid admitting a major Saint and Doctor of the Church made any error in writing about natural same sex attraction, a foundation stone of Catholic moral theology.

His theological conclusions help explain why the Church is reluctant now to reassess its teaching, when modern evidence and thinking calls for a serious review. Aquinas codified a teaching and reinforced a Tradition that was built on mistranslations and misinterpretations of Scripture, the pagan patriarchal roots of same-sex revulsion and exclusion, and the Church now chooses to disregard the wealth of scientific understanding about the flexibility and diversity in gender and sexual behaviour found throughout the natural world and different human cultures, and the changed world situation since 2000 years ago. The Church is discomforted because all this doesn’t fit the doctrinaire and simplistic construction which is the Catholic Natural Law for sexual behaviour.

Rather than recognise the weight of evidence calling for a thorough reassessment of whether the Church is actually transmitting God’s Truth and the message of Jesus in Gospels about sexually expressing human love, the Church is still sheltering within its comfort zone of old certainties. The Second Vatican Council made clear this is not good enough. The Church has found new understandings of the Truth before, including about slavery and usury. The Truth about the sexual expression of love between people is its latest challenge.

Further Reading and References
¹ Pickett, Brent, “Homosexuality”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), and Homosexuality and Natural Law

² Macedo, Stephen, 1995, “Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind” Georgetown Law Journal 84: 261-300.

³ George, Robert P., 1999, In Defense of Natural Law. New York: Oxford University Press

[4] Bradley, Gerard V., 2001, “The End of Marriage” in Marriage and the Common Good. Ed. by Kenneth D. Whitehead. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press.

[5] George, Robert P., 2001, “‘Same-Sex Marriage’ and ‘Moral Neutrality’” in Marriage and the Common Good. Ed. by Kenneth D. Whitehead. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press.

[6] http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/Aquinas.pdf

[7] Pope, Stephen J., 2004, The Magisterium’s arguments against same sex marriage: an ethical analysis and critique, Theological Studies, 65

[8] Aquinas, Thomas Summa theologiae 1–2, q. 96, a. 2, ad 3.

[9] Finnis, “Law, Morality, and ‘Sexual Orientation,”’ 1075, n.63.

[10] See Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, vol. 2: Living a Christian Life(Quincy, Ill: Franciscan, 1993) 651; and John Finnis, “Law, Morality, and ‘Sexual Orientation,”’ Notre Dame Law Review 69 (1994) 1049.

[11] Gerard V. Bradley and Robert P. George, “Marriage and the Liberal Imagination,”Georgetown Law Journal 84 (1995) 301–20, at 301–2.

[12] Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus 2.653. Finnis argues that sexual intimacy between two members of the same sex can by their very nature accomplish no more than what is expressed in casual sex, sex contracted with a prostitute, or solitary masturbation. (See Finnis, “Law, Morality, and ‘Sexual Orientation,”’ 1049, 1067.) Some critics of course object strenuously to this description of gay and lesbian sexual activity, but this debate need not be entered here. See Paul J. Weithman, “Natural Law, Morality, and Sexual Complementarity,” in David M. Estlund and Martha C. Nussbaum, ed., Sex, Preference, and Family: Essays on Law and Nature (New York: Oxford University, 1997) especially 239–41.

[13] John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) 147.

[14] Finnis, “Law, Morality, and ‘Sexual Orientation,”’ 1070, emphasis in original text. See also Robert P. George, “’Same-Sex Marriage’ and ‘Moral Neutrality,”’ in Christopher Wolfe, ed., Homosexuality and American Public Life (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 1999) 141–53.

[15] Finnis, as [14]

[16] Weithman, “Natural Law, Morality, and Sexual Complementarity” 242–43.

[17] Stephen Macedo, “Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind,” Georgetown Law Journal 84 (December 1995) 261–300, at 282; emphasis in the original text.

