Chaste and Faithful to the Church: True liberation is found in the verities of Catholic moral teaching

Are conservatives really “fag-bashers”? Was this the import of the recent letter to the world’s Catholic bishops, entitled the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, sent out by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith?

To the Boston Globe and other leading newspapers this Vatican document was typically conservative or reactionary, and was construed as encouraging violence against gays. Repeatedly quoted, out of context, was the sentence: “When… homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.” (For the full text of the letter see Origins, Nov. 13, 1986.) This was not at all viewed by liberal readers and gay activists as that sober realism for which the Church has always stood, but rather as incitement to further baiting and bashing. Ignored or downplayed, predictably, were the words preceding this passage, namely, that “it is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action” and that “such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs.” In these horrifying days of the AIDS epidemic one does well to be clear about these things.

The Church is not here — it cannot be said often enough — side with conservatives or liberals, with the Right or the Left, but to uphold those truths, spiritual and moral, that are distinctly Christian and Catholic. It is true that in their insistence upon the nature of these truths conservatives often sound uncharitable, and indeed some may intend as much. But as one who, as a student of the Sixties, has travelled the long and dangerous roads of various political and sexual “liberations,” and who now considers himself a conservative and theologically orthodox, I find more compassion in some of the harsh verities of the Catholic faith than in the sweet-sounding compassion of so-called liberalism. While I wish that conservatives would exhibit a charity less afraid that doctrine will become tainted or relinquished merely because it is put into practice by the heart, I also wish liberals would display a charity unafraid of moral truth and a compassion unafraid of arduous responsibility. Both sides have much to learn from the Church.

Both camps — liberals and conservatives — have failed to appreciate fully the struggle waged by those homosexuals who uphold the Church’s traditional teaching and strive to lead fully chaste Christian lives. Because their witness to the working of the Holy Spirit is overlooked, important assumptions in the debate about the morality of homosexuality are ignored. Mainstream journals and newspapers will often favorably mention, in discussions of the plight of homosexual Christians, the national pro-homosexual organization known as Dignity, but will fail to mention that there are several pro-chastity alternatives. Indeed, references to such groups are difficult to find even in the more prominent conservative publications. The New York Times only recently mentioned a group known as Courage, the orthodox Catholic alternative to Dignity, in a brief front-page article reporting the Bishop of Brooklyn’s denial to Dignity and similar organizations of the use of Church property. (Because of its fidelity to Church teaching, Courage remained exempt from the ban.)

What is at stake can be seen in a response by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to an open letter which recently appeared in Commonweal (December 26, 1986). Written by one anonymous Stephen Elred (Stephen the Martyr conjoined with St. Aelred of Rievaulx?), the letter challenged Cardinal Bernardin for having been instrumental in the defeat of “gay rights” legislation before the Chicago City Council. Although the Cardinal’s response was respectful, compassionate, and sensitive while remaining true to the Church’s teaching, there were certain assumptions he as a shepherd with serious pastoral concerns could not confront. It is precisely here that homosexual witnesses to the struggle of remaining chaste as Christians have much to contribute, not only to the public debate regarding homosexuality but to the common good of the entire nation regarding the example of virtue.

Perhaps the greatest, and most dangerous, myth of the gay polemic is that there is unanimity among homosexuals on the nature and the cause of homosexuality. Gay activist groups make every effort to convey a consensus among homosexuals and to enforce the opinion that to challenge this consensus is to deprive a minority of human beings of their inalienable rights, as well as to dispossess them of their very identities. Yet in fact there exist homosexuals who consider themselves Christians and Catholics first, for whom identity is not equated with sexual orientation or genital expression. Such Catholics happen to be homosexuals, not always by choice, often by genetic and environmental factors too complex readily to admit of explanation or solution: for them identity is foremost a matter of conscience and that which transcends sensuality, viz., the soul. Their deepest feelings do not revolve so much around sexual yearning as around their need for and love of the Creator and Redeemer and Sustainer of us all.

