Should homosexuals remain in the Catholic Church?

Catholic New Times, Jan 16, 2005 by Gregory Baum

Catholic homosexual people committed to the Gospel ask themselves whether they should leave the Catholic Church where they are spurned, to become members of the United Church of Canada where they are respected. The Catholic Church teaches that homosexuals lack full human integrity and that homosexual love is always sinful, while the United Church looks upon homosexuality as a natural variant and accepts gays and lesbians as equal members of the congregation, including the right to seek ordination.

What should a Catholic theologian say to Catholic gays and lesbians who ask whether they should switch their ecclesiastical allegiance? One answer would be to insist that they obey the church's magisterium, that they humbly accept themselves as damaged personalities and abandon the idea that they are just as normal as other people.

According to the Doctrinal Congregation of the Vatican, "they are deprived of their essential and indispensable finality" and hence "are intrinsically disordered." While the Congregation defends their human rights in society and disapproves of public gestures of hostility toward them, it nonetheless insists that the homosexual life style is always sinful and should not be honoured by society. While the loss of an eye or a leg damages a person's integrity in a purely material way, the homosexual orientation, according to the Congregation, produces a more profound wound: it represents an ontic lack of human integrity.

Gays and lesbians should therefore learn to think of themselves as damaged in their very being. If they want to be good Catholics, they must learn to look upon themselves as wounded personalities, intrinsically disordered, ontically sick, merely tolerated in church and society, and forever excluded from the sharing their life with a person they love.

I would be quite unable to give such an advice. What should gays and lesbians committed to the Gospel then do? Should they join the United Church of Canada?

Through a process of reflection, prayer and consultation over a period of twelve years, involving all their members, the United Church of Canada has come to understand homosexuality as a natural variant and see homosexuals as normal members of the human family, enjoying full human integrity, despite their minority status. According to the teaching of the United Church, God creates the majority of human beings as heterosexual and a minority as homosexual.

Gay and lesbian believers must learn to accept their sexual orientation as a divine gift. Their life of faith, hope and love, in the keeping with the New Testament, does not prohibit them from seeking a partner and expressing their mutual love in sexual intimacy. If they think they have a call to proclaim the Gospel and become pastors in the church, they may present themselves--like other members--as candidates for the ministry.

Since the United Church professes the sola scriptura principle, the twelve-year-long decision-making process had to wrestle with the biblical texts that condemn homosexual behaviour. The United Church followed the hermeneutical principle that biblical passages which damage the humanity of people, such as women, Jews, homosexuals or other outsiders, must be subordinated to the central biblical message of the equality of humans before God and of God's universal love for them. The United Church had previously applied this principle when it decided to teach the equality of men and women, and consequently admit women to the ordained ministry.

A third option?

Is there a third option for Catholic gays and lesbians? Many of them love the Catholic tradition, the fusion between the biblical and Hellenist tradition, the double imperative of faith and reason, the sacramental and communal inheritance, and the church's transnational vocation. How can they give up what they regard as their spiritual, cultural and intellectual home? Is it possible to remain an active Catholic while dissenting from a particular teaching of the magisterium?

This question was widely discussed in the 1970s when vast numbers of Catholics, in fact the majority in North America, remained unconvinced by Pope Paul VI's encyclical of 1968, Humanae Vitae, condemning all forms of what he called artificial birth control. According to the HarperCollins Encyclopaedia of Catholicism (1995, p. 421) "Many Catholics--including theologians and priests--could not accept the central assertion of that document: the intrinsic immorality of every contraceptive act. Such dissent was viewed as illegitimate and, if public, punishable. Others viewed it as a dimension of the critical responsibility of Catholics and as an indispensable part of the teaching-learning process of the Church. The U.S. bishops in their pastoral letter, "Human Life in Our Day," (1968) viewed dissent as legitimate under three conditions: 1) it is based on serious reason, 2) it is respectful of teaching authority, and 3) it does not cause scandal." Empirical research shows that to this day the majority of Catholics in North America dissent from the church's contraceptive teaching.