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An Objective Disorder: Homosexual Orientation and God's Eternal Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
Recent declarations by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have disallowed any effort to rethink the tradition's negative evaluation of homosexuality. Citing Thomas Aquinas, the CDF appeals to eternal law as an important warrant for its position. Homosexual orientation is an objective disorder. It is an inclination to intimacy which violates God's design for human sexuality. This claim excludes further consideration of the topic. This study examines Aquinas' claim to know God's eternal law. At the heart of Aquinas' argument is the simile that creation is like a human artifact and God like an artist. When we know the work we know the Artist's intent. Heidegger's hermeneutical account of the work of art suggests that Aquinas has overlooked the historical grounds for the relationship between artist and artifact. Aquinas has the simile wrong. If Heidegger's approach is a reasonable alternative to that of Aquinas, then a space is opened within Catholic discourse to rethink the question of homosexuality.
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References
1 The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” (1986), 3.Google Scholar
2 Ibid.
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8 Quaestiones Disputatae De Veritate 2.8.
9 ST, 1.2.3.
10 ST, 1.16.1.
11 ST, 1.79.4
12 ST, 1.14.8.3.
13 ST, 1-2.91.1.
14 Ibid.
15 ST, 1-2.91.2.
16 ST, 1-2.93.5. The requirement that law be promulgated is met by the fact that God has made it possible for the human mind to know the law through the natural light of human reason (ST, 1-2.90.4.1).
17 Augustine, , De Libero Arbitrio, 1.6Google Scholar, quoted by Aquinas at ST, 1-2.93.1.
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24 ST, 1-2.93.1; Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, 1.6.
25 sr, 1.16.1.
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48 One can find this approach in the papal magisterium as late as 1903. See Pius, X, Fin dalla prima, a motu proprio of 12 18, 1903Google Scholar, AAS 36:339-45.
49 The closed character of ecclesial discussion on the question of homosexuality contrasts with Alasdair MacIntyre's description of the character of rationality implicit in the Summa Theologiae. “Every article of the Summa poses a question whose answer depends upon the outcome of an essentially uncompleted debate. For the set of often disparate and heterogeneous arguments against whatever position Aquinas' enquiries so far have led him to accept is always open to addition by some as yet unforeseen argument. And there is no way, therefore, of ruling out in advance the possibility that what has so far been accepted may yet have to be modified or even rejected. In this there is nothing peculiar to Aquinas' procedures. It is of the nature of all dialectic, understood as Aristotle understood it, to be essentially incomplete” (Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988], 171–72Google Scholar). But, when it comes to homosexuality, this model of rational dialectic is short circuited in ecclesial discourse, in no small part, by an appeal to immutable, eternal law.
50 ST, 2-2.153 and 2; Augustine, , The City of God, xiii.13.Google Scholar
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53 John Tuohey argues that CDF's call for discrimination, without supplying proportionate reasons, amounts to a “rewriting” of the Roman Catholic moral tradition (Tuohey, John, “The C.D.F. and Homosexuals: Rewriting the Moral Tradition,” America, 09 12, 1992, 136–38.Google Scholar
54 CDF, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” 10.