Category Archives: Homosexuality

Saint John Henry Newman and Chastity

Communion of Saints, Defending the Faith, Friendship, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, Sin, , , , , ,

In the days leading up to now St. John Henry Newman’s beatification in 2010, NPR’s All Things Considered turned its consideration towards the question as to whether the Cardinal may in fact have been gay.  Never one to miss the opportunity to promote the LGBT agenda, Fr. James Martin retweeted the article on the eve of Newman’s canonization saying, “This doesn’t imply that the man who will become a saint tomorrow ever broke his promise of celibacy. And we may never know for sure. But his relationship with Ambrose St. John is worthy of attention. It isn’t a slur to suggest that Newman may have been gay.”  Although no one in the Church hierarchy is likely to correct Fr. Martin, it is both a slur and manifestly false to suggest that the saint may have been gay.  A comment such as this is not only disingenuous, but reveals the lavender glasses that color everything that Fr. Martin says and reveals his animus for true Catholic teaching.  In the 2010 NPR piece, Fr. Martin was interviewed and offered that, “It is church teaching that a gay person can be holy, and a gay person can be a saint.  And it’s only a matter of time before the church recognizes one publicly.”  This reveals a serious flaw in his thinking and shows why he is ultimately unfit to minister to those people who struggle with same sex attraction. 

The Saints and Heroic Virtue

The second step in the process of canonization is to be declared Venerable.  This declaration, which, in Newman’s case, occurred in 1991, declares that the man exercised all of the virtues, both theological and natural to a heroic degree.  The point of such an examination is to show how deeply grace had penetrated the man’s life enabling him to practice the moral virtues with ease and the theological virtues eminently.  Among these natural virtues, chastity plays a key role meaning that, in Newman’s case, the Church has declared that he practiced chastity to a heroic degree.  And herein lies the problem with Fr. Martin’s hypothesis, both regarding the new saint and any canonized saint in the future: you cannot exercise chastity to a heroic degree and also be gay.

This may seem rather harsh, until we examine the nature of virtue in general.  The role of virtue in the moral life is to habitually order our faculties towards their proper end.  These powers of the soul “train” the lower faculties to respond in accord with right reason.  The man who struggles with disordered anger, or what we would call the vice of anger, by developing the virtue of meekness not only is able to keep himself from angry outbursts, but actually so governs his feelings of anger that it is only felt when it is reasonable to do so.  A similar thing can be said about all of our other vices or disordered inclinations including Same-Sex Attraction.  Just as meekness roots out any disordered anger, chastity roots out all disordered manifestations of our sexual faculties and orders them towards their proper ends.  The man who is truly chaste would no longer experience SSA.    

Notice that I did not perform any of the usual moral hairsplitting that many people make regarding this topic between homosexual activity and the vice of SSA.  While this may have some value in assessing personal culpability, it has no place when it comes to the virtue of chastity.  To employ such a distinction, such as Fr. Martin does in this case only serves to muddy the moral waters making chastity harder, not easier.  It all stems from an error in thinking that chastity and celibacy are the same thing.  But they are most certainly distinct.  Celibacy has to do with restraining the exterior actions.  Chastity has to do with properly ordering interior inclinations.  A man may be celibate without being chaste, but an unmarried man cannot be chaste without also being celibate.  Fr. Martin seems to suggest that St. John Henry Newman fell into the former category—celibate without being chaste.  To suggest that a canonized saint wasn’t chaste is a slur, especially given that the Church has declared him to be a man of heroic chastity.

Deep down, Fr. Martin knows all this.  This is his motivation for trying to change the designation of SSA from disordered to differently ordered.  If it is merely that there is a different ordering, then the chaste person could in fact experience SSA.  But if it is disordered then it will be rooted out as the person grows in chastity.  There is no reason why a person who struggles with SSA (or to use Fr. Martin’s designation of gay) couldn’t become a Saint someday, but it will only happen after they have removed that vice (and all the others) from their lives.  In fact, there may already be some Saint that had this difficulty at some point, but to suggest that we might someday have a gay saint is like saying that we already have a fornicating Saint in St. Augustine.  St. Augustine is a Saint because he became chaste and rooted out all the sexual vices he had in his soul. 

Blinded by the Lavender Light

All of this reveals why Fr. Martin is ill-suited to minister to those who have SSA.  All he can see is gay.  In examining the life of John Henry Newman, it is quite obvious that he deeply loved Fr. Ambrose St. John.  But it is only someone who sees all things in a lavender light that would mistake the love of friendship with erotic love.  The aforementioned St. Augustine, on losing a friend said:

I was amazed that other mortals went on living when he was dead whom I had loved as though he would never die, and still more amazed that I could go on living myself when he was dead – I, who had been like another self to him. It was well said that a friend is half one’s own soul. I felt that my soul and his had been but one soul in two bodies, and I shrank from life with loathing because I could not bear to be only half alive; and perhaps I was so afraid of death because I did not want the whole of him to die, whom I had love so dearly.

This seems very similar to what Newman said at the loss of his friend “I have always thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s but I feel it difficult to believe that anyone’s sorrow can be greater than mine.”  Would Fr. Martin have us believe that St. Augustine was gay or bisexual?  Or is it, that he is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging that there is a proper, non-sexual love between same sex persons in friendship?  One of the ways in which chastity is increased in the person with SSA is to acknowledge that to the extent that his love for the other person is real, it is really a disordered love of friendship.  Once this is realized the person is able to develop a healthy and ordered love for the other person.  What makes Fr. Martin unsuited then to help these people is that he would not admit to the true love of friendship.  Otherwise he would not make such a stupid comment about St. John Henry Newman, but put him forward as an example of how those with SSA might purify their love for a person of the same sex through authentic friendship. 

