People who know me know that I have a passion for theology, and that I rarely ever shut up about the latest book I’ve read. They know that this is what causes me to teach catechumens at the parish, to make YouTube videos on Lubac, Pieper, or Ratzinger, to teach online students (somehow attracted to my borderline fanatical enthusiasm), and to seek out conversations with Protestants, agnostics and atheists. It’s just that I love learning, and, even more, sharing what I’ve learned.
This enthusiasm—because of the nature of its object—has put me in contact with several people who often find themselves in crisis situations. Precisely because the question of God is the heart of this kind of passionate interest, the reality of suffering, and the turn toward God it elicits, is never missing from the many people I mix with.
At first I was surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) by how many people I would meet at group events, Mass, service projects, or online forums, that were in fact feeling crushed by life and were grasping at a final straw by showing up. The degrees of intensity vary of course. From Protestants dissatisfied with the banal services of their local megachurch to single mothers who had barely avoided homelessness, I’ve realized that one’s local parish (not to mention online forums) offers plenty of opportunities for the challenge of the Gospel. Of course, alone we are never up to the task, but this is precisely the benefit of forming strong small communities that can help each other in serving those who are thirsty for God in the midst of the modern world.
This encounter with people who suffer is the common experience of many priests, religious, and lay leaders. But also of every regular lay Catholic who has a social life. One thing the student of theology can do is help others understand the deeper meaning of the Church’s doctrines, and precisely in that way draw out the practical and pastoral implications contained within them. Pastoral conclusions intrinsically drawn from the mystery which doctrine reveals to us are pastoral in a way which far exceeds clever philanthropy.
In this spirit, I would like to offer some reflections on the question of homosexuality—a question which has arisen around me with unusual frequency in recent weeks.
When faced with someone seeking to become a member of your inner circle of friends (which is usually the first step in introducing them—organically—to the beauty of the faith and its power in our lives) it can be easy to immediately address their personal questions with theological distinctions without realizing that the person’s questions are firstly an introduction of themselves—and a vulnerable one at that. This is especially true with people stepping from the secular environment of the LGBT community to the environment a faithful Catholic lives in. Obviously I am not speaking of Sacramental wishy-washiness here. It should be obvious that OCIA has for its purposes to make very clear all that the Church teaches before the day of Baptism (at least obvious to Catholics who believe what the Church teaches). What I am speaking of is people’s day-to-day regular encounters and the process of making new friends, of bringing them into one’s own circle of friends. Often times for those who lived in the LGBT scene, that way of life has left them deeply dissatisfied, and they are looking for something different—although they often have no idea what it is. They are not theology nerds and are usually looking, first and foremost, for a sense of belonging. So it can happen that discussions which inorganically jump to moral philosophizing end up losing sight of the fact that persons are involved here, that they don’t want to be the object of moral or theological distinctions as if they were a problem to solve. No person is a problem to solve… in fact, each and every person is the solution to our overly abstract problems precisely because they remind us of the concrete requirement of love. I personally first came face to face with this reminder when a Catholic “friend” of mine used violence against two gay people in a Parisian metro… that was when these doctrinal questions took on a much more concrete relevance for me. But, as I said above: the deepest way to love (as I hope to show) is to draw from the mystery of truth and to organically reveal its salvific balm to those we are called to serve. This takes maturity, humanity, and even some cleverness.
It seems very obvious to me that locking away from everyone (not to mention from oneself!) the reality of homosexual feelings is wrong—although understandable because of the fear of rejection. With discernment, it seems necessary that people speak to trustworthy friends about these kinds of internal feelings. But it also seems that it would be wrong for Christians to believe that others who have homosexual feelings are fundamentally different from them, that they have an essentially different identity (as if they were of a different species: gay versus straight). In my personal experience this does precisely what I want to avoid: discriminating by driving a wedge between people and myself. Obviously it’s incredibly malicious to label (as many unfortunately do) people as sinners on the basis of their homosexual feelings (as if this were a choice!). An attitude like that is simply disturbing. The event in Paris partly illustrates this, and it has stayed with me for years. It is always in the background of my mind when I meet someone with homosexual attractions.