You will find these people in such denominational and non-denominational organizations as Regeneration, the Exodus Coalition, Homosexuals Anonymous, and Courage. This latter was founded by lay Catholics in New York City under the guidance of moral theologian Father John F. Harvey in 1980, and has been approved by Cardinal John O’Connor of that archdiocese and this past summer by Cardinal Bernard Law for the Archdiocese of Boston. A number of major cities across the country now have chapters. Although usually small in membership, these pastoral support groups make up in devotion to the traditional Church what they may lack in size. The important, and interesting, question to ask is why do we not hear more about them in the media? When the exponents of “enlightened opinion” do deign to acknowledge the existence of such organizations, why do they dismiss them as fit only for self-deluded types incapable of coming to terms with life, for deceivers who prefer living by double standard, or for cowards refusing to come out of the closet and who tremble before their own shadows? As if those only are brave who are engaged in the legitimization of their orientation and those ignorant, craven, or hypocritical who truly believe that “gay” sex is still a sin!

But if “dignity” is the key word for homosexuals struggling toward self-knowledge, then why are some attributed with wisdom and valor for demanding the right to act out their proclivities while others are stigmatized for insisting that the Church after all these centuries is still right? Are the former really so very brave for standing up in a society of ACLU lawyers and an overwhelmingly secular (and generally supportive) media? What if a true awareness of one’s homosexuality, and consequent achievement of dignity, is not so much a matter of recognizing social and historical repression but rather something deeper, more intimate and spiritual, indeed more unfashionable: that is, a matter of experiencing shame in a shameless age of sexual revolution?

This brings us to the second assumption of gay activists, that it is shameful to feel shame, humiliating to feel humiliation, especially in this enlightened age of ours. However, shame may not be so much the result of social taboos or external oppression (as materialist philosophies are ever fond of reminding us) as the result of a fundamental reason or primary cause inherent in human nature itself — of a transgression or violation of that very nature, or what Christians commonly call sin. We need therefore to ask why shame and humiliation before sin must now automatically be judged bad. Is this not what most people, whether gay or straight, feel on the threshold of true repentance and conversion? After all, we are daily to shoulder our individual crosses and daily serve our neighbors in selfless devotion to the Lord Who, in dying for us, suffered shames and humiliations we can never begin to imagine. Just as the fear of God prepares us for love of Him, so shame and humiliation are often what open our hearts to His mercy and to reconciliation.

There was a time when to be Christian meant accepting that suffering contributed to the development of character and resisting temptation to the cultivation of virtue — that to be tested meant that one was among the elect. Today we prefer constant reassurance and guaranteed security, an undiluted and undemanding happiness. We demand self-gratification, self-acceptance, self-affirmation, all for those very selves we are told to lose if we wish truly to find ourselves. Today we live as if there were no Heaven to aspire to or any Kingdom of God to await. Yet in I Corinthians we learn from St. Paul that even homosexuals who duly repent their sins shall also inherit that Kingdom. Amidst all our myriad comforts we forget what it means to be washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God (I Corinthians 6:9-11). And we forget Who Alone can wash our sins white as snow.

Instead of spiritual wisdom, we are handed the psychologistic assumption that if one “is born that way” then it cannot possibly be wrong. Charles Curran is neither the first nor the last to make constitutional homosexuality the cornerstone of an endorsement of genital activity. (Curran’s argument is intended to justify “only” monogamous homosexual liasons; but “constitutional homosexuality” is also used to justify the more common promiscuity that is actually practiced in the homosexual community. It is ironic that homosexual Catholics who defend Fr. Curran are themselves condemned by his strictures.) The argument usually entails that a loving God could not possibly have created six to ten percent of the population homosexual only to deny them fulfillment of their desires. One might as well say, though, that a loving God could not possibly allow any percent of the population to be born blind, lame, or retarded. Yet such happens all the time, as it did two thousand years ago. Why, then, should some not be born who are sexually imperfect, or (since concupiscence is part of mankind’s original sin) sexually abnormal? Many gays bridle at the suggestion of imperfection or abnormality, preferring instead to keep attention focused on the (real, to be sure) pain involved in having one’s identity branded a medical problem, a psychological weakness, or a sociological deviation — in short, what the Church calls objective disorder or mortal sin. But how do those born blind come to know they are blind unless they are told by those who can see? For the sake of a compassionate equality are the lame now to set the rules of baseball for everyone? In the name of alleviating pain shall we permit the retarded to establish an entire society’s system of education?