[18] Stephen Macedo, as [17]

[19] http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/Aquinas.pdf

Chris Morley’s complete series on natural law

Natural Law, Pure Reason and Vatican Jargon. (queeringthechurch.com)
Sex and Catholics 2: Gender perspectives and Evolution (queeringthechurch.com)
Sex and Catholics: the problems in Natural Law (queeringthechurch.com)
Sex and Catholics 3: Vatican II and Modern Specialists (queeringthechurch.com)
“Against Nature?”: Exclusive HETEROsexuality, and HomoPHOBIA.(queeringthechurch.com)

Spirituality, Testimony

Krzysztof Charamsa: “”God loves me, because I love my husband”(German Interview)

May 7, 2017 Terence 4 Comments

It is always worth paying close attention to press interviews with Msgr Krysztof Charamsa, the Catholic theologian at the CDF who came out as both gay and partnered, on the eve of the 2015 Synod on /marriage and family. There have been several of these, initially on the occasion of his coming out, and later with the launch of his book, in the original Italian and the later translations. Sadly, as far as I am aware, none of these have yet appeared in English.

I therefore provide below, my own free translation (based on a modified Google translation), of his most recent (German) interview with Berliner Zeitung. In this post, I present the interview in full, without comment. My responses will follow, in a series of follow-up posts.

Openly gay Msgr Krysztof Charamsa (left), with partner

Ex-Monsignore Krzysztof Charamsa “Gott liebt mich, weil ich meinen Mann liebe”

(Translation: “God loves me, because I love my husband”)

We meet in the breakfast room of a small hotel at Hamburg main station. Krzysztof Charamsa, 44, has presented his book here. He wears a light, waisted jacket, with a blue handkerchief, if I remember correctly. A white shirt. Blue jeans. He looks very elegant. The most striking however is orange glasses. Krzysztof Charamsa laughs and loves to cry. I had not imagined the Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic Church so. Not even one of his staff. Krzysztof Charamsa is a Pole, but speaks German. Very rarely does he search for a word.

What is Spinning?

This is my sport: cycling in the gym. At the bottom I am struggling, everything is going through my head. I can think clearly.

One does not step forward. This is your favourite sport?

It is like liberation. You kick wildly into the pedals. They sweat. You are exhausted. But you do not have to worry about anything. Your head is free. It hits the spot.

That’s why you wrote a book about the “immutability of God”.

My dissertation. At that time I did not know Spinning. I was looking for security, for a solid foundation. It seemed to me to offer me a God who is self-sufficient. This was a God who does not lean toward his creature. No God of friendship, no God in the world, in history. A very sad image of God, I find today. I’ve been thinking about why we’re going to suffer during my studies. Where we have a gracious God. That was my determining question. I have no answer. But today I think it was my homosexuality, my suffering for it, which made suffering such a big subject. I did not know anything about the pleasures of love, nor of gay love.

When masturbating did you have homosexual fantasies?

Yes.

That was not nice?

I was anxious. I spent my puberty in communist Poland, in the Catholic Church. Both hyper-homophobic facilities! With whom could I have spoken? How? I had no words for it. I had feelings of guilt. I would have had them, even if I had been heterosexual. But my gay fantasies increased my insecurity.

You were ten, eleven years in Hamburg. You must have seen homosexuals at least at the Hauptbahnhof.

I did not see them. Because I could not see them. In the world I lived in, there were no homosexuals. People just did not talk about them. They did not exist. As one says in Chechnya today: homosexuals can not be suppressed, because they do not exist. This is the way the Catholic Church behaved.

How many homosexuals are there in the Catholic Church?

Nobody can tell you. There are no surveys. I can only g. Based guess. Based on my experience. I was in priestly seminaries, I taught. I have always lived among priests. I was not a monk who lived in a single monastery. I believe that, cautiously estimated, fifty percent of the Catholic clergy is homosexual.

The total population is assumed to be 10%.

The priesthood is a fantastic space to conceal homosexuality when it is not socially accepted. For this reason the priestly life attracts many homosexuals. It does not matter that you are not interested in women. One is always in male company.

