IT’S THE SUBJECT CATHOLICS talk about a great deal and the one that they are criticized for talking about a great deal. In fact, they are criticized for being obsessed with the life issue, of being monomaniacs and single-issue extremists. Actually, such criticisms are usually nothing more than digressions or attempts to avoid the subject and dismiss the people discussing it. We talk about issues of life and sexuality because they matter. In a better world, the subjects we’re about to discuss here would be embraced by everybody, but, the world being what it is, it’s left to Christians and to the Roman Catholic Church in particular to take a stand and to speak up for the most vulnerable of people – the unborn, the elderly, the ill and handicapped, the most marginalized of marginalized. Catholics believe that life begins at conception and ends at natural death, and we know that this belief runs directly and increasingly contrary to the drift of Western society. Roman Catholicism is also inherently connected to, and an exponent of, natural law in that nature is God-given, and the laws of nature are as immutable and real as are the laws of gravity. It is in no way surprising that the Church champions unborn children or those threatened by euthanasia because nature tells us when life begins and when it ends. There are also, however, Biblical references to the unborn – Psalm 139 has “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Job has “Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?” and Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
But the Catholic defence is as much a moral and logical one based on science and on human rights as it is a religious or scriptural argument. All rights are important but the most inalienable and the most fundamental is the right to life. In fact, no right has any meaning unless it is underpinned by the most natural and essential right and that is, of course, the right to be allowed to be born. The argument is also about love, the love that increasingly dare not speak its name, the love for the unborn.
Some basic science first. At the moment of conception, a male sperm unites with a female ovum to fertilize it, and the single-celled organism formed is called a zygote, an intricate and sophisticated repository of biological information of both parents. Fertilization occurs in the Fallopian tube, and shortly afterwards cells move to the uterine wall of the womb. Within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, the tiny zygote multiplies at an extraordinary rate and becomes what is called a blastocys or a placenta, containing 150 cells. This is the embryo and will last until the eighth week of development. From the eighth week until birth, the word fetus is used. One month after conception, the eyes, ears, and respiratory stem are developing. A week later, the heart can be felt beating, and the following week the baby can grip and bend its fingers. Eleven weeks after conception there is steady breathing and then the baby will be able to swallow the amniotic fluid. Around two weeks after this, around fourteen weeks from conception, the baby can taste, and between sixteen and twenty weeks the baby can hear, including hearing its mother’s heartbeats. At twenty-three weeks after conception, the baby is sleeping regularly, and six months after conception the baby’s sweat glands are functioning. The following month the baby kicks, stretches, performs somersaults. From this point on there is considerable weight gain and at around nine months the baby is born and, suddenly, has a right to life, liberty, education, and the right to free speech, health care, assembly, and whatever else.1 It all seems rather arbitrary that these secondary rights are suddenly given to a person who up until that point had no right under law to be born and to not be killed.
At conception a child has a unique DNA and genomic character and is already unlike anyone who has been conceived or born before or anyone who will be conceived or born afterwards. It is a distinct human life and like all human life in a civilized society should have a right to exist. Yet the last twenty years have seen a curious twisting of the debate around the abortion issue and a monumentally successful campaign to marginalize pro-life opinion. Politicians are told that to even discuss the policy would lose them votes – though polls repeatedly show people at best as being divided on the subject – and opponents of abortion, whatever their views on other issues, are portrayed as wild-eyed zealots. This has made an informed, respectful discussion of the issue extremely difficult because the mere mention of abortion is enough to make many people in politics, media, and public life turn away as if their lives were threatened. Actually it’s not their lives but the lives of unborn children that are in danger.2
The reasons for the pro-life position are many and obvious. A woman has the choice to do whatever she wants with a tuft of hair or an appendix but not with a distinct person within her. The unborn child cannot survive outside of the womb but then a fully developed newborn child, or for that matter an injured or sick adult, will die quickly if left without care. Size is the most obvious difference between an unborn child and a teenager or adult, but this is a facile observation. After three months of growth, there is no new major development in an unborn baby. At nine months, the unborn child is more mature but then a five-year-old is more mature than a two-year-old, a teenager more mature than a ten-year-old. We know instinctively that this is a child, witnessed by how we would react if we saw an obviously pregnant woman smoking or drinking. We’ve been programmed to think differently if we see a pregnant woman opting to end the life of her powerless child. Much of the reluctance to consider the issue is precisely because when people do study abortion beyond the hyperbole of the mistakenly and misleadingly named pro-choice argument, they become so terribly disturbed and distressed. So they’d rather be ignorant than uncomfortable.
The arguments for abortion have been heard numerous times, especially in a media that is so often devoted to the abortion cause. While those in the pro-life movement are accused of obsession, it seems to be their opponents who are truly committed, never wasting an opportunity to promote their position and to dismiss pro-life arguments. How many detective dramas have we seen, for example, where abortion doctors are killed? Such a violent action is never justified and is, thankfully and contrary to what some would have us believe, incredibly rare, but compared with the millions of children aborted in recent years, an isolated assault on an abortion doctor does rather pale in comparison. So do the arguments in favour of abortion when they’re carefully considered. How about abortion, runs one of the most common debating points, in cases of rape and incest? These tragedies provide less than a fraction of 1 per cent of the reasons for abortion, and they are mentioned by abortion advocates simply to make pro-lifers appear extreme, claiming that pro-life advocates don’t care about rape victims or young girls forced into sex by a father. It’s nonsense, of course, but it does help win an argument. We should ask if those who support abortion in these rare cases would oppose it when rape and incest are not the causes of pregnancy. It would in most cases be a rhetorical question. Catholics believe that life is sacred and that while compassion, empathy, and understanding are essential, we cannot punish one crime by committing another. A rapist is a criminal, his child is not. Pro-abortion activists ask this question less because they care about rape and incest but more because they want to make the pro-life position appear unreasonable.
But surely if abortion is not legal and readily available, the argument continues, there will be countless deaths in backstreet abortions. Actually, we have no idea how many of these atrocities took place because they were, obviously, illegal and nobody would have been so foolish as to keep detailed records. There is no doubt that back-street abortions occurred, that women were treated terribly and were exploited and sometimes died. We know for a fact, though, that women die in legal, often publicly funded front-street abortions and that babies die in hideously greater numbers now that abortion has not only been legalized but is often encouraged either indirectly by the culture or directly by the abortion industry, which is not, as some would have us believe, purely altruistic, interested only in women’s health, and indifferent to profit. The problem is not where the abortion takes place but that it takes place anywhere at all. When it does, a baby is killed.
