The APA and Homosexuality
Via Kathy Shaidle, Sally Satel’s review of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder contains an interesting tidbit about the APA’s decision to eliminate homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders:
In the early 1970s, annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) were home to angry showdowns between the gay rights lobby and organized psychiatry. Activists picketed convention sites, shouted down speakers, and waged ad hominem attacks on psychiatrists who sincerely believed that homosexuality was a sickness. The goal of their flamboyant campaign against the APA — an impressive display of “guerrilla theater,” as one psychiatrist put it — was to force the association to take homosexuality out of its official handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, second edition, popularly known as the DSM-II.
In December 1973, they won. A decisive majority of the APA board of trustees voted to remove homosexuality from the professional nomenclature.”Doctors Rule Homosexuals Not Abnormal,” read the headline in the next day’s Washington Post. It was a major victory both for gay people and for the enlightened wing of the psychiatric establishment. But rather than calm the critics of psychiatry, the APA’s acknowledgment that homosexuality was not a mental illness only inflamed them. They took this as further evidence that the profession was a sham, and asked in outrage how psychiatry could claim to be a legitimate, scientific branch of medicine if its members determined the very existence of an illness by vote.
More. The APA changes its position on homosexuality after protest and harassment and people lose faith in the authority of its pronouncements? Go figure. It’s worth noting, though, that the conduct members of the APA were subjected to by those gay activists is just an extreme example of the social pressures scientists, academics, and other professionals are subjected to generally to conform their conclusions to the opinions of their social group. A researcher whose work tends towards some politically unpalatable conclusions is not likely to have people picketing his house, but he is likely to face a subtle ostracism from his friends and colleagues.
Exactly how much this tends to skew their work in the face of such pressure cannot be known (any more than we can know what the results of the APA vote on homosexuality would have been without the “guerilla theater” of the gay activists). But it is certainly a bias that must be taken into account.
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Since when did it become a Catholic position that homosexualiuty be seen as an illness? This post reaks of homophobia. Catholic teaching is very clear: (1) marriage is for one man and one woman geared toward the bearing and rearing of children; (2) any sexual activity outside this union is immoral. To target gays while letting heterosexuals off the hook on this regard is wrong, oftren reflecting more a psychological masculine aversion to the thought of same-sex activity than sound theology. Let’s not imitate the fundies in this area, OK?
Not to mention that anything posted by Kathy Shaidle is suspect at best and contemptible at worst. To wit:
Illinois school shooter was lefty social worker
“I feel that I am committed to social justice…” he once said.
Ah yes. “Social justice”: applying unworkable solutions to imaginary problems.
Note that “feel”.
Maybe he woke up one morning and realized his secular progressive life was devoid of meaning and purpose.
MM, perhaps you missed the point of the post.
If some researchers believe that homosexuality is tied to illness, or to the functions of germs (Greg Cochran at Utah and several others) or pure social construction or none of the above or some combo thereof – bully for them. Present the research and make the case. But intimidation should not a part of the equation.
Blackadder,
Another example of undue pressure would be Larry Summers, James Watson, and J. Michael Bailey (this is really a fascinating case – they were out for some serious blood…..)
Psychologists follow the same “manual” as psychiatrists. My wife’s a doctor of clinical psychology (which is why she can bear with me, coincidentally) and doesn’t think it’s an illness either, nor does she think that the orientation can be “cured”. She’s counseled HIV patients in the past, many of whom Catholic, unfortunately many a gay person took some serious damage from the way they were treated by (some) Catholics and resent the Church now. It seems nigh impossible to pull of the “hate the sin, love the sinner” act. In particular when people use the term “Sodomite”. (On this note – just how on earth was Lot any better than the men clamoring for the angels ? Hospitality > having virgin daughters gang-raped. Sweet…)
Once more the key posters on this blog seek to allow the fog of the liberal secular world to cloud the plain universal, and eternal truths of the Catholic Church.
Catechism of the Catholic Church
Chastity and homosexuality
2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,140 tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”141 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.
2358 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 they may encounter from their condition.
2359 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.
Now, the Church does not insist that homosexual inclination is a psychological disorder, for that would be in the realm of science. Clearly, though, the work of the Catholic Medical Association in this area finds that it is in fact a symptom of a broader illness and is often associated with other physical and psychological pathologies.
Courage is a growing ministry for homosexuals that uses spiritual and psychological treatments to assist those inflicted with this unfortunate inclination, and have had varying degrees helping them live chastely and restoring them to a normal sexual inclination.
God Bless,
Matt
It is hard to tell the symptom from the cause in this matter. Certainly, it doesn’t help with psychosexual development to be widely stigmatized, in particular in the past. Regardless of what one thinks of Church rule on this subject, it must be horribly difficult to identify one’s desire for companionship, love, and, yes, sex with being ‘objectively disordered’. Suppression and sublimation certainly results in a secretive culture. The more open someone is, the less likely they are to engage in the more appalling elements of male gay culture. It’s the ‘closeted’ ones that tend to get caught in restrooms, park, and so forth. The sex abuse scandal in the Church largely happened because of sexually immature homosexuals who entered the priesthood as a ‘beard’ or in the hope to overcome their inclination. Such immaturity then resulted in abusing their emotional ‘equals’, teenage boys.
One could go on forever about the misconceptions of many people – like to claim that homosexuals ‘define’ themselves by their sexuality. For one, that which separates one from the majority sticks out like a sore thumb and by virtue of that becomes defining from both sides. In addition, to reduce homosexuality to a collection of sex acts is just as absurd as if one did that for heterosexuals.