A homophobic organization of homosexuals

This is the dilemma of the Church. Hence much of the suffering and despair of the priests. Homosexuals are persecuted and at the same time homosexuality is celebrated. Aesthetic. Pope Benedict XVI has greatly aggravated the hatred of homosexuals. At the same time, however, under his pontificate, it was as gay as never before in the modern age: the red shoes, the peaks, tassels, and fringes that were on display everywhere. “Soon we will all have to wear lace underwear,” one of the papal ceremonial masters complained. See for yourself on Youtube how Ratzinger and other dignitaries of the Vatican look at the naked torsos of the brother Pellegrini! That same Ratzinger writes that homosexuals can not love. They have, he says, only this morbid desire.

Perhaps the Ratzinger’s own – deep-rooted – life experience … He is doomed to non-love.

That I do not know. But I do know that is precisely the situation in which many thousands of priests find themselves. The situation I was in, it took very long before I realized: it is not homosexuality that is sinful, but the church. Many, many homosexual priests are very good priests.

You were a member of the Congregation for the Congregation for twelve years. You persecuted the devil on behalf of the church. Then, on October 3, 2015, you publicly declared to the world : I, Krzysztof Charamsa, Catholic priest and member of the Congregation of the Faith, am gay, and this is my partner, Eduard Planas, whom I love. You changed from Saul to Paul.

I inherited the place, which became free, when Georg Gänswein became Ratzinger’s private secretary. I inherited his computer, his office, his chair. Paul followed the truth. When he persecuted the Christians, he believed that he had to do so for the sake of the truth. Then he recognized his error and became a Christian. I thought God was against my homosexuality, so I fought it. Then I discovered that God had nothing against my homosexuality. He had given something against which my love was strugling. I was an official of a truth office, a Stasi. I was perfect in this office. I put together, for every question, the views that the Church had represented over the centuries. The new knowledge of science did not matter. The church was in possession of the truth. This treasure was to be lifted. I did not do that as a cynic. I did it because I believed in it.

This was the purpose from one minute to the next.

I had nothing but a suitcase and my husband. That was a liberation. And peace. The first time: peace. A new security. I am a believing man, so I know: That was a gift from God.

You always have to get everything from the top!

Yes, yes. Of course I also have to develop energy and strength. But they also come from God. Life needs a foundation. If you have that, you can let go. This was the experience of Paul. This was also my experience. But it took me a long time to realize that the ecclesiastical texts against homosexuality speak about me. In the Catechism, for example, it says of homosexual relations: “They violate the natural law, for the transmission of life is excluded in sexual act. They do not arise from a true affective and sexual supplementary need. They are in no way to be approved.” Today I know that the catechism preaches homophobia and not the love of God. That’s why I introduced my partner at my coming out. This was a theological statement. I wanted to make it clear: I’m not looking for sex. I’m looking for love. Sex I can have anywhere. For me, it’s about love. Homosexual love.

Is the doctrine that the Father has the Son nailed to the cross in order to save mankind, not unloving?

The suffering, the self-sacrificing God – that is the mystery of religion.

This God, who always kills whole tribes of nations, would not you weep for the dead of Sodom and Gomorrah?

It is impossible to understand how God can allow this. But I believe it is his respect for human freedom. His respect for our freedom. It is the limit of the action of God.

But the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah did not perish because they were fighting each other. God eradicated them.

In the Old Testament there is this image of God. Jesus corrects this. The relationship between God, suffering and freedom is the greatest question of religion. That is their secret. I took the liberty to first acknowledge my homosexuality before God. He accepted me. When I did it before the church, she rejected me.

Sodom and Gomorrah?

When you read the text in the Old Testament, it was not about homosexuality – the later tradition shifted the emphasis to the sexual – but about xenophobia and the refusal of hospitality. Lot receives the strangers, in truth God’s angels, with friendship and is attacked by his fellow citizens. It is – in this the story is quite topical – about the correct handling of refugees and migrants. The Sodom of today is my home country Poland. No one is willing to accept refugees. There is no place for a Syrian family in all Poland. Poland is Catholic, but no one opens strangers to his house. This is just one example of the terrible confusion in the Catholic Church.