Another regular taunt is that only women have a right to comment on this issue. This is hardly a serious argument. Men are fathers, men are taxpayers, men are citizens. Men are also abortionists. Actually most abortionists are men and most of the people who profit from abortion are men. Men are also frequently responsible for abortions in that they do not fulfil their roles as fathers, abandon vulnerable women who are pregnant, and bring pressure to bear on women whom they have made pregnant because they do not want the responsibilities of fatherhood. The laws of a state are formed not only by the people whom they directly affect but by the state represented and led by the government and the judiciary for the good and protection of all people, whatever their gender, race, religion, or background. Surely it is the nature and quality of the argument rather than the gender of the individual making the argument that should inform our position. Gender bias does, however, lead to far more baby girls being aborted than baby boys. Modern technology has met with archaic gender preferences, and in parts of the Third World in particular, and in diaspora communities in Europe and North America, women are aborting babies if they are female, keeping them if they’re male. Rather a bitter paradox for feminist ideology. Yet if the unborn child is genuinely nothing more than tissue with no rights, the sex of the fetus should not be an issue – strangely enough, gender-selected abortion is certainly an issue for many people who would describe themselves as pro-choice, meaning that they’ve been living something of an ideological lie. They may argue that the specific killing of unborn little girls is morally irrelevant but viscerally they react to it because they know abortions based on the sex of the fetus are wrong. They know they are girls, and girls being killed purely because of their sex.
Nor is this a question of choice at all. Choice implies the possibility of a positive decision – the choice to say or do something, travel somewhere, be something. The choice to kill is considered both ethically and legally not a choice at all but a transgression of a code that allows meaningful choice to others. If a killer chooses to kill, a victim loses the choice to live. The argument that someone does not approve of abortion themselves, would never have an abortion, but would not stop someone else from having an abortion makes no sense – which is why it’s so often used by politicians! If abortion is not the taking of a life, it is always permissible; if it is the taking of a life, it is never permissible. The only reason to be opposed to it is if it is truly the killing of an innocent human being, and if this is so, one does not have the option of personally not wanting to kill while enabling and allowing others to do so. If it’s wrong it’s wrong. This is not an ethically neutral act even if so many people pretend it to be so because they fear social abuse or political defeat if they take a stand.3
Remember, as science and medicine advances, we will be able to preserve the lives of more and more early-term babies at earlier and earlier periods in their development. They will be able to survive outside of the womb at a very young age. Does this still mean that abortion is based on the point of independent, viable life? Not that it seems to matter very much even now because there are ghoulish cases where babies have survived abortion and been left to die. In other such cases, nurses have intervened to save the life of the baby, which raises any number of questions that in a saner scientific and ethical environment would never have to be asked.4
The unborn are vulnerable but the handicapped or disabled unborn even more so. We claim to be an enlightened age, more progressive and tolerant than at any time in the past and certainly more diverse and kind than the Catholic-based societies of old that we so like to use as examples of how we have evolved. We will provide facilities for handicapped people and congratulate ourselves on how we care for them. Yet abortion now deliberately targets those whose handicap can be detected in the womb, as many disabilities can be now and as many more will be in the future. Children with Down Syndrome, for example, are being aborted at a grotesque rate and there may come a time when we hardly ever see such people in society, where few if any children will even know what a Down Syndrome person looked like. On the one hand, we tell people with physical and mental challenges that they are equal and that everybody has equal worth but simultaneously we offer, allow, and sometimes encourage – it is standard for a doctor to inform a mother if an unborn baby has what is known as a “defect” and offer the grand euphemism of an “alternative to birth” – the removal of babies who may grow up looking a little different from the rest of the population.
Similar arguments apply to embryonic stem-cell research. The Catholic Church, the great promoter of science and scientific progress, is not at all opposed to stem-cell research but to the taking of cells from unborn children who cannot, obviously, give their permission. Stem cells can be taken from umbilical cords, the placenta, amniotic fluid, adult tissues and organs such as bone marrow, and fat from liposuction and regions of the nose. Stem cells can even be taken from cadavers up to twenty hours after death. There are in fact four different types of stem cell: embryonic stem cells, embryonic germ cells, umbilical cord stem cells, and adult stem cells. In that germ cells can be obtained from miscarriages that do not involve an abortion, the Church opposes only one of the three forms of stem-cell research, a position that may be surprising to some for the media has created the impression that if it were not for the Catholic Church’s opposition to stem-cell research, any number of terrible diseases and illnesses would be solved almost overnight. Although enormous progress has been made with stem-cell research, there is not a case of a single person being cured through the use of embryonic cells, partly because adult stem cells are obviously part of an adult body whereas embryonic stem cells are not.5
But at heart it comes down to the morality of using an aborted child for medical research or creating with the use of exploitative science some sort of clone – and remember that the creation of a cloned embryo for the purpose of harvesting cells is still the initiation of life for the sole purpose of using that life. Yet some argue that as abortions already take place – and in obscenely large numbers – it is tragic to merely discard these embryos when, whether we object to abortion or not, they could be used for a noble purpose and to help humanity. These babies may be dead but to humiliate and abuse them even after death and mutilate their tiny bodies is an extra insult to a unique human being. It is also likely to encourage further abortions in poor countries with women being bribed to conceive and then abort. It’s sad but true that medical science does not always allow itself to be determined by greater ethics, an example being the medical experiments conducted by the Nazis in the 1940s and some of the results obtained by the horrible exploitation of concentration camp inmates and political prisoners. Modern science has come to a consensus that any findings thus gathered cannot be used, and very few people would disagree with this. The human body possesses an innate and natural dignity, and even in death we cannot use a human body for whatever purpose without prior consent.
Once again, the Catholic Church refuses to accept a human hierarchy, whether it is based on race, gender, ability, or age. Black, white, male, female, handicapped or able-bodied, unborn, middle-aged, old, dying, or in the prime of life. No person should have immoral authority over another merely because they have the power by size, wealth, privilege, or race. It seems an eminently humanistic proposal, but when Catholicism articulates it, the Church is accused of interfering in areas that should not concern it.