The closest the Bible comes to acknowledging sexual inversion is when Christ says that there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, eunuchs who have been made so by men, and eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 19:12). It would seem that the two former conditions do not ineluctably qualify one for sanctity and that the latter is achieved decisively through conversion and repentance. A loving God requires more of us than simply being alive, or indeed of “propering.” Otherwise how could a loving God have allowed Job to suffer as he did, or His Son to be hung on a cross? In The Problem of Pain C. S. Lewis explains that love is not necessarily the same thing as kindness and that “God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.” To forget the utter mysteriousness of His purpose is itself to court blindness.

The thorniest assumptions of homosexual rhetoric involve the issue of civil rights. Here, we are told that the majority of homosexuals are not at all irresponsible in their sexual behavior, that, to take as a characteristic argument a line from the Commoweal letter mentioned above, “the desire to make love to a person of the same sex is not inextricably tied to pederasty, sado-masochism, pornography, promiscuity, or any of the other destructive behaviors which [people] rightly fear.” Aside from the usual omission of masturbation as an habitually destructive habit, such assertions exhibit idealistic romanticizing and wish-fulfillment more than reliance on evidence. The findings of the McKusick study, for example, reveal that of the 24 percent of homosexual males in San Francisco “engaged in the least promiscuity, 33 per cent admitted to oral/anal contact, 41 percent to accepting semen in their rectum, and 52 percent to ingesting semen in the last thirty days” (quoted in National Review, Jan. 30, 1987, p. 55). My own knowledge of the gay scene in Boston — underground reports, gay community newspapers, public cruising and display give every indication that the bars, the baths, the bushes, and the beaches are far from empty, and most can observe for themselves that many neighborhood and college stores are not devoid of their share of “homophile” magazines — leads me to believe these figures are by no means exaggerated.

Although the gay community is purportedly well educated as to the facts of AIDS, their own advocacy of “safe sex” is not all that often practiced. A gay spokesman was reported in the pages of this journal to have publicly announced that it is far better to risk certain death than to diminish sexual pleasure [see “Dying For Sex,” In View, May 1986]. A homosexual dying of AIDS announced on national television (with the apparent approval of his doctor and a civil liberties lawyer, both of whom were present) that he would continue to have sex and felt no obligation to inform his partners of his disease. Gay newspapers have carried headlines criticizing “safe sex” on grounds quite different than, if not contrary to, those of conservatives. Generally, however, articulate gayspokesmen are circumspect in presenting their image to straight audiences, having become as adept in public relations as the Reagan administration they enjoy condemning for the same.

Nowhere is this image-making more prevalent or more deceptive than in the issue of just how gay rights laws would affect groups advocating sexual liberation for children as well as putatively homosexual adolescents. For it is never made clear just who would then decide, under a regime of gay liberation, who among the young are constitutionally determined to homosexuality on the one hand, and who are psychologically confused or troubled on the other hand. The impression generally received is that parents might not even be considered a last resort. We often hear the counterargument that self-avowed homosexuals should be allowed to teach because the seduction of students would be rare if not nil, a point that lately downplays the once much-touted influence of an open role model.

Some will still insist that if they had only had a gay teacher to help them through their formative years the pain of loneliness and confusion would have been lessened. But in struggling today at age 38, I wish I had had fewer secular humanists and civil libertarians to guide me through my identity crises, and more who were solidly and intelligently devout. I have known some whose formative years were crucial precisely because they had teachers who were literally too close for comfort. Here conservatives will have to shoulder some of the blame. Confronted with the love that once dared not speak its name but which now brays and brags, too many parents and teachers keep silent on the matter, and are therefore in no position to help their children when help, especially spiritual help, might be needed. Just as compassion without truth is not really compassion, so doctrine without a charity capable of meeting mighty trying tests is much less than it should be.