Master of Your Domain

Anthropology, Conscience, Contraception, Freedom, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, , , ,

A couple of months back there was an anti-vaping meme that circulating in social media that encouraged teens to masturbate rather than to vape: “Pleasuring yourself with Vape?  Try masturbation instead.  Masturbating alone or with a friend is a great safe alternative to vaping.”    Vaping may be bad, especially for teens, but the solution of masturbation is not a real moral alternative either.  The meme creators reasoned that when pleasure is the goal, it is better to choose masturbation because it is a relatively harmless activity when done in private (or even with a “friend”).  Unfortunately, anyone who contests this is puritanically shouting into the hyper-libidinous wind that keeps our culture sailing along.  Nevertheless, one could, and more importantly should, argue that masturbation is far more harmful to the person than vaping and therefore something that should also be avoided.

Because we are oversexed any conversation on this topic will naturally require some backing up of sorts.  Our culture may be obsessed with sex, but so are the apparent puritans who are always moralizing about it.  We will back up in order to first understand why sex is such a big deal. 

Sex and Desire

Our human desires all seem to point to some personal need that we have.  Hunger and thirst point to the need to eat and drink for example.  While quelling the hunger pains and slaking the thirst may bring us pleasure, that cannot be enough to decide what and how we should eat and drink.  We must always keep the purpose of the desire and its fulfillment in mind.  The pleasure is meant to be a motor that moves us towards something that is good for us.  In other words, those things we choose to eat and drink must actually meet the needs of nutrition and hydration.  Those that do not, we label as perverted.  Eating plastic coated with strawberry jelly and drinking antifreeze both might bring us pleasure, but ultimately they fail to meet the need or purpose of the desire.  In short, there are right and wrong things to eat, even if some of the wrong things are pleasurable.  Every desire must be submitted to our reason that judges right and wrong according to the purpose of the desire.

Sexual desire is similar to hunger and thirst in that it is an innate human desire, but it differs because it is more complex.  It is more complex not just because it points to the “need” to reproduce, but because it also points to two other important distinctly human aspects.  First, sexual desire points to sexual fulfillment.  By sexual fulfillment I don’t mean an orgasm, but to our fulfillment of what it means to be made as men and women.  Our sexual desire points to our personal fulfillment in women becoming wives and mothers and men becoming husbands and fathers.  I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of people finding fulfillment in other ways, but just to emphasize that we are talking about sexual fulfillment, that is, what the meaning or telos of being made as a man or woman is.  Even the most ardent LGBT activist admits this truth when they preach gender identity.  In any regard, because our sexual fulfillment is so vital to our personal identity, it is our strongest desire.

The vehemence of the desire is the second aspect.  Not only is its tie to personal identity the reason for its strength but the fact that it is the biological motor by which we come out of ourselves.  It is a social desire in that it finds its true fulfillment in uniting with another person.  But its relative strength also means that it is the one which is mostly likely to become perverted, making it prone to abuse and rationalizing Therefore, it is also the one, in our fallen state, that we need the most need of instruction by which reason might govern its use. 

It would be hard to dispute the fact that it is other-directed.  Even the person masturbating invokes their imagination to call to mind another person.  Sexual pleasure is not just a passive response to being touched, but an intentional pleasure caused by another person to whom one is attracted to.  It can never be like scratching an itch where one only receives relief from some tension, but a desire directed towards another person.  Kinsey and Freud might have duped us moderns into thinking is was just some physiological response that causes the arousal of the person, but we all know that it is the bodily contact in conjunction with the presence (real or imagined) of another person that one finds attractive.  The object of our attraction and our arousal must be a subject.    

What’s the Harm?

This other-directedness of sexual desire seems obvious so that we can see why we might label masturbation as wrong.  But it seems to be little more than a “guilty pleasure” causing no real harm.  The harm may be hidden, or, more accurately, we might say we are blinded to it, but it is a real harm nonetheless.  The harm comes into view when we call to mind that human beings are creatures of habit, or virtues and vice.  No act occurs in a vacuum but always moves us towards virtue or vice.  Because sexual desire is so strong, there is perhaps no field of human activity where the law of habit is more obvious.

Masturbation by its very nature is a self-directing of sexual desire.  The aim is not to unite to another person, but to gain pleasure.  The turning to the self is no mere guilty pleasure but forms a habit of thinking and acting in that way.  It isn’t just a self-indulgent act, but makes someone selfish.  The person becomes habituated to seeking their own pleasure first and their partner’s pleasure becomes only a calculated concern.  They want their pleasure only so that they will come back around. 

Because sexual arousal is an intentional act, the person develops the habit of mind that makes arousal by a real person increasingly difficult.  A real person does not always do what the other person wants in the way that they want.  Masturbation becomes in a very real sense a gateway perversion to ever-greater perversions.  Nearly all sexual deviants began with masturbation.  This is not to say that everyone who masturbates will become a depraved sexual predator, but that it sets a person on that path because of what we will call the law of diminishing pleasure.

As we have said, pleasure is like the motor that moves the human engine towards truly good things.  But when pleasure becomes the finish line and not the motor, it always diminishes.  One then has to find new and more exciting ways in order to increase pleasure or re-direct the pleasure back to its intended end.  The point is that the chaste man derives far more pleasure from the marital embrace than the “stud” who traverses from woman to woman, just as the temperate man enjoys a scotch more than a drunk or the temperate woman enjoys a fine steak more than a glutton.  When we moderate our pleasures to only the right use of those things that cause the pleasure, pleasure always increases. 

Returning back to the anti-vape campaign mentioned at the beginning, we can now see why masturbation is a horrible alternative.  Indulging the strongest of our desires may reduce the desire for a lesser one, but it only further ensnares the teenager in a loop of pleasure seeking.