Catholic_Church, Sexuality and gender

The Papal Apology: Keep the Conversation Going.

July 5, 2016 Terence 1 Comment

Reports of Pope Francis’ apology to the gay community drew extensive commentary in the press, with divided responses from LGBT sources. There many statements that this was welcome, but also many who pointed out that the statement was limited, and just didn’t go far enough.

On Sunday (3rd July) I had the privilege of participating in a live TV discussion about this, on BBC1 (available here on BBC iPlayer, at 30:41 from the start, to about 42:30).

For the benefit of readers unable to access iPlayer, here’s a summary of my contributions.

My first point was that this statement needs to be seen in a broader context. Coming from the pope, this attracted the attention, but there have been other apologies before, from both Protestant and Catholic leaders. When I was in Sweden for the European Forum of Lesbian and Gay Christian organizations, the Bishop of Gothenburg said in his address to the opening ceremony that the Church should make an act of repentance to the LGBT community, for the past harm it has done to them. At the Family Synod in Rome last October, the entire group of German speaking bishops made a collective apology to lesbian and gay Catholics.

I went on to say that this apology was just one part of a much broader interview, which could explain why it was so brief – and so disappointed some LGBT Catholics. While welcoming the apology, some said that it should also have gone into some explanation of why the apology was needed, what needs to be done to prevent future harm, and how can we begin a process of healing. However, it’s important that the apology has been made, however limited it is at the stage.

After inviting contributions from the rest of the panel, the moderator brought up the popular but mistaken idea that homosexuality is regarded as immoral in Catholic teaching, asking me directly, “Are you immoral?” My response was to point out that there is nothing in Church teaching against homosexuality – but only a few statements opposed to homosexual acts. The Church accepts that “homosexuality” as an orientation is entirely natural, and does not endorse attempts to change it.

There is of course, a great deal more than I could have said, given more time. Even this simple idea that homosexual genital acts are contrary to Church teaching, is not as straightforward as it seems. In a later discussion of the Anglican synod “Shared Conversations” process, I pointed out that this is not just about discussing “what the Bible says”, as one of the panellists had claimed, but also about hearing from the lived experience of lesbian and gay people themselves. To that, she quickly interrupted to talk about her second-hand experience of a gay man she knows, who she said had come to Christ and rejected his homosexual life. I deeply regret that I was not given the chance to reply that my own experience was the exact opposite: time had run out on us. Otherwise, I would have described how my attempt to live fully within the bounds of Church teaching on sex and marriage had left me steadily drifting away from all religious practice and belief. It was only later, after I had come to terms with my sexuality as an openly gay man in a committed, stable same-sex relationship, that I was able to return to the church. Since then, I have found, like many others, that fully embracing my sexuality in fact has enhanced my faith and my spirituality.

Looking back on my experience of how time severely limits how much one can say, I have more sympathy for Pope Francis’ failure to elaborate more fully in his apology. However, he has opened up a conversation. It’s now up to the rest of us, to keep that conversation going.

Catholic Church Should Apologize to Gay People, Says Top Adviser to Pope Francis (Bondings 2.0)
Church Must Apologise to Gay People, Says Pope’s Advisor (Irish Times)
Reflections on Pride (Fr James Martin SJ, at America)
Catholicism and LGBT Discrimination (US Catholic)
Why LGBT Catholics Are Skeptical Of Pope Francis’ Apology To Gays (Think Progress)

Marriage / family

Cardinal Sarah: Softening Christ’s teaching on marriage is ‘heresy’

September 27, 2015 Terence 1 Comment

Speaking to the World Meeting of Families, Cardinal Sarah has warned that softening Christ’s teaching on marriage is heresy.

