Introduction
If you have ever heard of me, you will know that for about thirty years I have maintained a public disagreement with what is considered the current doctrine of the Church regarding (to save time) what I call “gay issues”. Although you may disapprove of me, or even despise me, for saying what I say, I hope we can agree that I pay the price for defending my positions. My public disagreement with what ecclesiastical authority considers a “third-order doctrine” and the practical consequences of acting according to my conscience in relation to that disagreement have practically made me a “non-person” within the Church that I love. Although I am a priest and a doctor in theology, for the last thirty-plus years I have not been able to exercise public ministry in the Church nor hold a teaching position at a Catholic faculty. In 2015, I was formally removed from clerical status (without any accusation being presented to me or any explanation being given). Subsequently, in 2017, by a special grace of Pope Francis, I was confirmed in the priesthood and granted the faculty to preach and absolve. For whatever reasons, the Holy Father decided that my vocation should not simply be discarded, even if it did not return me to public ministry. I suspect this latter point was due to the fact that any Ordinary who agreed to incardinate me would have placed himself in the unenviable situation of having to publicly defend myself against the inevitable wave of hatred that would flood his office, when the work of a bishop includes defending the current doctrine of the Church, whether or not he personally agrees with it.
Thus, if you consider that the condition of “non-person” is the appropriate place for me, I cannot but agree. Occupying this place is my way of obedience to the Church, as she commands me to exercise my priesthood. Not being welcome to participate in the life of a local Church hurts; I occasionally go through moments of sadness and discouragement, and I long for this situation to change. But this does not tarnish the deep joy that the grace which has allowed me to occupy this canonical limbo and live out my vocation brings me. I am not sure if there is any formal way that allows me to exercise public ministry until the disagreement in the area I have mentioned ceases to be so psychologically tense for the clerical world as it currently is.
Why do I start like this? Not to complain, but to show you that I consider myself at least as conservative as you are when it comes to expecting the teaching and testimony of the Church to be simultaneously true, clear, and logical. I have staked my livelihood on this. I want to invite you to sympathize not with me, which I do not need, but with all those who are forced to publicly maintain positions that they know to be false or that they have been forced to defend for other reasons, and with those who, from within those same circles, are trying to do something about it.
In response to the report of Synod Group 9, some of you have shown indignation at what you perceive as a lack of honesty in subtly normalizing homosexuality against the constant teaching of the Church. The same seems to have led some of you to hate Pope Francis or to condemn the “confusion created in the minds of the faithful” by the evident signals he gave. Some of you are indignant that a testimony about Courage, provided by one of the witnesses selected from the numerous contributions received, was made public in a semi-official report. And this, considering that Courage is a Catholic group whose stated objective is to support gay and lesbian Catholics seeking to live a life of continence and celibacy according to current magisterial teaching. Some of you, knowing as well as I the high percentage of gay men in the clergy in general, and in the Vatican in particular, choose to see all this as some kind of progressive sodomitic conspiracy to subvert Church doctrine.
Naturally, I am not asking them to consider me an ally. I ask them to do something slightly different, which is to show a little empathy toward everyone participating in the reflection on this matter: popes, cardinals, bishops, theologians, and witnesses who are part of Study Group 9, Courage, and those who have influenced them in one way or another, as well as Catholics in general. There is a real problem here, not simply one of ideology or moral fiber: if they truly love the Church we have, rather than the one they believe we should have, please help me bring to light what that real problem is, so that it becomes clear that it is not about malice, cunning, lust, or power politics.
Part 1
For convenience, and so as not to take up too much of your time by going too far back in history, I propose that we start with the period surrounding Pope Paul VI’s document Humanae Vitae. As you know, Pope Paul considered it his mission to maintain what is actually the only teaching—or central norm—that the Catholic Church has on sexuality. It is that the sexual act between spouses of different sexes, open to procreation, is a good thing. And that any other sexual act is, to a greater or lesser extent, a bad—because defective—version of that good act. This norm had already been formulated in the period before the death of Clement of Alexandria, in 215 AD, and became the traditional teaching of the Church, receiving firmer support from Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Pope Paul was pressured by many people, including the vast majority of the members of the commission he himself had appointed to study the matter, to stop it being indispensable that the loving or “unitive” function of the sexual act be accompanied by its procreative function.
