Homosexuality: 2. The Truth Question

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 15, 2010

If you read part one of this commentary (Homosexuality: 1. The Disorder Question), you’ll have noticed that my correspondent begins by asserting her “bona fides” through the statement: “I am a practicing Catholic.” She then goes on to reflect not Catholicism but the prevailing attitudes of the surrounding culture. In this light, her response to the reply outlined in the previous entry—the reply in which I explained the disordered nature of homosexuality—is even more telling:

I’m sure you can quote me the scripture proving that I am against “God’s plan” in this. And furthermore, you can bolster that with what the Magisterium has to say about “God’s plan”. It is really difficult to have a rational discussion about a subject when you are trumped by God. I guess you know what God thinks better than I do. As does the Magisterium. Of course. Silly me for using the brain God gave me.

This, of course, is nothing but vintage late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century self-congratulatory between-the-ears fluff. In the confusion that has characterized Catholic formation (or the lack thereof) over the past couple of generations, even Catholics don’t like being “trumped by God”. It’s so…so…irrational! We moderns have a nearly infinite capacity to portray ourselves as romantic heroes because we so courageously follow the crowd.

But it is not at all irrational (nor does it indicate a lack of personal  integrity) to be trumped by God. In fact, to permit oneself to be trumped by God is the first lesson in the productive use of human reason.

There are, it would seem, two kinds of people in the world: (1) Those who understand that the human person has a powerful tendency to regard the prevailing attitudes of his surrounding culture as “rational”, and who therefore seek to protect themselves against the obvious pitfalls of that tendency; and, (2) Those who don’t, and so have no effective way of facilitating the transcendence of cultural limitations which is reason’s true glory. If my correspondent were at once intelligent, self-reflective and honest, she would admit immediately that, had she lived fifty or a hundred years ago, she would have had a strong tendency to believe that homosexuality was disordered. She would have received this from her surrounding culture, and she is likely to have accepted it uncritically, just as she now receives and accepts the opposite.

The problem here is that every culture, in every time and place, tends to inculcate a combination of truth and error, and by far the psychologically least demanding course is always to accept the entire mix uncritically. What this means, though, is that the most important activity of human reason is to find ways to place itself outside the assumptions of the surrounding culture so that it can perform a more objective analysis of each question. The simplest and most certain means of doing this is to avail oneself of Revelation.

The only absolutely certain authority in the universe is God. If we have good reason to believe—as we do—that God has desired to communicate with us through some revelation, and that we have identified this revelation (through its character and circumstances which are inexplicable without divine intervention), then an intelligent believer will always use anything he can learn from that revelation as both a starting point and a potential corrective, both to other sources of information and to his own propensity for intuitive and logical error. In other words, it is not the person who dislikes being “trumped by God” who is “using the brain God gave” him, but the person who really wants to be “trumped by God” as often as possible.

Now let us consider for a moment what it means to be “a practicing Catholic”. For purposes of being a Godparent, it means simple observable things, such as regularly attending Mass and participating at least externally in the life of the Church. But in a far more meaningful sense, being a practicing Catholic means engaging not only externally but interiorly in Catholic life—opening the mind to Revelation, participating in the life of grace, living ever more deeply the mysteries of Faith. One who claims to be a “practicing Catholic” should welcome a deeper appreciation of Scripture, a growing understanding of Tradition, and the intellectual and moral guidance of the Magisterium, for it is precisely these things which enable the Holy Spirit to perfect us, including our reason. In other words, it is only these things that enable us to be consistently trumped by God.

One of the many things Revelation helps us to do is to understand more fully the nature of all those things any given human culture tends to obscure. Therefore, one of the salutary results of adherence to Revelation is that Christians are able to perceive that homosexuality is disordered even when their culture tells them it is not. Moreover, they can also figure out the reasons and explain them cogently once they have gotten on the right track by seeing the basic truth in the Divine mind. Silly me, then, if I fail to take advantage of Revelation to free my mind from cultural constraint. Silly me if I fail to take advantage of the single most obvious aid that will enable me to “use the brain God gave me” well.