The Boston Globe Wed  Feb 25  1998

Catholic Church invites homosexuals to choose life

JOHN M. HAAS

My friend is an educated man with an earned doctorate. He is Catholic. And he is, as he puts it, gay. 

One evening as we sipped hot tea in a Chinese restaurant, he leaned toward me and said, “John, you have to realize, we gays want just what you straight people want. Marriage, a family, children.”

“Those are lovely sentiments, Charlie,” I responded. “But don’t you think God has a plan for the way families are to come into being?”

“I used to,” he replied. “But not anymore.”

The conversation was short, but it seemed to capture the fundamental difference in outlook between those who find they can never accept homosexuality and those who consider it merely another way of living out one’s life. Of course, in our conversation I used the language of a believer when I asked if my friend did not think “God had a plan.” But I could have just as well asked, “Don’t you think nature has a plan for the way families are to come into being?”

The Catholic church’s position on homosexuality is portrayed by some as harsh and cruel. Indeed a recent opinion piece referred to it as “hurtful,” “medieval,” “repressed,” and “contradictory.” Yet it is such charges that leave those who are not homosexual baffled. To us the church’s position seems merely to correspond to reality, to express the way things are, not the way some people wish they might be.

Underlying the church’s teaching on homosexuality is the conviction that sex makes sense; it has a purpose, a meaning. We do not need a special revelation from God to tell us what it is.

People have only to open their eyes and their minds. The church has the conviction that humanity is divided into male and female for a reason. It reflects a design and a plan not of our own making.

The purpose of sex is so self-evident it is bewildering how some do not see it. At the most fundamental level of human existence we can see that there simply would be no perpetuation of the species without a reproductive cell from the man and one from the woman which find themselves joined in one of the most remarkable of human activities.

The church is often accused of devising arbitrary moral norms with apparently no purpose than to thwart human happiness. Yet, she is convinced that her teachings are the very opposite of arbitrary. They reflect the way things are.

The church’s teaching on sexuality is really no more difficult to understand than understanding that men and women were made for one another, for love, for bonding, for engendering children and establishing a family. 

Admittedly, church documents do not always explain teachings in ways that are easily understood in contemporary society. A number of years ago the Vatican issued a Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics. In it the topic of homosexual practices was addressed. Not surprisingly it judged them to be wrong and gave the following reasons: “According to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts which lack an essential and indispensable finality.”

In other words, they do not fulfill the purposes (finalities) of human sexuality. 

We Catholics know that if people do not use their bodies according to nature’s design, they may suffer. This is true if people overeat, do not get enough rest, drink too much, use drugs. This is certainly the case with homosexual practices. After all, there are reasons why you will find proctologists and immune disorder treatment centers advertising in gay newspapers.

Is the church being cruel by warning people to avoid practices that are proven to be harmful physically and which we believe are also harmful spiritually? In fact, church leaders believe they have a moral obligation to warn people about such practices.  All her teachings are but different ways of expressing her concern for human happiness.

I know a Catholic priest who was chaplain at an Ivy League school. He was accepting of all students, including those who were self-declared gays. Yet he always, with sensitivity, presented the church’s teaching about homosexuality. One day a former student who had been active in the Catholic center returned to campus. The priest recounts that it was one of the worst days of his life when this young man tearfully and angrily accused him of not warning him more forcefully about the dangers of his homosexual lifestyle. Now he is dying of AIDS. 

Jesus looked on the city of Jerusalem in his day and was moved to tears at the thought of the human misery within its walls. “If only you know the things which make for peace,” he lamented. Today his church looks on a world in misery and with heavy heart repeats his words, “If only you knew the things which make for peace.”

The church bears ill will toward no one. Certainly not homosexuals. What she desires for them is the fullness of life. That is why she warns them against those actions which have brought so much suffering and death. Quoting the Bible, the church extends an invitation to all: “Choose life.”

John M. Haas is president of the Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care.