Of course, due to the ‘deviant’ nature (de-viare, off the path) of homosexuality, there are problems caused by the fact that man and woman are made for each other (and even that isn’t all fun and games), and man and man, woman and woman, are not. Hyper-sexuality in the former, and hypo-sexuality in the latter, are quite common.
Lastly, while a gay person, in particular a man, is more likely to be more promiscuous, lead a more dangerous lifestyle (meth, in particular) etc, it ain’t necessarily so – there are many homosexuals who are quite ‘boring’ and ‘normal’.
I have a friend in Courage, I am not sure that ‘re-programming’ is part of that ?
P.S. “Sodomite” is as inappropriate a term as “onany”. The question in the story was the respect for guests, a big thing in the culture. That the women wouldn’t come clamor is self-explanatory. Neither seems ‘Lot’ to have deemed his fellow ‘Sodomites’ to be homosexual, but rather bi-, since he offered them his virgin daughters instead…(who later would go on to jump their drunken fathers and both managed to get pregnant, conveniently giving birth to ‘Ammon’ and ‘Moab’, thus paving the way for future genocide of the respective -ites.
Matt: I don’t know what point you are trying to make, but my point in no way contradicts the Catechism. See why the Church condemns homosexual activity– because these acts, by their nature, separate the unitive from the procreative aspects of sexual intercourse. That teaching is laid out quite clearly in Humanae Vitae, which deals more directly with contracepted sex– but the argument is exactly the same (I believe it was Elizabeth Anscombe who saw immediately back in the 1960s that if the Church changed its teaching on artificial contraception, it would have little justification for standing against same-sex activity– as with maqny other things, she proved prophetic in that regard.)
And yet “Christians” often tend to hold homosexuals to a higher standard, don’t they? We are often willing to turn a blind eye to heterosexual philandering, to adultery, to divorce and serial monogamy. And when have Americans ever taken like greed and gluttony seriously? No, it is too easy to excuse our own weaknesses and demonize the “other”.
Eve Tushnet has an explanation: “The often vicious and violent anxiety about masculinity is one reason that the ways in which homosexuality is stigmatized in our culture look nothing like the ways we treat many other things Scripture calls vices.” (see here: http://vox-nova.com/2007/07/05/homosexuality-too-much-fuss/) In other words, it’s cultural, a perversion of religion (as is the treatment of women in parts of the Islamic world).
Those who believe gay people can be “cured” are engaged in a deluded fantasy, one that can have terrible implications for a person’s psychological health. This is abusive therapy at its worst. Gay Catholics are called to chastity, and in return should expect love and acceptance from the rest of us– they should not be held to some higher standard, and we most certainly should not try to “cure” them of their “disease”. And we wonder why self-loathing, destructive behavior, and suicide are so prevalent among the gay community…
MM (and et al.),
While I appreciate that it’s facile and dangerous to suggest that each and every person who is truly gay can and should be cured, what are you going to do with my formerly gay friends who are now happy heterosexuals? Are they deluded? (Maybe.) Were they not really gay? (They’d be surprised to hear that.) Am I lying? (no.)
Look, I also know of gay people in the communities in which I’ve been involved (cities, colleges, etc) who have committed suicide. I do not want to discount that very real fact. But sometimes conversion therapy works.
I don’t think we turn a blind eye to divorce, adultery, serial monogamy, etc etc. Adultery gets pastors defrocked in even the most liberal churches. Divorce and remarriage is in most conservative prot churches treated as something sad which involves repentance. Most conservative prot churches don’t countenance serial monogamy — repeated divorce and remarriage — within their folds. How much time have you really spent among us?
There is nothing new about this article, it is a weary old talking point of the homophobic brigade.
If the Church listens sincerely to the experience of gay people — something it has never done and is currently resisting — it will come to the following insights:
1. the goodness of homosexuality, which is in no way an abnormal or deviant sexual orientation
2. the need to extend to gays their proper participation in the natural right to marry, by recognizing the moral validity and legal protection of same-sex unions
3. the need for the Church to repent of its immeasurable crimes against gay people.
Correction, by “this article” I mean the selective snippet from it posted above. Looking at the entire article I find an excellent discussion of the problematics of diagnostic classifications. The author does not at all share the homophobic purposes to which the tendentious quoter subjected her, nor does she claim to reveal anything new about the APA decisions on homosexuality, nor does she claim that the APA is a football of political correctness.
“If the integrity of a medical specialty turns on its ability to make meaningful diagnoses and to distinguish the sick from the well, then psychiatry was in a deep crisis of credibility. To be sure, removing homosexuality from the nosology was A GOOD FIRST STEP; but, diagnostically speaking, it was low-hanging fruit. The truly arduous work of creating a coherent classification scheme demanded a thorough re-examination of other, more plausible diagnoses, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and so on.”
In short, that homosexuality is not a mental illness is a no-brainer. The really difficult issues facing psychologists are those that come under such rubrics as schizophrenia and depression. These are no doubt “illnesses” of some kind since they cause suffering and confusion, whereas homosexuality, as history shows, has always, like heterosexuality, been a source of pleasure, positive affective states, aesthetic vision, and creativity.
I have a feeling you aren’t referring to a Thomistic good of homosexuality Fr. O’Leary. Rather than having me speculate, would you clarify the good to which you are referring?