Hand in hand with this move to legitimize abortion and allow the use of the aborted is the mantra we hear a great deal in the economically developed countries: that the world is over-populated, that primarily Africa and Asia have too many people, and that as a consequence wealthy people have the right if not the duty to eliminate poor people. Actually the world is not overpopulated at all but the West is certainly greedy. We artificially divide up African regions, call them countries, and then wonder why they don’t function properly. We install dictators, sell them arms, exploit their natural resources, fight our wars vicariously through them, give them the example of corrupt colonial rule, and then wonder why they are not stable and cannot feed themselves. There is one notably painful example of the different assumptions, expectations, and existences of people in the wealthy and the poor world. There is in Africa a wild-growing grass, Hoodia gordonii, that when sucked and chewed lessens the pains of hunger; it is given by mothers to their starving children. The grass has now been turned into capsules to be taken by obese people in the West as an appetite suppressant. The juxtaposition of one people forced by necessity to deal with terrible hunger and another by indulgence to control their inflated appetites not only is poignant but should be an embarrassment to the developed world. It’s unjust, un-Catholic, and wrong. Yes, un-Catholic. Absolute equality is impossible and not even desirable, but the obscene gap between wealthy and poor in the world is outrageous and has Western politicians concluding that the solution to Third World hunger issues is to reduce the population. No, the solution is to help them and allow them to feed themselves properly. It is always agonizing to see some of the champions of the permissive society in Hollywood – dramatically and hysterically anti-Catholic – making well-publicized trips to Africa and Asia to adopt a local baby. They may mean well – though the fashion for such adoption is sickening – but what they fail to appreciate is that the solution to child poverty is not to remove the children but to remove the poverty. This is what the Catholic Church has been demanding for decades, for a radical redistribution of wealth so that all of God’s creatures can enjoy the comforts of a full belly and a long life.
Nor is this hypocrisy confined to Africa. In Peru, for example, the government has great trouble feeding its people and maintaining proper levels of nutrition for its children. This seems strange in a country with a massive annual fish catch, one that should be sufficient to feed the population with healthy and vitamin-packed fish products. Up to half the catch, however, is exported to North America to be used as cat food.
The Catholic Church argues that it is not the size of the population that matters but how we treat that population. The Catholic commitment is to a world where skin colour and geographical location are less important than the Christian belief in the equal value of every human being. People do live in crowded condition but they always have, no matter how small the population. It’s human nature and economic reality that we assemble close together in order to exchange goods and maintain communal life and collective safety. There is nothing new in that at all. People actually occupy around 3 per cent of the earth’s land surface. If 1,200 square feet was given to every person in the world, they would still all fit into an area the size of Texas – whether the Texans would object is an altogether different issue! World population growth is also declining. United Nations figures reveal that the 79 countries that make up 40 per cent of the world’s population now have fertility rates too low to prevent population decline. The rate in Asia fell from 2.4 between 1960 and 1965 to 1.5 between 1990 and 1995. In Latin America and the Caribbean, for the same dates the rates fell from 2.75 to 1.70. Europe, of course, is rapidly losing its population altogether – 0.16 between 1990 and 1995, which really means zero.6
In that environmentalism has taken on an almost religious fervour, it’s hardly surprising that leading activists fear that “overpopulation” will damage the environment and have disastrous effects on the planet’s ecological system. The worrying inconsistencies of the green movement aside, we need to remember that many if not most of the especially lovely parts of the world with the greatest environmental quality are in densely populated countries. Rain forests, for example, are not disappearing because of overpopulation. In Brazil, where some of the major damage is occurring, the population per square mile is far less than half the world average. As for air and water pollution, some of the most egregious cases of damage and poor quality have been in countries such as Poland, Russia, and China where population growth is extremely low.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that food surpluses are close to 50 per cent in the developed world and around 17 per cent in the developing world – hardly proof that people starve because of too little food. Food supplies have doubled in the last 50 years, and farmers currently work on half the world’s arable land. The food is there, if it is distributed fairly and competently. The Ethiopian famine in 1984 and 1985, for example, is a horrendous case not of people dying due to lack of food production but of a corrupt government stealing food from farmers and businessmen and selling it to buy arms. It was socialism and not overpopulation that led to the terrible suffering. Africa, in fact, has one-fifth the population density of Europe, and Taiwan, with five times the population density of mainland China, produces much more per capita than its Communist neighbour.7
The Church has also tried to oppose the idea that, even if overpopulation is a myth, the people of the developing world themselves want to reduce their numbers and the West should listen to them. The evidence says otherwise. There are warehouses full of condoms in Bangladesh and the Philippines where in spite of education or propaganda campaigns from the government, often via pressure from Western states, the population is simply not interested in using them. The idea of abortion is an alien concept in the Islamic world and most of Africa, and, if anything, these countries want to increase their population and deeply resent what they see as the cultural imperialism – usually so opposed by the left – attempted by pro-abortion and socially liberal politicians from Europe and North America.8
So the Catholic Church and faithful Catholics show a certain commitment, even an obsession, with the saving of innocent life. It is nothing at all to be ashamed of and something that, one day, will be seen as a mark of honour – just as the early opponents of slavery or “premature” opponents of the rise of fascism are now honoured. At the time of their activism, they were regarded as extremists and troublemakers who, according to establishment wisdom, would be better off involving themselves in something that mattered. The Church, though, has always held up a mirror in which society can see reflected some of its uglier aspects, and it does not like what it sees. Thus it becomes angry but not, as it should be, with itself but with the Church. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to issues of personal gratification and sexuality and especially, apart from abortion, when issues of artificial contraception, condoms, and the birth-control pill are discussed. The Church warned in the 1960s that far from creating a more peaceful, content, and sexually fulfilled society, the universal availability of the pill and condoms would lead to the direct opposite. In the decade since, we have seen a seemingly inexorable increase in sexually transmitted diseases, so-called unwanted pregnancies, sexuality-related depression, divorce, family breakdown, pornography addiction, and general unhappiness in the field of sexual relationships. The Church’s argument was that far from liberating women, contraception would enable and empower men and reduce the value and dignity of sexuality to the point of transforming what should be a loving and profound act into a mere exchange of bodily fluids. The expunging from the sexual act the possibility of procreation, the Church said, would reduce sexuality to mere self-gratification. Pleasure was vital and God-given but there was also a purpose, a glorious purpose, to sex that went far beyond the merely instant and ultimately selfish.