The Danger of Playing House

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Homosexuality, Moralilty, , , ,

“Playing house” is a common children’s make believe game where the children take on adult roles usually centering around family life.  What happens when adults, armed with enough technology to make believe believable still like to play the game?  Something along the lines of what happened in Nebraska recently where a “61-year-old Nebraska mom has become a grandmom after giving birth herself — acting as the surrogate for her adult son and his husband.”   Even Aldous Huxley would find this truth stranger than fiction, despite being only half-way down the slippery slope into which our culture is descending.

Imagine little baby Uma, when she is much older Uma, looking at her birth certificate, the one that “looks really creepy for us.”  On it, she will find the name of one of her fathers, Matthew Eledge.  Under the heading of Mother, she will find the name of her grandmother.  Now this permanent public record will look like a case of incest.  Uma may know better, but is it better that she knows better?  In truth she will know that she was pieced together in a laboratory from various interrelated parts.  She will know she was a “product” of conception that originated with her father’s sperm and her other father’s sister’s egg.

Straight Out of A Brave New World?

As the origins of life grow to more closely resemble Huxley’s decanter than nature, it is increasingly difficult to point out this injustice.  Justice requires that equals be treated as equals.  When a child is conceived in a manner such as this, the relationship between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of producer and product.  In essence this is, as Donum Vitae points out, “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of scientific technology.”   

No one can measure the psychological effects of knowing this upon the person, and, interestingly enough, no one has attempted to study it.  Children of divorce often face an identity crisis even though they are told that their parents “love them very much.”  That is because it is not enough to know you are loved, but you must also know that you came from love, that is, you are not an accident.  Likewise children conceived in a laboratory could face a similar identity crisis.

If you doubt the person-product connection, re-read the linked article and notice the description of the process they went through, including a quality control measure called “preimplantation genetic testing which would help determine the embryos most likely to develop into a healthy baby.”  If you are going to spend all the money (again described in detail in the interview) then you want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.  Meanwhile six other children, Uma’s brothers and sisters, were set aside as byproducts of conception.  The article doesn’t say what happened to these six children but they were likely frozen or test subjects for human experimentation.  At least there was some semblance of a human decency when the men decided that choosing the sex of the child was too much “like playing God.” 

Procreation and the “Right to Make Life”

Perhaps the clearest indication of where this slippery slope leads is revealed in the form of a question.  After laying out all of the specific costs of the procedure and a complaint from the two men that IVF is cost prohibitive for most “couples”, the author asks, “should citizens have a right to make life?”  And this is, the battleground over which must fight if we are to rectify this injustice.

Humans do not reproduce, they procreate.  This is more than a mere semantical distinction.  Reproduction is a closed activity.  It simply requires two material creatures to exchange their genetic matter to produce offspring.  Human procreation is different however.  Like other material creatures, humans exchange genetic matter.  But they lack the capacity to exchange or create the spiritual element within their offspring.  This must be created by Someone else and requires His intervention.  Because procreation requires the intervention of a Third, the child must always be received as a gift and not as something that the couple is owed.  Couples receive children rather than grasp at them. 

The biological limitations that God has written into nature are there for our own good and for our own thriving.  Seizing what should otherwise be a gift, perhaps the greatest gift that God can bestow on us in the natural realm, leads to spiritual ruin for the parents.  But it need not be so for the children.   Even though the children conceived in this manner face an existential crisis and appear to be a mere product of technology, in truth they are not.  They are still persons of inestimable value because despite their immoral beginnings, God, as the ignored Third, still chose for this child to exist.  He still loved them into existence, even if their parents chose to hide that love behind scientific techniques.

One way to put a halt to the skid down this slippery slope is to change our rights language.  Even if the State grants them, there are no such thing as “reproductive rights” and not just because humans don’t, properly speaking, reproduce.  As proof of this, notice how they have little connection to actual duties towards other people connected to these rights.  In fact, they render children’s rights obsolete.  What people do have are procreative rights.  These natural rights are always in reference to their duties to children and ensure the dignity of children both born and unborn.   

In closing, there is one more thing that needs to be said regarding giving up on gay marriage as a battle already lost.  This is no mere “playing house” precisely because of stories like this.  In order to keep the game up, six children had to be condemned to death or a frozen existence.  This couple may be the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.  The demand for procedures like this (as well as the demand to develop lower cost alternatives) will continue to increase unless we do something to protect these children.

Gender Dysphoria and the Brave New World

Culture, Freedom, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Theology of the Body, , ,

After receiving an overwhelming thumbs-down from the LGBT community for her upcoming role as a transgender man, Scarlett Johansson has withdrawn from her participation in the film.  Initially she defended her casting by reminding the critics that actors in movies are not actually turning into the characters they play but instead are merely portraying them.  Never ones to fully grasp the distinction between imagination and reality, the transgender supporters continued to blast her until she finally relented telling Out.com that she had made a mistake.  In her official statement she said, “I am thankful that this casting debate, albeit controversial, has sparked a larger conversation about diversity and representation in film.”  While Ms. Johansson may be grateful that a conversation has been sparked, this particular group of people’s track record with actual conversation and debate is rather sketchy.  Adept at verbal sleight of hand and ad hominem (would they call it something different like ad et identify hominem?) arguments transgender activists avoid answering the tough questions.   But just in case they are in a talkative mood, there are a few questions that many of us would like to have answered.

The movie is supposed to tell the life story of a “transgender” man, Tex Gill.  I put the adjective in front of man in quotation marks not to be a contrarian but because my question has to do with the label transgender.  If he really is a man and not constructed to be a man, then why must that label appear at all?  Is he any less of a man than say a man who hasn’t transitioned?  It seems to me that by applying the modifier, you are admitting as much.  What if a man had been cast to play the protagonist?  Would we have seen the same response?

Why Must There Be a Label?

