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Anonymous —
- Why did you stop going to Mass when you married?
- What happened to your unanswered questions?
No one can live long on a young
teen's concept of things! I know you have matured in other areas, so I
would suggest you buy a Catechism and get the mature answers to those questions. You will be inspired
and amazed by the contents of the Catechism which is a sure summary of
Catholic teaching. If you have particular question, don't hesitate to
ask us.
You speak of changing feelings. I know, you know that all feelings change.
Feelings are feelings: partly biochemical emotions that can support our
intellect and will but we should never lead with them because feelings
are inherently changeable responses to external situations and hence unreliable
guides.
As for religion, it is not meant to be a missing piece in our self-construct.
It is a relationship with the Living God who gives meaning to the universe
and to our lives.
As for the crux questions, the short answer is this: You want objective
answers. They are in the Catechism, well explained, if briefly. However,
you are right:
- You cannot be a Catholic and believe that homosexuality,
in itself, is a morally good and natural thing, nor that there is such
a thing as homosexual marriage.
- You cannot be a Catholic and believe that
a pregnant woman has the right to terminate the life of her child.
The Catechism will give you the moral arguments. Here is some elaboration.
At the end of this e-mail reply, I will put all these things in the perspective
of God's love for you.
Homosexuality may or may not be a choice (it is certainly deep seated),
but homosexual activity is a choice. A person can have a variety of strong drives
that are controlled only with difficulty (in the area
of pathology, one can think of any compulsion or phobia in the same way), and the Church
certainly understands that we all have very strong drives to do disordered
things (and the Church teaches that homosexual attraction
is a disordered attraction). That's why God has given us helps in the
Church — so that we can fulfill
God's Word and get help to rise again when we fall. Our
inability to follow God's Word is something we all share (original
sin) and it is why God gave us His own life, in Christ, through
the sacraments — so that we would be empowered to live God's way of life!
It takes supernatural power to live God's way.
The nature and morality of homosexuality is a completely separate issue
from that of homosexual marriage or civil union. I put
marriage in quotes because marriage is a natural, not
a political, institution
that has existed from the beginning as the original gift of
God that has come down to us from before the Fall. It is also, by nature,
the union of man and woman. Even biochemically, same-genders cannot unite.
In men, anal union causes acute allergic reactions, (see Ethics and Medics at the National Catholic Bioethics Center),
while in heterosexual couples it causes a real biochemical union, even
apart from the union that happens in procreation.
Other forms
of sexual activity are not union, they are simply mutual pleasuring for
a sense of emotional union. God's ways are very incarnate, not just emotional!
You might want to read a book by Christopher West on Theology
of the Body [CD] to get a sense of the Catholic view of sex.
Anyway, if the state can declare that two men or two women can marry,
then it can declare that a man and his daughter or a woman and her sister
can marry. Ultimately, it can be carried across species (and
there is already a movement to do this). If marriage is a legal right
to be recognized as a stable couple because of emotional and erotic attachment,
then we are asking the state to reward any emotional erotic attachment
with the privileges it accords to traditional marriage.
Plus other
unions do not provide the benefit to the state, (its
creation, continuance, and the formation of its children), that
real marriage does. Of course, this presumes a view of marriage that includes
openness to the possibility of fertility. This itself is a view that we
have lost today.
There are other objections:
- the much higher rate of violence and abuse
among homosexual couples than even among unmarried heterosexual couples,
and
- the statistical lack of stability to the union. Even stable unions
are not exclusive.
Heterosexuals are largely unaware of the realities
of gay life.
There is also the question of what to do about the adoption
of children. No one has the right to adopt someone else's child. A child
is not a commodity. Moreover, the child has the right to a mother and
a father.
The second issue you raised is even more fundamental. Abortion is a question of
a woman's choice only in the same way that any moral issue is a question
of choice. We all have a free will to do good or evil. We can choose
to steal or not, to lie or tell the truth, to be rude or not.
- Some things
are immoral but not illegal.
- Some things are illegal and immoral.
- Some
things are legal but not moral.
- Many immoral things cannot be regulated
by the state and we have the legal choice to do them.
- Some immoral things
that are essential are regulated by the state. The state does not permit
us to:
- kill one another
- take someone's property
- lie in court, or
- do
a number of things.
Regardless of what the state says, (states are often
wrong), it is never a morally good choice to kill an innocent human being.
Your formulation overlooks the child being killed.
It is scientifically
an individual member of the human species. If we can kill this child,
who is already male or female and who is self-directing in its development,
then we can move that line and kill anyone. Your own right to life depends
on the right to life of this little being.
You will be welcomed in any number of Christian denominations
who accept homosexuality and abortion. The Episcopal church is breaking
up over these things. All of the Christian churches that accept them have
left Scripture and tradition behind and are letting the current fashion
of opinion be their guide. They have a nice union in community around
gestures, songs, political positions and even some good deeds — it is hard
to kill Christianity. Perhaps you will find one that has rituals and teachings
that are according to your taste. You will be comfortable, perhaps emotionally
comforted, but ultimately unsatisfied because only truth, and true union, hard
as it sometimes is to digest, satisfies the human heart. First,
read the epistles of St. James and of
St. Peter. The same things were happening
in the old world.
- St. Paul speaks of pharmaceutical birth control and abortion.
- The first century document, the
Didache, teaches against abortion.
If you decide to believe in the rightness of homosexual acts and of
abortion then you are indeed leaving all of Christian tradition behind,
regardless of what modern Christianity says.
I wish you blessings as you respond to God's call in your heart. Don't
let yourself be dissuaded
(by your initial objections,
by worries about future emotional changes, or by social or familial concerns) from
this pursuit of God's tantalizing invitation that is just awakening in
your heart. Everything will fall into place once you find the pearl of
great price, once you find the treasure beside which everything appears
in its true worth.
God is using the sense of something missing in your
spiritual life to draw you gently to Him.
He wants you.
He wants to love you and fill you with truth and joy and
Himself. He is courting you.
Don't play so hard to get!
— Mary Ann
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