This also applied to the Church’s attitude toward the use of condoms in Africa. When, for example, in 2009 Pope Benedict XVI made a series of comments about the dangers of condom use in Africa in the attempt to prevent AIDS, there was an outpouring of applied ignorance and proof after proof, if we needed it, of the survival of anti-Catholic prejudice. Talkradio hosts who had long callously and naïvely blamed Africans for all of Africa’s sufferings suddenly became champions of the continent. Doctors and academics who had shown no previous concern for the plight of Africa were instantly transformed into experts and partisans.
First some context. AIDS had smashed its way through Africa for almost two generations before many people in Europe or North America had even heard of it. It killed poor black people many miles away, and nobody matters less to the wealthy white than poor blacks many miles away. It was only when the disease was brought into the male homosexual community of the United States that the likes of Elizabeth Taylor became so emotional on television, and numerous actors, politicians, and public figures made it one of the most fashionable causes in modern times. AIDS was killing people just like them, and they could identify with its horror and were terrified that they could be the next to suffer. Indeed, AIDS is a fascinating case study in itself in that while politicized statistics and agenda-driven activists try to tell us otherwise, AIDS in the West is still most prevalent among gay men and intravenous drug users. The public was told in North America and elsewhere that in various areas the infection rate had doubled in the heterosexual community. This was often true. What was not always volunteered was that these were often small towns, and the numbers had increased from one person to two or two people to four. But it is the suffering itself rather than the nature of the sufferer that should motivate us. Catholicism teaches that it is a person’s humanity and not their sexuality or addiction that obliges us to care for them and love them. Problem is, this philosophy was rarely applied by the secular world when it was Africans rather than Californians who were in need.
That, at least, seemed to be the attitude of many in the Western elites, who were the very people most condemning of the Roman Catholic Church when it announced that it opposed the use of condoms to deal with the AIDS crisis in Africa. Yet it was the Church that was in Africa caring for people with AIDS long before the disease was widely known in North America and Europe and when Hollywood and the Western media were more concerned with puppies and kittens. Mind you, cats and dogs still seem to concern celebrities and their public supporters more than starving children. Even today almost half of all African people with AIDS are nursed by men and women working for the Roman Catholic Church – a Church, by the way, that has also called for all African debt to be forgiven and for a radical redistribution of wealth to be instituted from the northern to the southern hemisphere.
It was highly unusual for any of this to be mentioned when Pope Benedict was attacked for his condemnation of the condom fetish. If we read the man’s statements, however, what we see is a sophisticated deconstruction of Western double standards and a thoughtful critique of the failed attempt to control AIDS. First, it’s not working. In countries where condoms are state-distributed, are free, and are ubiquitous, AIDShas not been controlled and is often spreading. Second, even where AIDS is less of an issue, such as in North America, the increased availability and use of condoms has coincided with an annual increase in STDS and so-called unwanted pregnancies. Third, one failure of a condom to work – and the failure rate is significant if not overwhelming – is not a mere mistake but a death sentence. Fourth, condoms enable promiscuity rather than encourage abstinence. And sexual activity is about more than mere intercourse; a cut finger or a small body wound can allow infection to occur. Fifth, how dare we treat black people and those who live in the developing world as if they were children? They are as capable of self-control as anyone else. All over Africa, most successfully but not exclusively in Uganda, there are elaborate, empathetic, and extraordinarily successful abstinence programs that emphasise humanity rather than lust – a philosophy that runs directly contrary to the sexual gratification cult so favoured by some of the people in the West who are so opposed to Church teaching of sexuality and who became so apoplectic at Pope Benedict’s comments.
Of course, there is more to this anti-papal neurosis than television comedians making jokes about celibate clergy and commentators assuming that they know far more about Third World reality than a priest who has worked in an African city slum for forty years. Conventional wisdom has it that Africa has a population problem and that Africans can become “more civilized” if they have fewer children. It’s an organized and sometimes quite sinister campaign. Africa is, if anything, underpopulated and the problems of the continent are far more about Western greed, colonization, resources, and arms sales than about family size. The Church has spoken out on these issues for decades and was, for example, one of the leading voices at the United Nations that persuaded the multinational pharmaceutical companies to make their early anti-AIDS drugs generic and thus affordable in the developing world.
The Catholic approach to contraception is not new, in spite of the central modern document on the subject in 1968. The encyclical Humanae Vitae or On Human Life came at a most important time in the evolution of sexual ethics. These were the 1960s, and in 1968 in particular the Western world was embracing a new, open, and what was considered liberated approach to sexuality and life. The Second Vatican Council had met, Paul vi was not considered a particularly conservative Pope, and many of those who objected to traditional Church teaching expected a new and even revolutionary approach. It was supremely naïve really but more the product of selfish wishful thinking than a genuine understanding of what Catholicism and Catholic moral order is about. As is often the case, the Church demonstrated what being truly counter-cultural meant and surprised and disappointed many people by reiterating and justifying the pristine beauty of marriage, married love, and the unworthiness and life-belittling nature of contraception. It surprised and disappointed those who were interested in change for the sake of change and not in change as a means to spread the Christian Gospel. To purposely and artificially obstruct God’s plan for marriage and the creation of life was intrinsically wrong, said the encyclical, but natural family planning was permitted because it still allowed the possibility of God’s plan to be fulfilled. The document stated that contraception was “any action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible.” And “we must once again declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun, and, above all, directly willed and procured abortion, even if for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as licit means of regulating birth. Equally to be excluded, as the teaching authority of the Church has frequently declared, is direct sterilization, whether perpetual or temporary, whether of the man or of the woman.” This included condoms, the Pill, sterilization, and any other unnatural form of obstructing conception.9
Sadly, there were people who left the Roman Catholic Church over Humanae Vitae, but this says far more about them than it does about the Church. If they were true Catholics, they would have accepted papal teaching, as challenging if ultimately fulfilling as this may have been. For many of them, the papal confirmation of the Catholic approach to sexuality contradicted their personal sex lives; they wanted the Church to accommodate them rather than to reform their own behaviour so as to accommodate the Church founded by Christ. Nobody said Christianity was easy. It’s difficult to turn the other cheek, to forgive those who abuse you, to live a charitable and selfless life. All that was said was that sex was to be enjoyed in the context of love and with openness to God’s plan. He gave us the ability to love and be sexually intimate, and we should repay him by using those gifts responsibly. This, it seems, was simply too much for some. It’s very likely that those who left the Church over Humanae Vitae, and still leave over sexual issues, would not leave the Church over some statement of, for example, theology or foreign policy. How selfish and small, then, to abandon an institution that one is supposed to believe is God’s instrument on earth just because it refuses to affirm someone’s lust and because of a person’s insistence on putting sexual convenience before consistent, moral, Christian precedent. Still, pride rather than principle has led thousands in the West to leave the Church. The Church, though, refuses to leave them.