In other words: most of the commission members, all committed Catholics, did not believe that every sexual act had to be open to the possibility of procreation to be good. However, in 1968, the Pope told them they were wrong: to avoid sin, every sexual act must be open, at least potentially, to achieving its indispensable end in procreation.
According to all indications, Pope Paul was deeply moved when it became clear that the vast majority of Catholic faithful with direct experience in the matter in question did not accept his teaching, and that several episcopal conferences did everything possible to mitigate the consternation caused among the faithful by teaching them about the importance of conscience. Although it is difficult to obtain reliable statistics, almost sixty years later, between 80% and 90% of the Catholic population does not accept or practice the teaching. After the first years in which John Paul II tried to revitalize Pope Paul VI’s teaching, both through his writings and through those he appointed as bishops, the issue has gradually lost importance. Both Pope Benedict and Pope Francis have been quite discreet about it, and there are probably many young Catholics, even in highly legalistic cultures such as that of American Catholicism, who simply do not know this teaching.
In most places where employment depends on the approval of Catholic institutions, this matter is not controlled. Heterosexual Catholics who are not married, or who are divorced, are rarely, if ever, fired if it is discovered that they maintain a romantic relationship. And the issue of abstinence from artificial contraceptive methods in any married couple—something invisible to anyone outside the couple—is hardly raised as an obstacle to accessing a job, or for their children to be baptized, confirmed, or admitted to Catholic schools. Priests, who hear many more confessions from heterosexual people than I do, will tell you that their married penitents rarely mention the topic, and that they, the priests, are reluctant to bring it up, for fear that it will drive people away from confession, which would make it difficult for them to seek reconciliation when they feel overwhelmed by sins that truly concern them.
It should be mentioned that, following the Humanae Vitae, several groups were founded to help Catholic couples who wished to follow its teaching. By using one or another method to schedule their intimate relations, they could comply to the letter with the teaching, reducing the possibility of conception derived from sexual intercourse to a minimum without completely preventing it. There were also attempts to clothe obedience to the teaching in language that sounded less Aristotelian, such as that offered by John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.” The groups that put this into practice necessarily had greater influence than their numbers justified, since both they and the bishops who supported them could gain the Pope’s favor by demonstrating their loyalty to him on a matter that touched his heart particularly.
However, the vast majority of the faithful have simply stopped thinking about their relationships, their bodies, and their families using the intellectual tools that Paul VI had employed to issue his judgment. They did not do so out of immorality, weakness of faith, frivolity, or because they were victims of rampant secularism. They did it because the linguistic, biological, psychological, and moral world that led to that judgment no longer made sense to them. And this was largely due to the normalization of the astonishing advances in gynecology in particular, and modern medicine in general, since the discovery of the ovary in 1858. Pope Paul VI’s determination in 1968 to adhere to definitions whose background in the third century had been the reproductive biology proposed by Aristotle—the best of his time—did not transcend the limits of a fading framework of meaning. That, along with long-term changes in a cultural mentality that had taken for granted male ownership over female bodies, guaranteed the poor reception of the teaching.
Now, consider what this means in practice: it means that the vast majority of Catholic faithful do not accept, neither in theory nor in practice, that a sexual act that is not open to the possibility of procreation is, by the mere fact of it, an “intrinsically bad act for lacking its indispensable end.” They know that sexual relations between couples without a procreative purpose can be something perfectly good. And when they are not, it is very rare that the lack of openness to procreation has diminished the act: most of the time, some form of emotional or physical violence, incompetence, or lack of delicacy is what has turned it into a defective version of itself. This non-acceptance of the obligatory nature of the indispensable end of the act is not punished in any way; neither does the obedience or disobedience of a couple become visible in any way, unless the couple in question expresses it deliberately. And the ecclesiastical authority has completely grown accustomed to this situation. When a teaching remains on paper, it is not transmitted between several generations of families and it is not monitored where even conservative ecclesiastical authorities have the power to do so, then, de facto, the teaching is what the Church does, not what a document says.
