Keeping the Faith

There’s a fairly good article in the Washington Blade on the American bishops’ gay outreach guidelines and the challenges of being both Catholic and gay. Most of the commentary is predictably from the leftish side of the argument, as the more conservative gay Catholics are probably not lining up to be interviewed by the Blade. This comment was really good, although it probably needs a few nuances:

One significant question for Catholics who remain active in the church’s gay ministries is how they reconcile their sexual orientation with the church’s teachings on the matter.

“I know what the church, the hierarchy, the people way up at the top are saying, but for myself it’s a personal issue with me and God,” Silva says about why he chooses to remain a practicing Catholic. “It has nothing to do with what the cardinal, the Pope, the bishops say.”

When he read about the bishops’ plan to vote on the gay ministry document, Silva was dismayed. But placing it in the context of other church teachings on sex, it didn’t seem so harmful, he said.

“They tell straight people not to have sex … without getting married,” Silva says. Discussing the matter is a step in the advancement of gay rights within the church, he says. “It’s a start, it’s a sort of waking up.”

A lot of more secular gays think, as the article’s author does, that the dissonance is between Church teaching and our orientation. The dissonance is really more between the teachings and our sexual choices. The Silva fellow hits on that, pointing out that there is plenty of dissonance between Church teachings and the sexual choices of most straight Catholics. In that context (the bishops also repeated Church teaching against contraception in the same meeting as they discussed ministry to gays), it’s not so much about condemnation as it is about holding up a sexual ideal that society has pretty much rejected, rightly or wrongly. Straight Catholics who are all homophobic need to realize that the Church (for many of the same reasons) also rejects a guy sleeping with his girlfriend, a single man practicing the “solitary vice,” a wife going down on her husband, a married couple using the pill, or a divorced man remarrying while his ex-wife is still alive. Gays aren’t being singled out. If it seems like that, then I think it’s more about homophobia than Church teaching as such.

Another thought occurs from the above selection. Yes, there’s a difference between my faith in God and the things that the Pope and cardinals say, but that doesn’t mean the two don’t have anything to do with each other. Even if they are wrong sometimes or ignorant, they’re still the main teachers of the faith I have. Even if I listen to them with a critical ear (in the good sense), I still ought to listen. Then, weighing their words against what I know from scripture, tradition, and solid theology, my conscience may accept or reject what they are saying, but it’s got to be more than just a knee-jerk reaction. And that goes not just for gay sex, but for straight couples and their contraceptives, too.

Bishops’ Guidelines for Pastoral Ministry to Gays and Lesbians

What about the Bishops’ Conference’s new guidlines for gay and lesbian ministry? Everyone seems to be all worked out about them.  On right-wing blogs and news sites, people are accusing the bishops of betraying Truth (always with capital letters), of soft-pedalling sin, and of capitulating to The Gays. Some of the nervous nellies are even claiming that — gasp — this document is worse than Always Our Children (being part of the Vast Homosexual Conspiracy, I predictably like AOC). Presumably, that’s because the document begins by reiterating Catechism teaching that gays and lesbians have human dignity, too, presumes that sexual orientation is neither a choice nor generally changeable, does not endorse “reparative therapy” pseudo-science, and does not wallow in excessive verbiage about how twisted, warped, and evil we are.

On the other side of the fence, gay activists are making lots of noise about the same document being hateful, homophobic, etc. Presumably that is because this national document doesn’t reject the teaching of the world-wide Church, because it reiterates (in much more careful and considerate language) what the Church has been teaching all along, and because it repeats the standard discipline that if a person has engaged in what the Church considers serious sexual sin (of whatever sort), then confession is necessary before receiving the Eucharist. In other news, the sky is still blue. One valid criticism, I think, is the way the document discourages people coming out: on that, more in a bit.

The document seems very balanced to me. In 25 pages, it sets out a framework of what a ministry should look like if it (a) sets out to help gay Christians in our particular struggles to follow Christ and (b) intends to bill itself as a Catholic ministry. What follows is a listing of the various topics covered by the document, with my own comments on each section.

Repression and the Male Sex Drive

*Christopher has written a very thoughtful post on the nature of male sexuality (of both the gay and straight varieties) and the need for elucidating first principles that lead to healthy integration, rather than self-destructive and compulsive “acting out.” I’m not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, but I think he has hit the problem in the bull’s eye. Whether or not one comes to quite the same conclusions, I think *Christopher points us all on the right track in terms of where the solutions lie.

Gay Adoptions and the Catholic Church

Here’s an interesting article in The Tablet on a Catholic adoption agency sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, Catholic adoption agencies have seen that sometimes it’s in the best interest of a child to place him or her with a gay couple and have quietly been doing so for some time now. On the other hand, the Vatican has reasserted that the ideal is for a child to be placed with a man and woman in a traditional marriage, and that gay partnerships are so far from that ideal that Catholics (and, a fortiori, Catholic agencies) ought to oppose gay adoption. Adding to the dilemma is the insistence of certain governments that an agency either does not discriminate regarding sexual orientation, or gets out of the adoption business altogether.