Christian teaching against contraception was standard and not exclusively Catholic until the 1930s – the Anglicans softened their position at the 1930 Lambeth Conference due more to member activism than theological consideration and within seventy years became almost indifferent to Christian-based life teachings – but some evangelical denominations are now reconsidering their former approach to contraception. These Protestant churches have seen that apart from any Biblical arguments on the issue, the practical results are surprising but clear. Rather than liberating women – a frequent and leading argument made about the issue – contraceptives have tended to allow men to bring pressure to bear on women, telling girlfriends and partners that there is no chance of pregnancy so there is no reason why she shouldn’t have sex with him if – yes, that old one – she really loved him. Rather than giving women more control over their sexuality, it’s often allowed men to take even more power in the equation. The method of natural family planning advised by the Catholic Church is not the regularly mocked rhythm method – another outdated anti-Catholic cliché – but the Billings Ovulation Method in which women monitor their fertility, as well as their gynaecological health, and listen to the natural cycle and demands of their body. Unlike the Pill, it is entirely safe and gives control of a sexual relationship to the woman and not the man. It demands respect for women, for nature, and for the act itself, which by necessity becomes something other than habitual and commonplace.
There is, by the way, increasing medical evidence linking the contraceptive pill to women’s medical problems, particularly in the area of breast cancer. It’s bewildering how the Catholic Church that objects to the use of the Pill is accused of sexism while multinational drug companies who make a fortune out of a product that has millions of women putting alien chemicals into their bodies for decades, sometimes starting in the early teens, escape censure. The Pill fundamentally changes the way in which the female reproductive system is supposed to work and is often as much if not more for men’s pleasure as for women’s equality.10
Contrary to what critics might say, the Church does not demand large families and does not insist on what the more vulgar critics describe as “Catholic imperialism”; one theory is that Catholic teaching on contraception is part of some larger conspiracy to populate the world with Catholics. If you doubt that people believe this, take a look at any anti-Catholic website or just listen to general conversation. The truth is that contraception is in reality considered wrong because it violates natural law and contradicts the natural, God-given purpose of sex, which is procreation. The Church is the most human institution ever to exist, and it understands human nature because it was founded by He who created the world. Sex is fun, is supposed to be, and always will be. It’s not just pornographers and prostitutes who appreciate the attraction of sex, and to abandon sexual pleasure to such people would be a moral disaster and a colossal surrender. The Church celebrates sexuality, celebrates fertility, and, most of all, celebrates the meeting of man and woman as one. It’s baffling how we Catholics, who tend to have larger families than is the norm because of our open and fruitful attitudes to sex and love, are somehow supposed to be frightened and intimidated by sex while the aggressively childless or 1.2-kids brigade are allegedly the sexual experts. Put bluntly, Catholics love it, revel in it, rejoice in its fecundity, positively dance in the joy and sweetness that is God’s gift of sexual intimacy within a love- and romance-filled marriage. Catholics are not scared of sex but their neurotic, sexually confused opponents seem to be scared of Catholics.
Contraception is not new and was practised by cultures as early as the ancient Egyptians and the Romans. Poisons, sponges, condoms made of animal skins, and other such sexy and appealing devices were used in an effort to prevent the creation of human life. The Bible opposed such activities from as early as the Old Testament – the story of Onan and scripture’s condemnation of masturbation or coitus interruptus – and the New Testament, and the early Church continued this position. It’s sometimes said that if an activity or belief is not specifically prohibited in the Bible then it cannot be wrong, which is a breathtakingly absurd conclusion. The New Testament does not have anything to say on all sorts of immoral behaviour, partly because its writers did not have the space or the time, partly because these issues are not directly pertinent but also because some acts were so generally and obviously disapproved of that to repeat the condemnation would have been redundant if not insulting. Very few parents tell their children not to jump off tall buildings, and it’s terribly unusual to read a television instruction manual that warns against hitting a friend over the head with a television set. It doesn’t mean that mums and dads are fond of falling children or electronic companies advocate murder in their name.
The Church fathers were certainly specific about the issue of contraception. In AD 195, Clement of Alexandria wrote: “Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted,” and Hippolytus of Rome wrote in 255 on the subject of heresies and great errors: “On account of their prominent ancestry and great property, the so-called faithful want no children from slaves or lowborn commoners, they use drugs of sterility or bind themselves tightly in order to expel a fetus which has already been engendered.” In AD 419 Augustine was absolute in his condemnation, and this from a man who had known the temptations of the world: “I am supposing, then, although you are not lying for the sake of procreating offspring, you are not for the sake of lust obstructing their procreation by an evil prayer or an evil deed. Those who do this, although they are called husband and wife, are not; nor do they retain any reality of marriage, but with a respectable name cover a shame. Sometimes this lustful cruelty, or cruel lust, comes to this, that they even procure poisons of sterility.”
It’s hardly a surprise that subjects such as contraception and abortion lead to such anger and frustration because they are directly personal and involve the most intimate and immediate forms of gratification and pleasure. Foreign wars, racist oppression, and mass injustice do affect us and should affect us more, but we are able to construct a distance, a fence of separation, between us and external issues that we find difficult to build when it’s personal and concerns our daily life and our daily pleasure. But before anybody makes some grand, sweeping gesture about Catholics and abortion, Catholics and contraception, and Catholics and sex they should ask who it is – the Church or the modern, materialistic, and decadent world – that has confused its priorities. The sexual fanatics are those who obsess about sex and believe it to be morally neutral and have no inherent value. The Church believes that sex is so wonderful that it contains values as well as virtues.
