Your sexual pathology doesn’t make you special

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 06, 2025

Those in the social mainstream have always justified themselves by contrast with the kinds of sins their milieu deems most shameful. The arrogant, self-righteous, and repressed within respectable society either deny their own sins outright, or cover them over as less egregious than the sins of the socially unacceptable. Christ overturned this when he told the chief priests and the elders that tax collectors and prostitutes would go to heaven before them.

It has long been understood that the reason our Lord preferred the company of the disreputable is precisely because they knew they were sinners. The Pharisees, on the other hand, denied the reality that without God’s grace, we are all on the moral margins. The Lord spoke so sternly with them because their attitude was blocking the very possibility of accepting His mercy.

Modernity introduced a perversion of Jesus’ approach. Rather than seeking out those on the moral margins because they need mercy, revolutionary progressivism values them precisely because they transgress. Those whom our Lord called the sick and the lost are pitied today not because their sins make them unhappy and lead them toward hell, but because they are allegedly oppressed by the very existence of social norms. At the same time, they are increasingly enthroned as the new self-righteous establishment while, as Fulton Sheen put it, “today the decent man is practically off the reservation.”

Since Catholics are always influenced by the society in which they live, we see echoes of this dynamic within the Church. The most obvious example, though not the only one, is the discomfort around Catholic teaching on same-sex attraction. There are, of course, those who dissent altogether from the Church’s teaching on the evil of homosexual acts, whether they engage in those acts themselves or defend those who do.

But there is also a small number of Catholics who, while professing an intent to live chastely according to Church teaching, nonetheless still claim a special category of identity for themselves based on their disordered desires, advancing novel interpretations of Catholic anthropology while seeking special treatment and pity from other Catholics. They speak as though they inhabit a second category of human sexuality that is somehow a source of special gifts (and not simply in the way that God can bring good out of any suffering or evil), rather than a wound that needs to be healed as far as possible in this life. A fair number of otherwise orthodox Catholics of the self-consciously “listening” type have bought into the self-narrative of Catholics who claim an LGBT identity.

My basic problem with these kinds of special claims is simple: We are all sinners. We all have sinful tendencies and disordered dispositions or pathologies. Every one of us has, from original sin, disordered sexual desires we have to cope with, and the majority of us have our own personal sexual wounds and hang-ups from life experience. Aside from the “normal” temptation to lust and excessive sexual appetite, in this pornographic age a huge number of “straight” people have outright aberrant desires and fetishes. No matter what temptations assail us, it is part of the Christian vocation to face up to the truth about ourselves, and then seek conversion and healing.

Thus, the obligations of “straight” and same-sex-attracted Catholics are not fundamentally different. If that means people with unusual struggles shouldn’t be ostracized, it also means they shouldn’t be treated as special. Nobody is exempted because their disordered desires are “normal” and nobody is exempted because their disordered desires are unusual. Admittedly, some sins are worse than others, while conversely, certain temptations and crosses are more burdensome than others, perhaps requiring special pastoral attention. But as soon as we begin to categorize ourselves in ways that justify our disordered inclinations, whether as normal or abnormal, we are refusing the call to conversion.

Self-knowledge and deeper conversion

Today the authority of “lived experience”—especially the experience of desire, suffering, or oppression—is often invoked as though subjective experience were self-authenticating. But we are not the ultimate judge of our own lived experience, which we often misinterpret precisely because our experience of sin darkens the intellect, while overwhelming passions lead to what St. John Paul II called the emotionalization of consciousness.

Rather, the authoritative interpreter of our experience is Christ, who has been tested in every way, yet without sin. Therefore “lived experience” must listen to the Church, which speaks for Christ, and to the saints, who share in the wisdom of Christ. It is in light of the Cross, not of therapeutic self-pity, that suffering brings forth wisdom and lived experience is purified into the mature self-knowledge which enables deeper conversion.

This conversion is not just a matter of outward behavior, but of the complex of sinful dispositions often enshrined as “my personality”. The normal man may stop sleeping around, but if he doesn’t deal with his underlying desire for validation through possessing others, he hasn’t yet fully converted. Likewise, the same-sex-attracted man who is continent, but clings to the desire for attention and construction of a false persona that is often bound up with gay male pathology, has not fully converted.

The recognition of this calls all of us, mainstream and marginal, to drop the excuses we make for our disordered attitudes and behavior. After all, there still exists the old-fashioned religious hypocrisy condemned by Christ. A Catholic husband and father who indulges the marital act with carnal motives can justify it by the large family which “proves” his virtue—but God sees his heart. Even worse is the hypocrisy of spouses who pollute the marriage bed with unnatural acts or contraception and then complain about how society is going down the tubes because of the people whose sexual sins are harder to hide.

My discussion of modern sexual debates is meant to illustrate a broader point about the moral life. Most people tell themselves, on some level, “At least I’m not a homosexual, a prostitute, a drug addict, a murderer!” But only the one who doesn’t see himself as fundamentally different from these sinners has the basis to reach out to them in compassionate solidarity. And only the one who does not spare himself in the spiritual fight can confidently call them to convert.

Conversely, while those who themselves lack self-knowledge may be quick to judge others—this is obvious—in some cases they may instead be naïve in too readily accepting the claims others make about themselves. Self-interest is sometimes operative here: if I offer inordinate pity and excuses for someone else, then I earn the right to indulge myself as well. That is not true solidarity, but more like collusion in mediocrity, akin to a drug-abusing doctor who prescribes suspicious quantities of painkillers. We can see this dynamic clearly at work in the secular world, where those Fulton Sheen called the “sob sisters” and the “social slobberers” cover their own moral failings by becoming “allies” to the avant-garde of licentiousness or racial resentment.

Catholics must be strangers to this kind of worldly dealing. I believe if we were all a bit more ruthless in denying our own self-justification and self-pity, aside from the inherent good of personal conversion, we would be less quick to throw an uncritical pity party for every group that claims to be mistreated by the Church or society, nor would we be self-righteous and callous towards real suffering. Wise as serpents and innocent as doves: The Church should always be a true refuge for sinners, comforter of the afflicted, and counselor to the confused. What we don’t want to be is a field hospital staffed by quacks with a reputation for filling out ample prescriptions, no questions asked.