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Galileo and gays

By Peter Sellick - posted Tuesday, 1 March 2016


I came across an article by Angus Ritchie in ABC Religion and Ethics/ 16th Feb 2016 in which he compared the Church's response to homosexuality to its response to Galileo's support for the heliocentric form of the solar system. In 1610 Galileo published Sidereus Nuncius that supported Copernicus' evidence for heliocentrism. However, certain members of the Church clung to the old view that the earth was the centre of the solar system. Galileo was put on trial, and he was found to be "vehemently suspect of heresy". He was sentenced to indefinite imprisonment.

This shameful episode in the Church illustrates the problems encountered when the Church overreaches its authority to include the intricacies of the natural world.

But what, you ask, is the connection between the trial of Galileo to the Church's traditional attitude to homosexuality? It has now been established that a small proportion of men and women find themselves same sex attracted. How this comes about is unknown. It is not a choice of the individual and is indelible. Efforts to change orientation with psychotherapy have failed to a massive degree.

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Attempts by Christians to "pray the gay away" are similarly unsuccessful. The fluidity of sexual orientation has now become scientifically established just as the heliocentric universe was in Galileo's time.

St Paul, in Romans 1:26,27, refers to homosexual acts as an example of the corruption produced when humanity gave itself up to worship the creature instead of God, in other words, to idolatry.

This occurred in the context of Roman and Greek culture in which it was accepted that men used boys for sexual satisfaction. The lack of understanding of inherited sexual orientation meant that it was assumed to be a choice, and an unnatural choice at that, and hence an occasion for sin.

Thus any interpretation of biblical texts in both the Old and New Testament must recognise the context. Same sex attraction was not understood as psychologically defining, there was no concept of a person being homosexual. In this context homosexual acts were seen as a perverse diversion from sexual acts that were not fecund and were hence condemned.

Readers of the Old Testament in particular would be aware of the importance of child bearing in many narratives. Without children the future was closed and the promise of God to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations forfeit.

There is no reason to think that the proportion of people who experienced same sex attraction was different in biblical times. That they were suppressed may horrify us but cannot be cause for condemnation. A mature view of history will take into account the context and moral approbation must be suspended.

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A more recent example of the importance of context is the abhorrence of homosexuality expressed by my beloved Karl Barth when writing in 1951 in his Church Dogmatics (CD III.4) Barth sees that same sex attraction is contra to the divine command that orients men and women to each other as is set out in Genesis 2 and expressed in Adam's joyful cry: "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."

Barth gives no quarter to homosexuality as might be expected of a male Swiss theologian writing in 1951.

The Roman Church became lenient in the reception of the same sex attracted and recognises its indelible nature. Thus in Persona Humana (VIII) 1975, we find the following:

"A distinction is drawn, and it seems with some reason, between homosexuals whose tendency comes from a false education, from a lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or from other similar causes, and is transitory or at least not incurable; and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable."

I am not sure how these two groups may be distinguished from each other. The latter group are to be treated with understanding and sustained in hope but they must remain chaste even though they find themselves incapable of enduring a single life. Homosexual acts are regarded as "intrinsically disordered".

They are so because they are condemned by Scripture and because "according to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts which lack an essential and indispensable finality." That is, they lack an end in the begetting of children.

The mainstay of this conclusion is the same as for the conclusion that contraception is disallowed in Humanae Vitae (1968) that such acts are contrary to the natural law written in the very being of humanity. The purpose of sexual acts is to produce children: any activity that prevents this is a subversion of the purpose of sex and hence a sin against the creator of the natural order.

A simple definition of natural law is proved by Curran in his The Development of Moral Theology: "by using God given reason and reflecting on what God has made, the rational creature can determine what is the plan of God." Nature demonstrates a purpose. If the purpose of sexual acts is procreation then anything that acts as a barrier to that is contrary to the plan of God and hence sin. Contraception, homosexual acts and masturbation fall within this category.

Natural law theory relies on a particular understanding of what it means for God to create. It assumes that God has actually made the universe according to His plan. However, the figure of Charles Darwin stands in the way of this as well as our discovery of deep time and space that reduces the earth and human history to insignificance.

As I have noted before, this does not do justice to the biblical understanding of creation. God does not create a universe, He creates a nation Israel, he creates a new creation in the baptized person, He creates a new people, the Church. This He does through his two hands, the Word and the Spirit.

Thus any idea that we can read the plan of God from nature is nonsense. Nature is morally neutral and chaotic; there is no plan to it. The only order in the world is the order of the Word of God. Christ is that order incarnate. Rather than read nature the Church should be reading/hearing the Word made flesh.

The application of natural law theory to sexual ethics has been a disaster.

Married Catholics all over the world have refused the teaching on contraception because they find a need to limit the size of families for reasons of economy and the health of the wife. In a crowded household and limited resources the fear of conception casts a pall over the intimate relationships between man and wife.

The traditional position would condemn gays to lives unenlightened by intimate emotional and sexual relationships, the very lives that the Church celebrates as the ultimate flowering of humanity. Out of a realization of the truth of the science about same sex attraction and our of a concern for those involved, it seems onlyjust that these relationships should be recognised by the Church as one path to the fulfilment of the promise of intimate relationships.

Pope Francis may be looking for a more pastoral way but his path is blocked by the iron logic of natural law ethics.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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