We see this confusion of priorities at its most deadly at what is, as it were, the other end of the debate: euthanasia, mercy killing, compassionate homicide, assisted suicide. Pride hides beneath most that is wrong, from the thinnest of failings to the fattest of crime. Pride leads us to believe that we, rather than God, are always in control and that our bodies are ours to do with what we want, whenever we want. Sometimes this attitude is invincibly malicious, sometimes almost understandable. When it comes to the subject of euthanasia, we see both aspects. For those promoting what amounts to a cult of death, it is horror, pure and simple. For those who are suffering, the subject is far more complex and delicate. The arguments for euthanasia are perhaps better known than those against it because we hear them publicly articulated on a fairly regular basis. Implicit but perhaps not consciously so in this approach is the notion that disability is a curse, that we have the right and wisdom to make our own decisions about when to die, and that so-called mercy killing is administered only after layers of consideration. If at all possible, nobody approaching death should experience pain, and experts in the field now know that nobody need do so. All physical pain can be controlled but insufficient time and money is spent training doctors and nurses how to deal with end-of-life challenges.11
The proposition that a person who feels that they want to die is making an objective, informed decision about whether to live or die is fatuous. In reality, they are the least qualified people because they are, yes, so terrified and agonized that they want to die. Any of us who has experienced any sort of pain or nausea know that it is difficult to see beyond the immediate need to be free of distress. Beyond the physical pressures are the emotional ones – the feeling that one doesn’t fit in any longer, the attitude that “I’ve had a good life, the children could do so much with the inheritance I’ll leave behind, it costs them so much money to keep me in the home, and I know the grandchildren don’t like coming all this way to visit me all the time.” The media tells them that only the young and sexy matter, they are made to feel by television and radio that life is over by the age of seventeen, there are anti-aging stores opening on the main street, and then we wonder why elderly people feel rejected. A culture that once revered the aged as temples of wisdom now looks on them as slums of irrelevance. The answer is not to help someone die but help them to live.
It is no accident that the people most intimidated by, and active against, euthanasia are the disabled. While we boast equality, we violently discriminate against disability at the earliest opportunity by aborting babies that are considered imperfect and then attempt to pass legislation and create a cultural shift that would make the life of disabled people easier to terminate in their more mature years. In 1993, for example, Robert Latimer, a farmer in western Canada, killed his little girl Tracy. She had cerebral palsy but did not ask to die, was surrounded by people who loved her and even by extraordinary people who were willing to adopt her if her care became too difficult for the Latimers. Mr. Latimer put her in his truck, poisoned her to death with carbon monoxide, and then put her body into his wife’s bed, hoping the girl’s mother and the authorities would believe that Tracy had died naturally. His crime was discovered, and his defence was that he was putting her out of her misery when, of course, he was putting her out of his. When Latimer was arrested and charged and especially after he was imprisoned, media campaigns and petitions sprang up to support him. Almost all the time the defence was at work, it hardly ever mentioned the rights of the little girl who had been murdered. It took a child writing in the Vancouver Sun newspaper in 1994 to show another side of the issue.
My name is Teague. I am 11 years old and have really severe cerebral palsy. The Latimer case in Saskatchewan has caused me a great deal of unhappiness and worry over the past few weeks. I feel very strongly that all children are valuable and deserve to live full and complete lives. No one should make the decision of another person about whether their life is worth living or not.
I have a friend who had CP and he decided that life was too hard and too painful. So he really let himself die. I knew he was leaving this world and letting himself dwell in the spiritual world. I told him that I understood that the spiritual world was really compelling, but that life was worth fighting for. I had to fight to live when I was very sick. The doctors said I wouldn’t live long, but I knew I had so much to accomplish still.
I have to fight pain all the time. When I was little life was pain, I couldn’t remember no pain. My foster Mom Cara helped me learn to manage and control my pain. Now my life is so full of joy. There isn’t time enough in the day for me to learn and experience all I wish to. I have a family and many friends who love me. I have a world of knowledge to discover. I have so much to give.
I can’t walk or talk or feed myself. But I am not “suffering from cerebral palsy.” I use a wheel chair, but I am not “confined to a wheelchair.” I have pain, but I do not need to be “put out of my misery.”
My body is not my enemy. It is that which allows me to enjoy Mozart, experience Shakespeare, savour a bouillabaisse feast and cuddle my Mom. Life is a precious gift. It belongs to the person to whom it was given. Not to her parents, nor to the state. Tracy’s life was hers “to make of it what she could.” My life is going to be astounding.
We have to be extremely careful when we use terms like quality of life because they are entirely subjective and, anyway, largely without meaning. I see people who are physically and mentally able all the time who have no obvious quality of life. They seem to do no good to or for others, they are selfish, lazy, foolish, rude, arrogant. Such a life does not seem to be one of any genuine quality. Equally there are millions of people, often living in slum conditions and working in mundane, empty jobs whose quality of life may be questioned. Or wealthy, privileged but spiritually bankrupt, vacuous men and women who contribute little but take so much. They appear to have no quality of life and thus have no need to be alive. It depends who has the power and who is able to make the decisions. In the 1890s and early twentieth century, social engineers and eugenicists advocated an entire systematic program to eliminate those whom they considered to be lacking in quality of life. The anti-Catholic zealot and internationally renowned novelist H.G. Wells wrote of the elimination not only of the mentally and physically ill but of the sexually perverse, the black, brown and yellow, and anybody who did not “fit in” with the new world of which he dreamed. He was joined in these ambitions by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and darling then and now of feminism and abortion rights.12
Beyond the intellectually flimsy and morally dangerous definition of quality of life, there are also semantic difficulties with words such as terminal. One of the champions of euthanasia, Jack Kevorkian, when speaking to the National Press Club in Washington DC in 1992, said that a terminal illness was “any disease that curtails life even for a day,” and the Hemlock Society, one of the largest and most active pro-euthanasia organizations in the world, frequently uses the word terminal as part of the phrase terminal old age, which has sweeping implications. Doctors generally admit that estimates of life expectancy are extremely difficult and dangerous to make, and although informed estimates of life expectancy certainly have a place in medicine, numerous people every year live far longer, even years longer, than expected. Sometimes this means a great deal more money is required to keep them alive and well, and that means more personal investment from families and more public investment from governments providing institutionalized health care and from insurance companies providing private insurance. The idea that financial concerns are not taken into account in the realm of euthanasia is naïve in the extreme. Then, of course, we have the slippery slope argument, often dismissed by supporters of euthanasia as being hysterical. Yet some slopes are slippery, very slippery indeed.
