Prof. Dan Maguire's Letter to the US Bishops

Letter from a Catholic Theologian to All 270 United States Catholic Bishops

By Daniel C. Maguire, Marquette University.
maguired@juno.com

 

In what may be considered an act of undefeatable hope, I decided to write to all 270 U.S. bishops. Beyond a doubt they could be among the most influential religious leaders in the nation if only they could get off what I call the pelvic issues and address, in prophetic style, the basic biblical concerns of poverty, justice, and peace on an imperilled earth.

Even though the bishops are not theologians, they pontificate on theology and bring their form of theology into the political arena, forbidding Communion to pro-choice politicians but posing for pictures with war-making presidents and legislators. The pastoral letter on Peace in 1983 "The Challenge of Peace," spelled out the criteria for a "just war." George Bush's invasion of Iraq violated all of its criteria, the pope called the invasion "a defeat for humanity," and yet the bishops and most Catholic theologians and laity stand meek and mute throughout this disaster. The press then consider the bishops' statements to be "Catholic teaching." The press tend not to understand the difference between Vatican theology and Catholic theology---the latter being more broadly based and more infused with the "wisdom of the faithful" (sensus fidelium).

When Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae in 1968, over 600 American theologians issued a public dissent to that assault on Catholic consciences, in the spirit of Jesus in Luke 19:40: "I tell you if my disciples keep silence, the stones will shout aloud." Groups like Call To Action and Voice of the Faithful do speak out but mostly "my disciples keep silence." Not wonder in the next verse, Jesus "wept."

In the original letter to the bishops, I enclosed two pamphlets, one of same sex marriage and one on abortion, showing the variety of theological opinion on these issues. I urged the bishops to rise to assume a prophetic ministry on justice, peace, poverty and ecological issues. Three bishops answered. All focused on the two issues on which they are all too impaled and none spoke to their missing voices on issues where the Gospels speak loudly and clearly, especially on the pro-life issue of war.

For the benefit of non-theologian readers, I will offer in brackets explanations of some of the Latin and technical terms of theology. (I did not offer explanations in my original letters to the bishops.)

Professor Daniel C. Maguire
Marquette University
P.O. Box 1881
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-1881

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June 19, 2006

To the Catholic Bishops:

Given the "great divide" that exists in the contemporary Church between bishops and theologians, I think that communication, even if it leads to little agreement, is a human good.

In this spirit, I am enclosing short pamphlets on two topics on which hierarchical teaching has become impaled, abortion and same-sex marriage, to the neglect of the needs of the increasing militarism of our nation, our neglect of the poor of the world, racism, sexism, and the wrecking of the earth's ecology through greed. 

Cardinal Mahoney's recent prophetic intervention on the human rights of immigrants shows that the authority of Catholic bishops is welcomed and respected when they speak out courageously on basic Gospel values. There are other moral issues on which auctores scinduntur. [Catholic theologians are divided on these issues] On those issues, if you do not wish to use the hallowed Catholic expression consulas auctoribus probatis, [check with established theologians] you could well use the model of teaching that the American Catholic bishops used on the life/death issue of the Vietnam War in November 1966: 

"We realize that citizens of all faiths and of differing political loyalties honestly differ among themselves over the moral issue involved in this tragic conflict. While we do not claim to be able to resolve these issues authoritatively, in the light of the facts as they are known to us, it is reasonable to argue…" 

Since there is no infallibly defined position on either abortion or same-sex unions, a similar modesty would enhance episcopal teaching. The Second Vatican Council wisely said: "Let the layman not imagine that his pastors are always such experts, that to every problem which arises, however, complicated, they can readily give him a concrete solution, or even that such is their mission (The Church in the Modern World, n. 43). It should cause no wonder that the laity do not take it as obvious that celibate bishops are necessarily more reliable "experts" on sexual and reproductive issues than the laity, "anointed as [the laity] are by the holy One"(Constitution on the Church, n. 12) and experienced as they are in their grace-filled lives. 

This modesty would acknowledge, with the previous code of Canon Law, that "the bishops, whether teaching individually or gathered in particular councils, are not endowed with infallibility" (Canon 1326). The canon asserts that bishops are veri doctores seu magistri. [the bishops are teachers] That teaching ministry would best be conducted by recognizing that modesty is called for when one teaches in areas where infallibility is not an issue, where the teachers have no privileged expertise, and where good people from all faiths reasonably disagree.

Cardinal Dulles made a crucial theological point, deserving close attention at this time. Avery Dulles, S.J., in his Presidential address to The Catholic Theological Society of America said that the Second Vatican Council "implicitly taught the legitimacy and even the value of dissent" ("Presidential Address: The Theologian and the Magisterium," Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 31 (1976). 