MM,
Since many are perfectly willing to hold those who commit adultery and serial divorce in equal contempt with those who commit homosexual acts, I don’t see what benefit the comparison brings unless one wishes to argue that the latter acts should not be held so highly in contempt. While the hypocrisy charge is popular to bring, the deficit can be on either side of the hypocrisy equation. It seems self evident that much of society does not hold divorce to the level of contempt proper to such an offense of public morality. Therefore, I fail to see how bringing the treatment of homosexuality down to (or up to depending on one’s perogative) the level of divorce or other heterosexual crimes would be a benefit to society.
Irenaeus, you mention two categories of gay people:
1. suicides
2. those no longer gay
Could you add a list of some other categories of gay people you have known? I have met no one is those two categories, but I have met:
1. Happily “married” gay couples
2. Diligently celibate and happy gay individuals
3. Sexually active but unattached gay men and women
The gay experience that these categories represent is far more normal bread-and-butter reality that the picture of gay experience that could be derived from the two categories you mention — in fact the two categories you mention might even suggest that it is the destiny of homosexuality to disappear, either by conversion or by suicide!
though I have known very many gay men and women, I have never met anyone who said they were gay in the past but now no longer experience same-sex attraction, nor have I met any gay person who committed suicide.
Clarification on the goodness of homosexuality.
I argue that as part of God’s creation, homosexual orientation is ontologically good. “They are not well in their wits to whom any part of Thy creation is displeasing” wrote Augustine against the Manichees.
I argue that committed homosexual unions participate analogically in the goods of marriage identified by Augustine: fidelity, creativity albeit not in the form of procreation, sacramentality in that the couple’s love reflects the love of Christ. (fides, proles, sacramentum)
Aquinas somewhere referes to homosexuality as a natural instinct, though of course he was prevented by the terrifically dark church teachings from building on this. On the latter see Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy. In the name of that teaching “sodomites” were burnt alive for centuries, and the private lives of millions upon millions of people were overshadowed with needless guilt and anxiety, and lack of freedom.
The most profound good represented by the gay movement is not sex or even love, but respect for the freedom of the human conscience.
MM,
I noticed how you dealt only with homosexual acts, and ignored the crux of the current question which is the disorderliness of homosexual tendancies.
And yet “Christians” often tend to hold homosexuals to a higher standard, don’t they? We are often willing to turn a blind eye to heterosexual philandering, to adultery, to divorce and serial monogamy. And when have Americans ever taken like greed and gluttony seriously? No, it is too easy to excuse our own weaknesses and demonize the “other”.
Eve Tushnet has an explanation: “The often vicious and violent anxiety about masculinity is one reason that the ways in which homosexuality is stigmatized in our culture look nothing like the ways we treat many other things Scripture calls vices.” (see here: http://vox-nova.com/2007/07/05/homosexuality-too-much-fuss/) In other words, it’s cultural, a perversion of religion (as is the treatment of women in parts of the Islamic world).
Nice little red herring.
Those who believe gay people can be “cured” are engaged in a deluded fantasy, one that can have terrible implications for a person’s psychological health. This is abusive therapy at its worst. Gay Catholics are called to chastity, and in return should expect love and acceptance from the rest of us– they should not be held to some higher standard, and we most certainly should not try to “cure” them of their “disease”. And we wonder why self-loathing, destructive behavior, and suicide are so prevalent among the gay community…
Are you suggesting that homosexual tendancies are an incurable disorder, or not “disordered” at all? Which is it?
God Bless,
Matt
By the way, to suggest that divorcees are worthy of contempt is not good.
The Catholic Church regularly practices divorce in the cases of the Pauline and Petrine Privileges. Moreover its annulment industry can be seen as divorce by another name.
There is a current tendency to interpret church teaching on the disorderedness of the homosexual orientation by saying that it means only that the acts are disordered, the tendency being disordered only insofar as it tempts one to the acts.
Unfortunately, the language of Vatican documents, such as Cardinal Grocholewski’s decree on gay seminarians, does not bear out this interpretation.
Moreover, the use of the very homophobic writings of Fr Tony Anatrella, and the issuance of a bioethical dictionary with has been called a breviary of homophobia, show clearly that in Vatican circles a show of homophobia is favorably viewed.
“If the Church listens sincerely to the experience of gay people…”
Experience (as well as “spirit”) is a most nebulous category on which to construct doctrine; everyone has different experiences, they are uncheckable, and it’s anthropocentric to the core. Why should I trust gay experience over fascist experience of the divine? How do we know this or that experience is a legitimate experience of God?
The above mentioned documents clearly regard homosexual orientation itself as a psychological disorder, and that is also the implication of the recent utterance by the US Bishops’ Conference. Church hierarchs and movements like Courage play footsie with NARTH, which aims to cure homosexuality seen as a psychological sickness.
Test the spirits, St Paul says. Nebulous? No more than any theological or humanistic idea. God gave us intelligence and his Holy Spirit to help us deal with these “nebulous” matters. If you close yourself off from dialogue and from listening to the experience of people, you will end up issuing doctrines on the basis of other doctrines, as happened in the Humanae Vitae debacle.
Irenaeus,
That last point was a good one.
Fr. O’Leary,
Can/do you aim to rectify your position with natural law? Do you have a well constructed counter-argument to those who argue that homosexuality (tendency and acts) are indeed disordered? And what about the Biblical passages that seem to evidently refer to the disorder of homosexual acts?
And do you happen to have a specific passage wherein Aquinas claims homosexuality is “natural?” Or in what sense he is employing the word “natural?” That seems to matter a lot, and at face value, I have to say your claim about Aquinas seems to be a huge stretch, as it would likely implicate him in some serious contradiction.
