On Sanctifying Sodomy

"The Final Report of Study Group 9 ... is a jaw-dropping attack on Scripture and everything that the Church has ever taught concerning sodomy."

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

The Final Report of Study Group 9 of the Synod on Synodality is a jaw-dropping attack on Scripture and everything that the Church has ever taught concerning sodomy.

Is sodomy no longer a sin? Are instances of same-sex attraction among those inclined to commit it no longer to be viewed as a disorder? Will the sacrament of marriage soon be administered to couples in committed homosexual relationships? 

Has the Church, in other words, changed her mind on the subject of sexual perversion, no longer insisting sodomites cease and desist from a practice that, until quite recently, she had unequivocally condemned? One might certainly think so, judging from the latest document coming out of the Office of the Synod of Bishops, in which the Church’s traditional teaching is thoroughly trashed on the grounds that it persists in keeping alive a “paradigm” no longer applicable in today’s world.

“The Church’s mission,” we are now being told,

is not a matter of abstractly proclaiming and deductively applying principles that are set out in an immutable and rigid manner, but of fostering a living encounter with the person of the risen Lord Jesus, by engaging with the lived experience of faith of the People of God.

And when the lived experience finds itself at variance with the received teaching of the Church? What then? Why simply adjust the teaching to fit the practice. God forbid that people should have to adjust their practice to fit the teaching. Unless, of course, like all tyrants, the Church were to force her teaching down unwelcome throats, thus causing people to throw up.

Otherwise, the document appears to be saying, we shall all remain helpless “against the temptation of the sterile and regressive ossification of principles and statements, of norms and rules,” which stand athwart “the lived experience of individuals and communities.”

You mean, like so many normal gay men and women who wish only to have Mother Church approve and bless their union like everyone else? And thus to reinforce the point, the authors include actual testimony from self-confessed Catholic homosexuals, who proudly claim to be married to other men. They are entirely at peace, too, with the arrangement, inasmuch as they see it as both assuaging their own appetites for gay sex while, according to their lights, satisfying the demands of the Church’s faith.  

“My sexuality,” insists Jason Steidel, one of the two men quoted in the report—last seen, by the way, on the front page of The New York Times, photographed alongside his so-called husband while receiving a blessing from Fr. James Martin, S.J.,—“isn’t a perversion, disorder, or cross; it’s a gift from God.  

I have a happy, healthy marriage and am flourishing as an openly gay Catholic. It’s taken years of prayer, therapy, and affirming community to get here, but I thank God for my sexuality and station in life…. Being an LGBTQ Catholic is not easy, and many days I grieve the harm the church has caused. But I also have hope. I have witnessed conversion during Pope Francis’ papacy at the local and universal levels of the church, and I look forward to helping build up the body of Christ that reflects Jesus’ ministry of healing and inclusion. 

He is not alone, it seems. A number of progressive prelates have joined the same team, including no less a figure than the current Cardinal-Archbishop of Washington, D.C., Robert McElroy, whose embrace of “radical inclusion” requires that LGBTQ+ Catholics, however unrepentant, be given a seat at the same table where heterosexual Catholics dine, prompting his fellow bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, to suggest that by holding such a view, which is flat-out heretical, he may no longer be “in full communion with the Catholic Church.”

Not a problem, meanwhile, for Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, who has long argued that, thanks to the discoveries of “value-free” modern science, we now know that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality has become hopelessly outdated—positively paleolithic even. We need to jettison it at once, therefore, lest we remain so hidebound in our beliefs and habits that no one will ever take us seriously again.

We must overcome the obvious inadequacies of the creation account in Genesis, for instance, which rather quaintly supposes that God was actually making us male and female and that the institution of marriage and family would naturally follow. Not at all, he tells us. Instead, we need to apply “a synodal interpretation of the text,” in order to see that, in fact, it was “humanity” that God was creating, not men and women. Such Bronze Age binaries must give way to a more polymorphous conception of how humanity chooses to mate.

“We as Church are part of that humanity,” he reminds us, “and we are called to serve humanity.” Yes, even when it looks as if it’s throwing itself off the nearest cliff.

Well, here’s my binary, and it leaves little room for maneuver: either sodomy is a sin, in which case those who practice it need to repent and try, with God’s grace, to get over it; or, if it’s not a sin, then throw out the two testaments, Old and New, along with every other stricture of nature and grace going all the way back to Eden before and after the Fall—leaving nothing at all left to forbid in the sexual realm.

Or favor, for that matter. Like chastity, which is the practice, in these days ever more necessary and heroic, to conform one’s sexuality to a standard of self-mastery after the pattern of Jesus Christ Himself. Isn’t that, after all, the real mission of the Church? To help us all live more chaste lives in order to burnish the image in which we were first made and, thus, grow ever more perfectly into the likeness of God?

The bottom line here is that the Church is not now, nor has she ever been, pastorally invested in the spread of sin. Her job is to do all that she can to help us get to Heaven, which means urging us all to become saints. Yes, even the sodomites. Provided, that is, like the rest of us, they give up their sins.