Those keenly aware of social and familial responsibilities cannot but be wary, in the light of what they see and hear daily, of sympathizing with the movement for homosexual civil rights. I for one cannot expect heterosexuals to do so until homosexuals have shown considerably more responsibility for their actions than they have — I would go so far as to say, until homosexuals can now prove they are capable of responsibility both to society and to one another.

There is also a question of whether civil rights should even be allocated on the basis of “sexual preference.” Homosexuals should be guaranteed every civil right as persons, not on the basis of their “taste” in sex. Christians in particular should ask whether a third mode of sexual being actually exists, for it would seem from the Biblical account that God created man and woman not only for union with one another, but in his own image. Anything else would seem to be, according to St. Paul’s radical insight in his letter to the Romans, idolatorous: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator” (1:24-25).

We must now confront the morally and spiritually critical assumption that because the sexual desires of homosexuals are both congenital and so persistent such desires must come from God and be morally good. Although the Vatican’s pastoral letter does not consider the particular inclination of the homosexual person to be a sin, it does see it as an objective disorder due to its “more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil” (no. 3). The moral evil is, of course, that sexual act which goes against the very order of creation and hence the Creator. The pastoral letter goes on to emphasize that “the fundamental liberty that characterizes the human person and gives him his dignity [belongs] to the homosexual person as well” (no. 11). It insists that the fundamental identity of every person, heterosexual or homosexual, is that of a creature of God, “His child and heir to eternal life” (no. 16). While both homosexual and heterosexual Christians are called to a chaste life, homosexuals in particular are being asked to heed the call “to enact the will of God in their life by joining whatever sufferings and difficulties they experience in virtue of their condition to the sacrifice of the Lord’s cross” (no. 12).

At this point the Church leaves off how exactly homosexuals are to do this in their friendships — which is not to say that the Church’s tradition is barren of any further teaching. St. Aelred of Rievaulx wrote at some length on the nature of spiritual friendship which for him was not in the least devoid of passion and devotion, and even went so far as to elaborate on the friendship between Christ and “the beloved disciple” in sensual terms reminiscent of the Song of Songs. Here the Church needs staunchly to defend one of its great, because all too rare, treasures. For there are scholars such as John Boswell who, in his overrated Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, claim Aelred as a gay hero, and can manage even to quote him so that the reader does not realize just how profoundly chaste both he and his message are.

Before the birth of Christ a pagan philosopher dealt with this problem no less profoundly, powerfully, and passionately than did Aelred — although we must not forget that, unlike Aelred, he did not have our Lord’s supreme gift of redemptive salvation. It is arguable, though, that without Plato there would have been no Aristotle, no Augustine, and no Aquinas. This ancient Greek lover of wisdom designated the “eros” or intense love between two men as the most divine of madnesses, describing as well the intimacy of an ardent physicality that drew the line sharply at genital contact. For him this love was analogous to the procreative love between a man and a woman: he portrayed not only the overwhelming impact of beauty on the beholder but how and why such beauty rendered the beholder “pregnant.” However, the children that this love gives birth to are of the spirit rather than the flesh: virtue and wisdom. From their nurture within the personal bond itself to their development and refinement in contributions made to society and culture and ultimately to their fulfillment in leading one to behold the source of Absolute Beauty, virtue and wisdom were considered children without which civilization could not survive.

Although Plato’s acumen here, concerning the significance of “erotic”/Platonic love as “a marriage of true minds,” is not sufficiently appreciated, the eminent conservative Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper has offered a study of just this enthusiasm or “being filled with the god.” Pieper demonstrates that Plato was confronting in his time a libidinous situation much like the one in our own time. For this ancient Greek, according to Pieper, man is “corrupting love when he pursues that seemingly so ‘reasonable’ technique for living which aims at uncomplicated pleasure [and] practicing a form of self-betrayal which cheats him of his true potentialities.” Indeed homosexuals have done much less honorably by Plato than has the Church they ridicule, for they blithely enlist a great philosopher in the echelon of their famous while utterly neglecting the realism of his idealism: namely, that sexual consummation of such a love is unnatural and necessarily precludes any spiritual consummation, and that to practice the absolutely essential virtue of chastity raises one heavenward.