“Even members of the Church can be tempted to soften Christ’s teaching on marriage and the family,” the cardinal said. “To varying degrees, the idea would consist in placing the Magisterium in a pretty box and separating it from pastoral practice, which could evolve according to such circumstances, fashions and emphases.”

Cardinal Sarah heads the Vatican Congregation for Sacred Worship. He should take his message to his colleague in the Vatican, Cardinal Muller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who mistakes Vatican doctrine for “God’s word”.

….. he (Cardinal Muller) said that “it’s not possible” for those who have violated church doctrine with regard to divorce, homosexuality or abortion to be fully welcomed back into the church: “It’s not an academic doctrine. It’s the word of God.”

Continue reading Cardinal Sarah: Softening Christ’s teaching on marriage is ‘heresy’ →

History, LGBT history, Sexual Orientation, Sexuality and gender

Some African Gay History

September 9, 2015 Terence 1 Comment

The common claim by African homophobes is that homosexuality is somehow “un-African”. The reality is just the opposite. Same – sex relationships have always been part of African culture, across the continent, just as they have been the world over, in every period of history (until European colonists and missionaries attempted to stamp it out, thus introducing homophobia).

Writing in the Guardian, Bisi Alimi gives some examples.

If you say being gay is not African, you don’t know your history

Continue reading Some African Gay History →

Church history, Theology

The Distorted Tradition of Natural Law

August 16, 2015 Terence 4 Comments

Thomas Aquinas and Natural Law are often trotted out by the rule-book Catholics alongside the half-dozen clobber texts as a supposed justification for denying respect and equality to sexual minorities. I have absolutely no expertise in Thomist theology, but was intrigued by this observation, in a longer article (“The Other Side of the Catholic Tradition”), at the Washington Post.

Thomas Aquinas, who followed a century after Hildegard, wrote commentaries on 10 works by the greatest scientist of his day, Aristotle, even though the pope had forbidden Christians to study Aristotle. So controversial was Aquinas in his day that the king of France had to call out his troops to surround the convent where Aquinas lived to protect him from Christians aroused by fundamentalist clergy. For Aquinas, “revelation comes in two books—the Bible and Nature” and “a mistake about nature results in a mistake about God.” Aquinas insisted that one is always responsible to one’s conscience, more than to any other authority (emphasis added).

There are clear echoes of this in the modern world, where so many religious reactionaries insist on ignoring the clear findings of science, inserting instead their own established prejudice. If we accept Aquinas’ thesis that “a mistake about nature results in a mistake about God”, the implications for Catholic sexual ethics are profound. The first of these would have to be a recognition that same-sex attraction is tu entirely natural and non-pathological dominant sexuality for a small but distinct minority of people, and a smaller part of the sexual make-up of many more. This much is familiar, as is the knowledge that many animals (possibly even all or most mammals, but also birds, reptiles and insects) also practice degrees of homosexual activity.

No species has been found in which homosexual behaviour has not been shown to exist, with the exception of species that never have sex at all, such as sea urchins and aphids. Moreover, a part of the animal kingdom is hermaphroditic, truly bisexual. For them, homosexuality is not an issue.

–Medical News

But even more important, and not nearly as well-known, are the findings from science that natural sexual activity, as observed in the animal kingdom, is not after all solely geared to procreation. This has been the traditional assumption, but thanks to empirical evidence, we now know better. In several animal species, an extraordinary range of non-procreative sexual activities occur.

In some animals, sexual intercourse begins as much as a year or two before physical maturity and the onset of fertility – and so with no prospect of procreation.
Some species practice anal intercourse. or conventional intercourse without ejaculation, or intercourse outside of the estrus period.
Many species engage in masturbation, alone, or with others of either sex. Where they lack hands they use alternative strategies.