Fortunately, and partly because disobedience regarding the “intrinsically bad sexual act, deprived of its indispensable end” is invisible and uncontrolled, there is an abundant and good Catholic discourse on marriage: preparation for it, procreation, companionship, shared life, family dynamics, where the “tail” of that teaching does not move the “dog” of the matter at hand. Outside of strictly controlled moral theology faculties, a broad and rich Catholic discourse has developed about what we might call “heterosexual couple life”, because people are capable of talking about these things thanks to their experience, with the help of novels, movies, songs, and psychology. They are able to find their way toward understanding how to live the sacrament of marriage through the meaning acquired along the way and shared with others through testimony given, gradually filtering out what does not come from God and assimilating—and flourishing through it—what does come from Him. Learning over time.
Now, here is where the true problem alluded to previously begins to arise for the ecclesiastical authority. Because, as is logical, there is a small minority of Catholics who feel oriented primarily, both emotionally and erotically, toward people of our own sex. Therefore, it is worthwhile to compare how the ecclesiastical authority tried to address our situation starting in 1968, since in both the cases of the majority and those of the minority, the ecclesiastical authority proposes exactly the same doctrine. According to what Father Gustave Martelet, SJ, commented to Paul VI while he was reflecting on what stance to adopt when drafting Humanae Vitae, that if it allowed the bond between the unitive and procreative function of the sexual act to be broken, it would deprive the Church of any logical reason to teach against homosexual acts. And that is exactly the case, since, following the same logic, a sexual act between people of the same sex constitutes “an intrinsically bad act because it is not open to its indispensable end”. The only difference between this act and its heterosexual equivalent is that no deliberate obstacle is interposed to the indispensable end of the act (some artificial contraceptive method): because it is not necessary. The use of a condom, for example, among homosexual men is a prophylactic option, never an contraceptive one.
Let us therefore look at some history about how that same teaching has evolved over time in relation to this specific group. In 1975, the ecclesiastical authority wanted to underline its views on sexual ethics in general and did so in a document that included the Church’s first public teaching in history using the word “homosexuality”[1]. This was due to the simple reason that the only teaching the Church had imparted on the subject during previous centuries referred to acts between people of the same sex. Literally, there was no prior magisterial teaching about “people who are like this.” And, in fact, the word “homosexual,” the first semi-scientific term to describe “people who are like this,” was not coined until 1869. In the 1975 document, the ecclesiastical authority was aware of the important medical and psychological advances in this field during the previous twenty-five years, since, by reiterating its teaching on acts that cannot achieve their indispensable end, it speaks of the “homosexual condition,” warning that some people were treating this as a neutral or even positive reality. Why this warning? Because the ecclesiastical authority knew that if the “condition” were neutral or even positive, the acts could not be intrinsically bad, since the condition would form part of the created order and the acts derived from it would therefore have their own purpose as good parts of creation, a purpose that evidently would not include procreation. Thus, they would then be contingently good or bad acts, whose goodness would depend on circumstances entirely external to their suitability for procreation.
The perception that gay and lesbian people “are simply like this,” or, in my unpoetic expression, that we are “carriers of a minor, non-pathological, and regularly occurring variant in the human condition,” had continued to grow, however, throughout Western society and far beyond, where people got used to finding us and getting to know us. Including, of course, seminarians and members of the clergy who encountered and knew each other and themselves. In other words, the attempt to insist that we were, in one way or another, defective heterosexual people whose condition could not be described neutrally or even positively, ran into increasing difficulty. And this led to a genuine theoretical problem: if the ecclesiastical authority were to admit that “gay and lesbian people are simply like this,” it would be recognizing a category of human beings for whom sexual intimacy does not require an openness to procreation. Of course, it would be absurd to allow such intimacy to the minority with same-sex orientation while denying it to the majority with opposite-sex orientation, and doing so would in fact sink Humanae Vitae.