The Boston Archdiocese’s pullout has gotten the most notice. But the Archdiocese of San Francisco makes for an interesting contrast. There, the letter of the law is being followed, with the Archdiocese no longer placing any children for adoption since it can no longer place with homosexual couples, but the Church is nevertheless “loaning” employees to do basically the same work with another non-profit group that does occasionally place children with gays and lesbians.

It seems logical to me that children would do best in a loving, Catholic family with a Mom and Dad and other siblings. But sometimes that sort of family is not available for a particular child, particularly if the child has special needs. Surely it’s better to place a kid with a loving, responsible same-sex couple than to let him be tossed around from foster home to foster home until he turns 18.

Certainly, what matters most is the welfare of the child, and not the wishes of the would-be parents. But there are no data to support the notion that kids of gay couples turn out any better or worse than kids of straight couples, all else being equal. So, even if one agrees with the Vatican that the best thing would be to place the kids with a man and wife, sometimes the best available option is to place them with homosexuals. Really, if I were a Catholic adoption agent, I would be more worried about the religion of the prospective parents than about their sexual orientation.

Sexual Ethics

One of the strengths of Christianity, and of Catholicism in particular, is the idea that discipleship to Christ is all-encompassing. Through baptism, we become a new creation in Him, and our whole way of looking at and relating to the world is altered. Moral conversion is part and parcel of being Christian. Whatever you may think of Catholic morality, you can’t help but admire its synthetic coherence and inner consistency. A blend of natural law (which looks to non-religious facts of human nature as pointers to human right and wrong) and the doctrines of Scripture and Tradition, Catholic moral teaching provides a compass for how to live one’s life and general principles to apply to the concrete particulars of the here and now.

In the sexual realm, Catholicism teaches the goodness of human sexuality and of the human body. The obvious purpose for which sex exists in the biological sense is for the perpetuation of the species. This biological fact provides one of the basic data points for the natural-law teaching. And because the purpose is not just to make babies, but to raise them up in a stable way, we arrive at the ideal of sex within a stable, committed partnership of parents, which forms the basis of the human family. This natural-law insight matches up with the Scriptural foundations of marriage as a divine institution, from the first family in Genesis, through the teachings of the Old Testament, and into the Christian sexual ethic found in the New Testament and practice of the Early Church.

Summed up, Catholic teaching holds that human sexuality is ordered to the procreation of new life, within a stable and loving family. Each sexual act is an expression of love and selflessness to one’s spouse, with nothing and no one coming in between, open each time to the possibility of that love being concretized in the conception of a new person, forever linking the man and his wife. Anything that falls away from that ideal is disordered — masturbation, pornography, adultery, pre-marital sex, contracepted sex, or same-sex relations — because it fails in one way or another to lead to the ideal for which sex is seen to exist. To the degree that an act fails to reach the ideal, it is sinful. The entirety of Catholic sexual ethics is rooted in this integrated understanding of the purpose of human sexuality. To alter one piece of the teaching requires a rethinking of all the rest, and would seem to require a rethinking of the Catholic understanding of the human person.

The strongpoints of the traditional teaching are that it is fundamentally a positive vision of the body and sex, an ideal proposed (rather than primarily a list of prohibitions), a harmonious synthesis (rather than a loose grouping of unrelated teachings), backed by centuries of basically consistency. It also fits in well with the general biblical assumptions about married life.

When the subject comes up, people sometimes ask me why can’t we just accept gay marriage/gay sex/commited unions or whatever. Or, why can’t the Pope just decide it’s ok? Well, part of the problem is the difficulty of how to move from saying this is absolutely forbidden to saying that this is permitted. Second, a revision on the gay question would require a complete overhaul of all Catholic sexual ethics, and probably an overhaul of the general assumptions about human nature itself. You can’t just change one of the conclusions without also altering the premises. So, theologically it’s a hell of a lot harder than it sounds.

And if in conscience one comes to the sincere conviction that the Church is wrong on the permissibility of same-sex sex, then what standards do we take? Presumably our Christian values will shape our notions of right and wrong in sexual intimacy, as they shape everything else in our lives. So, where do we find an ethical source that can guide us surely and objectively in our sexual choices? If we just take everything as it comes and do what feels right, we’ve basically abandoned any sort of moral compass beyond our own momentary desire. Sex only in a committed and monogamous union, guarded by vows and blessed? Why only that? Why not also sex between consenting and loving partners, with or without a union? Or sex for recreation, even without love, so long as no one is coerced? And, once I’ve arrived at a standard, what does that standard have to say about heterosexual relations, because the two are bound to influence each other? Once I set aside the internally consistent and objective traditional teaching, I’m not sure what else offers me a firm and conscience-guiding alternative ethical standard. We can’t just make something up. Nor can we craft a new teaching that sounds good but does not flow from the rest of Christian moral teaching. It might be good, but it wouldn’t be Christian.

I think this is one of the biggest hurdles for articulating a gay sexual ethic, whether for an individual who decides to step outside of traditional Catholic moral doctrine on this issue, or for the Church in some hypothetical future where it decides to find a place for sexual relations between people of the same sex. I don’t have the answer, and I’ve never found a convincing theory anywhere else. If God really does intend for gay people to have sex, then the answer has to be out there. And if there is in fact no satisfying answer, then…