The council, says Dulles, conceded "that the ordinary magisterium of the Roman Pontiff had fallen into error, and had unjustly harmed the careers of loyal and able theologians." He mentions John Courtney Murray, Teilhard de Chardin, Henri de Lubac, and Yves Congar. Dulles says that certain teachings of the hierarchy "seem to evade in a calculated way the findings of modern scholarship. They are drawn up without broad consultation with the theological community. Instead, a few carefully selected theologians are asked to defend a pre-established position.…" Dulles aligns himself with those theologians who do not limit the term "magisterium" to the hierarchy. He speaks of "two magisteria-that of the pastors and that of the theologians." These two magisteria are "complementary and mutually corrective." (He neglected the third magisterium, the sensus fidelium, the experience-fed and graced wisdom of the faithful.) The theological magisterium may critique the hierarchical magisterium. Dulles concludes: "we shall insist on the right, where we think it important for the good of the Church, to urge positions at variance with those that are presently official...[i.e. taught by the hierarchy]." These are not the words of some fringe theologian; these are the words of a theologian who is now a cardinal of the Catholic Church and nothing in his subsequent writings refutes these basic and broadly accepted assertions.

On the two subjects of these little pamphlets, we have produced an Oxford University press book (Sacred Rights, 2003) on the debated issue of abortion in world religions and I would be pleased to send you a copy if you were interested in further discussion. We will also produce two books, now with publishers, on the sin of heterosexism. These books contain chapters from distinguished scholars in Judaism, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism.

Sincerely,

Daniel C. Maguire

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Archdiocese of Milwaukee
Office of the Archbishop

July 13, 2006

Professor Daniel C. Maguire
Marquette University
P.O. Box 1881
Milwaukee WI 53201-1881

Dear Professor Maguire,

As the bishop of the archdiocese where you reside, I am obliged to reply to your circular form-letter, sent to the bishops of the country on June 19, 2006.

The opinions expressed in the two pamphlets enclosed in that correspondence are totally at odds with clear Church teaching. Sacred Scripture, the Magisterium, and Natural Law are consistent in opposition to abortion and so-called same-sex marriage.

You speak of your duty to dissent. Well, at least call it such. To claim that support for abortion and same-sex "marriage" is consonant with Catholic moral teaching is preposterous and disingenuous.

I, too, have a duty: to teach what the Church clearly believes. Your opinion on these two matters is contrary to the faith and morals of the Church.

Faithfully in Christ,

(Signed)

Most Reverend Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of Milwaukee

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Professor Daniel C. Maguire
Marquette University
Department of Theology
P.O Box 1881
Milwaukee WI 53201-1881

July 18, 2006

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of Milwaukee

Dear Archbishop,

I have received your letter of July 13. I was pleased that you replied even though your message was not as gracious or as pastoral as that of the one other bishop who replied. Terms like "preposterous" and "disingenuous" (the usual code for mendacious) are not the words of a pastor so much as those of a scold. Some of my colleagues-too cynically I believe-said I should take no offense because the letter was obviously written not so much for me as for those with whom you shared it here and abroad. I don't believe that...not for a minute. I think that, in your fashion, your intentions were to help me in matters where you feel I am mistaken and that you wanted to do this for the good of the Church. Therefore, I will continue in the hope that even from such a caustic opener, some fruitful dialogue might commence.

Acting on this belief in your good faith, and in your sense of pastoral mission, I would be much helped if you would explain some things for me:

(1) You speak twice of "clear" Church teaching. To know what is clear and how clear, Catholic theology developed a careful criteriology presented, for example, at the Gregorian University in the 1951 De Valore Notarum Theologicarum et de Criteriis ad eas Dignoscendas. "To teach what the Church clearly believes" (your words) one must know what nota theologica attaches to it. [The Church recognized that not everything is de Fide; most issues are debateable] The possibilities are: De fide divina, proxima Fidei, Theologice certum, Doctrina Catholica, certum, commune et certum moraliter, communius, communissimum, probabilius, probabile. Other negative notes are temeraria, offsensiva piarum aurium, etc. In other words, not everything is taught with equal clarity leaving many things to be debated freely.

It would be helpful to me and to all the Catholic theologians who agree with me on the two issues you address to know which "note" you attach. Do you believe that the issues you address should not be debated by theologians at all? Should theologians who hold the liberal views on these issues be banned as speakers at Catholic parishes? (I suppose I know your answer to that.) 

(2) Also, I would be helped to know how your position on these two theologically debated topics relates to the condemnation of "absolute tutiorism" by Pope Alexander VIII on Dec. 7, 1690. [This condemnation said that when there are good reasons supported by reputable scholars, the most restrictive opinion should not be enforced.] It would seem you run afoul of that condemnation thus putting you into "dissent." Of course, as Cardinal Dulles said, dissent is not always bad but is often a service to the Church, in accord with the maxim "dissent in and for the Church."

(3) I was disappointed that your reply to me ignored my concerns about episcopal leadership and prophetic mission in areas such as peace, poverty, and ecological devastation. Let me focus on one question, peace: In the Pastoral Letter of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, May 3, 1983, "The Challenge of Peace," the bishops developed with care the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello criteria. It would be quite a stretch to say that the recent invasion of Iraq complied or complies with those criteria. Have you or other bishops called attention to that? If you approve of that war, do you feel that the decision for that invasion satisfies the criteria developed by the U.S. bishops? If this undeclared war is in violation of those criteria (which would mean the killing in this war is murder), should legislators who support the war be denied Holy Communion? Should citizens be advised not to serve?

