The centrality of marriage: homosexuality and the Roman Catholic argument - Homosexuality: Some Elements for an Ecumenical Discussion

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan, 1998 by James P. Hanigan

Twentieth-century developments

Such was the unfolding tradition of Roman Catholic thought about human sexuality for 1900 years. It is essential now, as a second step, to explore 20th-century developments in the Roman Catholic understanding of sexuality and sexual behaviour.(31)

Along with many of their fellow human beings, Roman Catholic theologians have come to recognize (with lime or no thanks to theology) that there is a reality appropriately called a sexual orientation,(32) and to understand that one's sexual orientation, whatever it may be and however it comes to be,(33) is fundamentally not a matter of conscious free choice or preference. Nor is a change in one's sexual orientation, if it is possible at all, a simple matter of repenting for one's past sins and making a firm purpose of amendment, nor of developing a more fervent prayer life, nor of growing in virtue, nor, in our more contemporary style, of undergoing therapy or finding a support group.(34) Hence sexual orientation itself is not a matter for moral evaluation, not a condition itself meriting either moral praise or blame, not a basis for excluding some people from or including other people within the human family or even the ecclesial community. A heterosexual orientation is no more a basis on which either virtue or human rights may be claimed than is a homosexual orientation a basis on which virtue and human rights may be denied.(35)

We have also come to understand that sexuality is not an accidental feature of human nature and human personality, but a constitutive element, a mode of being in the world. To quote a Vatican document on the subject, "the human person is so profoundly affected by sexuality that it must be considered as one of the factors which give to each individual's life the principal traits that distinguish it"(36) Sexuality is therefore something that shapes and influences all our relationships and activities, though we certainly do not always know how it does this or in what precise ways this influence is manifested.

This recognition of the importance of sexuality to human personhood, along with the modern Western mentality, which attempts to think things out from the viewpoint of the individual person rather than from the viewpoint of society. has also enabled Roman Catholic theologians to appreciate more fully the personal and interpersonal significance and value of human sexual relating and activity - what Catholic language refers to as the unitive meaning of sex - along with its already achieved understanding of the social, procreative meaning. Few knowledgeable Roman Catholics today would simply affirm that the primary and overriding purpose of human sexuality is procreation or deny the profound relational and unitive significance of sexual intercourse. Indeed, so basic has the unitive meaning of sex become in Roman Catholic thought.(37) as both an expression of and an effective cause of relational unity (of love), that the major problematic in Roman Catholic sexual ethics for the past thirty years has been how to understand and explain the connection between it and the procreative meaning of sexuality.(38) This shift in understanding accounts for both the extensive theological dissent within Roman Catholicism about contraceptive practices in marriage and the need felt by many theologians and bishops to reconsider the established teaching about many other sexual practices, especially same-sex relationships and acts.(39)