You don't have to make babies to have a holy kind of sex - homosexuality and Catholicism

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 26, 1999 by Jeannette Batz

What is Roman Catholicism saying to the sizable percentage of the human population that is infertile, has a different physical or hormonal makeup, yearns to be the opposite sex or grew up oriented toward the same sex? Stifle who you are. You can be it, technically speaking, but don't express it, don't use it to build a relationship, don't integrate it with the rest of you.

If you're desperately lonely, or you do feel a vocation to love someone intimately and share your life with that person -- ignore your own inclinations. Get some therapy, summon every ounce of energy you've got and shift your natural orientation counterclockwise, so you can live as society and the church dictate and make babies.

Those babies won't thank you for it. Tom says when he was married, they'd all be putting up the Christmas tree, and his wife would start to hum Christmas carols, and he'd tell her to shut up. He's not proud of that. But it's the kind of thing that happens when you're spending all your energy repressing and suppressing and masquerading and hating yourself and hating the charade.

Somehow I don't think that's how our creator intended us to live. I don't think he would have given Oscar Wilde a job selling insurance and a house and three kids in the suburbs. I don't think he would tell Jenny she's a "freak of nature" because she's neither male nor female. I don't think he'd condemn her to involuntary celibacy and solitude, either.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called love "the most powerful and still the most unknown energy of the world." We've tapped only a fraction of its potential. And that's as true of physical love as it is of spiritual. In fact, it's the times these two dimensions merge that remind us of marriage's ongoing sacramentality.

"Little by little, love becomes distinct," Teilhard wrote elsewhere, "though still confused for a very long time with the simple function of reproduction. No longer only a unique and periodic attraction for purposes of material fertility; but an unbounded and continuous possibility of contact between minds rather than bodies ... the pull towards mutual sensibility and completion.'

Our bodies can help us realize that. If we let them.

Jeannette Batz is a staff writer at The Riverfront Times, an alternative newspaper in St. Louis.