Last October, the Roman Catholic Bishops of Ontario issued a brief statement objecting to Section 18 of Bill 7, a Bill aimed at bringing Ontario’s legislation in line with the Carter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 18 called for “sexual orientation” to be placed under Ontario Human Rights Code, 1981, forbidding “discrimination” against it. Neither terms were defined or explained.
The bishops pointed out that this was unacceptable, allowing all sorts of interpretations. Their stand completed the efforts of others, such as R.E.A.L. Women, Evangelical and Pentecostal churches and Catholics Active for Life. All had drawn attention to the same error and to the serious nature of this legislation earlier in 1986 when similar legislation was proposed federally.
Awareness about what was unfolding federally was raised by The Interim, through the editor’s comprehensive coverage of the hearings conducted by the House of Commons Committee faced a flood of briefs and oral presentations from homosexual and lesbian groups. The hearings led to recommendations in October 1985 for “sexual orientation” to be placed under the Canadian Human Rights Act. In March 1986, the then Minister of Justice, Mr. John Crosbie, did not embrace that particular recommendation, but he did announce a policy of guaranteeing homosexuals entry into the RCMP, the Armed Forces and the federal civil service. Many saw this as a welcome preliminary step.
The first move by the federal Tories towards legal recognition of “sexual orientation” was soon complemented in Ontario by David Peterson’s Liberal government, when the legislative Justice Committee accepted an NDP sponsored amendment, in May 1986, calling for protection of “sexual orientation” under the Ontario Human Rights Code. There were no public hearings to debate such a contentious amendment; just a Liberal-NDP coalition determined to push it through.
The literature issued by the above-mentioned groups, while remaining respectful of the rights of homosexual individuals, rejected the government’s stand that nothing more was involved than the mere right to jobs, housing and service. It countered the common fallacy that homosexuality is congenital, and that its practice has no serious consequences.
Acceptable alternative
In the past, the homosexual community itself has made it clear that the battle for “sexual orientation” is to be understood as the justification of the homosexual lifestyle. Also, according to them, “discrimination” is an attempt to deny or object to the view that homosexual behaviour is an acceptable alternative to “heterosexuality.” The overall strategy of the “gay drive for acceptance” was summed up by Richard Goldstein in the Village Voice of June 12, 1980:
“In the end, the gay alternative means departure not just from heterosexuality, but from social orthodoxy…In other words, gay liberation is a social event. In its most moderate politics – the enactment of civil rights legislation – it has radical potential because civil rights legislation opens the way to acceptance, and acceptance opens the way of the dissolution of the norm.”
The Bill 7 debate provided the occasion for charges of hate literature against opponents of Section 18 by media and politicians, especially when these opponents represented views endorsed by religion. One astonishing attack came from Tory MPP Susan Fish who charged that the Bishops “had introduced McCarthyism” into Canada and that their stand should be regarded as a “deadly, deadly attack on human rights.” Not a voice was raised in protest against this defamation except that of the Bishops themselves.
Nothing further will be said here about similar travesties of truth elsewhere in the daily press or in the Legislature. Instead, I want to draw attention to how dissenters among Catholics continue to undermine essential moral principles.’
By chance, following closely on the Ontario Bishops position vis-à-vis the proposed Ontario legislation (now enacted), the Vatican issued a statement on The Pastoral Care of Homosexuals, on October 30, 1986. It came in the form of a letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith addressed to all Catholic bishops in the world.
This letter not only reiterated the Church’s past condemnation of homosexual activity, but it also clarified that homosexual orientation should not be understood as simply neutral:
“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”
The letter published at this time precisely to counteract “assertions inconsistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church” (Section 1) and the “enormous pressure (brought) to bear on the church to accept the homosexual condition as though it were not disordered…” (Section 8). It noted that “those within the church who argue in this fashion often have close ties with those with similar views outside it, (who) are guided by a vision opposed to the truth.” (8)
Opposing Rome
The letter stated that “an overly benign interpretation” has been given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral or even good, and that there “is an effort in some countries to manipulate the church by gaining the often well-intentioned support of her pastors with a view of changing civil statutes and law.” (Section 9) It directed that “all support should be withdrawn from any organizations that seek to undermine the teaching of the Church, which are ambiguous about it or which neglect it entirely.”
