Response to Michael S's Invitation

Thanks, Michael, for your invitation.  I would simply be channeling some Catholic moral theologians whose work I find compelling.  I suggest you bypass me and go to the source!  Here's something of relevance I posted last September:

September 07, 2006

Catholic Theologians, the Catholic Church, and Homosexual Sexual Intimacy

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES--widely regarded as one of the premier theological periodicals in the United States--is published on behalf of the Jesuits in North America.  The editor, a Jesuit priest, is a member of the Department of Theology at Marquette University.

I want to call the attention of MOJ-readers to an article In the most recent issue--an article by two Catholic theologians:  Todd A. Salzman, who is Chair of the Department of Theology at Creighton University,  and Michael G. Lawler, Director of the Center for Marriage and Family Life at Creighton (and an emeritus professor in the theology department there).  Salzman and Lawler are co-authors of the forthcoming volume, Committed Love:  A Catholic Sexual Morality. The title and citation:  "Catholic Sexual Ethics:  Complementarity and the Truly Human," Theological Studies, 67 (2006), 625-52.

In their article, Salzman and Lawler explain why the Catholic Church's official position on the morality of homosexual sexual intimacy--the intimacy that Robby George dismissively calls "sodomy"--is deeply problematic.

In their conclusion, Salzman and Lawler write:

     This disputatio is an inquiry into the nature of the truly human sexual act.  We inquired, first, into the types of complementarity--heterogenital, reproductive, communion, affective, and parental--that the magisterium finds in a truly human sexual act and challenged the primacy granted to heterogenital complementarity as the sine qua non of such a truly human sexual act.  We suggested that the scientific evidence for the genetic, physiological, psychological, and social loading that creates either hetersexual or homosexual orientation as a part of a person's sexual constitution requires the addition of orientation complementarity to the equation.  This addition yielded our conclusion that an integrated orientation, personal, and biological complentarity is a more adequate sine qua non of truly human sexual acts. The truly human sexual act is doubly defined, therefore, as an act that is in accord with a person's sexual orientation and leads to the human flourishing of both partners.  If accepted, that definition will lead to the abandonment of the absolute norm prohibiting homosexual acts for persons with a homosexual orientation.  We repeat, the integration and expression of holistic complementarity, that is, the integration of orientation  with personal and biological complementarity determines whether or not a sexual act is moral or immoral.

Interested readers may also want to consult this article by another Catholic theologian, Stephen J. Pope, of the Department of Theology at Boston College:  "The Magisterium's Argument against 'Same-Sex' Marriages:  An Ethical Analysis and Critique," Theological Studies, 65 (2004), 530-65.

But what about scripture?  Those who wrote the Bible did not know that the earth revolves around the sun; they understandably presupposed with others of their time that the sun revolves around the earth. Nonetheless, we now know that their presupposition was mistaken. Similarly, those who wrote the Bible did not know what we are now learning about the determinants and character of homosexual orientation.  Let me quote, as I did in an earlier post, Galileo:

     The reason produced for condemning the opinion that th earth moves and the sun stands still is that in many places in the Bible one may read that the sun moves and the earth stands still.  Since the Bible cannot err, it follows as a necessary consequence that anyone takes an erroneous and heretical position who maintains that the sun is inherently motionless and the earth movable.

     With regard to this argument, I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth--whenever its true meaning is understood.  But I believe that nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify.  Hence if in expounding the Bible one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error.  Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies. 

Posted by Michael Perry on September  7, 2006 at 02:36 PM in Perry, Michael