Margaret Somerville is a bioethicist of international reputation. In 2010, she wrote,
Although the need for euthanasia to relieve pain and suffering is the justification given, and the one the public accepts in supporting its legalization, research shows that dying people request euthanasia far more frequently because of fear of social isolation and of being a burden on others, than pain. So, should avoiding loneliness or being a burden count as a sufficient justification? Recently, some pro-euthanasia advocates have gone further, arguing that respect for people’s rights to autonomy and self-determination means competent adults have a right to die at a time of their choosing, and the state has no right to prevent them from doing so. In other words, if euthanasia were legalized, the state has no right to require a justification for its use by competent, freely consenting adults.
For example, they believe an elderly couple, where the husband is seriously ill and the wife healthy, should be allowed to carry out their suicide pact. As Ruth von Fuchs, head of the Right to Die Society of Canada, stated, “Life is not an obligation.” But although Ms. von Fuchs thought the wife should have an unfettered right to assisted suicide, she argued that it would allow her to avoid the suffering, grief, and loneliness associated with losing her husband – that is, she articulated a justification. We can see this same trend toward not requiring a justification – or, at least, nothing more than that’s what a competent person over a certain age wants to do – in the Netherlands. Last month, a group of older Dutch academics and politicians launched a petition in support of assisted suicide for the over-70s who “consider their lives complete” and want to die. They quickly attracted more than 100,000 signatures, far more than needed to get the issue debated in the Dutch parliament. The Netherlands’ 30-year experience with euthanasia shows clearly the rapid expansion, in practice, of what is seen as an acceptable justification for euthanasia.
[Somerville concluded,] Initially, euthanasia was limited to terminally ill, competent adults, with unrelievable pain and suffering, who repeatedly asked for euthanasia and gave their informed consent to it. Now, none of those requirements necessarily applies, in some cases not even in theory and, in others, not in practice. For instance, parents of severely disabled babies can request euthanasia for them, 12- to 16-year-olds can obtain euthanasia with parental consent, and those over 16 can give their own consent. More than 500 deaths a year, where the adult was incompetent or consent not obtained, result from euthanasia. And late middle-aged men (a group at increased risk for suicide) may be using it as a substitute for suicide. Indeed, one of the people responsible for shepherding through the legislation legalizing euthanasia in the Netherlands recently admitted publicly that doing so had been a serious mistake, because, he said, once legalized, euthanasia cannot be controlled. In other words, justifications for it expand greatly, even to the extent that simply a personal preference “to be dead” will suffice.
Life is not a sentence but a blessing. Death is guaranteed but to encourage it is a curse, especially for those who are most vulnerable and do not have access to power, money, friends, and even the basic tools of appeal. These are the most likely victims of euthanasia, those who are so ill as to have lost the ability to speak, write, and communicate. Father Frank Pavone from Priests for Life sums up their situation and how they should be treated by a civilized society very well. “What about them? That, indeed, is the question for the pro-euthanasia forces. People who cannot communicate are people. This gets to the heart of the problem. A person’s inability to function does not make his life less valuable. People do not become ‘vegetables.’ Children of God never lose the divine image in which they were made.”
Children of God: the Catholic attitude toward all of us, at every stage of life. When Pope John Paul II was approaching death, his once-fit, muscular body was bent, broken, and decaying. He had been a robust man who hiked, skied, and played soccer. He had resisted Nazis as well as Communists, helped bring down a Marxist regime that had murdered and incarcerated tens of millions, rejuvenated an entire Church, written books that changed the world, and visited country after country and continent after continent to spread the word of Catholicism. He had been shot, had suffered terrible health problems, and now felt the approach of death. Yet in all of his last year, in all of his last moments, he showed the great dignity that is there for all of us as we approach the end of this life’s existence. He did not want to die but he was entirely content with death, because for the Catholic death is merely the beginning of the next stage of life. Beauty rather than euthanasia; grace rather than assisted suicide; joy rather than mercy killing.
If euthanasia receives a great deal of coverage in the media and the entertainment industry, the subject of homosexuality and the treatment of gay men and women takes up a degree of space that is staggering for a community that according to most credible estimates represents less than 3 per cent of the population. But compassion is especially necessary here for a whole variety of reasons, the most prominent one being that gay people deserve respect as men and women made in the image of God. Gay people live, love, feel, know sorrow and fear as well as happiness and triumph, contribute to society, and, like most people, generally try to be the best people they can be. There are all sorts of secular arguments used by the Catholic Church to respond to the issue of homosexuality, such as those the Church has outlined in resisting the demand so common in Europe, North and Latin America, and Australasia for samesex marriage. Actually this challenge is not so much about the rights of a sexual minority but the status and meaning of marriage itself. Indeed, the deconstruction of marriage began not with the gay community asking for the right to marry but with the heterosexual world rejecting it. The term common-law marriage said it all. Marriage is many things but it is never common. Yet with this semantic and legal revolution, desire and convenience replaced commitment and dedication. The qualifications, so to speak, were lowered.
And one does have to qualify for marriage, just as one has, for example, to qualify for a pension or a military medal. People who have not reached the age of retirement don’t qualify for a pension, people who don’t serve in the armed forces don’t qualify for a military medal. It’s not a question of equality but requirement. A human right is intrinsic, a social institution is not. The four great and historic qualifications for marriage have always been number, gender, age, and blood: two people, male and female, over a certain age, and not closely related. Mainstream and responsible societies have sometimes changed the age of maturity, but incest has always been condemned and, by its nature, died out because of retardation. As for polygamy, it’s making something of a comeback partly because of gay marriage and the subsequent expansion or loosening of what marriage is. Whenever this is mentioned by Catholics, we are accused of being extreme, but there is nothing extreme about it. Polygamy is an ancient tradition within Islam and was practised in Sephardic Judaism and some Asian cultures. When advocates of polygamy combine the precedent of gay marriage with the argument that true religious freedom includes the right of Muslim men to have more than one wife, it will be difficult, at least in the long term, to oppose it.