Pax Christi,
Fundamentalism is a sad mental prison worse than any sexual perversion, for it cuts one off from dialogue with others and from taking their humanity seriously. It is also highly dangerous to those others, at any moment likely to be identified by the fundamentalist with the Canaanites whom God commands in so many biblical texts to be exterminated. Gays have indeed been tortured and burned and executed at the hands of biblical fundamentalist for centuries. It is still going on in Iran at this moment — see, and sign, http://www.petitiononline.com/irangay.
Spirit of Vatican II,
your namesake is not present in the documents and is most certainly not of God. Your leap from Catholic teaching on homosexuality which clearly and obviously deplores any form of discrimination, to Iran is ludicrous.
Pick up a basic Catechism, start reading from paragraph 1. When you’re done, decide if you can accept the teaching of the Church in it’s entirety. Behind door number two?
God Bless,
Matt
Fr. O’Leary,
Need one be a fundamentalist to draw out an understanding of homosexuality as disordered, from say the Pauline Epistles? And of course assuming I am not using any such texts to justify torture, burning, or executions of any kind, what about such an interpretation would render it fundamentalist? Your hermeneutic reasoning is unclear to me.
Pax Christi,
Homosexual acts are disordered in the same way as contraceptive acts according to the Catholic Church’s interpretation of natural law, in that they separate the unitive from the procreative. But it can very well be argued that the unitive has an intrinsic value that need not be tied rigidly to the procreative.
If there is alleged to be some extra unnaturalness about samesex acts, I am not clear about where the Church would have spelt that out recently. Perhaps it would prefer to say that homosexual acts are unnatural as masturbation is, since they are not properly unitive either?
Biblical texts on this matter are not probative, since apart from the fact that some of them are murderous, comparable strictures are also issued on other matters that are now regarded as innocuous.
Paul in the much quoted Romans 1 (disgracefully quoted without comment in a footnote to Persona Humana 1975) does not only say that homosexual behavior comes from idolatry, he says that the lesbian orientation itself comes from idolatry. Which of course is incorrect. This may be conventional hellenistic rhetoric of the time; it is incidental to his argument and need not be taken seriously.
The Thomistic text is in John McNeill’s famous essay The Church and the Homosexual, but his reference is incorrect. The text says that homosexual feeling is natural secundum quid, which means in a certain respect, but does not say that homosexuality is in accord with natural law.
Matt McDonald, the leap from RC to Iran is not at all ludicrous. The Christian churches presided over and urged the execution of gays as long as that barbaric practice continued in the West. Our present enlightenment is imperfect because we have offered no token of repentence for the past and because we still act against gay rights not only in the case of civil partnership legislation but even sometimes in the case of decriminalization.
“Decide if you can accept the teaching of the Church in its entirety” — first, the Catechism is not necessarily the best presentation of that teaching; second, if a teaching is found to be false or evil one has a duty not to accept it — in the past Catholics upheld that duty in contesting church teaching on torture, slavery, religious freedom — today we are called to discern whether church teaching on homosexuality is not equally in need of reform. One cannot fob off one’s responsibility by saying one is only following orders, Eichmann-style. And a prudent silence is felt as betrayal by the faithful — just ask the married Catholics who rage against the silence of the priests when they struggled with great moral difficulties over the subject of birth control (now resolved by the general rejection of the church teaching).
Fundamentalism means building on the letter of Scripture while ignoring its wider horizon within which the letter must be interpreted. Paul wants Christians to be loving and sexually disciplined people; his conventional vice-lists need to be interpreted in that light. To use Paul as unquestionable proof that homosexuality is disordered and homosexual acts never conceivably justifiable is fundamentalist, especially when the texts are invoked to shore up an argument that is losing ground on the fronts of experience and reason. The Bible is just not meant to be used in that way. The fact that a moral precept read off from the Bible might appear to be benign (as opposed to the unbenign precepts of genocide etc.) does not mean such hermeneutics cease to be fundamentalist; and we have seen in any case that the use of Paul as an argument against gays is far from benign.
Spirit VII,
thanks I just wanted to make sure I understood you. Best of luck.
God Bless
Matt
ps. if you study a little more the documents of the council you claim to be a spirit of you would see that the teachings of the Church are not fundamentalism, no matter how strongly you oppose them
The teachings of Humanae Vitae, Persona Humana, etc. are not fundamentalist but are based on natural law argument.
But when these teachings are exposed to debate their weakness is seen in the way so many of their defenders instantly have recourse to fundamentalistic argument (both scriptural fundamentalism and biblical fundamentalism).
Also that footnote brandishing Romans 1 is pretty fundamentalistic. Indeed the teachings of Presona Humana and the Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual People, as well as their laconic resumption in the Catechism, are very poorly argued, compared with the careful presentation of the contraception teaching in Humanae Vitae. It is almost as if the Vatican wanted to suggest that there was nothing to argue about. Far from inviting a papal commission to discuss the issues, gays were simply told: “We do not discuss with you” and even “We do not think you are worthy of a discussion”. True, there was a very late and very grudging recognition of a church duty to defend gays from unjust discrimination (not the forms of dscrimination that the Church practices), so there has been some progress. Also John Paul II, on his first American trip, talked of “the grave moral difficulties faced by homosexual persons” — which is far more sympathetic than any previous papal statement.
