By the Publisher Love One Another! 1/2003 → Family Life
Jesus tells us that every extramarital and premarital sexual union is a grave violation of the virtue of chastity; this is also true in the case of homosexuality.
In its Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons (1986), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith states that although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.
Therefore, special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and teaches within the Church, clearly states what the aims of the sexual act must be. Natural law, Holy Scripture and Tradition insist on two inherent aims of the marital act: namely, the unitive (i.e. the inseparable bond between the man and woman) and the procreative (the bearing of children). To exclude one of these fundamental aims is morally impermissible. Since homosexual acts do not meet either of the two aims of the conjugal act, all such acts are contrary to natural law and immoral. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture – states the Catechism of the Catholic Church – 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 appoved (2357).
Holy Scripture lists homosexual acts among the sins that exclude people from salvation. Do not be decieved; neither idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor 6:9; cf. 1 Tim 1:9-11).
St. Paul deplores homosexual behavior as a grave depravity: women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error (Rom 1:26-27).
In Leviticus we read that if a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination (Lev 20:13; cf. 18:22).
Thus, Holy Scripture condemns all extramarital, including homosexual, sexual acts as a depravity contrary to the natural law. Any attempt at a moral justification of homosexual acts and homosexual marriages constitutes action against the Divine Law.
Human beings are either male or female in every cell of their bodies from the moment of birth until death. Homosexuality, however, is an acquired orientation, not unlike other personality traits such as trust or lack of trust, sense of inferiority or superiority, emotional dependence or inner freedom. These attitudes take shape through the individual’s personal interaction with his parents, peers and other people. Homosexuality is a disorder, apeculiar developmental anomaly. Claims that homosexuality is an innate tendency have absolutely no scientific basis. God created us as heterosexual beings. The homosexual orientation is a psychosexual deviation acquired through the negative influence of the environment.
Our hedonistic culture of death is blind to the objective evil of homosexual acts. The best way of dealing with the orientation – it claims – is to find a partner and live with him. The Church founded by Christ, however, teaches that only in matrimony between a man and a woman can sexual acts be moral. Thus, the person who engages in homosexual behavior commits immorality. To chose someone of the same sex for one’s sexual acivity is to annul the rich symbolism and meaning, not to mention the goals, of the Creator’s sexual design. Homosexual activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so its thwarts the call to a life of that form of selfgiving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living (Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,7).
The homosexual act achieves little more than mutual masturbation.
The above article was published with permission
from Miłujcie się! in November 2010
