The following is an accurate summary of Catholic teaching regarding homosexuality and the moral disorders related to it.
So, for those who want to know what the Church really teaches about homosexuality, here goes.
The Church refuses (yes, refuses) to consider a person to be ‘heterosexual’ or a ‘homosexual’. Every person has a fundamental identity: a creature of God and, by grace, His child and heir to eternal life.”
Each person also has a physical sex determined by his or her reproductive genitalia and organs: either male or female, man or woman.
The Church does not use the term “gender” as some people do, who claim that people have “sexual genders” as homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals, and so forth.
Instead, the Church teaches that each male should accept his sex as a man, and each female her sex as a woman; and that means accepting that one is different from and complementary to, and equal in dignity with, persons of the opposite sex.
In its moral teaching regarding homosexuality, the Church teaches that anyone who has a physical attraction toward sexual activity with a person or persons of the same sex can be so described.
Notwithstanding the lies spoken by the overwhelming majority of those who argue for the moral legitimacy of homosexual behavior, it is well known that most homosexuals are also heterosexual persons. That is to say, most people who engage, or have an inclination to engage, in homosexual activity also engage, or are more or less inclined to engage, in sexual activity with a person or persons of the opposite sex.
Very many homosexual persons marry and have children by their spouses. Not all do, and there are some who have a sexual urge but lack the psycho-physical maturity for marital intercourse.
The Church observes that in some homosexual persons the homosexual attraction comes from a false education, from a lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or from other similar causes, and is transitory and curable.
In addition, the Church admits that the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual disorders is not negligible, and that some homosexual persons may be definitively such because of some kind of pathological constitution judged to be incurable.
The Church is well aware of people who conclude that their tendency is so natural that it justifies their homosexual relations within a sincere communion of life and love analogous to marriage. But the Church, today as always, rejects that ideology and responds arguing from “the Natural Law”.
Catholic teaching, from the outset, has been that no homosexual acts are ever justified.
The Church’s Catechism reaffirms that every such inclination is an objective disorder, an intrinsically pathological inclination.
The reason why even the most deep-seated homosexual tendency must be called disordered is straightforward. Every such inclination is a tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.
The Church has been consistent in making a distinction between the disorder and the behavior in which a person freely chooses to engage. The particular disorder in and of itself is not a sin, unless willfully induced – for a sin is committed only as a free choice.
However, the homosexual disorder is precisely an inclination to choose a homosexual act – a sex act with a person of the same sex. And, like every other kind of non-marital sex act, any and every homosexual act is, if freely and deliberately chosen, a serious sin.
The Church’s teaching about homosexuality is proposed with ample awareness of modern psychological and biological research into the origins of these inclinations.
The Church’s teaching about these inclinations rests instead on the Catholic doctrine about the choice to engage in homosexual acts. This is a moral doctrine, a teaching about what is right (or wrong), good (or worthless and harmful), and choiceworthy (or sinful).
From its earliest years, the Church has understood its moral doctrine as not only a matter of Faith but also fully in line with human nature.
St Paul teaches clearly about this in his letter to the Romans (Rom. 2: 14-15). But Jesus had already made the point by his profound teachings on human sex (Matt. 19: 4). Moreover, the marital communion of man and woman which, on the basis of that complementarity of identities, was established “from the beginning” (i.e. in the intentions of God the creator of nature) (Rom. 19: 8).
As Jesus makes clear, this natural communion requires for its integrity not only the sexual intercourse of the spouses (Matt. 19: 5), but also the complete and unwavering mastery and overcoming – by everyone, married or unmarried -- of every desire for sexual contact or enjoyment outside marriage (Matt. 5: 27).
To look on anyone with lust is “adultery”, that is, an offense – even by the unmarried -- against marriage, a relationship both profoundly natural and sustainable only by fidelity to the truth.
Some of the greatest theologians and philosophers have explained the relationship between human nature, the natural world as a whole, and the truths of morality. Everything that should be and is worthy of rightful choice is natural and grounded in the realities of human nature.
