The paradox of this doctrine was evident even within its first, brief articulation. Immediately before stating the intrinsic disorder of homosexuality, the text averred that in “the pastoral field, these homosexuals must certainly be treated with understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their personal difficulties.… Their culpability will be judged with prudence.” This compassion for the peculiar plight of the homosexual was then elaborated: “This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it.…” Throughout, there are alternating moments of alarm and quiescence; tolerance and panic; categorical statement and prudential doubt.
It was therefore perhaps unsurprising that, within a decade, the Church felt it necessary to take up the matter again. The problem could have been resolved by a simple reversion to the old position, the position maintained by fundamentalist Protestant churches: that homosexuality was a hideous, yet curable, affliction of heterosexuals. But the Church doggedly refused to budge from its assertion of the natural occurrence of constitutive homosexuals—or from its compassion for and sensitivity to their plight. In Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s 1986 letter, “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” this theme is actually deepened, beginning with the title.
To non-Catholics, the use of the term “homosexual person” might seem a banality. But the term “person” constitutes in Catholic moral teaching a profound statement about the individual’s humanity, dignity, and worth; it invokes a whole range of rights and needs; it reflects the recognition by the Church that a homosexual person deserves exactly the same concern and compassion as a heterosexual person, having all the rights of a human being, and all the value, in the eyes of God. This idea was implicit in the 1975 declaration, but was never advocated. Then there it was, eleven years later, embedded in Ratzinger’s very title. Throughout his text, homosexuality, far from being something unmentionable or disgusting, is discussed with candor and subtlety. It is worthy of close attention: “[T]he phenomenon of homosexuality, complex as it is and with its many consequences for society and ecclesial life, is a proper focus for the Church’s pastoral care. It thus requires of her ministers attentive study, active concern and honest, theologically well-balanced counsel.” And here is Ratzinger on the moral dimensions of the unchosen nature of homosexuality: “[T]he particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin.” Moreover, homosexual persons, he asserts, are “often generous and giving of themselves.” Then, in a stunning passage of concession, he marshals the Church’s usual arguments in defense of human dignity in order to defend homosexual dignity:
It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.
Elsewhere, Ratzinger refers to the homosexual’s “God-given dignity and worth,” condemns the view that homosexuals are totally compulsive as a “demeaning assumption,” and argues that “the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation.”
Why are these statements stunning? Because they reveal how far the Church had, by the mid-1980s, absorbed the common sense of the earlier document’s teaching on the involuntariness of homosexuality, and had had the courage to reach its logical conclusion. In Ratzinger’s letter, the Church stood foursquare against bigotry, against demeaning homosexuals either by antigay slander or violence or by pro-gay attempts to reduce human beings to one aspect of their personhood. By denying that homosexual activity was totally compulsive, the Church could open the door to an entire world of moral discussion about ethical and unethical homosexual behavior, rather than simply dismissing it all as pathological. What in 1975 had been “a pathological constitution judged to be incurable” was, eleven years later, a “homosexual person,” “made in the image and likeness of God.”
But this defense of the homosexual person was only half the story. The other half was that, at the same time, the Church strengthened its condemnation of any and all homosexual activity. By 1986 the teachings condemning homosexual acts were far more categorical than they had been before. Ratzinger had guided the Church into two simultaneous and opposite directions: a deeper respect for homosexuals and a sterner rejection of almost anything they might do.
At the beginning of the 1986 document, Ratzinger bravely confronted the central paradox: “In the discussion which followed the publication of the [1975] declaration… an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral or even good. Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.” Elsewhere, he reiterated the biblical and natural-law arguments against homosexual relations. Avoiding the problematic nature of the Old Testament’s disavowal of homosexual acts (since these are treated in the context of such “abominations” as eating pork and having intercourse during menstruation, which the Church today regards with equanimity), Ratzinger focused on Saint Paul’s admonitions against homosexuality: “Instead of the original harmony between Creator and creatures, the acute distortion of idolatry has led to all kinds of moral excess. Paul is at a loss to find a clearer example of this disharmony than homosexual relations.” There was also the simple natural-law argument: “It is only in the marital relationship that the use of the sexual faculty can be morally good. A person engaging in homosexual behavior therefore acts immorally.” The point about procreation was strengthened by an argument about the natural, “complementary union able to transmit life,” which is heterosexual marriage. The fact that homosexual sex cannot be a part of this union means that it “thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living.” Thus “homosexual activity” is inherently “self-indulgent.” “Homosexual activity,” Ratzinger’s document claimed in a veiled and ugly reference to HIV, is a “form of life which constantly threatens to destroy” homosexual persons.