(4) Also, on debated moral issues, such as the two you chose to focus on, how do you value the views of Protestant Christians? Recognizing that Protestant Christians differ with many Catholics on dogmatic issues, the Second Vatican Council said that "ecumenical dialogue could start with discussions concerning the application of the gospel to moral questions." What weight do you give to Protestant views on these two issues? If you are, as you seem, dogmatically certain on these two issues, could you enter into "ecumenical dialogue" on those issues? Would you encourage Catholic theologians to do so or simply to announce to these Protestants they are "totally at odds with clear Church teaching, Sacred Scripture, the Magisterium, and Natural Law," to quote you? That would not be a basis for dialogue.

I await your reply, your courteous reply, to these queries. [That reply is still awaited, though I suspect Jesus will return before it arrives.]

Sincerely yours,

Daniel C. Maguire
Professor

*****

The Moderate Roman Catholic Position
on Contraception and Abortion

By Professor Daniel C. Maguire,

Catholic Theologian, Marquette University

Let's start with the Roman Catholic positions (note the plural) on contraception and abortion not because it is the oldest religious tradition---it is not---but because of its influence internationally on these issues. For one thing, the Catholic Church is the only world religion with a seat in the United Nations. From that seat, the Vatican has been very active in promoting the most restrictive Catholic view on family planning, although there are more liberating Catholic views that are also thoroughly and genuinely Catholic. The Vatican from its unduly privileged perch in the United Nations along with the "Catholic" nations---now newly allied with conservative Muslim nations---managed to block reference to contraception and family planning at the United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This alliance also delayed proceedings at the 1994 U.N. conference in Cairo and impeded any reasonable discussion of abortion. With more than a bit of irony, the then Prime Minister Brundtland of Norway said of the Rio conference: "States that do not have any population problem--in one particular case, even no births at all [the Vatican]--are doing their best, their utmost, to prevent the world from making sensible decisions regarding family planning."

The sudden rapport between the Vatican and conservative Muslim states is interesting. For fourteen centuries the relationship was stormy to the point of war and persecution. During that time abortions were known to be happening and yet this produced no ecumenical coziness. Is the issue really fetuses, or is it that these two patriarchal bastions are bonded in the face of a neew threat...the emergence free, self-determining women? Questions like this and all of the above summon us to make Roman Catholicism the first of our visits to the world religions.

One of the tragedies of human life is the separation of power and ideas. The Catholic tradition is more filled with good sense and flexibility than one would gather from its leaders. Religious leaders are often not equipped to give voice to the best in the tradition they represent. In Catholicism, popes and bishops are usually not theologians and often they do not express the real treasures of wisdom that Catholicism has to offer to the world. That is changing as lay people enter the field of Catholic theology and bring to it their real-life experience as workers, parents, and professionals. Catholic theology is no longer a clergy club, and that is gain.

One of these lay theologians is professor Christine Gudorf. Christine is an internationally known scholar teaching at The International University in Miami. She is also a wife and a parent. Catholic theology was done in recent centuries almost exclusively by men. That changed and women began in the last half of the twentieth century to enrich the tradition with their scholarship and experience as women.

Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit scholar, said that nothing is intelligible outside its history. The point is well taken. If we lost our personal history through amnesia, we would not even know who we are. Gudorf believes along with many scholars that there is nothing that clears the mind of caricatures like a bracing walk through history.

The Catholic Story

Gudorf points out that Christianity was born in a world in which contraception and abortion were both known and practiced. The Egyptians, Jews, Greeks and Romans used a variety of method of contraception, including coitus interruptus, pessaries, potions and condoms, and abortion appears to have been a widespread phenomenon. Knowledge of all of this was available to the Christians and although church leaders tried to suppress it they were never fully successful.

Surprisingly, abortion and contraception were not the primary means of limiting fertility in Europe even before the coming of Christianity. Infanticide was the main method as it was elsewhere in the world. Christianity reacted against infanticide, but there is evidence that it continued to be practiced. Late medieval and early modern records show a high incidence of "accidental" infant death caused by "rolling over" or smothering of infants or reporting their death as "stillborn." As Gudorf says, "the level of layings over could hardly have been fully accidental."

However, during the middle ages infanticide was much less common than abandonment. Most often infants for whom parents could not provide were left at crossroads, on the doorsteps of individuals, or in marketplaces in the hope that the child would be adopted by passersby. (More often it condemned the children to a life of slavery or an early death.) To ease this crisis, the church in the middle ages provided for "oblation." This meant that children could be offered to the church to be raised in religious monasteries. Many of them eventually became celibate nuns and monks, thus leading to further containment of fertility. 

Another Catholic response to excess fertility was the foundling hospital. The foundling hospitals were equipped with a kind of "lazy Susan" wheel (ruota) where the child could be placed anonymously and then the wheel turned putting the child inside. The good intentions in this were not matched with resources and the vast majority of these infants, sometimes 90 percent of them, were dead within months. Because of the reliance on infanticide and abandonment, it is not surprising that there was not much discussion about abortion and contraception. As Gudorf says, "the primary pastoral battles in the first millennium were around infanticide, the banning of which undoubtedly raised the incidence of abandonment." Also the high mortality of children due to nutritional, hygienic, and medical debits was a common and cruel form of population control.

