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

The Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II all have accepted and worked with this new starting point for thinking about human sexuality: the significance of the unitive meaning of human sexual activity as an expression of interpersonal love.(40) Two things stand out about their efforts. One is that human sexual activity as an embodied expression of self-giving, covenantal love remains normatively linked to marriage. The other is the relationship between self-giving love and the procreative meaning of sexual self-donation. Hence. the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on the relationship between the unitive and procreative meanings of sex is abundantly clear. Pope Paul VI expressed it bluntly in his encyclical letter Humanae Vitae: "The church... teaches that each and every marriage act... must remain open to the transmission of life... That teaching... is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning.(41)

Less clear perhaps is the basis the official teaching has for affirming that this connection is willed by God as inseparable in every single act of sexual intercourse and so nominative for human sexual behaviour. More than one Catholic theologian has called this teaching a position in search of an argument,(42) though Pope John Paul II among others has expended a great deal of ink trying to make the argument.(43) In brief, the argument insists that for the mutual, total gift of self to one another which is marriage, the gift of one's embodied sexuality and fertility in all its natural fullness must be included. That gift is intelligible and authentic only if given to and received by one capable of receiving it, that is, a member of the opposite sex. In short, so the argument runs, artificial contraceptive practices, and all the more homosexual activity, involve a partial withholding of the total gift of self, and so are inescapably an intentional failure in the meaning and reality of marital love.

Persuasive or not, for our purposes here the above sketch enables us to see why, despite the new appreciation for sexuality as a constitutive aspect of human identity and the positive evaluation of the interpersonal significance of sexual activity, the Roman Catholic Church, at least in its official teaching, remains convinced of the immorality of homosexual conduct, and why as a consequence it continues to understand and describe the homosexual orientation not as sinful, but as optically disordered.(44)

Homosexual rights

Given Catholic teaching on the created dignity of every human person as the foundation of human rights.(46) and its understanding of sexual orientation, a homosexual orientation is in and of itself irrelevant to the question of rights.(46) Homosexual persons share the same human dignity and may claim the same human and civil rights(47) in both church and society as heterosexual individuals. Nor does immoral behaviour deprive anyone of human dignity and human rights, though it may be reason to define more narrowly or even curtail some civil rights.(48)