The only logical way, therefore, to “save” the Humanae Vitae—that is, to treat it as still valid teaching for heterosexual people, even when it became clear that its main intended audience did not accept it—was to insist that gay and lesbian people should consider themselves defective heterosexuals whose condition must be defined based on their (non-) relationship with the conjugal act open to procreation. This is what led to the famous phrase in the 1986 document[2], which stated that “although homosexual tendency is not in itself a sin, it is a tendency more or less strong towards acts that are themselves intrinsically evil and, therefore, must be considered objectively disordered.”
This formulation presented several novel elements. The first is that by stating that the homosexual tendency is not in itself a sin, the ecclesiastical authority avoids the neo-Calvinist temptation to consider “homosexual tendency” as absolutely depraved. Therefore, anyone who claims that “the Church teaches that homosexuality is a sin” is simply mistaken. The second is affirming, for the first time in history, that homosexual tendency must be considered objectively disordered. This does not mean what “objectively disordered” usually means in modern language (such as when we say that “we know objectively, thanks to scientific discoveries, that anorexia is a pathological disorder”). It means that the tendency is “removed from its true object.” The true object being a sexual act with a married partner of the opposite sex that is open to procreation. The statement aims to close the legal gap regarding “intrinsically evil acts” that had opened up with the possibility that gay and lesbian people “are simply like that.” The authors knew that an intrinsically evil act cannot derive from something good, so, in order to maintain the act as intrinsically evil (in contrast to being good or bad depending on the context), they needed to redefine what it derives from as disordered, but without thereby making it radically depraved.
The third element worth highlighting is of a logical nature: the formulation makes clear that the central teaching maintained is that of the prohibition of “intrinsically evil acts,” just as for heterosexual people. But it also makes clear that this teaching, in the case of gay and lesbian people, can only be maintained if it is considered that their tendency is disordered with respect to its own object. That is what “must be considered” affirms. Formally speaking, the assertion is as follows: “Since we know absolutely and certainly that such an act is always and everywhere wrong, and since we know that intrinsically evil acts cannot derive from good tendencies, therefore there must be something wrong with your tendency to perform the act in question.” It can be seen that this functions as a perfectly circular syllogism. Nevertheless, if the tendency is actually based on real and existing human biology and psychology and turns out not to be pathological, then you will have ended up, even without realizing it, making a true statement about something that is. A statement based not on observation, but on your need to keep a prohibition intact.
It can be understood why the Anglo-Saxon authors of the 1986 document (whose original was in English, not Latin[3] ) opted for that formulation. They were facing kind Catholic bishops who wanted to be able to say: “Yes, we know that you gay and lesbians are simply like this, and that God loves you as you are. The only thing we teach you is that your sexual relations are forbidden.” But this, as any genuinely Catholic thinker knows, is nonsense characteristic of weak minds: authentic moral prohibitions in Christianity must correspond to something true about the nature of those affected by them; they cannot simply be limited to: “Well, you must not do this because we say so, or because Moses says you must not.” Christianity knows no extrinsic moral law: that is precisely what Saint Paul’s discussions with his Jewish brothers concerned regarding the Law. No, the only way to keep Humanae Vitae firm was to discard the possibility that any act between same-sex individuals could be adequately ordered, while at the same time avoiding the proto-Protestant solution of declaring a specific form of human desire intrinsically depraved. An exceptionally delicate tightrope walk, whose uncertain journey has unintentionally injected significant confusion into the life of the Church.
What do I mean by this? Well, the ecclesiastical authorities of the 1980s seem to have thought that “as long as homosexual people do not ‘come out’ nor ever formalize their relationships in the public sphere, then no one will really notice their acts[4] and they will not be subject to discrimination.” Of course, they will hardly have any subjective guilt in the matter, if they have any, and a largely benevolent clergy will forgive them very easily, just as we have been forgiving each other in this matter for centuries. Thus, they should remain silent, not come out, and the matter will be as private as almost all heterosexual marital disobedience is in this sphere.” These mid-1980s authorities, in fact, judged very poorly what was happening around them, namely that the grotesque legal inequalities imposed on same-sex couples during the years before antiretrovirals in the AIDS era made formal legal protection of their unions urgently necessary: some way to guarantee the visitation rights of closest family members, shared pension rights, surviving spouse rights, and shared property rights. And the simplest way to guarantee all this, just as with heterosexual unions, was—and still is—civil marriage.
