More on priests' heterosexual eros

A New York priest (who asked me to withhold his name) emailed me the following in response to Mike Foley's explanation (see here and here) of the importance of "priests' heterosexually oriented eros":

I suppose one way of describing my difficulty with the Foley line (popular I think among some bishops) is that it assumes that the object of erotic desire is the only important factor of a person's sexual makeup, or perhaps it presumes something worse.  That is, I gather that Foley would concede that a person who is gay is capable of orgasm--so that's something they share with heterosexuals.  I presume he would say they are suceptible of lust, another thing they share with heterosexuals.  The question is whether any of the "higher" aspects of human sexuality are shared by homosexuals and heterosexuals alike--that is, those features of our sexual makeup that we would call characterological--the desire for family, for self-sacrificing love, and so forth.

One way of reading the argument (though I think Foley tries to avoid it) is that the homosexual personality is so distorted by the same sex attraction that nothing of value remains in their sexual makeup.  This strikes me as odd in light of the Church's traditional view that the mistake of the "gay subculture" was viewing the person primarily in terms of the object of their erotic desire.  I've always thought that was an important part of the Church's teaching, and not one that has been easy for me to preach in working with gays and lesbians.  It is getting harder now when at least some (applying more of their own version of psychology than of theology) in the Church, purporting to represent orthodoxy, seem to be adopting precisely the vision of "orientation as definitive of the person" that then-Cardinal Ratzinger's 1986 letter so persuasively rejected.

So I will finish by repeating or perhaps clarifying that at least one difficulty with adopting these arguments about the heterosexuality of the priesthood is discerning how one determines the properties of human sexuality (such as the inclination to generativity, desires for begetting, nourishing and defending) that homosexuals and heterosexuals alike share.  There may be different answers for different people as well--it's not clear how one would begin to answer such questions (presumably the methods of psychology would be a likelier source of guidance than those of theology), but it is also not clear that if we cannot answer those questions we should presume answers that suggest the many gay priests who have served the Church over the years were doing so despite their inability to share in the same sort of self-sacrifice as heterosexuals, let alone answers that suggest they ought never to have been ordained at all.