I realize that my account of church attitudes to gays sounds incredibly bleak, especially given the acknowledged prevalence of homosexual orientation and more among the clergy at every level. But looking at the texts, what other impression can I form? The people ask for bread and get stones. No wonder this is the issue that is currently most dinting the popularity of the Church among young Americans, as reported elsewhere on this site.
I am reminded of the old Chesterton quote “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
SVII illustrates precisely what is wrong with Catholics in the West. We have found Christianity difficult, so we leave it untried. THAT is why so many young people do not practice the faith. We would rather be entertained than develop anything of eternal substance. For the most part, there is no serious rational disagreement among young people with the Church’s positions, mostly because we don’t know what they are.
Similarly, accusing people of homophobia (and the Church) and fundamentalism shows that the arguer is acting in bad faith. Especially when one is a priest. Not only are they NOT arguments in any meaningful sense, but the audacity of a priest to deny the teaching authority of the Church is…well…disheartening for this struggling Catholic.
I thought (in my ignorance) the post was about the APA changing its opinion (Plato: opinion is not truth) on homosexuality based on ‘pressure’ from the ‘community’ in question. and, the change was based on a vote, not on empirical evidence. Again, I prove my stupidity.
We are commanded to love God with our entire beings and love our neighbors as we love ourselves. In life, we have free will and choices, one of them: the flesh and the spirit. The Gospels teach we must deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow Christ. Is the bar set too high? I am a grave sinner and a contemptible person. It just seems to this wild-eyed ignoramus that homosexuals and homophiles choose the flesh, and more: wish to sanctify the flesh outside the Sacrament of Matrimony. The Gospels also teach: you cannot serve two masters.
SVII is a priest???????????? Do priests take vows? Are there among the vows obedience and the foreswearing of modernist heresy?
My wife keeps saying, “All men are pigs.” I can’t argue with that; especially after reading about the man (choosing the flesh) who deserted his wife of 30 years. We’ll be married 30 years in September. Six of the best days of my life! A testament to human endurance! I’m constantly, silently saying, “Forgive all injuries.” In the end, it’s the (spiritual) love you give, not the love you get that matters. I have control over how I love, little or no control over how others love me. A couple in Holy Matrinmony ought to be helping each other toward salvation. Finally, a vow before God Almighty is a vow.
Oh! Happy Jimmy Carter Day, y’all!
T. Shaw is right. The post is not about the causes of homosexuality (or whether it can be “cured”). It’s about the social pressure people face to reach certain conclusions on politically charged issues (pressure that can be seen, I think, it certain of the comments).
T. Shaw,
“vows…the foreswearing of modernist heresy?”?
depends on when SVII was ordained.
Enjoy Lent
peace to all
I teach in a Catholic school in America right now, although I’m soon to go back to Europe (probably to stay).
Most of my students have out-of-the-closet “gay” friends–friends whom they love and respect.
In my experience, there is no single Church matter that more repels American and Western European youth than the Catholic Church’s blanket condemnation and stygmatization of innate homosexual orientation. It positively infuriates a large number of them who are not otherwise anti-Catholic.
I believe the Church is losing millions of its youth over this.
digbydolben,
if only salvation was a popularity contest:
Matthew 10:34 Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword.
Thankfully your a solidly orthodox Catholic and seek to help your students understand how merciful the Church’s teaching is in offering salvation to those troubled people, instead of the sure road to Hell that the secular alternative offers.
God Bless,
Matt
Digby,
Well, that might be a very relevant statement if the Church’s teaching on sexuality was a campaign platform plank — however since the Church claims its moral teachings are true and immutable, the current popularity or lack thereof are not exactly relevant factors.
What I find a bit interesting about this (turning back to the APA history that formed the basis for the post) is that what we see here is a discussion of what is “normal” or “healthy” in which people are pitting function against personal experience. On the one hand you have the activists back in the 70s arguing that they don’t experience their homosexual inclinations to be a disorder, and thus they want it removed from the list of psychological disorders.
On the other hand, the APA book prior to the 70s had a solid point from an empirical point of view. Reproductive success within the human species require mating with a member of the opposite sex, not the same sex. So someone with a strong mental drive to mate with the same rather than the opposite sex has, from a strictly biological point of view, a disorder to the extent that his drives are causing him to act in ways directly contrary to passing on his genes.
M.Z.:
You seem to be under-emphasizing the importance of hypocrisy. As I argued in a previous post (http://vox-nova.com/2007/10/25/the-challenge-of-homosexuality-and-gay-marriage/#more-1287), the young are rejecting Christianity in huge numbers because of what they see as a discriminatory approach to homosexuals. It’s not abortion– even if they disagree with the Church’s stance on abortion, they are sympathetic to an encompassing pro-life position ( a hypocritically-selective approach to the gospel of life will not be accepted, but’s that’s another story).
What I am saying is that if people understood the actual Church position on homosexual activity, especially as it pertains to marriage, the culture would be more sympathetic. And that means separating ourselves from the fundies who rely more on selective literal OT injunctions and less on the natural law. How many Catholics do you think really understand that the arguments against homosexual activity stem from the theology of Humanae Vitae? Very few, I would warrant.
I am more convinced than ever that many heterosexuals have a psychological aversion to same-sex activity. It somehow threatens their masculinity (see Eve Tushnet’s excellent essay on being gay and Catholic). And they project this insecurity onto the faith, and tend to demonize one immoral act over equally serious immoral acts that lie in the realm of heterosexuality. You seem to be suggesting, MZ, that is situation should not be rectified.