The label will always apply because the dirty little secret is that you cannot actually change someone’s sex to match their gender identity.  No amount of hormone therapy can change the biological reality, a reality that touches the entire person all the way down to the cellular level.  Some differences are not due to hormones but are a direct result of the genetic differences between the two sexes as numerous studies have shown. (like the ones detailed in Exploring the Biological Contributions to Human Health: Does Sex Matter?).  The best you can do is to give that woman some masculine characteristics.  Likewise, no amount of plastic surgery can turn that same woman into a man.  Perhaps you can remove breasts and construct something that looks like a penis, but it will never achieve true biological functioning completely like one.  This, and the exorbitant cost, is why most people opt out of genital reconstruction.

At best the person suffering from gender dysphoria can hope for artificial changes in their bodies in hopes of matching their gender identity.  How is it then that this will remedy the inner turmoil they experience?  In other words, how will they ever be able to remove the “transgender” label and live merely as a man or woman?  They will always carry some physical reminders of who they really are.  It is no wonder then that most of the evidence points to the psychological benefit being relatively minor given that they have only deepened their existential crisis by living in, as Dr. Paul McHugh says, “counterfeit sexual garb.”

St. John Paul II reminded us over and over that men and women only find true meaning in their lives by making a sincere gift of themselves to others.  In a fallen and wounded world this is far from obvious so that God has left our bodies as a sign of this path to happiness.  To mutilate this sign in hopes of finding your true identity only serves to lead a person further into darkness rather than light; unhappiness rather than fulfillment; transgender man rather than man.

One of the reasons why Johansson was hesitant to give up the lead in this film is because it has all the makings of an Oscar winning performance.  In fact it does not take much prognostication skill to predict that whomever ends up playing Tex Gill will be nominated for an Oscar.  We can be just as sure that Hollywood won’t be making any movies about the thousands of horror stories of those who at various stages of transitioning realized they were making a mistake and couldn’t sufficiently de-transition to undo the damage already done.  That is because these people do not fit the narrative that transgender activists are writing.

Thanks to the rise of radical feminism, all distinction between the sexes must be erased.  In her 1970 book called The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone added a Marxist twist to Simone Beauvoir’s idea that the female body (with its capacity for bearing children) is at odds with women’s freedom.  Enslaved to their bodies and victims of male privilege the only way out (synthesis in Marxist terms) is to erase all differences between the sexes.  Rather prophetically she calls for an end to “sex distinction itself” by any means necessary including the use of biotechnology.  Thanks to the invention of the term gender and Gender Studies programs her vision has become a reality.

The question however is how many innocent people must fall prey to the creation of a Brave New World in which rather than helping those with gender dysphoria come to grips with who they are, we must be coerced into agreement with them.  They outlaw “conversion therapy” saying it is cruel to help someone live in accord with their biological sex while they encourage actual conversion therapy that includes hormone therapy, puberty blockers and surgical mutilation.  They silence all those who disagree with them and bully actresses into passing on movie roles.  Welcome to the Brave New World!

Disorderly Conduct

Anthropology, Defending the Faith, Homosexuality, Human Dignity, , ,

It’s not always what you say, but also how you say it.  Even a man like St. Peter, characteristically known for his bluntness, recognized this and cajoled the peddlers of the Good News that while having a ready defense of the reason for their hope, it should always be done with reverence and respect for the other person.  The truth is naturally harmful to error, but it can always be presented in a manner that makes it more palatable to those who hold those errors.  This balance is at the heart of the Church’s pastoral mission.  That is why, when the self-appointed Apostle to the LGBTQ community, Fr. James Martin, says that the Church’s language regarding the homosexual condition is unnecessarily harsh, we ought to take his criticism seriously.

Fr. Martin takes exception to the use of the term disordered.  The Catechism uses the term twice within the context of same sex attraction (SSA)—once when referring to homosexual activity, calling it intrinsically disordered (CCC 2357) and then a second time calling the inclination itself objectively disordered (CCC 2358).  Many people, Fr. Martin included, are quick to point out that the term disordered refers “to the orientation, and not the person” (Building a Bridge, p.46).

Why We Use the Term Disordered

They are correct that in this context the adjective, disordered, is modifying the inclination and the action and not the person.  But this does not mean that the persons themselves are not disordered.  In fact, the Church believes that we are all disordered and those with same sex attraction are no different in that regard.  The particulars of their disorder may be different than mine or yours, but rest assured dear reader that we are all disordered.  If we weren’t then there would be no need for the Church.  The Church is given by Christ so that He might continue His ministry to disordered tax collectors and prostitutes throughout time and space.

The use of the term disordered is really meant to highlight an important aspect of human life, one that truly is Good News.  Life is not just a series of unrelated episodes, but has a specific purpose or end based upon the fact that we have an unchangeable human nature.  Those inclinations and actions which take us towards true fulfillment are said to be ordered to happiness, those which take us off that path are said to be disordered.  In short, homosexual inclinations and actions are only one of a number of things that are disordered; things such as lying and calumny are also classified as being intrinsically disordered by the Catechism (CCC 1753) precisely because they lead us away from a life of true fulfilment and happiness.

Nevertheless, the Catechism does single out the inclination as disordered and this also for a very good reason.  There is only one way in which order can be re-introduced back into our fallen nature—grace.  The Church turns her focus to this inclination rather than the many others because she wants to apply the medicine of grace to those who live with same sex attraction.  She is the lone voice crying out in the desert that SSA is a serious obstacle to the Promised Land.  That is, in their struggle for chastity and rightly ordered love, the person struggling with same sex attraction may unite their suffering with the suffering Christ, sanctifying the whole Church in the process.  This is why we should “build a bridge” to them and invite them in—not just because we want to see them healed, but because of their particular cross they might add to the holiness of all the members of Christ’s Mystical Body.