This is some armory of argument. The barrage of statements directed against “homosexual activity,” which Ratzinger associates in this document exclusively with genital sex, is all the more remarkable because it occurs in a document that has otherwise gone further than might have been thought imaginable in accepting homosexuals into the heart of the Church and of humanity. Ratzinger’s letter was asking us, it seems, to love the sinner more deeply than ever before, but to hate the sin even more passionately. This is a demand with which most Catholic homosexuals have at some time or other engaged in anguished combat.
It is also a demand that raises the central question of the two documents and, indeed, of any Catholic homosexual life: How intelligible is the Church’s theological and moral position on the blamelessness of homosexuality and the moral depravity of homosexual acts? This question is the one I wrestled with in my early twenties, as the increasing aridity of my emotional life began to conflict with the possibility of my living a moral life. The distinction made some kind of sense in theory; but in practice, the command to love oneself as a person of human dignity yet hate the core longings that could make one emotionally whole demanded a sense of detachment or a sense of cynicism that seemed inimical to the Christian life. To deny lust was one thing; to deny love was another. And to deny love in the context of Christian doctrine seemed particularly perverse. Which begged a prior question: Could the paradoxes of the Church’s position reflect a deeper incoherence at their core?
One way of tackling the question is to look for useful analogies to the moral paradox of the homosexual. Greed, for example, might be said to be an inn
ate characteristic of human beings, which, in practice, is always bad. But the analogy falls apart immediately. Greed is itself evil; it is prideful, a part of original sin. It is not, like homosexuality, a blameless natural condition that inevitably leads to what are understood as immoral acts. Moreover, there is no subgroup of innately greedy people, nor a majority of people in which greed never occurs. Nor are the greedy to be treated with respect. There is no paradox here, and no particular moral conundrum.
Aquinas suggests a way around this problem. He posits that some things that occur in nature may be in accordance with an individual’s nature, but somehow against human nature in general: “for it sometimes happens that one of the principles which is natural to the species as a whole has broken down in one of its individual members; the result can be that something which runs counter to the nature of the species as a whole, happens to be in harmony with nature for a particular individual: as it becomes natural for a vessel of water which has been heated to give out heat.” Forget, for a moment, the odd view that somehow it is more “natural” for a vessel to exist at one temperature than another. The fundamental point here is that there are natural urges in a particular person that may run counter to the nature of the species as a whole. The context of this argument is a discussion of pleasure: How is it, if we are to trust nature (as Aquinas and the Church say we must), that some natural pleasures in some people are still counter to human nature as a whole? Aquinas’s only response is to call such events functions of sickness, what the modern Church calls “objective disorder.” But here, too, the analogies he provides are revealing: they are bestiality and cannibalism. Aquinas understands each of these activities as an emanation of a predilection that seems to occur more naturally in some than in others. But this only reveals some of the special problems of lumping homosexuality in with other “disorders.” Even Aquinas’s modern disciples (and, as we’ve seen, the Church) concede that involuntary orientation to the same gender does not spring from the same impulses as cannibalism or bestiality. Or indeed that cannibalism is ever a “natural” pleasure in the first place, in the way that, for some bizarre reason, homosexuality is.
What, though, of Aquinas’s better argument—that a predisposition to homosexual acts is a mental or physical illness that is itself morally neutral, but always predisposes people to inherently culpable acts? Here, again, it is hard to think of a precise analogy. Down syndrome, for example, occurs in a minority and is itself morally neutral; but when it leads to an immoral act, such as, say, a temper tantrum directed at a loving parent, the Church is loath to judge that person as guilty of choosing to break a commandment. The condition excuses the action. Or take epilepsy: if an epileptic person has a seizure that injures another human being, she is not regarded as morally responsible for her actions, insofar as they were caused by epilepsy. There is no paradox here either, but for a different reason: with greed, the condition itself is blameworthy; with epilepsy, the injurious act is blameless.
Another analogy can be drawn. What of something like alcoholism? This is a blameless condition, as science and psychology have shown. Some people have a predisposition to it; others do not. Moreover, this predisposition is linked, as homosexuality is, to a particular act. For those with a predisposition to alcoholism, having a drink might be morally disordered, destructive to the human body and spirit. So, alcoholics, like homosexuals, should be welcomed into the Church, but only if they renounce the activity their condition implies.
Unfortunately, even this analogy will not hold. For one thing, drinking is immoral only for alcoholics. Moderate drinking is perfectly acceptable, according to the Church, for nonalcoholics. On the issue of homosexuality, to follow the analogy, the Church would have to say that sex between people of the same gender would be—in moderation—fine for heterosexuals but not for homosexuals. In fact, of course, the Church teaches the opposite, arguing that the culpability of homosexuals engaged in sexual acts should be judged with prudence and less harshly than the culpability of heterosexuals who engage in “perversion.”