Matt: you do not understand the language you are quoting. THe original CDF document that used the term “objectively disordered” (some time in the late 1980s, I think) did so because some Catholics were using Church understanding from the 1970s that homosexuality was not necessarily an illness to imply that it could be morally virtuous. Of course, that is not the case.
There’s much more to “success” in life than “reproductive success.”
I think that the Church’s teachings about homosexuality have precious little to do with Jesus Christ, and a great deal to do with retrograde Semitic prejudices and religious bigotry against “pagans” and their customs.
I also think that it is doubtful that Jesus Christ shared his people’s bigotry. Many Christian fundamentalists like to opine that, because of Christ’s “silence” on the subject in Sacred Scripture, he can be assumed to agree with all the Jewish prohibitions of homosexual behaviour and stigmitizations of homosexual people.
It is ironic, then, isn’t it, that certain of the most moving words of the Catholic mass repeat what the Roman centurion said to the Lord, when he offered to cure his “servant” (i.e. slave) boy: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but, if you will only say the word, my servant shall be healed.”
Even if–as I’ve heard some desperate Fundamentalists insist–the Lord had supernatural knowledge of the private affairs of a Roman centurion, who may be assumed to have practised the normal behavior of Romans with their slaves (a behavior that was resolutely asserted in Roman custom and law), it may be assumed that the Jews standing around Christ might have been scandalized by his healing of what they could only assume was the centurion’s MINION. They would have been fully cognizant of their Roman overlords’ regular sexual relations with their male or female slaves.
So, in that story, Christ does not say to the centurion what he said to Mary Magdalene, “Go and sin no more,” thereby reinforcing the shibboleths of his fellow Jews, but simply assumes that the centurion does, indeed, love his slave boy, and he cures him. I don’t think there could be any more telling witness than this of Christ’s siding WITH the “homosexuals” of his time, and AGAINST the teachings of the modern Church.
(And, by the way, the Greek word of the original Scriptural text makes it very clear that the slave was the centurion’s “boy.”)
I am more convinced than ever that many heterosexuals have a psychological aversion to same-sex activity.
I’m sure they do. In fact, if God gave a few people homosexual feelings, He must also be responsible for giving many more people a feeling of aversion to homosexuality. Indeed, if you listen to the experiences of these people, you will find that the vast majority of them live happy and fulfilled lives, while feeling an aversion to homosexuality. Thus, since God created this instinctual aversion, it’s not up to us to question God’s creation, which is ontologically good.
Also, if you don’t want to say that God created the aversion, Darwinian evolution will do the trick quite handily. Hardly anything could conceivably be more favorable to future reproductive success than the instinct to avoid homosexuality, which is why evolution would have selected for such an aversion as strongly as it would select for the desire to avoid death.
If rejection of traditionally Christianity among the young was due primarily to its stance on homosexuality, then we would expect to see membership swell in the churches that have taken a more gay-friendly stance. That hasn’t happened.
Blackadder,
a fantistic point, the most gay friendly “church” in the US is of course the Episcopal “church” which is collapsing under the weight of it’s own depravity.
The conservative Christian ecclesial communities and Catholicism are undergoing strong growth, as is (regretfully) Islam which is very strict on such moral matters.
Morning’s Minion,
so you’re saying the that the document is false when it says the inclination is objectively disordered? The Church has always taught that, and digby makes a good point, it’s not all about reproduction, if it was, the Church would have to call celibacy objectively disordered. No, the orthodox position is exactly what the Catechism teaches: the inclination is objectively disordered, acting on it is objectively and gravely sinful.
God Bless,
Matt
Gerald Augustinus,
I’ve learned a lot from reading the comments on this post (outside of the liberal rantings of some of the commentators), but I have a question.
How do homosexuals define themselves if it isn’t about their homosexuality?
Seriously, help me clear this misconception of the “Gay Culture” because from everything that I’ve seen in my lifetime the one overriding factor that homosexuals seem to sell is their homosexuality (among other depraved sexual activities on display).
Tito
“The one overriding factor that homosexuals seem to sell is their homosexuality”.
Yes, I agree! Benjamin Britten’s operas are all homosexual propaganda, as are the literary works of Auden, Forster, Gide, Genet, Hopkins, Housman, Henry James, Marlowe, Wilfred Owen, Platen, Plato, Proust, Rimbaud, Sappho, Verlaine, Gore Vidal, Virgil, Edmund White, Tennessee Williams, Wilde, Woolf.
But then heterosexuals are no better — the operas of Puccini, Verdi and Wagner are pure heterosexual propaganda (with a touch of the other brand thrown in in Wagner) and so are the literary works of Dante*, Petrarch, Chaucer, Shakespeare*, Ronsard, Marvell, Stendhal, Hugo, Goethe*, Balzac*, Racine, Corneille, Euripides, Ovid, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy.
My asterisks refer to possible “gay” streaks in these heterosexual propagandists.
There is something wrong with “straight culture” — people don’t seem to be able to stop talking about “love” and, godhelpus, “sex”.
The new head of the German Episcopal Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollisch of Freiburg, says that homosexuality is a social reality, and defends the right of the State to establish juridical rule for homosexual communions of life; these are not marriages.
There, my friends, is the Church of tomorrow, a decent and sensible Church, not the plaything of homophobes.
