See No Evil?

Along with is boss, the Archbishop Elect of Washington, DC has no problem calling God's inspired word and the Church liars on sexual morality.

From Crisis

By Anthony Esolen, PhD

The newly appointed archbishop of Washington, D.C. sadly shares the assumption prevalent among liberal theological and exegetes, that the Scripture contains, as Hans Kung put it, a lot of "trash."

The newly appointed archbishop of Washington, D.C., Robert McElroy, says that the Church has learned more about human sexuality since the days of St. Paul and that, armed with this knowledge, we can now interpret Paul’s strictures against homosexual behavior as applying only to its abusive forms in ritual prostitution and pederasty but not to people who are committed to loving one another till death should part them.

I once believed the same thing and argued along the same lines; but that was 35 years ago, when I was relatively young and more than relatively stupid, and when I had not yet shaken off the assumption, prevalent among liberal theologians and exegetes, that the Scripture contains, as Hans Kung put it, a lot of “trash.” I had not yet studied the Old Testament in Hebrew or the New Testament in Greek, nor had I come to terms with the systematic coherence and interdependence of the Church’s teachings on sex, marriage, and the bearing and raising of children. 

I was, effectively, a heretic. I will not get into the details of what persuaded me to give up the heresy and obey, except to say that it took a little time. I did not see everything at once, but I ended up experiencing the enlightening effects of intellectual submission and obedience. Truth sheds light upon further truth.

It is not difficult to pick to pieces the tired old arguments for Sodom Over the Rainbow. First, St. Paul’s condemnation of homosexual behavior in Romans 1 has nothing to do with any cultural context or attendant emotions. The only thing he focuses on is that it is male with male or female with female. It is therefore contrary to created nature. The sin he has principally in mind is not prostitution or an imbalance of power between man and boy but idolatry. 
Punishing our sins, God delivers us over to the vanity of our corrupted imaginations. We reduce, we pervert, “likening our Maker to the grazed ox,” as Milton says of the rebel king Jeroboam. To turn the male into a mock-female, to sow the seed of new life in a sewer or to consume it, is an offense to the Creator, who made all things wisely and not with incoherence and absurdity and futility. It is an anti-creation, manifest in the impossibility per se that such actors can increase and multiply and fill the earth.

Second, Scripture is often sublimely uninterested in the feelings of sinners. Moses does not poll the children of Israel as to what they felt when they erected the golden calf. Ezekiel does not care about the religious passions of the women desecrating the Temple when, to quote Milton again, “His eye surveyed the dark idolatries / Of alienated Judah.” I have no doubt that St. Paul, living among the pagan Greeks, had encountered many a homosexual pair who considered themselves the finest of friends, and no doubt Jesus understood that ill-matched husbands and wives might like to get quit of one another and then marry somebody who could make the sun seem to shine brighter. Did John the Baptist care about the feelings of Herod Antipas and his former sister-in-law Herodias? 

Physicians do not care if we like our poison, nor does the poison consult our opinion; and moral evil is to the soul as poison is to the body. What guilt God imputes to people who are partly ignorant of the evil is a separate question, as is whether evil passions such as cruelty or vindictiveness or wrath compound the evil in the individual case. You can no more have a spiritually healthy society in which fornication is taken as a norm, with sodomy smuggled in by the back gate, than you can have a healthy body if you consume ergot-mildewed wheat and drink the scum of stagnant pools.

Third, the reason why you cannot choose among the teachings regarding sex is not that you are legalistically enjoined to accept them all. It is that they imply one another; they are, as it were, a body. It will not do to say that one of them is more important than another, when none of them makes complete sense without the others. The brain, considered alone, may be more noble than the kidneys or the bone marrow or the stomach, but you cannot live unless all of those organs are in order, and the organs themselves make sense only as organs, in one body.  

Consider Jesus’ injunction against divorce. He reminds His audience not of legal permissions or requirements but of foundational reality. “Have you not heard,” He says, “that in the beginning God made them male and female, and for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall be one flesh?” Someone greater than Moses is here. He is the ultimate lawgiver, the Word through whom all things were made. 

The indissolubility of marriage is presented to us as an objective fact, not as dependent on anyone’s hope for happiness in this world. This fact is located not in the mind but in the structure of bodies male and female, made for one another. There is no such thing as either sex without the other; they make no sense individually; to pretend otherwise is, to use the powerful Old Testament negative, tohu wa bohu—waste and void, absurd, empty. No permission of homosexual action can, logically, get past Jesus’ condemnation of divorce because the meaning of sex is marital, and marriage is a created reality.

Fourth, Jesus clearly numbers fornication among the sins that “come out of a man” to defile him; and even if we want to plug wax in our ears to ignore the Lord, we have Sts. Paul, John, and Jude saying the same thing, with ringing clarity. Is fornication the worst of sins? Assuredly not. Nor is pneumonia as bad as a bullet in the head; but it can kill you just as well. 

Scripture does not take sexual sin lightly. Genesis is a saga of strife, confusion, and tragedy occasioned by this most unruly of passions, the sexual. Sodom is presented as the most appalling instance, but by no means are the Sodomites alone; think of the rape of Dinah, the bed trick pulled by Laban and Leah, or Potiphar’s adulterous wife accusing the innocent Joseph when she does not get her way with him. 

Well, if mere fornication is wrong, though it does not violate the created nature of bodies male and female, then we need not trouble ourselves about the morality of sexual actions that do violate that nature. The argument works a fortiori. The converse also holds. If we are to wink at sodomy, we have no logical grounds, none, for condemning fornication, which at least may result in a genuine marriage down the road. Again, the teachings are organically coherent. Remove the skin, and the whole person dies—heart, head, lungs, everything.

Finally, we have learned things about human sexuality—but not what the bishop has in mind. Rather, they are things the liberal Catholic must labor not to see. We can observe that in the case of male homosexuality in societies wherein pederasty is not a way of life, there is some trauma back of it, some thwarting or perverting of the universal male desire to form brotherhoods, to be accepted by other boys or men as one of the gang, the platoon, the crew, the team, the council. We can look at the lives of homosexual men and see this early derailment. From it, we can predict that “monogamy” in their case makes no sense, as exclusivity in male friendship makes no sense. We can also predict a few other things that are not pleasant to discuss, that have to do with crimes, so to speak, unresolved in childhood.

We can also observe the terrible wreckage the sexual revolution has caused, especially among the working class and the poor, whose moral capital, about the only capital they possessed, it has rifled. When the bishop was a boy, people of no great perspicacity might dream that a new age of delight between man and woman was dawning now that they were being set free from the old rules. How anyone can think so now is beyond me. I imagine someone in 1960 giving Hugh Hefner or Helen Gurley Brown a glimpse of our current malaise: loneliness, family chaos, and confusion. Even those ruiners might have repented in advance, Hefner becoming a family man in some Mayfield, Brown joining a convent of nuns.

What explains such blindness? Misplaced tenderness of heart? Foggy thinking? Ambition? Unrepented sin? The accidents of political alliance? And why do people who say they care about the poor not care about the least considered among the poor? Why do they not care that their permissiveness lays a snare in the path of the lonely or fatherless boy, or the young man and woman who see no point in getting the marriage before the baby? What is at back of their abrogation of Scripture, the consistent teaching of the Church for two thousand years, and common sense and decency?