The Weight of the Burden

It is worth mentioning as well why so many people who suffer with SSA do read into the Catechism a specific condemnation of their being ontologically disordered—they read it as a noun rather than an adjective.  There is something much more fundamental to each person than their sexual inclinations.  In fact the Church, “refuses to consider the person as a ‘heterosexual’ or a ‘homosexual’ and insists that every person has a fundamental identity: a creature of God and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life”(PCHP, 16).  The truth is that no one is ontologically homosexual; there really is no such thing as “homosexuality” or “heterosexuality”.  There are only two sexual identities; male and female.  Our sexuality is the call of men and women to love as God loves in and through their bodies.  The unfortunate reality is that we live in a fallen world where there can be distortions that obscure our sexual identity.

This particular burden is especially difficult because it attacks one’s ability to relate to other people, both of the opposite sex and the same sex.  In other words, it disorders all your relationships.  This leaves the person feeling very isolated and very alone.  When they find a community of like-minded people, whose social action centers on making their inclination and actions ordered it is hard not to fall victim to wearing nothing but the homosexual label.  We are so much more than our feelings and our genitals however.  Even if the inclination were not disordered, wearing the label to the extent that many wear it, would lead to grave unhappiness.  That basket can’t hold the eggs of our identity and the Church wants those who struggle with SSA to know that.

We can see why then the Church might use the term disordered as a way to point out there is an ordered way of life in which things proceed in an ordered fashion towards true human fulfillment, but is the phrase “still needlessly hurtful. Saying that one of the deepest parts of a person — the part that gives and receives love — is ‘disordered’ in itself is needlessly cruel” (p. 46-47), as Fr. Martin suggests?  There might be a gentler term that could be used, but most that I can think of betray the truth.  Fr. Martin’s suggestion that we should call it “differently ordered” is problematic in that it implies that it is ordered.  It is, according to him then one different way of life that when lived out would lead to true personal happiness and thriving.  The Church cannot, as Cardinal Sarah says in referring to Our Lord’s encounter with the woman caught in adultery, be more merciful than her Lord.  The merciful call of the Church always echoes Christ’s compassionate call to conversion.  That is, it always mixes the bad news with the Good News, or rather begins with the bad news (dis) and ends with the Good News (ordered).  Come to think of it, maybe, just maybe, there is wisdom in the use of the term.  It’s not always what you say, but how you say it indeed.

 

***As a postscript, I would not recommend anyone spend money on Fr. Martin’s book as it is really a veiled attempt to circumvent the Church’s teaching through subterfuge and verbal gymnastics.  His unwillingness to engage any of his critics head-on always makes someone suspect in my mind.  Instead, buy Daniel Mattson’s book Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay.  For anyone trying to aid in the bridge building, this book should be one of the pillars.

Our Lady of Fatima and Gay Marriage

Church and State, Contraception, Homosexuality, marriage, , ,

When Our Lady appeared to the children of Fatima, she warned that without conversion, Russia would continue to spreads its errors throughout the world.  The “errors” to which she was referring were mainly those of Communism, rooted in the philosophy of Karl Marx.  More than an economic theory, Marxism views all of history as the conflict between oppressors and oppressed and seeks to do away with all division, natural or not.  Marx himself presented it as a conflict between capital and labor, but those categories can readily be adapted to any two groups including gender, race or sexual orientation.  While the fruit of the Marxist tree that is Communism may be dying, the Marxist roots are alive and thriving within our own liberal democracy, a society that is deeply (and deliberately) divided.  This makes Our Lady’s words all the more prescient and ought to give us pause as we mark the 100th anniversary of her appearance at Fatima.

All of the prior Marxist attempts to remake human nature and society have met one almost insurmountable obstacle—the Family.  Marx himself envisioned this obstacle and called for the abolition of the family in the Communist Manifesto saying, “Abolition of the family!  Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”

As long as the foundation of society remained strong and in place, any attempt to change society as a whole would ultimately fail.  But weaken the foundation and society will fall with it.

Not surprisingly, the Communist Party USA has been one of the most vocal supporters of the push for gay marriage.  They knew that by subverting marriage, the Family would ultimately be laid waste.  Ultimately this is why those who oppose Gay Marriage cannot give up the fight.  By removing one of the means by which the Marxist spread their errors, we are hastening the reign of the Immaculate Heart.

Thinking Clearly about Marriage

Pascal said that our first moral obligation is to think clearly so that before we do anything we must understand why Marriage and the Family are intrinsically linked.  Without marriage, the Family ceases to exist.

Amidst all the debate in the past decade about redefining marriage, neither side could actually define either the classical definition or the revisionist version.  In order to see why the family and marriage are linked, we must begin by offering a definition of marriage.  Marriage is the complete union of two persons.  It is the total union of their persons at every level of their temporal being—spiritual, emotional and bodily.  The conjugal bond is what makes marriage unique in comparison to any other relationship or community of persons.

What revisionists have tried to do is to remove one of the elements.  They would almost certainly call it an emotional and spiritual bond.  Although it may seem surprising it is the bodily union that they must remove; not because it isn’t a sexual relationship but because it is not a conjugal relationship.

Men and women are capable of performing all biological processes on their own, save one, procreation.  To perform this process they need a complementary other.  In other words, in performing acts that may lead to procreation, they become a single “organism.”  It is not just any sexual activity that unites them, but only sexual activity that is intrinsically ordered to procreation.  In order to be unitive, sexual activity must also be the kind that is procreative.  Any other sexual activity (including contracepted) simply becomes the exchange of pleasure and does not unite the two people physically any more than a handshake, a back rub, or putting one’s finger in another’s ear.  Only in the marital embrace can two spouses be physically united, an act that same-sex couples cannot perform.  Marriage, under the revisionists’ definition must therefore no longer be a complete union of two persons since the couple is unable to become one flesh.