Autoeroticism also occurs widely among animals, both male and female. A variety of creative techniques are used, including genital stimulation using the hand or front paw (primates, Lions), foot (Vampire Bats, primates), flipper (Walruses), or tail (Savanna Baboons), sometimes accompanied by stimulation of the nipples (Rhesus Macaques, Bonobos); auto-fellating or licking, sucking and/or nuzzling by a male of his own penis (Common Chimpanzees, Savanna Bonobos, Vervet Monkeys, Squirrel Monkeys, Thinhorn Sheep, Bharal, Aovdad, Dwarf Cavies); stimulation of the penis by flipping or rubbing it against the belly or in its own sheath (White-tailed and Mule Deer, Zebras and Takhi); spontaneous ejaculations (Mountain Sheep, Warthogs, Spotted Hyenas); and stimulation of the genitals using inanimate objects (found in several primates and cetaceans)

-Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance

Dolphins engage in non-procreative sex that has no human counterpart. They use their partners’ blowholes as additional orifices available for penetration.
Some species practice oral sex – including oral self-pleasuring (“auto-fellatio”)

Animals of several species are documented as engaging in both autofellatio and oral sex. Auto-fellatio or oral sex in animals is documented in goats, primates, hyaenas, fruits bats and sheep

Remarkably, some primates even make their own sex toys, fashioning dildos out of liana vines, and masturbation aids from suitable fruits.
Chimpanzees and penguins have been found to engage in forms of prostitution, exchanging sexual favours for food (chimps) or pebbles used in nest-building (penguins).

The implications for sexual theology are profound.

To forestall the standard reaction to this argument, I am not arguing here that because these sexual practices are found in nature, they are therefore acceptable. Animals also engage in incest, intercourse with juveniles, and necrophilia – none of which I recommend. What I am suggesting, is that we must remove the argument from nature in deciding on sexual morality. Much of the traditional Catholic theology on sex derives from Aquinas’ concept of “natural law”, which he in turn derived ultimately from his reading of Aristotle. We now know conclusively that whatever his value as a philosopher, Aristotle has no value whatsoever as a natural scientist. By Aquinas’ own reasoning, to follow Aristotle’s mistakes about nature is to make mistakes about God. To be really true to the spirit of Aquinas, we must therefore reject his own conclusions about nature in the light of the scientific evidence, and find alternative sources on which to base our sexual ethics.

What other sources are there? Traditionally, these have been the Bible and the early Church fathers to go on. Modern Biblical scholars are finding that many of the traditional interpretations of Scripture on sexual matters are flawed, while the ascetic elevation of celibacy as a Christian ideal, and the accompanying disapproval of all sexual acts, was based on a belief in the parousia – an imminent second coming of Christ.

If the traditional sources are now shown to be flawed, what else is there? The example of Aquinas in fact, helps us here, but pointing to his commitment to studying the best scientists of his day. We too can learn (and the Vatican agrees) from the best scientists of our day, not in the field of animal behaviour, but in the modern discipline of human sexuality and related fields. The findings by these scientists are that sexuality is a fundamental part of our human make-up, that diverse orientations are entirely natural, that a healthy and active sexual life can contribute directly to both physical and mental health, and that sexual expression serves many more purposes than simply procreation alone.

Probably the majority of Catholic theologians already accept this. It is time that the Vatican paid more than lip-service to its claim that we must take seriously the findings of natural and human sciences, and did so too.

Recommended Books

Boswell, John: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People In Western Europe From The Beginning Of The Christian Era To The Fourteenth Century: Gay … of the Christian Era to the 14th Century
Moore, Gareth:
A Question of Truth: Christianity and HomosexualityOliva, Adriano: Amours : L’église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels (French Edition)
Bagemihl, Bruce: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (Stonewall Inn Editions (Paperback))
Roughgarden, Joan:Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People

Bible, New Testament

A Key to Romans 1 – Hiding in Plain Sight

January 3, 2015 Terence Leave a comment

At Bible – thumping Liberal, the straight ally and evangelical Christian Ron Goetz asks a crucially important question:

HOW DO I RECONCILE PAUL WITH MY SUPPORT FOR LGBT FOLKS?

