Has the Church ever edited "homosexuality is a choice" out of the Catechism?

[Digitonomy]

Tendances foncières and *tendances profondément enracinées *are substantially different. The second is the same as in English, the first means that it’s part of their basic make up, which would mean they have no choice.

Just to clarify further for those of us who are not true francophones, foncière means property, so I think as an adjective in this phrase a good translation would be innate. So tendances foncières are innate tendencies, and *tendances profondément enracinées *are deeply rooted tendencies. A small but potentially significant difference.

In this thread, we erred in analyzing only paragraph 2358’s second sentence, while the first English translation actually incorporated a bit of the first sentence into the second – effectively tendances foncières became [paraphrasing] “deep rooted tendencies… that are not chosen,” instead of my preferred translation, “innate tendencies”.

Fair enough, but then what of the “objectively disordered” phrase? That was omitted altogether in the second sentence, and it didn’t end up elsewhere in paragraph 2358 of the first English translation. Conspiracy theorists’ eyes are no doubt starting to dilate with the thought that translators were trying to scrub “objectively disordered” from the Catechism. But that doesn’t bear scrutiny in my view, since the paragraph immediately prior (2357) says

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

So why the change? I think the English translators felt they were removing repetition and making the paragraph clearer. Since there was no typical edition on which to base the translation, there was less obligation to word things in exactly the same way as the original. Moreover, I suspect some of the English translators were also involved in the translation into Latin. Making minor changes in phrasing and such while still being faithful to the meaning of the original French, they probably felt would give an option for the Latin typical edition to improve on the French. An option that was taken, as the Latin translators kept the English wording of deeply rooted tendencies, although they dropped the idea of innateness altogether.

Other examples elsewhere in the CCC would be needed to prove or disprove this theory, but it does seem pretty clear that the English translators were not jumping the shark, and the changes (at least in this paragraph) from 1st to 2nd edition were not because the 1st edition was poorly translated, but because the Latin translation changed from the original French text.

 

[Contarini]

Digitonomy, I think you’re missing the important distinction between saying that acts are “objectively disordered” and saying that “tendencies” are.

So I can see why the English-language translators would have wanted to eliminate the language of “objectively disordered tendencies,” which is taken by many gay people, such as Andrew Sullivan, as saying that they, as people, are “inherent moral deviants.”

Edwin

 

[Rau]

Digitonomy, I think you’re missing the important distinction between saying that acts are “objectively disordered” and saying that “tendencies” are.

So I can see why the English-language translators would have wanted to eliminate the language of “objectively disordered tendencies,” which is taken by many gay people, such as Andrew Sullivan, as saying that they, as people, are “inherent moral deviants.”

Edwin

The acts are described as “intrinsically disordered” - “meaning always wrong to choose”. The inclination is “(objectively) disordered” given it is an inclination to a disordered thing.

I don’t see great value in the use of “objectively disordered” - noting in particular that that expression is used only once in the entire Catechism. While it is a not wrong statement, it can be read to be “condemning” something about the person over which he may well not have control (the inclination, not the acts). It may also seem like a medical diagnosis (which it is not).

The point of the teaching is that the acts are wrong, and the inclination to those acts is not itself a good thing, for it may constitute or give rise to a strong temptation to wrong acts.