We ought to hold to the Church’s official teaching on marriage precisely because it presupposes an understanding of the human being which prevents an “us vs them” discrimination and alienation. Of course, as is painfully apparent, there are Christians who use this teaching as an ideological weapon to discriminate. This is why it’s important to reflect deeply on the Church’s doctrine, on its philosophical implications, and to appropriate it so as to love others properly. We must think with the Church on these issues—not because we support discrimination, but precisely because we believe the Church’s teaching fights against discrimination.
It seems to me that a more analytical investigation into this question is necessary, at least for the individual Christian who is sure to encounter a situation where he will have to give a reason for the Church’s teaching.
And so it behooves us to start at the beginning: where does homosexuality come from? Maybe with exception to the last couple decades, it seems that homosexuality is usually not immediately a result of societal influence (“immediately” being an important qualification). The catechism mentions that it’s etiology (the science of origins, or of causes) is extremely complex. If one thinks about it for a while, it becomes apparent that this is because it is unique in each case, although everyone agrees that there are similarities (this is unlike with genetic conditions where the cause is empirically definable). In fact, this is why the LGBT community has dropped, in recent decades, the political talking point of “born this way” and adopted the position that sexuality is fluid. Rather, the etiology seems to be interpersonal at the most basic level. Of course, anytime this is brought up it creates outrage in the LGBT community because they perceive in it a weapon used by fundamentalists to abuse minors with conversion therapy (which is unfortunately not always an illusory fear). And yet they themselves have adopted this language of sexual fluidity.
But simply considering the question philosophically should make the genetic appeal fall apart: is a child born with a sexual attraction to his own gender? Of course not. Their sexuality emerges as they grow and learn to love maturely. Sexuality, genetically speaking, has to do with glands disposed to arouse reactions toward things that are not internal, but external to the organism. This means that “attraction” or “orientation” always initially presuppose a person’s relation to the “other.” Of course, a person’s relation to the “other” is inevitably tied to the relation of the self with itself: i.e., to self-identity. All self-identity is directly related, in its early genesis, to the mother-child relationship, and, subsequently, to the father-child relationship. Now if someone wants to speak of a genetic makeup which is more “sensitive” in a boy, or more “assertive” in a girl, then it seems reasonable to me to speak of a genetic predisposition. But that is not the same thing as saying people are born gay or straight. The basic relationships of a child are what determine his or her sense of identity, which is always something discovered in relation to an “other,” to something not intrinsic and therefore not biological.
The hanging on to this genetic argument in some popular circles will sometimes prompt comments about homosexual behavior in animals. When we see such things in nature, it is almost always related to the absence of the opposite sex combined with the presence of sexual frustration (something similar in human beings, in fact: which is why some people recount homosexual experimentations in early adolescence without for that matter being attracted to their gender moving forward). If—in the case of animals—homosexual behavior is not tied to unavailability, it would be tied to unisex cases or severe animal trauma.
This leads to an interesting conclusion: a “homosexual” in the way we use the word today, doesn’t actually exist. It presupposes an ideological anthropology where human beings are radically individual and don’t share a common human essence, but rather are first and foremost autonomous “desiring energies” that enter into contracts with other “desiring energies.” There is no common nature and no social dimension to that nature—only atomized individuals whose essences follow from their existences. Ultimately this is tied to French existentialism.
And so, what this means is that the Church’s teaching—which holds to a realist anthropology—is precisely what breaks the inbuilt ostracism found in the ideological anthropology of the LGBT, thereby making inclusion actually possible. But this inclusion is not superficial, contractual, or extrinsic, but ontological (real). And since agere sequitur esse (action follows being), helping someone see that they are not different in fact makes a profound integration possible in practice—an integration that reaches its perfection through grace in the body of Christ. The eureka moment is this: this body of Christ is the one which bore the shame of exclusion for the unity of all. What an immense spiritual horizon this opens up! One that rivals all shallow philanthropy in its pastoral depth.
I hope this article was clear and helpful.
God bless,
Dom
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