A word of explanation as to why I have been careful about calling them acts that are “ordered to procreation.”  As a biological process, procreation has aspects that are under control of the person and aspects that are not.  One may choose to breathe, but one cannot choose to get oxygen into the blood.  Provided the conditions are right, that happens “automatically” and is outside the direct control of the person.  So too with acts ordered to procreation.  A couple can engage in the marital embrace, but whether conception occurs or not, happens after the fact and is outside of their direct control.  In other words, it is not the actual conception of the child that causes the act to be unitive.  It is unitive because it is a procreative act.  Grasping this helps us to see why an infertile couple may still be married (because they are capable of procreative acts even if they do not lead to conception) and a same-sex couple may not.

Marriage and the Family

It also helps us to understand what it means when we say that children are the end of marriage.  They are not the purpose of marriage—the purpose is the total union or communion of the persons—but they are the fruit of marriage.  In short, they are a natural result of the communion of persons in marriage.

With all that has been said, we can understand that the Church is not being old-fashioned when she defines the family as “born of the intimate communion of life and love founded on the marriage between one man and one woman” (Gaudium et Spes, 48).  The family as the first society a person belongs to forms that person in his vision of reality.  Each child learns that he or she was generated from an act of love and was quite literally loved into existence.  It is the school of love where the child learns both how to love and be loved.  In short, “a society built on a family scale is the best guarantee against drifting off course into individualism or collectivism, because within the family the person is always at the center of attention as an end and never as a means” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 213).

Joining the Battle

If the goal is to destroy the family, then get rid of marriage.  Erotic love is too powerful to destroy it altogether, but modifying it to the point that it becomes unrecognizable is sufficient to destroy the family.  Not surprisingly with a change in marriage we are seeing a change in what people call a family.  A “family” that is not founded upon marriage as the communion of persons is built on sand.  It is only the complete bond of the spouses to each other that keeps the family together.

Since the Obergefell decision almost two years ago, many Catholics have disengaged from the battle for marriage.  It is time to pick up the battle once again, especially considering what Sr. Lucia, the Fatima visionary once said.  “The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. However, Our Lady has already crushed its head.”  Let us re-engage and fight for marriage and the family!

Love is Love isn’t Love

Friendship, Homosexuality

In the battle to normalize homosexuality there must be some collateral damage.  Lies are like parasites to the truth—always doing harm and ultimately killing their host.  The truth that homosexuality preys upon is not just erotic love, but the love of friendship.  The push for gay marriage may have done great harm to the love between a man and a woman in marriage, but ultimately it will not be the only casualty.  In the end it will have also destroyed the ability for two men or two women to develop healthy friendships.

One might quickly dismiss all of this as homophobic hate speech.  But I assure you homophobia is alive and well in the hearts of many young people today—just not in the sense we usually use the term.  They may not have a problem of someone else being gay, but the fear of being gay themselves, or at the very least appearing to be gay, lurks in their hearts.  How could it not be, given what they have learned?

Love is Love and the Harm it Does

“Love is love” they are told.  Hard to believe that a tautology could do so much damage.  Given that it has become a battle cry for a gay agenda, it doesn’t take much logic to conclude that love is about sex.  It is only love when it is expressed sexually.  What is not expressed sexually is not love.

Now enter into the heart of a young person.  They search and realize that they too indeed are drawn to certain members of the same sex.  They find themselves attracted to them and may even want to show affection towards that other person.  They may go so far as to realize that they enjoy that particular person’s company over another person’s or even look forward to seeing them.  All of this is natural.  Ages upon ages, men have loved other men and women have loved other women with a love of friendship.

Now, dear reader, when you read my description above, where did your thoughts go?  Were you thinking “wait, is he saying it is natural to wrestle with feelings of homosexuality”?  Or did you immediately think “he is merely describing friendship”?  The answer can reveal to us how much the culture has infected us and how deeply we need to see friendship in its proper light.

Notice that I called it natural and not normal.  In substituting normal for natural we have created a culture that embraces its brokenness.  Natural, or that which fulfills us as persons, is always good.  “Normal” is what everyone else is doing and usually has a nicer ring to it than rationalizing.  Normal is how we can keep up with Mr. and Mr. Jones.

Returning back to the inner workings of our young man or young woman.  They now begin to apply what they have learned to their feelings.  They are left with two alternatives.  They can think that what they are feeling may be some homosexual tendency and maybe experiment.  Or, and this is more likely, they will feel a sort of revulsion towards that other person because they equate the love they are feeling as something sexual.  Ickiness will win out and that other person will remain at arm’s length.  The chance for an authentically fulfilling friendship will pass them by.

Here is what they won’t do.  They likely won’t seek help to work through this from their parents, teachers, coaches or mentors.  They have been told that homophobia is the unforgivable sin and would never want to appear to say there is anything wrong with it.  They may look to the same people as models and find that they too do not have anything akin to true friendship.  The sages don’t know what true friendship is and are too busy for something so useless anyway.  As a father, a High School Baseball Coach, and a mentor to College Students, I see this as a theme across the board.  It affects kids who have been homeschooled just as much as Catholic school kids and public school kids.  They have no idea what friendship is or why it matters they have them.

An Alternative Explanation

We may quickly blame technology for the dearth of friendships in the young, but what if that is the effect rather than the cause?  What if our entire society has been so damaged in its ability to form meaningful friendships that technology actually offers us an escape from the emotional turmoil brought about by the feelings of friendship?

Obviously, modeling proper friendship is important to redeeming friendship, but it has been lost mostly on an ideological front.  We need to be prepared to challenge the notion that “love is love.”

Love is love, but not all loves are equal.  Some loves are higher than others and their differences are not in degree, but in kind. Classically the Greek classified them into three categories—affection (which they called storge), friendship (philia), and love between the sexes (eros).  As Christians, we would add a fourth, namely the love of God (agape).

