The book Light of the World consists of a series of broad ranging conversations between Pope Benedict XVI and Peter Seewald. It's about various controversial issues affecting Church and World. In Chapter 14, titled "Overdue Reforms ?", Seewald quotes two statements from the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding homosexuality, and then asks Pope Benedict if these two views in the Catechism are not contradictory.
Here is Seewald's first quotation:...the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible...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. The Catechism calls us to treat homosexuals with the respect and acceptance that is their due, simply because they (and we) are human beings. Then comes the second statement: Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as great depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. Here the Catechism clearly says that homosexuality is not a "natural" or "normal" way for human beings to act, and in fact is a disorder, so much of a disorder ("intrinsically") that there is no way to justify homosexual acts or make them right. So Seewald asks: "Doesn't the second statement somewhat contradict the respect for homosexuals expressed in the first one"?
Seewald seems to be asking how can you accept and respect a person (first quotation) if you think what he/she is doing is wrong, sinful, seriously disordered, and in fact, a great depravity (second quotation). Worth asking, no? When I find a person's actions to be deeply repugnant, my feeling of repugnance usually extends itself automatically to the person as well. Seewald's question, however, is not phrased in a way that is emotionally charged. He keeps the question theoretical: "Is not one perspective incompatible with the other? Here's Pope Benedict's answer to that question: "No." Well, that is both clear and blunt; no hedging or qualifying, just a straight out negative. He goes on to explain: "It is one thing to say that they are human beings with their problems and their joys, that as human beings they deserve respect, even though they have this inclination, and must not be discriminated against because of it. Respect for man is absolutely fundamental and decisive."
I love that explanation. We human beings are concrete, specific individuals, not theoretical constructs, and the pope recognizes that fact. He tells us that every human being deserves to be accepted and respected simply because he/she is, i.e. exists! The pope offers more than a theoretical answer, because both acceptance and respect involve our real feelings and actual emotions towards concrete people. He is pointing out that our value as humans doesn't begin with our activity or productivity, but springs simply from being. We have no right to reject or despise any member of the human race since our very existence is good. That makes sense to me. A newborn baby doesn't just need love, it has a right to love, and a right to demand it. What's the basis of that right? The newborn's very existence. If my, or our, worth depended on actual accomplishments, very few of us would be worth anything at all. An embryo, a fetus, an unborn baby, even a new-born, would be worth nothing. Acceptance of and respect for one another on the very basis of our common existence, is the decisive starting point for all of our interactions with one another.
The pope continues his train of thought: "At the same time though, sexuality has an intrinsic meaning and direction, which is not homosexual." This is the affirmative thrust his"No" leads to. Sexuality has a positive meaning and direction which we do not arbitrarily assign but has been built into the structure of sexuality. That is his second point, which he builds on the foundation block of his first statement. The reason why he can disagree with, and disapprove of, homosexual activity even though he has a very real acceptance of, and respect for, homosexuals as human beings is congruent with the meaning and direction he sees in sexuality. In fact, it is out of respect and acceptance for homosexuals that the pope affirms an obvious truth and says that homosexuality is a disorder. Since homosexuality is itself disordered, both the acceptance of, and respect for, anyone who calls himself homosexual require that this truth be made clear. Indeed, why would you lie to someone you accept and respect, no matter what the disorder? Presumably, the more serious the disorder, the greater the need to face the truth instead of colluding with an illusion or a deception.
Since the fall into original sin, our human nature itself is in a state of disorder. The disorder in us begins when we do. The Creator made us male and female, as the Scriptures say. (True, God made us without any disorder originally, but a look in the mirror, and a look around us at the world we live in, both provide objective proof that Adam and Eve have passed on to us the skewed human nature they acquired by sinning. This is not surprising, for how could they pass on anything else?) Men are disordered, women are disordered, and so are our male-female relationships. As individuals and as couples, we will never be a complete whole, because both our individual wholeness, and the wholeness that comes from our male/female relationships, does not start off in right relation to God. We carry that disorder into all we do, and all we develop into, as we journey through life.
