By Clement Harrold

June 14, 2024 

Sometimes critics of the Catholic Church’s moral teachings will argue that her position on the sinfulness of homosexual acts should be updated because there are plenty of other biblical teachings that we no longer abide by today.

If the Church is happy to disregard the Old Testament’s prohibition on beard trimming or eating shellfish, for example, then why not disregard the Old Testament’s teachings on homosexuality as well? While this objection may appear clever at first glance, it quickly falls apart for two major reasons.

A Permanent Moral Law

In the first place, the objection rests on a basic misunderstanding of the ways in which the Church continues to apply Old Testament teachings. The Medieval Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, famously distinguished between three different categories within the Mosaic Law: the moral, the ceremonial, and the judicial.

The moral laws of the Old Testament are precepts like “Thou shalt not kill,” “Take care of the orphan and widow,” and “Worship the Lord your God.” The ceremonial laws, by contrast, are dictates relating to ancient Israelite liturgy and ritual. These included things like provisions for how the Ark of the Covenant should be treated, instructions for what priests should do on holy days, and various dietary restrictions which the people were expected to follow. Finally, the judicial laws are about forming a system of justice for enforcing the moral laws within the specific time and place in which those laws were received.

For Aquinas, a point of major importance in understanding the Mosaic Law is that of the three categories of law, only the moral was intended to be permanent. The moral law is permanent by its very nature, because good and evil are objective realities which transcend the limitations of any particular time or place. Ceremonial and judicial laws, by contrast, are contingent, depending on the unique needs of a given culture and era.

The ceremonial rules around things like beard trimming or eating shellfish thus served a specific but temporary purpose, whether that purpose be hygienic (e.g. limiting the spread of disease by banning less safe foods), or pedagogical (e.g. forcing the people of Israel to undergo certain outward practices, even quite strange practices, to drive home the message that they were a people set apart for God), or something else.

In much the same way, the judicial laws of the Old Testament enshrined certain penalties which were appropriate to the time and place in which Moses and his successors lived. It was a period in which there wasn’t a proper prison system, for example, and the death penalty was much more common. It was also a time when the people of Israel were surrounded by pagan nations, which meant that temptations to apostasy, idolatry, and the overall dilution of Israel’s religious identity presented constant threats.

For these reasons and others, the judicial system of the Old Testament can appear very harsh in places. But we need to bear in mind that those stricter judicial elements weren’t intended to last forever. Nor should we lose sight of the enormous compassion the Mosaic Law continued to express for the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.

When it comes to the moral precepts of the Old Testament, however, now we are talking about laws which were intended to last forever. This means that when the Mosaic Law prescribes capital punishment for sins such as murder, kidnapping, adultery, or homosexual activity, we need to make a critical distinction. The moral element behind these laws still stands: murder, kidnapping, adultery, and homosexual activity are still sinful. But what has changed with the coming of Christ is the judicial element behind the laws: the death penalty is no longer applied to these sins (at least not typically), and the modern Church has even gone so far as to express serious reservations about the morality of using the death penalty in today’s world.

What this boils down to, therefore, is that the Church doesn’t merely pick and choose which Old Testament rules to keep, and which ones to throw out. Instead, following the principles outlined by St. Thomas Aquinas and many of the Church Fathers before him, the Church understands that certain categories of Old Testaments laws were temporary and situational, while others are expressions of the moral law, which by its nature is unchanging and universal.

Confirmation in the New Testament

The second major reason why the Old Testament’s teachings about the sinfulness of homosexual activity can’t simply be done away with is that the New Testament also repeatedly affirms that homosexual activity is gravely immoral. In Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, and 1 Timothy 1:9-10, for example, St. Paul is very clear that engaging in homosexual relations is contrary to the moral law.

Rather than attempting to reinterpret Scripture to fit their designs, individuals who experience same-sex attraction should seek to discover in God’s Word a message which, like all worthwhile things, is difficult and challenging, but also profoundly powerful, life-giving, and true. They should recognize, too, the biblical message that all human beings are loved, cherished, and defended by the God who died for them. As St. Paul affirms in his epistle to the Romans, “But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (v. 8). That “us” includes homosexuals as much as it includes bishops, popes, and saints.

It’s also worth clarifying that homosexual acts aren’t wrong simply because “the Bible says so.” Homosexual acts are wrong because we live in an ordered universe and our bodies actually mean something. In other words, our bodies are not mere accidents arising through blind evolutionary forces, nor are they toys for us to play with and manipulate in whatever ways we please. No, our bodies are a gift from God, and they express something profound about who we are and the love we were made for.

Our bodies tell us that we are created male and female. Indeed, the difference-cum-complementarity of the two sexes is stamped into the very fabric of our being. Men and women are created for each other, and these foundational truths are accessible to all people in all places. Hence when Sacred Scripture condemns homosexual acts, it simply affirms and clarifies what the natural law already tells us.

Made for Love

We’ve already seen that while the Bible clearly recognizes the immorality of homosexuality acts, it also speaks powerfully about a God who love all of us without exception. This love is perfectly revealed in Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and it’s a love which God invite us to share in. The Catechism explains:

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection. (§2359)

Like everyone else, homosexual persons are called to take up their Cross and follow Jesus. It is only through this path of self-renunciation and sacrificial love that we begin to discover true interior freedom, and a peace and joy which the world cannot give.

Still, we might ask, isn’t the Catholic Church unnecessarily harsh when she uses language like “intrinsically disordered” to describe homosexual relations (see Catechism §2358)? Here it's worth remembering that the Catechism uses this language when discussing a whole range of activities. The sins of lying and calumny (§1753), our misuse of our passions (§1768), our excessive attachment to material things (§2424), and the sin of masturbation (§2352) are all described as either “disordered” or “intrinsically disordered.”

This reminds us that Catholics who experience same-sex attraction aren’t in some special category of sinners. On the contrary, we all experience disordered desires and inclinations, as Fr. Mike Schmitz explains in his book Made for Love:

Because we are all fallen human beings, there is no one of us who does not have some wound in the area of our sexuality. Whether people experience heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual attractions, people experience at one time or another sexual feelings and attractions that aren’t good for them to act upon or embrace. Someone’s woundedness could manifest itself in a sexual attraction for members of the same sex, or in a desire to look at porn, or in a desire for someone who is not one’s spouse, or in a desire for any number of other things. Even within marriage, spouses sometimes have to deal with feelings that can make it a challenge to respond to one another appropriately when it comes to sexuality. This is why the virtue of chastity—a virtue by which we act properly with respect to our sexuality—is important for everyone. (p. 133)

Today, therefore, the Church continues to offer the same moral guidance she has always offered, not so that people will be miserable, but so they can be truly happy. For all of us in different ways, this truth can feel arduous at times. But if we are willing to put our trust in Jesus—the same Jesus who has transformed untold millions of lives over the past two thousand years—then we will not be disappointed.

Further Reading:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdh8ZK_qpRw

Daniel C. Mattson, Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace (Ignatius Press, 2017)

Michael Schmitz, Made for Love: Same-Sex Attractions and the Catholic Church (Ignatius Press, 2017)