But the analogy to alcoholism points to a deeper problem. Alcoholism does not ultimately work as an analogy because it does not reach to the core of the human condition in the way that homosexuality, following the logic of the Church’s arguments, does. If alcoholism is overcome by a renunciation of alcoholic acts, then recovery allows the human being to realize his or her full potential, a part of which, according to the Church, is the supreme act of self-giving in a life of matrimonial love. But if homosexuality is overcome by a renunciation of homosexual emotional and sexual union, the opposite is achieved: the human being is liberated into sacrifice and pain, barred from the matrimonial love that the Church holds to be intrinsic, for most people, to the state of human flourishing. Homosexuality is a structural condition that restricts the human being, even if homosexual acts are renounced, to a less than fully realized life. In other words, the gay or lesbian person is deemed disordered at a far deeper level than the alcoholic: at the level of the human capacity to love and be loved by another human being, in a union based on fidelity and self-giving. Their renunciation of such love also is not guided toward some ulterior or greater goal—as the celibacy of the religious orders is designed to intensify their devotion to God. Rather, the loveless homosexual’s destiny is precisely toward nothing, a negation of human fulfillment, which is why the Church understands that such persons, even in the act of obedient self-renunciation, are called “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.”
This suggests another analogy: the sterile person. Here, too, the person is structurally barred by an innate or incurable condition from the full realization of procreative union with another person. One might expect that such people would be regarded in exactly the same light as homosexuals. They would be asked to commit themselves to a life of complete celibacy and to offer up their pain toward a realization of Christ’s sufferings on the cross. But that, of course, is not the Church’s position. Marriage is available to sterile couples or to those past child-bearing age; these couples are not prohibited from having sexual relations.
One is forced to ask: What rational distinction can be made, on the Church’s own terms, between the position of sterile people and that of homosexual people with regard to sexual relations and sacred union? If there is nothing morally wrong, per se, with the homosexual condition or with homosexual love and self-giving, then homosexuals are indeed analogous to those who, by blameless fate, cannot reproduce. With the sterile couple, it could be argued, miracles might happen. But miracles, by definition, can happen to anyone. What the analogy to sterility suggests, of course, is that the injunction against homosexual union does not rest, at heart, on the arguments about openness to procreation, but on the Church’s failure to fully absorb its own teachings about the dignity and worth of homosexual persons. It cannot yet see them as it sees sterile heterosexuals: people who, with respect to procreation, suffer from a clear, limiting condition, but who nevertheless have a potential for real emotional and spiritual self-realization, in the heart of the Church, through the transfiguring power of the matrimonial sacrament. It cannot yet see them as truly made in the image of God.
But this, maybe, is to be blind in the face of the obvious. Even with sterile people, there is a symbolism in the union of male and female that speaks to the core nature of sexual congress and its ideal instantiation. There is no such symbolism in the union of male with male or female with female. For some Catholics, this “symbology” goes so far as to bar even heterosexual intercourse from positions apart from the missionary—face-to-face, male to female—in a symbolic act of love devoid of all nonprocreative temptation. For others, the symbology is simply about the notion of “complementarity,” the way in which each sex is invited in the act of sexual congress—even when they are sterile—to perceive the mystery of the other; when the two sexes are the same,
in contrast, the act becomes one of mere narcissism and self-indulgence, a higher form of masturbation. For others still, the symbolism is simply about Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, and the essentially dual, male-female center of the natural world. Denying this is to offend the complementary dualism of the universe.
But all these arguments are arguments for the centrality of heterosexual sexual acts in nature, not their exclusiveness. It is surely possible to concur with these sentiments, even to laud their beauty and truth, while also conceding that it is nevertheless also true that nature seems to have provided a spontaneous and mysterious contrast that could conceivably be understood to complement—even dramatize—the central male-female order. In many species and almost all human cultures, there are some who seem to find their destiny in a similar but different sexual and emotional union. They do this not by subverting their own nature, or indeed human nature, but by fulfilling it in a way that doesn’t deny heterosexual primacy, but rather honors it by its rare and distinct otherness. As albinos remind us of the brilliance of color, as redheads offer a startling contrast to the blandness of their peers, as genius teaches us, by contrast, the virtue of moderation, as the disabled person reveals to us in negative form the beauty of the fully functioning human body, so the homosexual person might be seen as a natural foil to the heterosexual norm, a variation that does not eclipse the theme, but resonates with it. Extinguishing—or prohibiting—homosexuality is, from this point of view, not a virtuous necessity, but the real crime against nature, a refusal to accept the pied beauty of God’s creation, a denial of the way in which the other need not threaten but may actually give depth and contrast to the self.
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