The notion is widespread that current Biblical scholarship has vindicated all other assumptions about gayness and gay love we have thus far discussed. This scholarship, however, is not convincing to even a casual reader of the Bible. From Derek Bailey’s work to that of Robin Scroggs and John McNeill, S. J. (now under fire from the Vatican) there are hardly any points which are not debatable. Ranging from the extremely disingenuous to the obviously tendentious, their hermenuetical exercises hardly convince, even though there was a time I desperately wanted to be convinced. I have never been able to understand how these modern researchers can claim to know (in the religious and moral act of interpretation as opposed to the technical) not only what escaped the hearts and brains of two hundred previous centuries, but what the members of these cultures and times — including the inspired authors of their sacred literature — supposedly could not even grasp about themselves. With Chesterton and Lewis I balk at such evidence of “chronological snobbery,” at the assumption that what is modern and living is ipso facto better, wiser, and truer than what is ancient and dead. Such a quasi-scientific assumption, of course, neatly exempts itself from any kind of moral judgment while levelling moral condemnation against the past. In other words, I do not believe that Christ having come to save sinners, sinners ought now return the favor by rewriting Scripture.

Arguments abound demonstrating that the Jewish stricture against (and death penalty for) “a man lying with a man as with a woman” (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13) ceased to apply with the advent of Christ and the Good News. Such arguments assert, furthermore, St. Paul’s lack of qualification in matters generally sexual and specifically homosexual, which, gay spokesmen emphasize, Jesus never discussed. How can this be anything but disingenuous when our Savior Himself tells us, as reported by Matthew, that He has not come to abolish but to fulfill the law, that till Heaven and earth pass away not an iota will pass from the law (5:17–18)? Jesus, moreover, exhorts us to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect (5:48), thereby echoing that refrain in the old law exhorting us to be holy as our God is holy (Leviticus 19:2). Lest we should fail to understand what He is saying, He explains that the commandment against adultery is now extended to mean that anyone who lusts in his heart has already committed the sin (5:27-28). How then are we to interpret the old law against a man lying with a man unless it means that the very thought or desire is now itself the sin? This conception of absolute purity is further verified by the Beatitude promising that the pure in heart shall see God (5:8). Elsewhere the Son of Man teaches that purity of heart excludes sins covered by the Decalogue, including fornication (15:19), a word referring generally to any illicit sexual act.

If the claim is that a monogamous homosexual relationship is exempt from Biblical proscriptions against fornication and unchastity, are we then to believe that all Scriptural references to marriage only speak of man and woman because their authors were momentarily forgetful of their pederastic brethren? Inasmuch as our Lord speaks only of marriage between man and woman as licit, how can we possibly construe Him also to mean monogamous marriage between persons of the same sex? Rather than translate Christ’s silence on homosexuality as tacit approval, we should understand the absence of a specific condemnation both in the context of His broad declaration that He has come to save all sinners as well as in that of St. Paul’s dictum that “fornication and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is fitting among saints” (see Ephesians 5:3).

In the pastoral letter on homosexuality, a document much reviled by gay liberators as utterly lacking in compassion, I myself find a powerful and healing compassion throughout. I find, too, my own subtly profound liberation in the statement that only what is true can ultimately be pastoral because what is true has begun, finally, to set me free — and most especially, my dear friends as well. It is not now, nor ever can be, a matter of, say, the aforementioned Stephen Elred’s truth or of Paul Guay’s truth, but simply, purely, and ultimately Christ’s truth, Who gave His life that we might live.

Author

  • Paul Edward Guay

    Paul Edward Guay is a lecturer and Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, ethics, and literature at Boston University. In 1987, he wrote Texts and Contexts of Ideal Friendship: Ethical Meditations Toward a Tradition of Erotic Philia.

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