Zur Frage, ob sein Katholizismus für Homosexuelle offen sei, sagte Zollitsch, Homosexualität sei eine „gesellschaftliche Realität“. Er bekräftigte das Recht des Staates, rechtliche Regeln für ihre Lebensgemeinschaften aufzustellen; Ehen seien das nicht. Zollitsch distanziert sich so indirekt von Amtsbrüdern, die eine Gleichstellung homosexueller Partnerschaften mit der Ehe befürchten – die gebe es nicht.
http://www.rundschau-online.de/html/artikel/1201191991625.shtml
fr O’Leary,
Why do you remain a priest of the Catholic Church? Is itto be in a better position to destroy her from inside?
Elise,
it would seem so.
God Bless,
Matt
Elise and Matt,
Priest and Bishops have been trying to destroy the Church for many many years (not that I am accusing Fr. O’Leary, far from it) but I think it serves as a sign that the Holy Spirit still guides the Church, even in the face of her imperfect clergy. If you discount the action of the Holy Spirit then you would and should be scared for the Church. If however you see the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church then you see how all encompassing the Love of God can be for us imperfect clergy (and laity), still striving to serve the Lord.
Enjoy Lent
Peace to all
PadreVic,
I fear for the grave wounds to the Church and the loss of souls that it entails, but I fear not for Her destruction. I pray for all priests and bishops, good and bad (perhaps the latter are in more need).
God Bless,
Matt
Sorry, Matt and Elise, but your panic is showing. A humane and decent sexual ethics, that is not hung up on the current Vatican taboos, is far closer to what the majority of Catholics and their clergy think, than are the posturings of fundamentalism. The fact that PadreVic includes many Bishops among those he would see as seeking to destroy the Church suggests that what we are dealing with here is a genuine quaestio disputata. Instead of seeking to close down discussion, we do better to face up to the issues honestly, in dialogue also with those they most practically concern.
Yes, we all know what the Catechism says. We all know what JPII and Benedict XVI have said. They keep saying it and fewer and fewer people are listening.
Before people parade around with the “orthodoxy banner,” they should study Church history and doctrine. Up until very recent times, no doctrine was considered authoritative unless it was “received” by the people (the “sensus fidelium”). Take the instance of artificial contraception. Only the tiniest minority of Catholics have “received” this teaching. The theological community has utterly rejected it. The bishops and clergy have too, despite some perfunctory decrees to the contrary. It is therefore not a binding teaching…unless one would like to argue that, oh, maybe 95% of all Catholics will be going to hell (after all, the teaching does say that A.C. is a gravely intrinsically evil act).
How about masturbation. Same teaching: gravely, intrinsically evil. Who here is actually willing to go on record and say that everyone who has masturbated and not confessed it (and deliberately so because they do not accept the teaching) will be going to hell.
If you are willing to say that, then you may wish to refer to Rule #2 in Catholic morality. It has something to do with the inviolability of conscience.
The same dynamic is happening with homosexuality.
The problem in ALL these areas is that the Church’s moral reasoning, its methodology has not changed since Thomas Aquinas. Duh!
Spirit of Vatican II,
Whether intended or not, I had a good laugh reading your response to my question.
Thanks, I needed that.
SVII / Kevin57
You apparently mistake the Catholic Church with a democracy. It is not, Christ’s domain is a Kingdom.
Your understanding of Catholic teaching is profoundly flawed. The teachings you dissent on have been held from the beginning, they are irreformable, I suggest you move off to a reformation denomination for what you seek.
God Bless,
Matt
Matt,
Perhaps there is more for you to learn with this and other situations of the Church.
Enjoy Lent
peace to all
Agree with kevin57 except for that distracting reference to hell; Paul VI did say that objectively immoral acts could be “diminished in guilt, inculpable, or subjectively defensible” (Letter to Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of Washington).
Irreformable, unchanged from the beginning… famous last words of beleagured dogmas… and see Noonan’s famous books for proof to the contrary.
The role of sensus fidelium and church reception in the establishment of teachings remains one of the less well-defined regions of Catholic thought. Remember what a lot of trouble it gave Newman, with his essay “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” (1859).
Nonetheless, if an encyclical, containing official but non-”infallible* teaching (apparently it was Paul VI who urged Msgr Lambruschini to stress the non-infallibility of the encyclical in presenting it to the public) is persistently rejected by the vast majority of the faithful (the rejection has lasted 40 years now) — not to mention a substantial number of bishops before subscription to the encyclical became a criterion for being made a bishop (the episcopal reception in Canada, Belgium, Japan and other countries could be read as stressing not only the freedom of the informed conscience but as treating the encyclical as merely a papal proposal to be judged by the conscience of the faithful) — and if the vast majority of priests have decided to bury the encyclical, as they have — then it stands to reason that the encyclical can only be regarded as a dead letter.
Cute, I just noticed that it’s Newman’s 206th birthday today. “I toast to conscience first, then to the Pope” he said.
Oops, 207th.
PadreVic,
don’t tell me you dissent as well?
The Church has teachings, not “situations”.
God Bless,
Matt
Matt & SoVII
I have tried to contact each of you separately in your blog comments. If you can please respond. Thanks
sorry for the off topic comment
Enjoy Lent
peace to all
Padrevic.
my email is mightyduk@gmail.com
God Bless,
Matt
PadreVic, my mail is josephsoleary@hotmail.com.
Matt, you notion of “dissent” is from a distant planet. If you were to open your mind to the great discipline of Theology — which is a far far stranger landscape than you imagine — you would, I think, find much not only to bemuse you but to enrich. The instant hostility to all theological questioning which has characterized the neocath blog movement from get-go must give pause to those churchmen who worry about orthodoxy. They have carried that worry to the point of strangling the Catholic mind and of encouraging outbreaks of sectarian hostility (as Cardinal Lehmann remarked of the recent CDF pronouncement).