August 27, 2013

I just got an email from Harold, one of my PFLAG friends. He asked the following question.

“How do you reconcile Paul’s words and yet support LGBTs?”

There are several good ways of approaching this question. One way looks at Paul’s specific words, what they mean and don’t mean, and then discover that Paul is not as anti-homosexual as fundamentalists make him out to be. Another way is to look at Paul as a man who was working out his theology, literally, as he went along. Another way is to see how Paul treated other issues of some disagreement, that have been puzzling or unclear to us. Finally, we can look at some of Paul’s own attitudes and interactions, and adopt some of them as our own.

-more at Bible-Thumping Liberal.

This is important, because Paul’s words in Romans and in Corinthians are the most disturbing of all the Biblical clobber texts for lesbian and gay Christians. The story of Sodom in Genesis should not be troubling at all, as the Bible itself makes clear that the infamous “sin of Sodom” is about injustice, and pride, and has nothing whatever to do with homoeroticism. There are numerous responses to the verses in Leviticus, but the simplest one is just to note that these are part of the Jewish purity laws, like the dietary restrictions, the prohibition on clothing of mixed fibres and shaving one’s beard, and the obligation of male circumcision. As such, they simply do not apply to Christians – as we read in the Acts of the Apostles. The letters of Paul are another matter, less easy to reconcile with our experience of a same – sex affectional orientation.

So, how can we do so? In his post, Goetz goes on, to elaborate on each of these ways of looking at Paul. There is also another, simpler still: the words simply do not mean what they are popularly supposed to mean. I’ve already discussed how this is so for Corinthians, where the Greek words “malakoi” and “arsenokoitai” have been mistranslated as referring to homosexuals. (They don’t). For Romans 1, I suggest that the key is simpler still, hiding in plain sight – in the title.

This is the letter to the Romans after all.

Hadrian and Antinous — Roman Emperor Hadrian and His Beloved, Antinous

Paul himself was a Roman citizen, and would surely have understood something of how his words would be interpreted. So let’s look at them: Continue reading A Key to Romans 1 – Hiding in Plain Sight →

History, Queer Saints and Martyrs

St Paulinus of Nola: Bishop, Poet, Saint – and Gay: (June 22nd )

June 22, 2014 Terence Leave a comment

Although some would dispute the description of Paulinus as ‘gay’, the description seems to me entirely appropriate to his sensibility. Although history records no evidence of physical expression of his same sex attraction, nor is there any evidence against it. Given the historical context he was living in (4th/5th century Roman empire) , when sex with either gender was commonplace for men at at all levels of society, inside and outside the Christian church, the absence of written records of private activities after 15 centuries is completely unremarkable. Nor is the fact that he was married particularly significant – for Romans, marriage and sex with men were entirely compatible.

What is known is that he was married, but also passionately in love with a man, Ausonius, to whom he addressed exquisitely tender love poetry. This is of sufficient quality and gay sensibility to be included in the Penguin book of homosexual verse:

“To Ausonius”

I, through all chances that are given to mortals, And through all fates that be, So long as this close prison shall contain me, Yea, though a world shall sunder me and thee,

Thee shall I hold, in every fibre woven, Not with dumb lips, nor with averted face Shall I behold thee, in my mind embrace thee,Instant and present, thou, in every place.

Yea, when the prison of this flesh is broken, And from the earth I shall have gone my way, Wheresoe’er in the wide universe I stay me, There shall I bear thee, as I do today.

Think not the end, that from my body frees me, Breaks and unshackles from my love to thee; Triumphs the soul above its house in ruin, Deathless, begot of immortality.

Still must she keep her senses and affections, Hold them as dear as life itself to be, Could she choose death, then might she choose forgetting:

Living, remembering, to eternity.

[trans. Helen Waddell, in Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse]

It is surely entirely clear from the above that whatever his physical erotic activities, his sensibility was entirely what we would today call “Gay”. Paulinus’ feast day was on Monday of this week (June 22nd). It is fitting that we remember him, and the multitude of other LGBT saints in the long history of the church.

