Is the Holy Father anti-gay, homophobic? Reading the newspapers and listening to the TV news reports, it would seem so… but what did he actually say on 22nd December 2008 to the Roman Curia? And why?
What follows is my translation of some of his speech together with an interpretation.
Pope Benedict’s argument centred around the four dimensions that surround the theme of the Holy Spirit. The first dimension is that of the Holy Spirit as creator – and this is the section which has led to the latest round of criticisms of Pope Benedict. In discussing the creator Spirit, he says that the opening of the creation account talks of “
the creator Spirit that hovers over the waters, creates the world and continuously renews it. Faith in the creator Spirit is an essential part of the christian creed”. This, then is the first step in his argument: the Spirit is understood by the christian as the creator Spirit.
What follows is a proof of this based on the inherent structure found in the universe and an extension of this to the mind of man which is capable of discerning it:
“Given that matter bears in itself a mathematical structure, it is full of spirit, it is the foundation on which modern science rests. It is only because matter is structured in an intelligent manner that our spirit is able to interpret it and actively remodel it.”
But, discerning and knowing this, we cannot remain indifferent. We have to accept that as intelligent created beings in a created universe we have certain responsibilities:
“The fact that this intelligent structure comes from the same creator Spirit that has also given us spirit, brings with it a task and a responsibility. The ultimate basis of our responsibility towards the earth lies in our faith concerning creation. It is not simply our property that we can exploit according to our interests and desires. It is, rather, the gift of the Creator who has designed its intrinsic orderings and with which he has given us pointers that we listen to as stewards of his creation. The fact that the earth, the universe, reflect the creator Spirit means also that their rational structures, which besides the mathematical order become almost palpable in experiment, have in themselves an ethical orientation. The Spirit that formed them is more than mathematics – it is Good in person that, via the language of creation, shows us the right way.”
The Church has to proclaim this and cannot keep silent on these issues which concern creation and the Creator. It’s not just a case of protecting the earth from being polluted and ruined but also of protecting the chief protagonist in all this, mankind, from destroying itself:
“Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the christian creed, the Church cannot and must not limit itself in transmitting the message of salvation to only the faithful. It has a responsibility for the created and must also assert this responsibility publically. And in so doing it must defend not only the earth, water, air, as gifts of creation, obvious to all. It must also protect man from destroying himself. What is needed is something like an ecology of man, understood in the right sense.”
I believe this phrase, “an ecology of man” is absolutely essential to understanding the Pope’s argument here. Ecology is the study of organisms in relation to their environments. An “ecology of man” can be understood as “human ecology”, that looks at the relationships between human groups and their physical and social environments but it can also be understood as an anthropology that includes the situation which the human being is in, that is, the human “condition”. The human condition is the state into which we are born, with all we inherit as biological beings that are human: our genetic patrimony, our animal state, our rational ability. Benedict continues:
“If the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and calls that this order in creation be respected, it is not a metaphysics that has been surpassed.”
In other words, one cannot dismiss this as something irrelevant, confined to a metaphysical worldview that many believe to have passed: it is still real, factual. Our bodies are either male or female: it is part of what we physically inherit as “higher animals” and even if we alter the physical appearance of our external genitalia sufficiently to seem other than they were originally, chromosome-wise we are whatever we were born as: either XX female or XY male – that is part of the normal order of the human condition. This human condition is “written” like a language in our make up by God and although we may choose to ignore it, we cannot cancel it out.
Benedict goes further here and sees in the deliberate effort to ignore this “language of creation” a path that will lead to man’s self-destruction:
“This is about, in fact, faith in the Creator and listening to the language of creation, disregard for which would be the auto-destruction of man and therefore destruction of God’s own work.”
Why? Sterile relationships are an ecological cul de sac. In simple terms, if human beings cease to procreate, we will die out. Now, I do not think that the Holy Father is naïve enough to believe that the human race is going to die out in the immediate future; the opposite is more likely. Nevertheless the path of ignoring the reality of our nature is an ecologically perilous one.
These questions are related to “gender issues” which set aside the physical nature of the human condition and adopt a subjective approach. But often these issues are really nothing other than an attempt to declare UDI from the “language of creation” and its originator, God. We want to feel we can decide for ourselves, we want to feel that we hold our own destiny in our hands:
“That which is frequently expressed and understood with the term, gender, is definitively turned into the auto-emancipation of man from the created and from the Creator. Man wants to form himself on his own and to arrange what concerns him always and exclusively on his own. But in this way he lives against the truth, he lives against the creator Spirit.”
This is about how we are created, not what we feel about things or what turns us on. I believe this part of the argument of the Holy Father centres on man’s desire to be his own master, particularly visible in the area of genetic engineering and what is becoming a widespread practice – eugenics: the deliberate selection of particular characteristics in an offspring. In the case of present day practice, the screening of foetuses for conditions like Down’s Syndrome and the abortion of those that do not make the grade. Because we have separated ourselves from the hidden language of the Creator we can begin to believe that we have it in our power to manipulate life itself as we should wish, whether this means combining genetic material from human and animal species or creating designer babies.
How does this relate to gender? The gender question is important because it has led to us ignoring the reality of our human condition. If I ignore my objective physical nature, my maleness in my case, I can apply a subjective label instead. I am straight, or I am gay or I am bisexual, or I am really a female inhabiting a male body and try to change sex, I am transsexual. All these labels may express how I might feel and how I might behave, but they do not say anything about my nature, which still remains male, whatever I feel and whatever I do. To reduce the human condition to one of subjectivity means that I can choose whatever I wish – in all areas of my life, in fact. What we have lost sight of is our “creatureliness”, the fact that we are not completely self-determining beings but are
contingent beings. Our human condition, our situation which we are born into, is decided as the two gametes fuse at our conception. From then on, several factors, from hormones that affect our development, to environment to upbringing and culture will influence how we respond to this situation, but the essential elements of “the language of creation” have already been specifically written into our very being.
This simple fact now needs protection:
“Yes, the rain forests deserve our protection, but no less than man as creature, in whom is written a message that does not mean the contradiction of our freedom, but its condition. Great scholastic theologians have seen marriage, that is the lifelong bond between man and woman, as a sacrament of creation which the same Creator instituted and that Christ – without changing the message of creation – then welcomed in the history of his covenant with men. It is part of the proclamation that the Church must bear witness to the creator Spirit present in nature as a whole and in a special way in man’s nature, created in God’s image. Coming from this perspective, it would be necessary to re-read the encyclical, Humanae vitae: Pope Paul VI’s intention was to defend love against sexuality as a consumer commodity, the future from the exclusive claim of the present and man’s nature against its manipulation.”
Is this gay bashing? I do not think so! It is an attempt to show the naturalness of the complementarity of the sexes which finds its greatest expression in marriage which is open to life. This does not deny that a certain percentage of men and women will find themselves attracted to people of their own sex: homosexuality is a reality. The Church has looked at its attitude to gay people and practices in the CDF document, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons. Neither does this mean that some men and women will not choose to live together without a marriage commitment. What the Church tells us is that it is because we are created beings that we bear the Creator’s imprint and that we can become pro-creators with his Spirit in creating, and the privileged place where this can happen is marriage.
To see the Italian text of the Pope’s speech, go to: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/december/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20081222_curia-romana_it.html