Catholic Teaching on Contraception and Abortion

Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion has been anything but consistent. What most people--including most Catholics- think of as "the Catholic position" on these issues actually dates from the 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii of Pope Pius XI. Prior to that, church teaching was a mixed and jumbled bag. The pope decided to tidy up the tradition and change it by saying that contraception and sterilization were sins against nature and abortion was a sin against life. As Gudorf says, "both contraception and abortion were generally forbidden" in previous teaching but both were often thought to be associated with sorcery and witchcraft. Pope Gregory IX in the Decretals of 1230 treated both contraception and abortion as "homicide." Some of the Christian Penitentials of the early middle ages prescribed seven years of fasting on bread and water for a layman who commits homicide, one year for performing an abortion, but seven years for sterilization. Sterilization was considered more serious than abortion because the issue was not framed as "pro-life" but rather, the driving bias was anti-sexual. The traditional Christian attitudes toward sexuality were so negative that it was only reproductivity that could justify this activity. Abortion frustrated fertility once; sterilization could frustrate it forever and therefore it was more serious. Also, since the role of the ovum was not learned until the nineteenth century, the sperm were thought to be little homunculi, miniature people, and for this reason male masturbation was sometimes called homicide. Clearly Christian historical sexual ethics is a bit of a hodge podge. To really understand it and to arrive at an informed judgment on Catholic moral options it is necessary to be instructed by a little more history. 

Catholic and Pro-choice

Although it is virtually unknown in much public international discourse, the Roman Catholic position on abortion is pluralistic. It has a strong "pro-choice" tradition and a conservative anti-choice tradition. Neither is official and neither is more Catholic than the other. The hierarchical attempt to portray the Catholic position as univocal, an unchanging negative wafted through twenty centuries of untroubled consensus, is untrue. By unearthing this authentic openness to choice on abortion and on contraception in the core of the tradition, the status of the anti-choice position is revealed as only one among many Catholic views.

The bible does not condemn abortion. The closest it gets to it is in Exodus 21-22 which speaks of accidental abortion. This imposes a financial penalty on a man who "in the course of a brawl" caused a woman to miscarry. The issue here is the father's right to progeny; he could fine you for the misdeed, but he could not claim "an eye for an eye" as if a person had been killed. Thus, as conservative theologian John Connery, S.J. said, "the fetus did not have the same status as the mother in Hebrew Law."

Following on the silence of scripture on abortion, the early church history treats it only incidentally and sporadically. Indeed, there is no systematic study of the question until the fifteenth century. One early church writer Tertullian discusses what we would today call a late term emergency abortion where doctors had to dismember a fetus in order to remove it, and he refers to this emergency measure as a "crudelitas necessaria," a necessary cruelty. Obviously this amounted to moral approbation of what some call today inaccurately a "partial birth abortion."

One thing that develops early on and becomes the dominant tradition in Christianity is the theory of delayed animation or ensoulment. Borrowed from the Greeks, this taught that the spiritual human soul did not arrive in the fetus until as late as three months into the pregnancy. Prior to that time, whatever life was there was not human. They opined that the conceptum was enlivened first by a vegetative soul, then an animal soul, and only when formed sufficiently by a human spiritual soul. Though sexist efforts were made to say the male soul arrived sooner---maybe a month and a half into the pregnancy---the rule of thumb for when a fetus reached the status of "baby" was three months or even later. As Christine Gudorf writes, the common pastoral view was "that ensoulment occurred at quickening, when the fetus could first be felt moving in the mother's womb, usually early in the fifth month. Before ensoulment the fetus was not understood as a human person. This was the reason the Catholic church did not baptize miscarriages or stillbirths." 

"Reflecting the pious belief in a resurrection of all the dead at the end of the world, Augustine pondered if early fetuses who miscarried would also rise. He said they would not. He added that neither would all the sperm of history rise again. (For that we can all be grateful.) The conclusion reached by Latin American Catholic theologians in a recent study is this: "It appears that the texts condemning abortion in the early church refer to the abortion of a fully formed fetus." The early fetus did not have the status of person nor would killing it fit the category of murder.

This idea of delayed ensoulment survived throughout the tradition. St. Thomas Aquinas, the most esteemed of medieval theologians, held this view. Thus the most traditional and stubbornly held position in Catholic Christianity is that early abortions are not murder. Since the vast number of abortions done today in the United States, for example, are early abortions, they are not, according to this Catholic tradition, murder. Also, all pregnancy terminations done through the use of RU 486 would not qualify as the killing of a human person according to this Catholic tradition of "delayed ensoulment."

In the fifteenth century, the saintly archbishop of Florence, Antoninus, did extensive work on abortion. He approved of early abortions to save the life of the woman, a class with many members in the context of fifteenth century medicine. This became common teaching. For this he was not criticized by the Vatican. Indeed, he was later canonized as a saint and thus as a model for all Catholics. Many Catholics do not know that thre is a pro-choice Cathlic saint who was also an archbishop and a Dominican.