Further reading:

For more online, see Paul Hansall’s invaluable LGBT Catholic handbook, or the Catholic Encyclopedia. (Note though that the latter’s entry on Paulinus is an excellent case study on how official Church history scrupulously edits out our LGBT history. In a reasonably lengthy entry, Ausonius and the verses addressed to him are noted – but the essential facts that the relationship was passionate, or that the verses were clearly love poetry, are carefully filtered out.)

In print, see John Boswell’s “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality”, pp133 – 134.

History, Queer Saints and Martyrs

Uganda Martyrs: Charles Lwangwa and companions

June 3, 2014 Terence 5 Comments

For queer Christians, the phrase “Ugandan Martyrs” carries a tragic double meaning. In Catholic hagiography, it refers to the execution / martyrdom in 1886 of a band of young men, pages in the Royal court of the Bugandan King Mwanga II, who had converted to Christianity and thereafter resisted his sexual advances. June 6th, is the anniversary of their joint beatification by Pope Benedict XV in 1920. Their feast day, known as the Feast of Charles Lwanga and companions, is celebrated annually on June 3rd.

Uganda_Martyrs

From a modern LGBT point of view, there is a quite different significance, almost it’s polar opposite. This perspective recalls that in the cultural context of the time, King Mwanga’s expectation of sexual service from his pages did not make him a perverted monster, as seen by the missionaries. Before the arrival of European colonials, different forms of homosexual practice and non-conformist gender expression were commonplace across Africa. Seen in this light, the execution of the pages was a legal penalty for resisting customary law – and the introduction by foreign missionaries of what has since become deeply entrenched cultural homophobia.

In recent years, the flames of homophobia have been further fanned by missionaries, this time especially by American evangelicals, who have promoted draconian legislation to criminalize homosexuality, carrying harsh penalties for those convicted of transgressions. Along with the legal penalties, the popular mood in Uganda has become so hostile, that life for ordinary gay and lesbian people in the country has become exceedingly difficult. Even to be suspected of being gay, frequently frequently leads not only to simple social ostracism, but also to outright exclusion from homes and families, to discrimination in employment and social services, to police harassment, to violence, and even to murder, such as that of David Kato. For many LGBT people, the only viable response is to leave the country entirely as refugees seeking asylum abroad.

So, the double meaning of the phrase “Ugandan Martyrs”: from the traditional Catholic perspective, the martyrs are those who were executed in 1886 for sticking by their Christian faith, in the face of Royal commands to renounce it. For modern gays and lesbians, the words refer to all those who are persecuted or even murdered, often in the name of the Christian religion, for their sexuality.

For a more extended analysis and reflection on the martyrs, and what this commemoration means for queer people of faith, see Kittredge Cherry at Jesus in Love Blog, who introduced her post on the feast day, by observing (accurately) that

Tough questions about homosexuality, religion and LGBT rights are raised by the Uganda Martyrs whose feast day is today (June 3).

Recommended Books:

Epprecht, Marc: Sexuality and Social Justice in Africa: Rethinking Homophobia and Forging Resistance (African Arguments)
Yemisi Ilesanmi: Freedom To Love For ALL: Homosexuality is not Un-African
Roscoe, Will: Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities

Uganda Martyrs raise questions on homosexuality, religion and LGBT rights (jesusinlove.blogspot.com)
David Kato: Ugandan LGBT rights activist (jesusinlove.blogspot.com)

Queering the Church

Tag Archives: Homosexuality

Sex and Catholics 3: Vatican II and Modern Specialists

Chris Morley’s complete series on natural law

More Weaknesses in Natural Law (Sex and Catholics 4)

Chris Morley’s complete series on natural law

Krzysztof Charamsa: “”God loves me, because I love my husband”(German Interview)

Ex-Monsignore Krzysztof Charamsa “Gott liebt mich, weil ich meinen Mann liebe”

The Papal Apology: Keep the Conversation Going.

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