All of sexual morality hinges on one principle: intercourse must be both unitive and open to procreation. Unitive implies marriage with true love, and procreative implies willingness to have and educate children in virtue. Once the two goals are separated in principle, then any kind of sexual activity becomes permissive and virtue is eliminated.
In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before the gay movement within or outside the Catholic ethos would want the rights of marriage, especially financial ones and legal acceptance by the federal government. Eventually, given Obergefel v. Hodges, it will become a crime to teach by example or ideas that the gay lifestyle is sinful, this is already happening in some states.
With the release of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI specifically asked everyone to follow and teach the moral norms forbidding contraceptive acts. Yet, it was a fact that for a prolonged period of time, neither an episcopal conference, nor a theologian, was ever publically corrected by the Holy See for their confusing or dissenting statements on the matter. It is true that the small and uninfluential L’Osservatore Romano published many learned articles from 1968 (even to the present) defending the truth and meaning of authentic conjugal acts, but with little effect on dissenting theologians. Of course, part of the Gospel deals with conjugal chastity infallibly by the ordinary magisterium, not as dogma of faith, but being essential to the salvific message of Jesus since it revolves around family life, the basis of society and the Church.
Local bishops, more or less, remained relatively quiet or tolerant toward dissenting theologians with the consequence that contradictions occurred in the seminaries, the pulpit and confessional of the parish priest. As a result, a penitent who wanted to practice contraception to protect his or her marriage and family from “harm” searched for a “pastoral and compassionate” confessor to get “permission.” Today, the faithful who regularly practice contraception do not go to confession and not frequently to Sunday Mass either. Many receive Holy Communion because they are following their “infallible conscience”.
Members of Alcoholics Anonymous speak of friends, husbands and wives who “enable” those alcoholics among them to continue their drinking by saying or doing nothing. “Tough love”, (the opposite of loving is supposedly to be tough) in terms of threats of leaving the relationship, and harsh language seems too harsh and intolerant and so drunks remain drunks.
Sobriety with all addictions takes time with many “slips” along the way. Likewise, leaving alcohol, drugs, porn, homosexual acts, masturbating, fornicating and adulterous activity by taking the road back to virtue is likewise very difficult because the love for sense pleasure is highly intoxicating and mesmerizing. Retracing the journey back to chastity is a cross because someone took a wrong turn down into this darkness of sin. The descent may have happened by accident, a poor self-image, loneliness, sexual abuse by a family member. but rarely—if at all—by genes. However, it could have commenced when children were never taught to avoid impure and unchaste thoughts and taking pleasure in them. All these influences toward sin implies the concept of enabling by others or self medicating interior wounds.
Nevertheless, given all the moral troubles listed so far and trying to return to virtue, the Council of Trent taught so many years ago1 that penitential action (prayer, fasting and works of mercy, both corporal and spiritual) is the road to staying the course of growing back to the love of God’s friendship and doing His wise will. Further, the same Council reminds us that “For God commands not impossibilities, but, by commanding, both admonishes you to do what you can, and to pray for what you cannot (do alone), and helps so you are able to do it.”2 One cannot save oneself by oneself but needs the assisting grace of the Holy Spirit. Many Catholics do not seem to know this teaching and so try to live like Pelagian self-made persons. Yet the only principal causality humans possess is to sin. To grow in any virtue, people need the grace of God as the primary cause and human cooperation as the secondary cause.
Regarding specifically the teaching of the Church on homosexual acts, the Catechism (2357) clearly proclaims:
… Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
Strangely enough, this is part of the “good news” because it clearly guides the young and old away from the consequences of acting in this matter. One’s very happiness in this life becomes precarious, and eternal salvation is in jeopardy when any precept of God is flaunted. St. Thomas, following the lead of Pope St. Gregory the Great, and experience itself, reminds us that the daughters of all sins of lust are “blindness of mind, thoughtlessness, inconstancy, rashness, self-love, hatred of God, love of this world and abhorrence or despair of a future world” (ST II-II 152, 5). Furthermore, what makes this teaching “good news” is that we know not only by the teaching of the Gospel, but also by reason informed by faith, what is genuine affection and friendship in contrast to its seeming or illusory opposites. Therefore, when parents following the Church’s teaching explain the limits or boundaries of sexual expression, the truth spoken in love is meant to set their children free from false happiness based upon primarily on the pleasure of the senses.
Father Basil Cole, O.P. is currently a Professor of Moral and Spiritual Theology, Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. Father is also author of Music and Morals, The Hidden Enemies of the Priesthood and coauthor of Christian Totality; Theology of Consecrated Life. A native San Franciscan, Father has been a prior in the Western province of the Dominicans, a parish missionary and retreat master, and invited professor of moral and spiritual theology at the Angelicum in Rome.