Our basic disorder cannot be overcome by our own efforts. Because of the Fall, we have no way to stand outside ourselves and evaluate ourselves objectively. The righting of our relation to God occurs by his grace and mercy working in us. But God does not work in us without us, i.e. without our asking him to, and asking freely and profoundly. This asking is not merely a matter of choosing Option A instead of equally valid Option B, but desperate begging. Our asking is "de profundis", a need born of the misery we find ourselves in. Only the Creator who mercifully sustains us even as he lets us experience our interior disorder can put us in right relation to himself.
Why not simply view homosexuality as one more disorder among the countless others, and let it go at that? Because sexuality is foundational. Sexuality affects the very ground of our being. Our sexuality with its male-female components, constitutes the core of who we are. Certainly many disorders abound in us, and they are all interrelated, but since our core being is disordered, so are our perceptions of our selves, and our perceptions of our relationships. Our disordered core-being is male/female, masculine and feminine, two halves of the whole each of us is, even though one half predominates. I am not equally half man and half woman, but a male with both masculine and feminine qualities, or a female with both masculine and feminine qualities. How the two halves become more or less integrated, or or become more out of balance, in any person male or female, is and remains mystery.
To call this process mysterious is not an attempt to escape its complexity, but to respect it. Science should study the phenomenon of attraction and sexual identity, and discover all it can about it: same sex attraction, other sex attraction, or attraction to both sexes. No matter how thoroughly science explores all the other related causes of homosexuality, I do not believe it will never be able to find one that is primary. Science will, I believe, learn more and more about the specific causes it studies. But the danger, I believe, in learning more and more about specific causes is that we also move further and further away from ever getting around to see how all the causes interrelate. The presence or absence of a certain gene, the help or harm from mother or father during early in childhood, or is the result of the psychic wound because of abuse, the predisposition we have in us because of our genetic structure, the influence of our formation and schooling, society and culture, etc., can all be studied ad nauseam. An either-or explanation will never be sufficient, and no amount of studies will ever be complete or definitive. Even if all finite factors could be exhaustively studied and comprehensively understood, science has no instruments to measure free will and grace. Both are impenetrable to the scientific eye. This does not prevent science from striving to learn all it can about the causes it can measure, but should serve to increase science's appreciation of the mystery we are.
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Our Creator is a Father who loves us even when he does not approve of us. So acceptance of others by us never means denial of any disorder, nor does it presume any who accept us think we are free from disorder! Nor does acceptance mean approval of the activity that a disorder provokes. Disorders are counter-productive, and end up being harmful to the self as well as to others. Acceptance and respect should be the starting point from which the person with any disorder is to be related to and dealt with, by family, friends and neighbors, doctors and lawyers, social workers and therapists, prison guards and or parole officers, etc. But the strange thing in our society and elsewhere is that homosexuality is no longer recognized as a disorder. Why is that? Why is gayness is mainstreamed, normalized, and legalized as an alternative life-style? I suppose one reason is that, over time, we can be brainwashed and socially conditioned to see the abnormal as normal. Bombardment through the media, training in the schools, political lobbying, legislation, and cultural pressure has succeeded in making commonplace what was startlingly odd in society not so long ago.
But Pope Benedict has not lost track of the true nature of sexuality He, Benedict, continues: "We could say, if we wanted to put it like this, that evolution has brought forth sexuality for the purpose of reproducing the species." By appealing to Evolution, which science sees as free from the taint of Religion, he is able to point out what science has loss sight of, or refuses to respect: namely that sexuality is geared by its nature to reproduction. Any honest scientist who deals with plants,animals, humans, or genes and cell structure would have to agree with that observation. Even an atheist who was a scientist has to admit this. Only then does he introduces Religion: "The same thing is true from a theological point of view as well. The meaning and direction of sexuality is to bring about the union of man and woman and in this way, to give humanity posterity, children, a future. This is the determination internal to the determination of sexuality. Everything else is against sexuality's intrinsic meaning and direction. This is a point we need to hold firm, even if it is not pleasing to our age." Posterity, children, and future generations: it is so obvious that these are intrinsic to the meaning and direction of sexuality, that it should not even have to be stated. How would our ancestors of long ago ever have gotten beyond mere rutting, if that was all nature had designed them to do?
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