In the sixteenth century, the influential Antoninus de Corduba said that medicine that was abortifacient could be taken even later in a pregnancy if required for the health of the mother. The mother, he insisted, had a jus prius, a prior right. Some of the maladies he discussed do not seem to have been a matter of life and death for the women and yet he allows that abortifacient medicine even in these cases is morally permissible. Jesuit theologian Thomas Sanchez who died in the early seventeenth century said that all of his contemporary Catholic theologians approved of early abortion to save the life of the woman. None of these theologians or bishops were censured for these views. Note again that one of them, St. Antoninus, was canonized as a saint. Their limited "pro-choice" position was considered thoroughly orthodox and can be so considered today. In the nineteenth century, the Vatican was invited to enter a debate on a very late term abortion, requiring dismemberment of a formed fetus in order to save the woman's life. On September 2, 1869 the Vatican refused to decide the case. It referred the questioner to the teaching of theologians on the issue. It was, in other words, the business of the theologians to discuss it freely and arrive at a conclusion. It was not for the Vatican to decide. This appropriate modesty and disinclination to intervene is an older and wiser Catholic model.

What this brief tour of history shows is that a "pro-choice" position coexists alongside a "no-choice" position in Catholic history and neither position can claim to be more Catholic or more authentic than the other. Catholics are free to make their own conscientious decisions in the light of this history. Not even the popes claim that the position that forbids all abortion and contraception is infallible. The teaching on abortion is not only not infallible, it is, as Gudorf says "undeveloped." Abortion was not the "birth limitation of choice because it was, until well into the twentieth century, so extremely dangerous to the mother." There was no coherently worked out Catholic teaching on the subject, as our short history tour illustrates and there still is not. Some Catholic scholars today say all direct abortions are wrong, some say there are exceptions for cases such as the danger to the mother, conception through rape, detected genetic deformity, or other reasons. Gudorf's sensible conclusion: "The best evidence is that the Catholic position is not set in stone and is rather in development."

Sex, Women, and the Sensus Fidelium

As we will see, debates about sexuality and reproduction are always influenced mightily by certain cultural assumptions. These usually involve attitudes toward women and sex. A culture that looks on women as sources of evil like Pandora and Eve is going to have trouble justifying having sex with them and may conclude that only reproduction could justify sexual collusion with women. That is exactly what happened in Christianity. Augustine said that if it were not for reproduction there would be no use for women at all. In his words, "in any other task a man would be better helped by another man." Early attitudes toward women were poisonous. The Mosaic law assumed male ownership of women. Early church writers said women lack reason and only possess the image of God through connection to men. Luther saw women as being like nails in a wall, prohibited by their nature from moving outside their domestic situation. And St. Thomas Aquinas said females are produced from male embryos that were damaged through some accident in the womb, turned into females. As Professor Gudorf says in her refreshingly sensible book Body, Sex and Pleasure, the church has rejected all of that nonsense but "continues to teach most of the sexual moral code which was founded upon such thinking."

Small wonder there is new thinking on sexual and reproductive ethics now. As Gudorf says: "The Roman Catholic Church (and Christianity in general) has in the last century drastically rethought the meaning of marriage, the dignity and worth of women, the relationship between the body and the soul, and the role of bodily pleasure in Christian life, all of which together have revolutionary implications for church teaching on sexuality and reproduction. In effect, the foundations of the old bans have been razed and their replacements will not support the walls of the traditional ban."

Gudorf and other Catholic theologians do not stand alone in the church on this dramatic and important change in Catholic teaching. Pope Pius XII in 1954 laid the groundwork for a change in Catholic teaching when he permitted the rhythm method. Though he quibbled about what means could be used he did bless contraceptive intent and contraceptive results. He even said there could be multiple reasons to avoid having any children at all in a marriage. In 1968 when Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the view that all mechanical or chemical contraception was sinful, the Catholic bishops of fourteen different countries respectfully disagreed and told the faithful that they were not sinners if they could not accept this papal teaching. 

Most of the laity, of course, had already made up their minds. The birth rates in so-called "Catholic" nations in Europe and in Latin America are close to or below replacement levels and, as Gudorf wryly puts it, "it is difficult to believe that fertility was cut in half through voluntary abstinence from sex." Such dissent from hierarchical teaching by Catholic laity is actually well provided for in Church teaching. The sensus fidelium, the sense of the faithful is one of the sources of truth in Catholic theology. This means that the consciences and experiences of good people are a guidepost to truth that even the hierarchy must consult. 

Catholicism in its best historical realizations is not as hidebound and authoritarian as many bishops, popes, and fearful conservatives would make it seem. There is, as Catholic theologian Charles Curran says, dissent from hierarchical teaching that is "in and for the church." Through much of Catholic history the hierarchy taught that all interest-taking on loans was a sin of usury--even the smallest amount. The laity saw that this was an error and decided that too much interest was sinful and that a reasonable amount was not. A century or two later, the hierarchy agreed...especially after the Vatican opened a bank and learned some of the facts of financial life. The laity are again, along with the theologians, leading the church on the moral freedom to practice contraception and to use abortion when necessary as a backup. Perhaps if the hierarchy were married with families, they could follow the wisdom of the laity in this at a faster pace. It would be a shame if it took a century or two for them to respect the conscience of the laity, graced and grounded as that conscience is in the lived experience of marriage and children.