The letter concluded that “departure form the Church’s teaching or silence about it, in an effort to provide pastoral care, is either caring nor pastoral.” (Section 14) It closed with the reminder that the Lord Jesus promised, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” (Jn. 8. 32) and that Scripture bids us speak the truth in love (cf. Eph. 4.15).
In the U.S. there was the expected outcry form members of Dignity, a group of Catholic homosexuals who reject the church’s condemnation of homosexual activity, and from the regular spokesmen for dissenting theologians and clergy, whose interests in opposing Rome here coincided with those of homosexual activists. The National Catholic Reporter (NCR), which in years past has supported an “opening towards homosexuality among clergy and nuns, provided the necessary publicity.
Many critics
In Canada too, Dignity spokesmen in Edmonton, Toronto and elsewhere were quick to criticize the Vatican, duly reported in the daily press, of course. But the Vatican statement also met opposition from more influential sources. The first one was the editor of the Saskatchewan Catholic weekly, Prairie Messenger, Fr. Andrew Britz. In an editorial on November 24, 1986, he rebuked the Vatican. He did not challenge any one point in particular, but he objected to the document (as well as to the Vatican action against Fr. Charles Curran in August 1986), as contrary to the true spirit of the Church. According to him, there was “great danger that many languishing out in the wilderness will see only a harsh church that does not understand their weakness…” The thrust of his editorial seemed to be that the Church must be at home with prostitutes and homosexuals, but should not tell them what their sinfulness is all about nor explain it to the rest of the faithful.
The Prairie Messenger’s view is not uncommon among those who have come to think of compassion and truth as opposites. But as the letter indicates, truth is compassion’s first duty.
While the Saskatchewan editor thought that “compassion” requires silence from church leaders, a Toronto paper continued its log-standing support for Catholic homosexuals. On October 26, the Catholic New Times (CNT) carried the article “Prayer group supports gay Catholics.” It reported on Covenant Circles, described as an organization helping homosexual people to grow spiritually through retreats and other pious practices. Last year’s retreat, the article noted, had been directed by Fr. John McNeill, S.J. psychotherapist and author of The Church and the Homosexual, who was to return shortly for a second visit.
What the CNT did not mention was that the same Dr. McNeill rejects the Church’s teaching on homosexuality as intolerable, that his 1976 book has been disowned by the Church and that he himself was in open conflict with his own order because of all of this. The Jesuits expelled him in January 1987. Hardly the person, one would think, to help troubled people grow spiritually. But then, McNeill would also deny that homosexuals are more troubled than other people. They are supposed to be gay.
Out of touch
The CNT also covered the Ontario Bishops’ statement (plus some related items) and, in its November 23 edition, the Vatican Letter. In both cases, dissenting views (often sweeping condemnations) were aired at length and the presentations in general seemed to be based on the notion that it was a clash of different views of more or less equal value.
Fr. McNeill’s visit to Toronto in the beginning of December gave the CNT the opportunity to print a sympathetic account of him as a persecuted individual under the title “Jesuit breaks Vatican directive.” (The directive prohibited him from speaking publicly on homosexuality and ministering to homosexuals.) Readers were informed that, “simply leading the group in a weekend of prayer and reflection means McNeill was disobeying the directive.” As for the Vatican Letter, McNeill called it “homophobic and life-destroying.” It indicates, he thought, how seriously the Vatican is out of touch with the people of the church.
In January 1987, the CNT published two articles which criticized the Vatican openly. One was written by Rabbi Dow Marmur, supposedly to explain the Jewish tradition on homosexuality and human rights. But, as might be expected from someone who is a public supporter of Henry Morgentaler, the article presented a caricature of the authentic Judaic tradition as well as of the issues surrounding Bill 7.
The second article, “Human Rights,” was by Gregory Baum, presently professor of Religious Studies at Montreal’s McGill University.
