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Are Homosexuals Sick?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Gareth Moore OP
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Recently in the Church a particular way of talking about homosexuals has become popular. Talk of perversion, sins against nature, and so on, has been less to the fore, giving way to a quasi-medical vocabulary, and a way of talking about gay people has developed which is more consonant with modern thinking. Now they are not so much wicked as sick; they suffer from something called ‘the homosexual condition’. It is not so much that they commit horrible and disgusting sins as that, unfortunately and through no fault of their own, they have a tendency or disposition to perform such acts. It is still a morally bad thing if they actually give way to this tendency, but it is not sinful that they have it; it is like a tumour in their moral insides. Thus homosexuality was described as a ‘condition’ in the 1975 Vatican Declaration on Sexual Ethics:

A distinction is drawn ... between homosexuals whose tendency 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.

There are many kinds of condition; we speak of social conditions, economic conditions, conditions of hygiene, and so on. But here it is the medical condition that is being taken as a model for homosexuality. That is clear from the reference to possibilities of cure and to ‘pathological constitution’.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 70 , Issue 823 , January 1989 , pp. 15 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Though it is controversial, I follow the practice of using the word ‘gay’ to refer to homosexual people of either sex. This is not meant to give offence to lesbians.

2 n. 8.

3 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith;: Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, n. 3.

4 An Introduction to the Pastoral Care of Homosexual People.

5 The Vatican Declaration neatly refers to gays as ‘those who suffer from this anomaly’ (n. 8). This is of course an admission that what the gay person suffers from is no condition; he or she suffers from being different.

6 Ratzinger does see homosexuality as mortally dangerous to those who have got it. He speaks of the self‐denial of gay people as something ‘which will save them from a way of life which constantly threatens to destroy them’ (n. 12). But notice that it is not now a disease, a condition, that is supposed to threaten to destroy them, but a way of life. A way of life is not akin to a condition. Here we are back with moral talk, and have veered away from the incompatible medical model.

7 nn. 13, 15.