Professor Christine Gudorf is hopeful in this regard. She believes that within a generation or two Catholic hierarchical teaching "will change to encourage contraception in marriage and to allow early abortion under some circumstances." She continues: "This change will occur because as the Catholic Church confronts the reality of a biosphere gasping for survival around its teeming human inhabitants it will discern the will of God and the presence of the Spirit in the choices of those who choose to share responsibility for the lives and health and prosperity of future generations without reproducing themselves, even if that choice involves artificial contraception and early abortion."

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April 20, 2006

 

A Catholic Defense of Same Sex Marriage

By Professor Daniel C. Maguire
a Catholic Theologian teaching at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
maguired@juno.com

The Catholic Church is beginning to rediscover what it once knew; that not all persons are heterosexual, that many people are homosexual and that this is just fine. In the past, the Church accepted homosexuality more openly and even had liturgies to celebrate same sex unions.1 There was a recognition that different sexual orientations are clearly part of God's plan for creation-some people are heterosexual and some are homosexual-this is the way God made us and we have no right to criticize God.

Wherever the human race is found we find persons of differing sexual orientations. (We find the same thing in God's animal kingdom.) Human history shows that some humans have same-sex attractions and unions and others have opposite-sex attractions and unions. The desire to bond lovingly and sexually with persons of the same sex or of the opposite sex, is a fact of life, a fact of God's creation, and we have no right to call it unholy. As the Acts of the Apostles says in the Bible, we have no right to declare unclean anything that God has made (Acts of the Apostles 10:15). To do so, in fact, is a sin. 

Obviously not all Catholics have heard this message. Prejudice against homosexual persons is common. Theologians call this the sin of heterosexism, a sin like racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism. These are sins that condemn people for being what they are, not for what these people do. These sins of prejudice are cruel sins that condemn people no matter how good these people are. If people are not white or are not male or are not heterosexual, they are condemned, even if they are saints. This is what racism, sexism, and heterosexism do. If homosexual persons live out their reality and enter into beautiful, same-sex relationships full of love and commitment and fidelity, we condemn them. Even if their unions are more successful, more lasting, more exemplary than some heterosexual unions, we still condemn them. Surely that is unjust.

Years ago, the Catholic theologian Father Andre Guindon wrote: "Christian communities should begin to receive homosexuals in their midst as full-fledged brothers and sisters and as those to whom God also offers his love."2 Catholic theologian Mary Hunt asks: "What could possibly be wrong with loving, mutual, safe, consensual, community-building sexual relationships between committed male or female partners?"3

 

But, are same-sex unions really marriage?

All the religions of the world give marriage a very high place. Marriage can be defined as the unique and special form of committed friendship between sexually attracted persons. This definition does not say that the persons have to be heterosexually attracted. Persons attracted to a person of their same sex can still be married. Marriage is a supreme human good involving exclusive, committed, enduring, generous, and faithful love, and this kind of love is not something that only heterosexuals can achieve. (In fact, some heterosexuals are not very good at it. Theologian Mary Hunt points out that "In fact, heterosexual marriages end in divorce as often as in death." 4) Friendship and love and commitment are human virtues and gay and lesbian persons are human and fully capable of a healthy human committed love in marriage. We have no moral right to declare marriage off limits to persons whom God has made gay. We have no right to say that marriage, with all of its advantages and beauty, is a reward for being heterosexual.

Dr. Hunt also points out how unfair it would be to say that heterosexual Catholics have seven sacraments but homosexual Catholics only have six if marriage is denied them. Who could imagine God creating people who are gay and then denying them the right to express their sincere and honest love in the holy sacrament of matrimony!

But what of the objections to same-sex unions?

St. Thomas Aquinas always said that it is important to know the objections to any teaching that you accept. When you face those objections you can come to know your own position better.

OBJECTIONS

Objection #1 The Bible says all homosexual activity is evil and sinful.

First of all, this is true. There are objections to same-sex unions in the Bible. However, many things in the Bible simply describe how people lived when the Bible was written. Not everything that the Bible tells us is something we could or should do today. For example, the Bible (Leviticus 25:44-46) tells us that we may buy and own slaves and "use them permanently" and will them to our children when we die! In the past, people who did not know how to interpret the Bible used these texts to justify slavery in Latin America and in North America. They did not know that sometimes the Bible is telling you what people used to do, not what people should do today. Sometimes the Bible gives you a lot of bad examples of how terrible people can be. The Bible treated slavery as a fact of life and talks about "a man who sells his daughter into slavery"(Exodus 21:7). Surely we would not want to do that today!

The Bible also forbids eating shell fish (Leviticus 11:9-10) but we do not feel we should obey that today.