At the moment the international diaspora Muslim community is not sufficiently politically comfortable to pursue the issue, and the clearly deranged polygamous sects on the aesthetic as well as geographical fringes of society obscure any reasonable debate. But the argument will certainly come and the result is largely inevitable. If love is the only criterion for marriage, who are we to judge the love between one man and his wives? The state, though, in fact has a duty to judge and to do so based on its own interests, the most significant of which is its continued existence, meaning that we have to produce children. As procreation is the likely if not essential result of marriage between a man and a woman, it is in the interests of the state to encourage marriage.
Of course, gay couples can have an obliging friend assist them in having a baby, and gay men can adopt or have some other obliging friend have one for them, but this is hardly the norm and hardly going to guarantee the longevity of a stable society. Just as significantly, it smashes the fundamental concept of a child being produced through an act of love. The donation of bodily fluid by an anonymous person, or by that obliging friend again, is an act not of love but of lust, of indifference, or of profit. For the first time in world history, many countries are purposefully creating and legitimizing families where there will be either no male or no female role model and parent. Anyone who speaks of uncles, aunts, communities, and villages raising children has no real understanding of family life. Single-parent families exist and are sometimes excellent and it’s also obviously the case that not every mother–father family is a success. But to consciously create unbalanced families where children can never enjoy the profound difference between man and woman, mother and father, is dangerous social engineering.
The Church teaches that homosexual desire is not sinful in itself, and that all sorts of people are tempted by sin and toward sinful lifestyles, and many of them are not sexual at all. It is the giving in to the temptation that creates the sin and blocks our relationship with God. The Old Testament refers to the sin of Sodom, where God was angry at the acts of homosexual intercourse that occurred in the city and eventually destroyed it. The episode is about more than homosexuality, for the Sodomites were also cruel and corrupt, but homosexuality was the major cause of God’s displeasure. There are liberal theologians or, more strictly speaking, gay activists who make theological statements who will argue that the example of Sodom is more about lack of charity than it is about homosexuality, but this is wishful thinking on their part. It’s significant that throughout Christian history, the only time this theory was proposed was when the gay rights movement became active. Hardly a coincidence. Leviticus also tells us, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” and “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.” Perhaps so, respond critics, but the Old Testament also contains prohibitions on various foods, on mixing of clothing material, and even calls for attacks on rival tribes and peoples that are absurd or repugnant to modern ears. This is a sorry and sad understanding of history and of the Bible. The Old Testament is part history, part warning, and part tuition and is fulfilled by Christ in the New Testament. Everything we see in the Old should be understood through the prism of the New – interpretation through the other end of the telescope as it were. All sorts of cosmetic, ceremonial, and era-related aspects of the book do not apply any more, but the moral code taught in the Old Testament is vital and timeless. By the logic of the revisionists we need not observe all the Ten Commandments; mind you, that seems to be the attitude of some of these same liberal theologians today.
The New Testament is just as specific about homosexuality; Paul in his letter to the Romans writes, “For this reason God gave them up to dishonourable 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. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct” and “Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practise them.” He is forgiving and understanding of all sorts of failings but reminds people again when discussing homosexuality, “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” The response from some in the gay community is that the translations are not always accurate and that Paul and his contemporaries lived at a time when we did not understand homosexuality or sexuality in general and that the modern Christian world should adapt to a post-sexual revolutionary world. Again, there is a fundamental problem of logic here. The translations are precisely accurate, and Paul was not referring to male prostitution or to the sexual abuse of young men but to homosexuality. As for Paul and the other early Christians not understanding homosexuality with the benefit of modern sophistication, does this also apply to his understanding of love, forgiveness, sacrifice, helping the poor and the marginalized, embracing our enemies, rejecting greed, searching for truth and goodness, and believing that Jesus Christ was the Messiah? He said and wrote about all these things but if he was wrong and so irrelevant and confined to his time when discussing homosexuality, why would any of his other opinions hold any credence today? God put His Son and His Son’s apostles and disciples on earth at a particular time and for a particular reason. Anachronism is the enemy and not the friend of liberal scholars.
Apart from the negative references to homosexuality in scripture and the overwhelming number of condemnations of it in Church history throughout most of the two thousand years of Christendom, there are also calls for the alternative: for sexual union between men and women, for procreation, for family, and for a human manifestation of the creation story. As has been mentioned before, the Catholic Church believes in and teaches natural law and that humans were made, naturally, to complement each other as men and women. Our physical differences and sexual and biological capabilities are not mere accidents but God-given gifts. They are to be relished and enjoyed but not abused and twisted. It is not homophobic to courteously and gently explain the Catholic objection to same-sex relationships any more than it is a form of phobia to speak out against other behaviour considered sinful by Christianity. This is painful for many gay people to hear, which is why the discussion must be handled with empathy and compassion. Yet the word homophobia is thrown around carelessly, often not to describe a bigoted and violent person who hates gay men and women but to silence anybody who has an objection to some aspect of the gay lifestyle. Thus it is a form of censorship and makes the Catholic, not the gay person, the victim in all this. Throughout Europe and North America, there have been attempts, often successful, to close down Catholic and other Christian organizations that may perform outstanding charitable work – Catholic social services, the Salvation Army, and so on – but who refuse to affirm same-sex marriage or give children as adoptees to gay couples. Priests, bishops, and ordinary Catholic laypeople have been taken to human rights commissions, fired, or even arrested and charged for speaking out on issues of homosexuality.
This is without a doubt not the desire of all gay people, and many are revolted by the heavy hand of political correctness. But they have also suffered over the years, and however delicate and empathetic the explanation of Catholic teaching may be, the words will sound harsh and perhaps be of limited comfort to a gay person. Many but not all gay people believe that they were born homosexual and that God does not make mistakes. He doesn’t. Actually, we have no idea whether people are born homosexual or not, and because the study of homosexuality is so politically controlled now, we probably never will – to suggest it is a mental illness or can be cured, for example, has led to and would probably still lead to dismissal from most registered psychiatric associations. Some people do seem to have same-sex attractions from an extremely early age, others admit to embracing the lifestyle and the preference much later. Whatever the case, it is essential that respect and understanding are always used in this discussion.
Sexuality and sexual desire are part of all of us, just as is original sin. We are a broken people in a fallen world, but because the Roman Catholic Church admits this, it is not always popular. The catechism states, “Basing itself on sacred scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” It goes on to acknowledge that the homosexual “psychological genesis remains largely unexplained” and that “the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s cross the difficulties that they may encounter from their condition. Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.” These are hard but true words about a story with an ending yet to be written.