In All Things
Pope: Save Humanity from Homosexuality?
From Reuters today: VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict said on Monday that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. "(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed," the pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration. "The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less." ... The pope said humanity needed to "listen to the language of creation" to understand the intended roles of man and woman. He compared behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations as "a destruction of God’s work". -- Reuters
The Reuters story has a misleading headline: "Pope likens ’saving’ gays to saving the rainforest." But it is humanity, says the pope, that requires "saving" from homosexuality.
Here is John Thavis, the superb CNS reporter, on the same story:
[T]he pope said, the church’s teaching on ecology needs to be understood as arising from God -- the "creator Spirit" -- who made the earth and its creatures with an "intelligent structure" that demands respect. Because of faith, the church has a responsibility for protecting the created world and for proclaiming publicly this environmental responsibility, he said.
The pope then explained why the human being must be at the center of the church’s ecological concern.
"The church must protect not only the earth, the water and the air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone. It must also protect man against self-destruction," he said. "The tropical forests certainly deserve our protection, but man as a creature does not deserve any less."
By "self-destruction," the pope said he meant "contempt for the Creator," and he said examples could be found in so-called "gender" issues today. He offered a case in point: Marriage as a permanent union between a man and a woman was something instituted by God as "the sacrament of creation."
Although the pope didn’t specifically talk about same-sex marriage, the meaning was clear enough to prompt some unusual headlines about rain forests and homosexuals. --CNS
James Martin, SJ
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Romano. Then I felt sad to see it repeated on this web site. Now it seems Fr. Martin has added a bit more from a CNS reporter who draws so-called 'obvious' conclusions. Is this really the stuff (type of reporting) that America Magazine should be made of?
It's not 'primitive' - it's the fundamental anthropology of human existence. Respect the intentions of the Creator - *all* of them. Resist the temptation to bend what God has made to meet the desires of our own broken wills, whether that be rainforests, bodies of water, or our own bodies.
Makes sense to me. It hurts, it's painful, it frustrates our own wilfulness and desires - to experience pleasure, to experience wealth and power - but it's consistent, at least.
should demand only homosexual teachers since the incidence of same-sex molestation is dramatically lower than that involving opposite sexes. The Christian Century magazine reviewed ten 'Christian' books on homosexuality and all but two were extremely criticized for misrepresenting scientific data, using concepts incorrectly and were described by the reviewer-psychologist as 'especially insidious.' 'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,' Ex.20:16.
Sexuality and sexual morality are, like the Sabbath, made for man. God has no interest in how people behave sexually except for his love for us. There is no level of spiritual perfection required of sexual love beyond human happiness, and by happiness I mean self-mastery and fulfillment, not license.
Put aside the poetics attached to the creative sex act and deal with people as God created them.
Asking gay people to live within the framework of monogamous unions, religious celibacy, or voluntary single chastity in exactly the way straight people are asked to do, seems supremely reasonable.
Continuing to insist that homosexuals are intrinsically disordered heterosexuals, in the face of growing evidence to the contrary, just seems insane.
With all due respect to Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Pope John Paul II, this is an area of moral teaching that, to put it most kindly, 'needs further development.'
~ James Alison
http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng02.html
I'm glad I traded God in for atheism a long time ago.
Earth to Catholics: there is no invisible sky ghost.
Man created the threat to 'the rainforest' and the rest of our environment and should be held accountable for those actions. Man did not create me to be gay. The Creator intended to make me gay, period. Would I choose to live a life of fear that the carload of kids driving by while my partner and I are doing yard work could jump out and kill us solely because they even perceived us to be gay? Would I choose to live in a way that has had 'Christians' spew vehement hatred toward me when they see us together? Why should I deny who God made me to be, when that would, in fact, be unnatural in the eyes of God?
This pope has rejected a plea by many countries of the world, through the UN, (except for the righteous Bush Administration and despotic fundamentalist states) to decriminalize homosexuality to save people from being put to death. He has sanctioned witch hunts in seminaries to remove great men whose empathy, intelligence, and spirituality would have made them outstanding priests. He has tried to make gays and lesbians feel inferior for solely 'being.' This is what it means to be a follower of Christ?
With all of the mess our world is in, his offensive, anti-gay diatribe is his message to the Church leadership days before the birth of the Prince of Peace?
To be honest, methinks Benedict doth protest too much.
that the Catholic Church does not condemn homosexual
orientation but homosexual behavior (sexual relations) which
a human being WILLFULLY CHOOSES. And it is this which is
'a destruction of God's work' the same as adultery or
pedophilia.
Any relationship that is not ordered towards God's definition of Love is a disordered relationship. Any act, that is not ordered towards God's definition of Love, is disordered.
Marriage is a Sacrament, the union of Husband and Wife in communion with God. This Sacrament of Marriage was instituted by God.
"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.'..."-Christ
(Matthew 19:4-5)
Weddings are the way for families to acknowledge the new situation, which is why as the civil law evolves to create marriages or civil unions for gays and lesbians - or equivalent rights are created through contract law (which takes only respect for contracts and the rule of law, not the creation of new rights) - the Church should celebration gay unions. For the couple, it does not matter - unless they would benefit from the Church's counsel regarding fidelity. The real beneficiaries of weddings are the family who have lost the rights to their brother/sister/child to that person's spouse. The Church's stubbornness in this area hurts families more than anyone else.
On the question of divorce, what Jesus was saying is that you cannot go back. If those who were so concerened about gay marriage were as concerned about divorce we might think that their stance was not about bigotry.
I would think there were more important themes to discuss on our celebration of the Lord's birth.
This fact, along with other phenomena in that affect human sexuality suggest that maleness and femaleness themselves, not our construction of them are less fixed than Pope would have us believe.
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