I have written other places about these four loves and their differences.  In this essay I would prefer to focus on another important aspect, namely the belief that true love is always expressed sexually.

Love is love but each of the loves has its own proper expression.  Affection, especially as between family members is expressed through hugs, kisses, tickling and the like.  The love of friendship is expressed with hugs, handshakes, high fives and the like.  Eros usually includes those expressions of affection, but also those expressions that we would call intimate and sexual.

What is important in this is that we help to identify that each of these loves has a proper form of expression.  We intuitively know this and it is why we make incestuous relationships illegal, give actresses a hard time for kissing their children on the lips, and make movies about the destruction of friendship when two people become “friends with benefits.”

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi has done a great deal of research into some of the causes of homosexuality.  While he has found that there are a number of causes, a common one, especially in men, is the proper expression of love by the father.  He found that a number of the fathers themselves had terrible relationships with their own fathers and did not have significant male friendships.  They would fail to show their sons what one man loving another man actually looked like.  The spirit of the world, when those children went out into the world, was only too happy to give them an acceptable model.  This is probably why there has been so much backlash against reparative therapy and why we must be prepared to fight this ideological battle.

Seeing the Rainbow Clearly

Homosexuality

One could arguably say that in no other time in her history has the Church faced such vehement opposition to her teaching regarding the immorality of homosexual acts.  For this reason, it is especially important that the principles underlying her stance presented in a clear and pastoral manner.

With the advancement of many of the empirical sciences in the last half century, we are only now coming to understand just how complex an issue homosexuality is.  While these sciences have aided in understanding much of the underlying psychology associated with same-sex attraction, it is because of the Church’s global vision of “the rich reality of the human person in his spiritual and physical dimensions” (Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons(PCHP), 2) that the Church is able to authoritatively discuss how those who suffer from this disorder can achieve integral human fulfillment.

An important distinction needs to be made at the outset in order to fully understand the teaching.  The Church makes a firm distinction between homosexual inclinations and homosexual acts.  Having a homosexual inclination is not in and of itself sinful.  This does not mean however that having such a tendency is neutral or even good.  Because it is a tendency towards a grave moral evil, the inclination itself is properly understood as an objective disorder (PCHP, 3).

Even if a person has this inclination, the Church cautions against labeling a person as homosexual because there is something much more fundamental to each person than their sexual inclinations.  In fact the Church, “refuses to consider the person as a ‘heterosexual’ or a ‘homosexual’ and insists that every person has a fundamental identity: a creature of God and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life”(PCHP, 16).

Furthermore, it is important to recognize that no one is ontologically homosexual.  The fact of the matter is that there really is no such thing as “homosexuality” or “heterosexuality”.  In truth there are only two sexual identities; male and female.  Our sexuality is the call of men and women to love as God loves in and through their bodies.  The unfortunate reality is that we live in a fallen world where there can be distortions that obscure our sexual identity.

Even though the Church recognizes that same sex attraction is an objective disorder, in her wisdom she leaves it to the empirical sciences to determine what causes this inclination in some people and not in others.  The Church does recognize that in most cases the inclination is not directly willed by the individual.  Although the inclination is not directly willed, it does not mean that a person is not free to choose whether these inclinations are acted upon.  For that reason she is most concerned with freely chosen homosexual acts when it comes to moral judgment.

Once this foundation is set, we can begin to look at the Church’s reasons for her constant teaching that homosexual activity is intrinsically evil.  Like all of her moral teachings, the Church bases her reasoning “on human reason illumined by faith” (PCHP, 1).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law (CCC 2357).  To see why this is the case, we begin by recalling that the first principles of the natural law are based upon the fundamental human goods, of which marriage and procreation are included.  God is the author of human nature so what is natural is also good so that “we offend God only by acting contrary to our own good” as St Thomas says.  The Church says that homosexual acts are immoral because they do harm to the good of the person by acting against fundamental human goods.  The fundamental human goods that the sexual act is ordered to are the union between husband and wife and the procreation of children (CCC 2201, 2249).  In other words, every sexual act then must be both unitive and ordered to procreation in order to be a true human good (CCC 2369).

Marching outside Church

Although this should be obvious to us, the fact that it is not is because we are steeped in a culture that approaches man dualistically and also encourages contraception.  Much of Pope John Paul II’s teachings on Theology of the Body were spent trying to help us clear away these two dangerous misconceptions.  In developing what he called an “adequate anthropology”, Pope John Paul II showed that the sexual difference that is marked by the reciprocal complementarity in the sexes reveals that the body has a spousal meaning. It is this complementarity through which man and woman are able to make a sincere gift of themselves to each other.

If we examine sodomitical or other homosexual activity we see that the unitive aspect of the marital act cannot be achieved.  In fact because they lack sexual complementarity the act is truly self-indulgent in that each partner uses the other for his own gratification.  Not only does this do harm to the spousal meaning of the body, but because it is based on an illusion of intimacy it leaves each of the partners emptier in their search for love.

These homosexual acts also lack the procreative aspect as well.  Although this is obvious, many say that the marital embrace is not intrinsically ordered to procreation.  One can then see how a culture’s acceptance of contraception leads to its acceptance of homosexual activity.

The Church’s teaching is also based upon divine revelation as well.  There are numerous biblical passages in which homosexual activity is clearly condemned.  Perhaps the best known passage is the story of Sodom (Gn 19:4-11, PCHP, 6).   This story refers to the attempted homosexual rape of Lot’s visitors by the men of Sodom.  Modern exegetes have attempted to reinterpret this passage and say that Sodom was destroyed for a lack of hospitality.  However, this interpretation not only is contrary to the traditional understanding of the Church but also is contrary to the interpretation that is given in Scripture itself.  The Letter of Jude says that the people of Sodom acted “immorally and indulged in unnatural lust” (Jude 7).