The Bible also says that wives should obey their husbands as if their husbands were God (Ephesians 5:22-24) and that wives should be "subjects to their husbands in everything." This made women slaves to their husbands and for along time people justified male control of women by using these Bible texts. The Church then learned that these texts described the way life was lived at that time but did not prescribe that we should live that way. They found better ideals in the same Bible and used them to correct these texts. Thus interpreters of the Bible went to Galatians 3:28 and there found the liberating ideal that "all persons [male and female]are one person in Christ Jesus," and that therefore no hostile divisions should be made between male and female, with neither one dominating the other.

When we come to the biblical texts on homosexuality we see right away that we could never treat them as rules for our day. The book of Leviticus says that anyone who has sex with someone of the same sex "shall be put to death: their blood shall be on their own heads"(20:13). St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans condemns homosexual relationships and lists persons who do such things among those who "deserve to die" (1:26-32). 

The Catholic Church today condemns capital punishment and even conservative Catholics and other Christians who condemn all homosexual relationships do not call for the death penalty for gays and lesbians.

Obviously, there are many moral questions that are not answered in the Bible. Homosexuality is one of them. What Catholic and other Christian and Jewish scholars do is to take the main principles of justice, compassion, respect and love for persons as God created (both heterosexuals and homosexuals are created in God's image) and apply these principles to today's moral issues such as homosexuality and same-sex marriage. That is why Catholic and other Christian and Jewish theologians defend same sex marriages today. They say that denying all homosexual persons the expression of their sexuality is unjust and sinful.

Do all Catholics and other Christians agree on same-sex marriage? No. Just as some Christians see all war as immoral and become pacifists, some others say there can be a "just war." Christians, including Catholics, have learned to live with these differences and to respect one another and live together anyhow. Catholics are now beginning to practice the same tolerance regarding homosexuality.

Objection #2: The Catholic hierarchy condemns all homosexual sex.

That is true. When Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he issued a teaching that said: "Respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of homosexual unions."5 Undoubtedly that is still the position of the pope. The question is how Catholics should evaluate the pope's position.

The Church consists of more than the pope and the bishops. In Catholicism there are three sources of truth, (or three "magisteria"): the hierarchy, the theologians, and the wisdom and experience of the laity (called in Latin sensus fidelium). In Catholic history, each of these sources of truth has at times been right and each of them has at times been wrong. So, for example, for many centuries the bishops, popes, and theologians taught that it was a mortal sin to take any interest on a loan, even one half of one percent interest. After a while, the laity, through their own experience with lending money, decided that a little interest was reasonable and fair to compensate the lender. Too much interest was wrong but a little interest as payment for the use of your money was reasonable and moral. In other words, the laity disagreed with the hierarchy and the theologians, and the laity was right. A hundred years after the laity made a decision on interest and acted on it, some theologians said they agreed; a hundred years later, the Vatican also decided that the laity was right. The Vatican even went on to open a bank and charge interest.

At other times in history, the hierarchy and theologians taught that slavery was moral and that anti-Semitism was not a sin. Obviously they were wrong and they eventually were corrected.

Something like that is now going on regarding homosexuality. Many Catholic theologians agree now with Protestant and Jewish theologians that same sex unions can be moral, healthy, and holy.6 Many Catholic people are living in same sex unions and adopting children and still practicing their Catholic faith. Many priests realize this and welcome these couples to Communion at Mass and even have private liturgical celebrations of their unions. Bishop Walter Sullivan of Richmond, Virginia even wrote a welcoming introduction to a book of essays by various Catholic theologians, some of whom defended the right of sacramental marriage for same sex couples.7

Obviously, then, Catholic teaching is in transition on this subject and Catholics are free to let their consciences decide either for or against same sex marriages. Both views-for or against homosexual marriage-are at home in the Catholic world and neither one of them can be called more orthodox or more official or more Catholic than the other.

Is the pope then wrong? I would join many other Catholic theologians in saying that he is definitely wrong and he will be corrected some day by one of his successors and by the rest of the church as previous popes who permitted slavery etc. were corrected. This is the way of the Church. After all, Pope Benedict also teaches that a spouse whose partner is HIV positive is still not permitted to use a condom for protection. This is obviously wrong and some bishops have even come out and said so. Almost all Catholic theologians say the pope is wrong on that point. 

There is a clear distinction to be made between "Vatican theology" and "Catholic theology." As in the above example, Vatican theology says a spouse cannot use condoms for protection from an HIV positive partner! Catholic theology, including the theologians and the sensus fidelium, the wisdom of the laity, does not hold that strange and damaging view.

In an old Catholic teaching called Probabilism we find the answer for Catholics. When there is a debate on a moral issue (in this case same sex unions), where there are good reasons and good authorities on both sides of the debate, Catholics are free to make up their own minds.8

This means that Catholic same-sex couples are perfectly free to practice their Catholic faith, receive the sacraments, and never feel that God forbids their union-or that their faithful, sexual union is anything but holy.

