Blurting out the truth

An "English gay Catholic" --a PhD student as well, which explains something-- has started a blog in which, while adhering to orthodox RC sexmoral teaching, wants to create "a theology of homosexuality" that honors the experience of gay Catholics.

I found myself blurting out a comment, the heart of which was this:

"For all its virtues, the Catholic Church has nothing whatever to offer to a homosexual person as such, except the message that your deepest drive to fully connect with another human being is shamefully foul. And by implication, that for this reason --this reason-- so are you."

I guess it touched a nerve in this Kinsey Six.

I get it, that some people have either a real faith or a deep attachment to Catholicism and decide to try to follow the Church's teaching on homosexuality by remaining chaste and celibate. And I understand, given how the RC sexual ethic is constructed, that it cannot approve samesex eros...or fornication or masturbation or birth control.

The Church gives a prohibitive moral reading of the actions which would be the outcome of the orientation and comes to the same conclusion as the Dalai Lama: "wrong holes." Consequently, the desire to perform those actions is dis-orderly, if not sinful as such. But what the Church cannot deal with is that for a truly homosexual person, this desire is constitutive of his experience of himself, others and the world. It is not just about holes --any more than heterosexual desire is-- but about human connection. Even the Catechism knows this: “2332. Sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and soul. It especially concerns affectivity..." Yet it still makes believe that somehow this particularly vile sexuality can be treated as if it were unconnected to all of the rest. Whether he calls himself  "gay" or "Uranian" or "androphile" or nothing, if this is the only kind of erotic-sexual-romantic drive he knows, given how deeply gender makes the world and personal identity, to condemn the orientation is functionally to condemn the whole man.

Offhand, I cannot think of any other situation in which the exercise of a constitutive orientation or inclination or drive is so absolutely forbidden and declared to be so absolutely irredeemable at any time.

But then, on that basis, to try to create some kind of positive Catholic reading of it...how the hell do you do that? You may as well try "A Theology of Heterosexual Pedophilia." It's a non-starter.

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