Still, not everything we find in our nature is a pointer to what is good, choiceworthy and reasonable.
For example, as St Thomas Aquinas points out, we all have “a natural inclination to follow our bodily feelings and desires even against the good of being reasonable.” This is one of many “natural” – i.e. innate, deep-seated, typical – inclinations which should not simply be followed!
Others are found more in some people’s nature than in others’: some people are more inclined to anger, including immoral anger, than others; some are more inclined to greed, some to crippling fear, and so forth.
Aquinas, following a lead from Aristotle’s research and reflections, reminds his readers that homosexual inclinations – e.g. the desire of some men to have sex with other men – arise in some cases from a desire for self-gratification which has initiated and sustained a corrupt taste for this sort of behavior, a bad habit. Int in other cases, such behavior stems from a defective psycho-physical constitution.
The way these inclinations originate in a particular person does not affect the fact that, insofar as they incline that person towards sex acts with persons of the same sex, they incline not towards but away from the authentic fulfillment of nature itself and the Divinely-revealed Will of the Creator.
Catholic teaching on sex has, from the beginning, done no more, and no less, than point out the ways in which every kind of sex act, other than authentic marital intercourse, is opposed to the good of marriage and the Natural Law.
The more distant a kind of sex act is from the marital kind, the more seriously disordered and, in itself, immoral it is.
Sexual intercourse, when it is truly marital, enables the man and the woman to experience and actualize their mutual commitment and communion at all levels of their being: biological, emotional, rational and volitional. It is only truly marital when it has the characteristics of the two-sided good of marriage itself: friendship and openness to procreation.
And so, the Church clearly teaches that a sexual act is marital only when (1) it is an act of the generative kind, that is, culminates in a union of the generative organs in which the wife accepts into her genital tract her husband’s genital organ and the semen he deposits within her; and (2) it is an act of friendship in which each is seeking to express commitment to and affection for, and the desire to benefit and give marital pleasure to, and share marital pleasure with, the other spouse as the very person to whom he or she is committed in marriage.
No one can judge it reasonable for human beings to seek sexual satisfaction in any other extra-marital way.
Homosexual sex acts, even between people who could never consummate a marriage and who wish, at the time, to be committed to each other in a lifelong friendship, can never be marital acts.
To judge them morally acceptable – to condone them -- is opposed to the very nature of marriage. Thus, they cannot reasonably be judged morally acceptable.
The Church’s teaching is clear and unequivocal: natural intercourse is not only heterosexual. Rather, it is marital.
That is, it is sexually complementary (heterosexual), and in each act of spousal intercourse enables the man and the woman, wife and husband, to experience, express and actualize together – physically, emotionally, and intellectually – both of the two essential marital ends and goods: procreativeness, and a friendship which is exclusive and permanently committed.
The Bishops do great harm and violence to this unequivocal teaching when, in their misguided attempts at being overly cautious not to offend the slightest sensibility, they dilute this clear teaching and sow seeds of confusion in the minds of the Christian faithful.
Homosexual actions are an innate offense against the laws of nature and the Will of the Creator. Those who freely and willfully engage in such are culpable of serious sin. Those who encourage such behavior are equally culpable.
The assault upon the Church by homosexual and gender identity advocates is unprecedented in history. Advocates for such disordered and immoral behavior can be found both within and outside the Church.
In response to that assault, the Church will best serve the needs and the good of those who entrust themselves to her care by simply, clearly and dispassionately reaffirming the Gospel truths about the Natural Law, moral good, moral evil, sex, marriage, and the marital act itself.
To do otherwise, to deflect from this clear teaching, to compromise its implications and consequences is to fail in the Church’s mission to go forth and teach and make disciples of all the nations.
May the Bishops and we be worthy of the task the Lord has placed before us to proclaim the beauty of what marriage and its full expression in the marital act really and truly are.
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