The view that homosexual people are condemned to involuntary celibacy for life is as cruel as it is absurd. Jesus said of celibacy: "Let those accept it who can" (Matthew 19:12). Voluntary celibacy for a good cause is something some can do but it is seen as a special talent, a special gift that not all have. The Vatican council called it "a precious gift of divine grace which the Father gives to some persons," but not to all.9 Abstaining from all sexual activity is seen by the Council as something "unique."10 You can not demand from all homosexual people that which is "unique."

St. Paul recognizes the same thing when he says "it is better to marry than to burn" (1 Corinthians 7:12). What kind of gospel "good news" would it be to tell all gay persons that their only choice is to burn?

Objection # 3: Homosexuality is a mental illness.

Some psychiatrists in the past did think homosexuality was an illness. That is no longer the case and it is an insult to homosexual people to keep repeating that old and outmoded theory. Studies of gay couples indicate that they tend "to appear as well adjusted as heterosexuals, or occasionally, even more so."11

Objection # 4: Children will be damaged unless they grow up in a home with a mother and a father.

This is not true. Psychologist Charlotte Patterson, among many others, has done extensive research on children of lesbian and gay parents. Her conclusion is that this does not present problems and does not lead to any higher rates of homosexual children.12 Theologian Mary Hunt writes: "Many lesbian and gay families have adopted children, welcoming them with love and affection, reasoning that a child's life with one parent or two parents of the same sex is far better than languishing in an institution or, worse, dying from neglect."13

Objection #5: Homosexuality is unnatural because it is never found in animals.

This is untrue. In his extensive study, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and National Diversity, biologist Bruce Bagemihl shows that homosexuality is part of our evolutionary heritage as primates. He reports that more than 450 species regularly engage in a wide range of same-sex activities ranging from copulation to long-term bonding.14

CONCLUSION

Homosexuality is not a sin. Heterosexism (prejudice against people who are homosexual) is a sin. It is a serious sin because it violates justice, truth, and love. It also distorts the true meaning of sex and thus also harms everyone, including heterosexuals.

It's what you do with your homosexuality or your heterosexuality that determines morality. Homosexuality like heterosexuality is morally neutral. As Catholic philosophers Daniel Dombrowski and Robert Deltete from the Jesuit Seattle University say "homosexual sexual relations [like heterosexual sexual relations] can be moral or they can be immoral."15 Moral theologian Christina Traina says that "the ultimate fruitfulness and durability of any union-heterosexual or homosexual-have everything to do with faith, friendship, generosity, community support, sexual and verbal affection and the hard work that goes into mutual formation of a working partnership."16

Sexuality is a gift to be cherished. We have no right to deny it to those whom God has made gay. As theologian Kelly Brown Douglas says, we have to create "a church and community where non-heterosexual persons are able to love themselves and those whom they choose to love without social, political or ecclesiastical penalty" so that they may enjoy life and enjoy sex with gratitude that life is so full of goodness and enriching variety.17

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1. John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Boswell writes that in the same sex ceremonies, we see the two persons of the same sex "standing together at the altar with their right hands joined (the traditional symbol of marriage), being blessed by the priest, sharing Communion, and holding a banquet for family and friends afterward... Same sex unions were thus neither a threat to nor a replacement of heterosexual marriage," 191.

2. Andre Guindon, The Sexual Language: An Essay in Moral Theology (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1977), 370.

3. Mary Hunt, "Eradicating the Sin of Heterosexism," forthcoming in Heterosexism: Roots and Cures in World Religions, ed. Daniel C. Maguire.

4. Ibid.

5. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons," June 3, 2003.

6. See Robert Nugent, ed., Challenge to Love: Catholic Views of Homosexuality (New York: Crossroad, 1983). Daniel C. Maguire, "Catholic Ethics in the Post-Infallible Church," in The Moral Revolution: A Christian Humanist Vision (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986).

7. See Challenge to Love: Catholic Views of Homosexuality.

8. On Probabilism and homosexual marriagae, see Daniel C. Maguire, "The Morality of Homosexual Marriage," in The Moral Revolution, 98-102.

9. See Walter M. Abbott, ed., The Documents of Vatican II (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 71, in the "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church."

10. Ibid., 71-72.

11. Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978) 208. See also Isaiah Crawford and Brian D. Zamboni, "Informing the Debate on Homosexuality: The Behavioral Science and the Church," in Patricia Beattie Jung and Joseph Andrew Coray, eds., Sexual Diversity and Catholicism: Toward the Development of Moral Theology (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2001), 216-51.

12. See "Lesbian and Gay Parenting: A Resource for Psychologists," http://www.apa.org/pi/parent.hyml Accessed August 15, 2005.

13. Mary Hunt, "Eradicating the Sin of Heterosexism."

14. Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

15. Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert Deltete, A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 86.

16. See Christina L.H. Traina, "Papal Ideals, Marital Realities: One View from the Ground," in Sexual Diversity and Catholicism: Toward the Development of Moral Theology, ed. Patricia Beattie Jung and Joseph Andrew Coray (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2001), 269-88.

17.Kelly Brown Douglas, "Heterosexism/Homophobia and the Black Church Community," in Daniel C. Maguire, ed., Heterosexism: Roots and Cures in World Religions, forthcoming.