There are numerous texts within the New Testament as well, but the clearest condemnation comes in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans in which homosexual activity is regarded as punishment for disbelief: “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:26-27).

Even if these individual Scriptural texts were omitted, one could easily argue the immorality of homosexual acts based upon the Scriptural understanding of sexuality itself.  Like her Divine Master, the Church points us back to” the beginning” to gain a proper understanding of human sexuality.  “God, in his infinite wisdom and love, brings into existence all of reality as a reflection of his goodness. He fashions mankind, male and female, in his own image and likeness. Human beings, therefore, are nothing less than the work of God himself; and in the complementarity of the sexes, they are called to reflect the inner unity of the Creator. They do this in a striking way in their cooperation with him in the transmission of life by a mutual donation of the self to the other” (PCHP, 6).  Only in marriage then do we find the proper place for sexual expression that finds its meaning in union and procreation.

In conclusion, despite the fact that the Church is often viewed as “intolerant” in her condemnation of homosexual activity, she bases her teachings on what is truly good for the human person.  This has been the constant teaching of the Church and is confirmed by both natural law and divine revelation.

Like They Do on the Discovery Channel

Homosexuality

Last year, the BBC ran a story called “Gay penguins in Kent zoo are ‘the best parents’.”   They deemed it newsworthy presumably because it is proof that since homosexual behavior and parenting occurs in nature then it is perfectly “natural” for humans to engage in it.  Hidden in this supposition though is what I call this the “Bloodhound Gang Premise” named for the 90s one-hit wonders that told us “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals.  So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”   Put less crudely, the hidden premise is that since we are no different than the animals, we can engage in the same behavior.

The problem with this however is the fact that as soon as we try to reduce man to a mere animal, we are confronted with the fact that he is not an animal but something more.  Man differs from mere animals because he knows that he is just not an animal.  He knows that he is fundamentally different.  He has a self-awareness that separates him from the rest of visible creation.  This is the meaning of Adam’s original solitude in the second creation account.  Man knows that he is different and in some ways above the animals.

Now immediately someone will jump on the comment above that we are different “in some ways”.  They will say that while we are different in that we have self-awareness, and an intellect and a will, sex is not one of the ways that we differ.  We have innate desires for sexual gratification just like the animals and just like the animals we must fulfill those desires.  However, even here, those that say this betray their position by their actions.

Bad Touch

They betray it in a number of ways, but there are two that I want to focus on.  The first is rape.  If we are no different than animals, then why is rape wrong?  Rape is wrong precisely because it is an offense against the will of the other person.  Animals don’t have a will and thus could not rape another animal.  When was the last time that you saw on the Discovery Channel a chimpanzee being tried for rape?

The second point is even more obvious because it flies in the face of this mentality.  Anyone who has frequented hiking trails has at some point found a used condom or condom wrapper on the ground.  No one assumes that it is from a deer, but knows it came from a person.  Why is this?  The answer is obvious—because only people contracept.

That is the most damning of all the evidence against this argument.  If we really are no different than the animals when it comes to sex, then how do you explain contraception?  The fact of the matter is that you can’t.  The truth is that it is a lie and like any lie, you have to cover it up with another lie by using contraception.  They want to be able to justify indulging their lusts and if it takes using nature as a rationalization, then they will do it.  Shouldn’t it be clear that acting this way merely reduces people to something less than they were made to be?  Reducing ourselves to mere animals only serves to make us less than the animals.

There is another sense in which people will try to justify homosexual behavior.  That is by saying that they can’t help it because they were made that way.  Along these same lines, there are many who have compared the fight for gay marriage with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  However, there is a key difference that cannot be ignored.  It is self-evident that within a person there are certain inclinations that ought to be acted upon and others should not.  This is true regardless of whether the cause of that inclination is genetic (e.g a “gay-gene”), environmental or a combination of the two.  Those who oppose gay marriage say that same-sex activity is one of those inclinations that should not be acted upon.  Just as laws against stealing are not directed at kleptomaniacs, but against the act of stealing, so too the opposition to same-sex marriage is not directed to homosexuals per se, but instead represents an opposition to homosexual activity.  It may be discovered that there is a “klepto gene” but that certainly would not then justify stealing.  In other words, the question of whether homosexuality is morally wrong can be argued, but to cry discrimination and compare the situation to the Civil Rights Movement begs the foundational question of whether homosexual activity is wrong or not.  All too often I find people falling into the trap of arguing the existence of a “gay gene” and end up at an impasse because you cannot prove a negative.  Instead we need to address the fundamental assumption that we ought to act upon every inclination we have, especially ones that we are genetically hard-wired towards.  Tell that to someone who struggles with alcoholism because it is in their genes.

Ultimately, they are right when they say “I was made that way.”  We are all made that way to one extent or another.  It is called original sin.  We all find ourselves with inclinations that we should not act upon.  We all find within ourselves “another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me” (Romans 7:23).  It is simply misguided compassion to say “they were made that way.”  We are not helping them but instead giving up on them and inviting them to embrace their brokenness.

This is important because there are a lot of people who struggle with same-sex attraction.  As then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in his 1986 CDF On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, this suffering can only be intensified by error and lightened by truth.  So many younger people when they first experience same-sex attraction assume that their fate is sealed because they were simply made like that.  They need to be told that there is help for them.

There are great groups out there such as NARTH and the Catholic Apostolate Courage who are fighting to get the truth out there in the face of those who have their own agendas.  Hollywood might portray it as a glamorous lifestyle, but it is far from it.  The scientific data paints a much different picture when comparing practicing homosexuals with heterosexuals.

My prayer then is that we will all be guided by the compassion of Christ.  His compassion is not to merely affirm but to speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15).