In his article Baum, charged that the Vatican letter is marred by a basic contradiction and confusion: defending rights of homosexuals as individuals, yet denying that homosexual rights should be protected under the law. Cardinal Ratzinger’s warning against what Baum called protecting the human rights of homosexuals by law,” he said, “is shameless.” It is “particularly offensive,” he continued, because the Cardinal is German. He should know he said, that homosexuals suffered under the Nazis.
Logically enough, Baum castigated the Ontario Bishops for doing the same thing as Cardinal Ratzinger (who he assumes is the author of the Vatican letter). He also berated them for joining forces in opposing Ontario’s Bill 7, “with citizens’ groups with outspoken right wing programs,” an accusation delivered without proof of evidence.
Sensible people
In between the various accusations, almost as an aside hardly worth mentioning, Baum offered the opinion that sensible people really didn’t expect much from Rome anyway. After all, he tells us, “the Catholic Church is a recent convert to human rights.” And ever since the Church’s conversion (apparently during the years 1962-65), “the old approach (of supposedly by opposing these rights)”, he stated, “often creeps into our thinking.”
Baum’s perceived contradiction in the letter from Rome on pastoral care of homosexuals does not exist in reality.
As individuals, homosexuals already have all the rights (and duties) of ordinary Canadians, including protection from persecution, harassment, etc. To seek protection for their homosexual characteristics such as their lifestyle, however, is to bestow upon them special rights, rights associated not with inherent, or inherited, or legitimate beliefs, but with acquired behaviour which is morally disordered. Legislation on “sexual orientation” enshrines moral disorder under the protective custody of law.
The reference to Cardinal Ratzinger’s German background is quite inappropriate, if for no other reason than because Vatican documents are not the personal missives of individual Cardinals. However, the charge is typical of a strategy development since Vatican II whereby, dissenters attack the personalities of the presumed author or authors in an attempt to “demythologize” authoritative teaching documents.
The situation of the homosexuals in Germany was also more complex than Gregory Baum makes it out to be. German cultural and intellectual life died after Hitler cam to power in 1933; but before that date German secular literature, stage and film was often nihilistic and decadent. The increase in homosexuality played no small role therein. While one should deplore the events after 1933, it should not lead one to conclude that because homosexual individuals carried a separate identity badge in concentration camps, they suffered more than others, or that their lifestyle is thereby somehow justified.
The charge about the Ontario Bishops associating with supposedly “right wing” groups is verbal violence. In current Canadian thinking the accusation sends shivers down the spines of any audience. Apparently, it is about to find a place within the Catholic Church in Canada, where people who desire to remain faithful to orthodox teaching are now denounced as “fundamentalists.”
While some people may want to thank Dr. Baum for letting them know that the Catholic Church now believes in human rights, some others may want to recall that this is not because of a supposed conversion at the second Vatican Council. The point of the Church’s rejection of the permissive society and the theories which feed it, including those of the homosexuals, is that this philosophy undermines, and ultimately destroys the rights of everybody. In other words, the document on homosexuality is a “human rights” statement in itself. By defending the true moral order based on the teaching of its divine founder, the Church defends the dignity and rights of all human persons, including their vocation to an eternal life.
The Church has done so not merely since Vatican II but from the beginning of her existence, in season and out of season, battling heresies and assaults of all kinds, not least of which were those which have attempted to replace with substitutes the authentic Christian teaching on marriage and the human body as gifts from God to be treasured and honoured. Perhaps at no time has this battle been fought so fiercely as today.
Meanwhile, key concepts such as the equality of all men and women, the nobility of suffering, the dignity of each individual human being, were and are Christian concepts originally introduced into a hostile Roman Empire and defended by the Church throughout the ages in the name of her divine founder.
Today, individual human life is sacred only for those who believe that God gives each human being a soul destined for immortality. Without that belief, one may readily join Stalin, or Mengele, or Morgentaler.
With the appearance of the October 1986 Vatican document, the press, fed by Catholic homosexuals, laity, as well as some priests, has taken great delight in letting the world know that many Catholic priests are homosexual and that the Church is lagging in helping AIDS victims.
Both accusations are false, though this is no reason to close one’s eyes to some ugly developments.
