What is the Catholic Church's teachings on homosexuality?
By Nich Fluh
I am amazed that fallen away Catholics, Protestants and other apostates, heretics, pagans and worse cannot seem to get a grip on the Catholic Church’s timeless teaching on homosexuality. Jesus only discussed marriage and divorce between a man and a woman because the union of a man and a woman is the only correct form of union in the eyes of God. It is a given. B-t-W, I only use the Douay-Rheims Bible for obvious reasons. For example:
Gospel According to St. Matthew 19:3-6, And there came to him the Pharisees tempting him, and saying: Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? Who answering, said to them: Have ye not read, that he who made man from the beginning, Made them male and female? And he said: For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh.
Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.
Gospel According to St. Mark, 10:6-9 But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother; and shall cleave to his wife. And they two shall be in one flesh. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
Clearly Jesus is referring to Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24. And there are plenty of references elsewhere in the New Testament:
First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, 6:9-10 Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, Nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God.
First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, 7:2-4 But for fear of fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render the debt to his wife, and the wife also in like manner to the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband. And in like manner the husband also hath not power of his own body, but the wife.
Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, 1: 26-30 For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents ….
First Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy, 1: 9-10 Knowing this, that the law is not made for the just man, but for the unjust and disobedient, for the ungodly, and for sinners, for the wicked and defiled, for murderers of fathers, and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, For fornicators, for them who defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and whatever other thing is contrary to sound doctrine….
Epistle of St. Jude, 1:7, As Sodom and Gomorrha, and the neighbouring cities, in like manner, having given themselves to fornication, and going after other flesh, were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire. In like manner these men also defile the flesh, and despise dominion, and blaspheme majesty.
Here below are references from the Old Testament that reinforce the above:
Book of Genesis, 1:27-28 And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them. And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth ….
Book of Genesis, 2:24 Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh.
Book of Genesis, 19:5-13
And they called Lot, and said to him: Where are the men that came in to thee at night? Bring them out hither that we may know them: Lot went out to them, and shut the door after him, and said: Do not so, I beseech you, my brethren, do not commit this evil. I have two daughters who as yet have not known man: I will bring them out to you, and abuse you them as it shall please you, so that you do no evil to these men, because they are come in under the shadow of my roof. But they said: Get thee back thither. And again: Thou camest in, said they, as a, stranger, was it to be a judge? Therefore we will afflict thee more than them. And they pressed very violently upon Lot: and they were even at the point of breaking open the doors. And behold the men put out their hand, and drew in Lot unto them, and shut the door:
And them that were without, they struck with blindness from the least to the greatest, so that they could not find the door. And they said to Lot: Hast thou here any of thine? son in law, or sons, or daughters, all that are thine bring them out of this city: For we will destroy this place, because their cry is grown loud before the Lord, who hath sent us to destroy them.
Book of Judges, 19:22-24
While they were making merry, and refreshing their bodies with meat and drink, after the labour of the journey, the men of that city, sons of Belial, (that is, without yoke,) came and beset the old man's house, and began to knock at the door, calling to the master of the house, and saying: Bring forth the man that came into thy house, that we may abuse him. And the old man went out to them, and said: Do not so, my brethren, do not so wickedly: because this man is come into my lodging, and cease I pray you from this folly. I have a maiden daughter, and this man hath a concubine, I will bring them out to you, and you may humble them, and satisfy your lust: only, I beseech you, commit not this crime against nature on the man.
Book of Leviticus, 18:22:
Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind, because it is an abomination.
Book of Leviticus, 20:13:
"If any one lie with a man as with a woman, both have committed an abomination, let them be put to death: their blood be upon them."
Then we have St. Peter Damian who wrote his Book of Gomorrah to Pope Leo IX in 1049 at a time when homosexuality and sexual perversion within the clergy were likely more rampant than it is today. Damien showed no false mercy or compromise in condemning sodomy, what he believed to be the gravest of all sins.
“If this absolutely ignominious and abominable vice is not immediately stopped with an iron fist,” he told the Pope, “the sword of Divine wrath will fall upon us, bringing ruin to many.”
Damian warned the Pope that the “cancer of sodomitic impurity is creeping through the clerical order,” decrying the sexual abuse of “spiritual sons” by Catholic priests. He warned that all clergy who are habituated to homosexual behavior should be removed from the priesthood, and that the wrath of God is provoked against those who continue to offer the sacrifice of the Mass while committing homosexual sins.
According to Damian, the evil of homosexual behavior
“surpasses the savagery of all other vices,” and “is to be compared to no other. For this vice is the death of bodies, the destruction of souls, pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the intellect, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, introduces the diabolical inciter of lust, throws into confusion, and removes the truth completely from the deceived mind.”
He notes that “whoever has soiled himself with the contamination of sodomitic disgrace ... unless he is cleansed by the fulfillment of fruitful penance, can never have the grace of God, will never be worthy of the body and blood of Christ, and will never cross the threshold of the celestial homeland.”
To priests engaging in homosexual activities, he warns:
“Beware of inextinguishably inflaming the fury of God against you, lest by your prayers you more sharply provoke Him whom you patently offend by your evil acts.”
Damian expressed profound sorrow for those priests who had fallen into sexual perversion. He promised them that they could be liberated from their enslavement to sin by God and restored spiritually if they repent and do penance.
St. Catherine of Siena said in her famous Dialogues — written as if dictated by God — that priests who commit homosexual sins appear before God as those filled with “stench and misery.”
Such priests, the Lord told Catherine, not only offend by failing to resist their fallen nature, “but do worse, committing that accursed sin against nature [homosexual acts].”
“Like the blind and stupid having dimmed the light of the understanding, they do not recognize the stench and misery in which they find themselves,” she wrote.
Continued the Lord to Catherine:
“It is not only that this sin stinks before me, who am the Supreme and Eternal Truth, it does indeed displease me so much and I hold it in such abomination that for it alone I buried five cities by a divine judgment, my divine justice being no longer able to endure it.”
Homosexual sin is traditionally one of the four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.
The Lord told Catherine that even the demons are repulsed by this sin.
“This sin not only displeases me as I have said, but also the devils whom these wretches have made their masters. Not that the evil displeases them because they like anything good, but because their nature was originally angelic, and their angelic nature causes them to loathe the sight of the actual commission of this enormous sin,” she wrote.
With homosexuality entering center stage in the discussions of the Synod presently going on at the Vatican, one should ponder upon the writings of Pope St. Pius V on this matter in his Constitution Cum primum of April 1, 1566. In this Constitution the Inquisitor St. Pius V calls the vice against nature one of the offenses that are most repugnant to God and raise His wrath. He warns judges against negligence in punishing these crimes and solemnly established that clerics should be given over to the secular arm for the punishment of death.
“Having determined to do away with everything that may in some way offend the Divine Majesty, we resolve to punish, above all and without indulgence, those things which, by the authority of the Sacred Scriptures or by most grievous examples, are more repugnant to God than any others and raise His wrath: that is, negligence in divine worship, ruinous simony, the crime of blasphemy, and the execrable libidinous vice against nature. For such faults peoples and nations are scourged by God Who, according to His just condemnation, sends catastrophes, wars, famine, and pestilence ... “Let the judges know that if, even after this our Constitution, they are negligent in punishing these crimes, they will not only be guilty of them in the divine judgment but also will incur our indignation ... If someone commits that nefarious crime against nature that caused divine wrath to be unleashed against the children of iniquity, he will be given over to the secular arm for punishment [of death]; and if he is a cleric, he will be subject to the same punishment after having been stripped of all his degrees [of ecclesiastical dignity].”