We’re still generally under West’s new context for understanding sexual morality as presented in his article, I merely wanted to do a preliminary exercise in how to arrive at conclusions based on what we have read so far especially the 4 marks of genuine sexuality according to the Holy Father. So this week we’re talking about contraception and self-imposted sterility one the one hand and Homosexuality which I have here termed homoeroticism on the other.
Intentionally Sterilized Acts
The Church rejects contraception on the grounds of bodily bondage among other reasons. To use hormones contraceptively is to put the body in bondage to a foreign schedule of fertility and to subject it to foreign powers. It means to take into our own hands a perfectly functional female body and to tell it “stop being as you were created.” The tragedy is that the modern age spares no expense in attempting to reinterpret this as a positive event.
In men, vasectomies and condoms are much the same. The tragedy is that we assume that there is great freedom in being able to wrap our genitals in balloons, and celebrate this as freedom. This would be hillarious if it were not so obstinately and dogmatically defended. Vasectomies are a rising trend in men in the 21st century, and the tragedy here is that the male body was meant to provide, not only shelter and economic support, or even love alone. In matrimony the woman’s body is a natural receptacle for not only orgasmic pleasure, but seed. The female body was created with this reception in sight.
The overarching inconsistency is that we live in a culture that desires to call this freedom at all costs, despite the bodily detriments and wounds to body and soul that these produce. The human body was created to produce children when sexually mature and engaged in mutual conjugality. Marriages shut off to children are de facto not marital. This does not mean infertile couples are inferior, merely that they too are called to raise, educate and make room for children with their lives and marriages.
Homosexuality and Homoeroticism
The Church does not hate homosexuals, in the least. However, you can see that the initial look at homosexuality falls under all these categories. If you do not wish to begin with the givenness of the body, and that maleness and femaleness are created for each other, there are other ways that the Church may affirm the same realities. For the sake of argument I will do so here.
If we were to examine homosexual actions we have to see the logical conclusion that homoeroticism is a violation of everything conjugal and thus is not truly a sexuality at all. We have seen that sexuality requires nuptiality and that nuptiality has certain conditions of givenness that uphold and support it for it to be true sexual expression of the human body. Now, this is not to say homosexual affections, which we will attend to in the future.
Homosexuality is a form of eroticism turned in upon its own gender. The Church has not outlined a concise and formal Magisterial teaching on the cause of homosexualty, and we will not venture so bold a move. Suffice it to say, we must take seriously that many of the aforementioned conclusions about givenness and especially the freedom for fruitful love are impossible within homosexual relationships.
Many detractors might offer that if you reduce relationships to their solely procreative meaning, then infertile couples are just as morally culpable as homoerotic relationships.
I disagree for the following reason: Infertility is a physical irregularity, but the relationship still expresses as closely as possible the nuptiality made possible by Christ’s reaffirmation of maleness and femaleness. Homosexual unity suffers not only from psychic irregularity, it expresses this irregularity through a physical irregularity that is not a logical consequence, but an election against trust in our createdness.
If bodies speak a nuptial language, this means that my maleness speaks of the type of conjugality it was created for. If I elect to participate in sexuality it must be a nuptial sexuality, it must fit all the positive freedoms that are the responsibility of a true sexuality.
Sexuality cannot possibly mean anything through which or to which I apply genital desires and thoughts. As all other bodily interactions it has to have a common language and an ethic to guide it.
As we have been deducing, sexuality is not a self-evident right, but a discipline with certain goals and rights and responsibilities whose ultimate outcome is mutual upbuilding of male and female unity towards the creation of an existence outside the two, a contingency, a child. To have the freedom to do this is the ultimate right and responsibility of a marriage where conception is possible.
Bonding and intimate togetherness alone cannot fulfill the nuptial meaning of the body because in being spoken for by each other, our bodies testify to their procreative abilities. This is the great freedom of the Church, that she is free to love children, free to welcome them, free to love sexuality because she offers an authentic one, free to love nuptiality, because it is rightly reflected in her doctrines. The Church is the great liberator, freeing us from a society that tells us that the lowest common denominator of license and desire is freedom. The Church offers us a renewed vision, a faith that is costly, but because of its cost, is worth so much more.
Homoerotic union is simply a violation of the sexual vocations inherent to the faith. It is a self-sterilization. Again, the cause is undeclared formally by the church, and the suffering and pain and torn emotions in homosexual Christians is certainly not to be taken lightly, or callously. Compassion impels our ultimate concern for our brothers and sisters, but we must nevertheless reaffirm 2,000 years of Christian wisdom.
A Journey with the Holy Father 