SVII,
the Church issues authoritative documents for a reason. The whole point of theology and discussion is to SAVE SOULS, not as some intellectual exercise. There’s an old expression, which instructs the end of debate:
“Roma locutus est, causa finis est”. Learn it, live it, love it, or one day you will rue it.
God Bless,
Matt
As a ten year old boy I learned the expression, Roma locuta est, causa finita est. But of course, whatever its meaning on Augustine’s lips in one of the twists and turns of the Pelagian controversy, it would be naive and disingenuous to believe that it solves every theological problem. When the Holy Office declared in 1866 that slavery was not at all incompatible with natural and divine law, some American bishops and theologians said “causa finita est” — to the great detriment not only of the freedom of those whose bodies were enslaved, but also to the detriment of the salvation of souls.
Spirit of VII,
You have to read the Church’s documents in context and not prooftext them to try and attack the Church’s teaching.
In 1839, the Holy Father Pope Gregory XVI issued the apostolic letter addressing specifically Black slavery as practiced in the US: We reprove, then, by virtue of Our Apostolic Authority, all the practices abovementioned as absolutely unworthy of the Christian name. By the same Authority We prohibit and strictly forbid any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately, opinions contrary to what We have set forth in this Apostolic Letter.
In 1866, the Holy Office issued an opinion addressing the situation of all forms of slavery (sadly I have only an excerpt, if you have the whole letter available online please provide a link:
“Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law, and there can be several just titles of slavery and these are referred to by approved theologians and commentators of the sacred canons. It is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged or given. The purchaser should carefully examine whether the slave who is put up for sale has been justly or unjustly deprived of his liberty, and that the vendor should do nothing which might endanger the life, virtue, or Catholic faith of the slave.”
You can see that this letter identifies that there are “just” and “unjust” forms of slavery. If you study the bible and the teachings of the Church throughout the ages, you will see that there are various forms of servitude both voluntary and involuntary. You can’t simply lump them all together, as some of them actually benefit the slavery in the context of that era. Therefore slavery as such is not intrinsicly evil. The Church has developed it’s prudential judgement in this area in relation to the modern world, to the current state of universal condemnation. One could reasonably argue that the Church ought to have acted more strenuously against all forms of servitude in earlier times, and that is a fair point, but it does not make your point valid.
The same can not be said with regard to homosexual acts which are intrinsicly evil, and inclination which is by it’s nature disordered. THe Church has developed it’s judgement on how to best minister to those suffering from such afflictions, but that does not make such acts condonable, nor will it ever change it’s teaching.
God Bless,
Matt
Nothing new to me in what you say there, Matt. It’s the Cardinal Dulles line. Nonetheless, the fact that US bishops and theologians in the 19th century argued that the possession of slaves was OK and that the Vatican had only condemned slave trading (time had erased the original injustice of that!) means in concrete that the Church betrayed the human rights of many people and cast itself in a shameful role. Today the Church is committing exactly the same crime against gays, with exactly the same time-lag from more enlightened ideas. In both cases the Church is seen as trampling on human rights. The only difference I can see is that the nasty anti-gay documents of the Vatican in 1975 and 1986 do not bear the papal signature — whereas Pius IX signed the shameful 1866 declaration; perhaps popes learned some caution from the embarrassments of their 19th century predecessors. See my discussion of this at http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/cardinal-avery.html
By the way “intrinsically evil” is a red herring. “It is not contrary to natural law for a slave to be bought and sold” is what the Church taught (and what even Popes has practiced); now the Church no longer teaches that. Or are you aware of some situation in which the Church says its OK to buy a slave today? Your adherence to the false notion that church official teaching never changes — which is magisterial fundamentalism, and has exactly the same hermeneutic structure as biblical fundamentalism — has led you and Cardinal Dulles (whose university is partly funded by slave-owner bequests) to adopt positions very much at variance with common sense and with orthodox Catholic thinking today.
By the way, the fact that slavery may benefit the slave is not a good argument for saying it is not evil. Prostitution often benefits prostitutes, but that is not necessarily a moral justification of it. Indeed such argument is on the dangerous slippery slope of consequentialism, very much used today in order to justify torture, which is claimed, like slavery, not to be “intrinsically” evil, so that it can become something permissible when a good is in view. Catholic morality permits the choice of a lesser evil, but it never permits doing evil that good may come of it. Your argument that good results justify slavery is arguing not only that slavery is not intrinsically evil but that it is morally neutral and can be a good in some cases. It ties in with reactionaries who argue that negro slaves in the US very actually very happy, as they sang their spirituals and respected their white masters and mistresses etc. Since human rights are invisible they are easily missed by those who do not want to see them. To enforce mandatory celibacy on gays, as you clearly wish to do, is to my mind to show little sensitivity to human rights; in practice it has condemned huge numbers of Catholic gays to loneliness, neurosis, or to a sexual life haunted by guilt and shame and never flourishing in a stable relationship. Many Catholic gays feel very cheated today as they see gay couples flourishing all about them with the blessing of their families and even of their churches. The Church has clearly made terrible mistakes, criminal mistakes in its dealing with homosexuality throughout history — torturing and murdering gays for centuries, urging their imprisonment up to our own time — and now only very belatedly and grudgingly suggesting that gays should not be exposed to unjust discrimination. And you say, blandly and blindly, that “the Church’s teaching has never changed”….