What this meant was that, if we look back at Humanae Vitae, a real and visible difference emerged over time between groups of people who cheerfully ignored the same teaching of the Church: the heterosexual majority, whose ignorance or indifference regarding said teaching was invisible and not subject to control; and the gay or lesbian minority, whose ignorance or indifference regarding that same teaching of the Church is clearly visible in all those lasting couples who are happy to appear together in public, and even more so if they have opted for what their country has proposed as the legal way to guarantee their basic rights as a couple.
Having reached this point, I want to explain why this is a much more important matter for all of us, as the Church, than it might seem. When habitual disobedience, even if invisible, to exactly the same teaching has no consequence for the vast majority of the faithful, yet for a small but significant minority of the population, that same habitual disobedience is visible and, therefore, susceptible to discrimination, we have reached a situationin factthat no responsible Catholic Christian, and certainly no Catholic leader, could tolerate: that it is permitted, or even encouraged, for people to judge others negatively for doing exactly what they themselves do[5] .
If there is anything fundamental in ecclesial life, from the words of Jesus in the Gospels to the correspondence of Paul and other epistles, it is that judging other people for things we ourselves do is a sure way to remain under wrath[6] . And, of course, most heterosexual people are unaware that if they themselves ignore the teaching but nevertheless condemn gay and lesbian people for practicing exactly the same prohibited acts, then they have been pushed toward wrath by ecclesiastical authority. This is simply because those heterosexual people can very well assume that acts between same-sex individuals are bad merely because they are acts between same-sex individuals (acts which, having a factor of “repulsion,” are quite different from theirs) and not because they are sexual acts that do not fit their indispensable purpose (acts that are morally identical to theirs). And it is that ecclesiastical authority can control—and in fact controls—the visible, but settles for applying the policy of “do not ask, do not tell” regarding the invisible. It is no surprise that Pope Francis was so insistent on trying to convey that gay and lesbian people are equal to heterosexuals in terms of sins, and it is no surprise that, for example, the USCCB and its litigious supporters, after building an entire legal strategy around obtaining exemptions from labor laws regarding gay and lesbian people, felt so annoyed. Francis was trying to save them and all of us from what Paul calls “wrath.”
This is, therefore, the fundamental reason why I would ask them to show some understanding toward those who, from authoritative instances, have been trying to address this issue: over time, the way of thinking that led to maintaining the validity of the Humanae Vitae has had gravely discriminatory consequences. For heterosexual people, it is a tail that does not wag the dog: the teaching has not hindered a whole series of other advances in what is good when living the sacrament of marriage. In fact, if Humanae Vitae were discreetly abandoned, it would probably only be noticed in Catholic faculties of moral theology and among historians. For gay and lesbian people, however, the tail wags the dog so much that there is no dog left: if one can only speak of the basic form of couple life visible in relation to the objectively disordered tendency that leads to intrinsically bad acts, then one cannot even imagine or work for a shared good, but only for mitigated evil. The reaction that many of you had to Pope Francis’s approval of Fiducia Supplicans is proof of your perception that the tail, de facto, eliminates any possibility of there being a dog.
In other words, gay people have been made to pay the consequences of something that heterosexuals gave up long ago without suffering any consequence. Even if they love the type of thinking that led to Humanae Vitae and its ingenious way of including gay and lesbian people in the same teaching, I ask them to consider that the unjust consequences of this logic, over time, have actually become a quite serious ethical and spiritual issue in their own right, with the risk of bringing grave consequences upon those who judge the visible and ignore the invisible (much broader). And that those who try to pay attention to this are neither traitors nor heretics.
James Alison
Religión Digital