Recent court cases, such as the ones against two Catholic priests for molesting altar boys in Ottawa and Cornwall, reports of some two dozen priests in the United States who have AIDS (out of 64,000 priests), and the publication of a book about some 40 American nuns who claim to be lesbians (out of 125,000 nuns), are clear evidence that a number of priests and nuns have acted both against their personal vows and Christian doctrine. Now, apparently, some of them feel obliged to discredit the Church at the same time as they are denouncing her condemnation of their lifestyle.
One such person appears to be Father Stephen Manning of Toronto, a member of the Dominican Order and a self-acknowledged homosexual, who in February 1987, publicly claimed that the Church was doing little for those with AIDS. He also explained to the newspapers that the Vatican letter “is an ignorant, malicious, cruel, nasty piece of work…It is based on illusion and doesn’t recognize the diversity of sexuality.”
What are we to learn from all this? First, perhaps that Catholic theologians and clergy who reject or ridicule their own spiritual leaders are not likely to change their minds. For them “dialogue” seems to a one-way street leading to a hardening of attitudes and a growing defiance of their Church and, I would add, of general sanity. Let me illustrate this with two examples.
Gregory Baum is a well-known dissenter. From the mid-sixties onwards he began to disagree publicly with Church teaching on sexual and family morality. In 1968 he was one of the leaders in the Church who rebelled against the papal encyclical On Human Life. Although he admitted in a 1970 interview with June Callwood of the Globe and Mail that he really hadn’t been aware of the Church’s age-old tradition of moral teaching, he continued to criticize this teaching with abandon.
Called to order
In the early seventies Baum’s views on homosexuality were used extensively by members of the homosexual community in their literature across North America to prove that traditional Catholic teaching on homosexuality was in error and …about to change. When the Vatican issued a normative statement on Sexual Ethic in 1976, reiterating its teaching, Baum rejected it publicly. At that time, still in Toronto and still a priest, he was called to order by Toronto’s Archbishop Philip Pocock. Stated the Archbishop:
“Father Baum’s published reactions are contrary to official Catholic doctrine and may not be followed as either the teaching or practice of the Catholic Church.” (Catholic Register, March 13, 1976)
Eleven years later, Baum still feels called upon to denounce the Vatican and still finds an eager audience for his views.
Andrè Guindon
Another such person is Father Andrè Guindon of St Paul’s University in Ottawa. In his 1976 book Sexual Language, Fr. Guindon analyzed the homosexual lifestyle, found it wanting, but nevertheless concluded that for some it could be “the most moral thing to do…” (See Part IV of “Sexual Revolution, feminism an the Church,” The Interim July/August 1986)
New role model
Fr. Guindon’s thinking has continued to evolve in the wrong direction, like that of others who began their literary careers by expressing contempt for the teaching of the “code-moralists” in Rome, as he did. Today, as Michael Jones explains in the February 1987 issue of Fidelity magazine, Guindon, in his new book The Sexual Creators (1986), not merely condones homosexuality, but now holds it up as a role model for those who live an ordinary married life.
“Gay males,” he writes, “have a special vocation…to teach North American males how to experience the quickening of loving feelings…Partnered gay persons have the opportunity to deepen the sensuous experience and to liberate sensuality from the shame which weights – upon it…”
Not surprisingly, Guindon described the October, Vatican Letter as “a very bad document.” “I disagree,” he told Jones, “with everything from the title to the last line.”
Nick of time
The mistaken sympathy bestowed on the homosexuality issue by so many, is sad and direct evidence that the teaching of theologians who dissent from the Church on this issue has found a response in the daily practice of a number of Catholics. Thus, instead of countering political errors such as committed by both the Federal and the Ontario government, it tends to encourage them. In this light the Vatican document on the pastoral care of homosexuals insisting as it does on the absolute unacceptability of homosexual activity, is most compassionate. It comes in the nick of time and as one may hope, prevent further foolishness within and without the Church.
This leads to the inevitable conclusion that action should be taken to remove from their posts the professional theologians or priests who publicly undermine church teaching. If they won’t teach or speak according to the rules of reason and religion, let them not teach or speak in the name of the Church at all. In the matter of homosexuality, those who suggest otherwise in the name of compassion, should find out first hand how miserable “gay” life really is and what an enormous disservice they do to homosexuals.
