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Little_Sheep
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Thank you for the hardy laugh!
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on_the_hill
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Thanks for the recap. Now I don’t need to bother reading the whole thread.
Thank you for the hardy laugh!
This is what I’ve learned from CAF: It is my faith that leads me to believe. There is no other rationale.
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Little_Sheep
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Amen.
This is what I’ve learned from CAF: It is my faith that leads me to believe. There is no other rationale.
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Used2beSherryG
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In neither one of your scenarios would it be necessary for me to refer to a third party. A that’s nice, thanks would suffice. Yes, really!
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pnewton
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For you it may be okay. For me and others it violates our conscience. I agree we need to be police, but there are plenty of other polite options that are morally acceptable, such as not using any title, relying only on the name and appropriate pronouns.
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Little_Sheep
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Honest question. For years, civil law has approved of marriages that are not marriages (Holy Matrimony) per the Catholic Church. And yet, I’ve never heard a fuss about these things from Catholics until same-sex marriage was ramping up to approval under civil law.
That is the reason that so many define the current RC Church hullabaloo over marriage equality to be “homophobic.” I personally am willing to accept in good conscience that many individual Catholics disagree with same-sex marriage due to deeply held religious convictions that inform every area of their life and that they are not “homophobic,” per se.
But still, in all my searching and researching and speaking to others and absorbing official Catholic Church teaching and belief on the subject, I cannot find an argument that holds water to explain away why some are so vociferous on this subject and not on the subject of, say, a person who remarried after divorce.
Put another way. If the OP had a coworker who had been married to her second husband for 20 years, would the OP assume there was no annulment and worry about calling the woman’s husband a “husband” instead of an “adulterous lover?”
I suspect the official Catholic answer might wax poetic on complementarity. Unfortunately, that argument is so painfully thin that well-meaning people who seek truth cannot accept or understand it. The Catholic tradition is filled with such rich, meaty, weighty philosophy - important, meaningful philosophy that betters the lives of humans.
I fear the Catholic Church has backed itself into the smallest of corners. As a Protestant (someone who does not expect perfection from the Church founded by Christ), that doesn’t bother me or truly even hinder my respect for the Roman Catholic Church. But it does leave me seeking a Catholic perspective that makes a lick of sense on this subject.
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Tantum_ergo
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You’re right, there are far too many heterosexual marriages that are not right in the eyes of God (notice I don’t say ‘in the eyes of the Catholic Church’. Everybody thinks the Church goes around making up rules. They don’t. They stick with the rules that God told them to proclaim. God knew that plenty of Catholics even would ‘honor Him with their lips, but not their heart’, but the rules HE has given are still there, whether people want to obey Him or not).
But --and I think people might not want to hear or see this–every one of those problematic ‘marriage in the eyes of the law but not God’ COULD at some point be made right with God.
The Catholic couple who married on the beach by the free spirit friend because it was so kewl to be ‘one with nature’ could simply confess and have their marriage not only legal, but valid and sacramental.
The nonCatholic couple who married with her being divorced once and him twice could at some point, either through seeking to become Catholic, receiving annulments IF their earlier marriages were not valid, and then convalidating the present marriage, make their marriage ‘right’, or the previous spouses could die. . .
IOW, the man and woman in a marriage might NOT have been free to marry when they did, but become free to marry later.
There is always that possibility of making it ‘right’ **in a heterosexual union.
So Catholics never HAD to ‘make a big deal’ of problematic heterosexual ‘marriages’. There were and are ways in which the situation can be rectified. The Church was content with proclaiming the teaching loud and clear, and hoping that the individuals in question would ‘do the right thing’.
BUT there is NEVER the possibility of ‘making it right’ in a homosexual union. Never. So yes, we have to make a ‘big deal’ of it from the get go.
It is simply not the same for a homosexual couple, who can never be ‘right’ in the eyes of God, as it is for a heterosexual couple who have the possibility to BECOME right in the eyes of God.
**
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Little_Sheep
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I appreciate your response. But, in charity, why would one assume that homosexual couples are practicing the act of sodomy. Is that too much for charity to withstand? Catholics seem to jump on that (as if they know what people do behind closed doors). This is what makes the official standpoint so disingenuous.
Cannot two men or two women build a fruitful life together and not engage in those actions that the Church finds distasteful? Are there not heterosexual divorced and remarried couples who practice chastity as the RC Church counsels? Of course there are. Why grant less charity to your homosexual brethren?
Again, the response of the people of God to their gay brethren is exceedingly thin. And this thinness shows to the rest of the world.
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Rau
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Marriage is a sexual relationship. It is demonstrably the case that advocates of SSM speak of and demonstrate the romantic relationship underpinning the desire for “marriage”.
Of course. And clearly marriage is not something they would seek. And there would be no requirement to place on such a couple the “restrictions” that generally apply to marriage (such as siblings being not permitted to marry, and so forth). These restrictions themselves reflect the nature of the relationship that “marriage” constitutes. It may be entirely reasonable for the State to offer a suitable legal framework for couples proposing a relationship such as you describe. That relationship should hardly be considered “marriage” though.
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Thorolfr
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Rau
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You miss the point entirely. Civil Unions were presented as marriage-look-alikes. eg. they included the same restrictions on who could be a party to them. I don’t know what watering down you imagine - it is not the legal framework that the Church has any objection to - rather the nature and intent of the relationship proposed and for which State endorsement is sought and offered.
Surely it is plainly evident that Marriage is the only sexual relationship that the Church can endorse, and that such sexual relationships can only be between Man+Woman.
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pnewton
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I think the problem you see does exist, at least with many Catholics. I think the reason is that homosexuality is not something most people understand or are tempted with. We tend to be the harshest judges of those sins we do not have to worry about. In these threads, you will see homosexuality treated in a way that is disproportional, almost like it is in a category of super sin, all by itself. Homophobic or psychology?
Theologically, you are correct. Despite what was said earlier about the possibility of change for the remarried, the *current *object state is similar to homosexual marriage. Also, not all re-marriages have a path to normalization, anymore than a homosexual marriage does.
Still, there is one difference. Two people of the same sex married are known by that fact to be in a situation where the marriage is false. Two people of the opposite sex are not always know to be in such a state. Charity demands we assume the best. Occasionally, we do know that a second marriage is a false marriage. In such a case, I think we should consider that our response to what we call those people (husband or wife) must be the same as we would in the homosexual marriage, if we are to be consistent.
In this case as well, the use of the proper name will avoid the problem of both conscience and impoliteness.
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Bookcat
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Off topic off topic off topic.
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Bookcat
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- No we do not ignore such unjust laws but work to remove them.
- We acknowledge that the court made that decision. Sure. That is history.
- We acknowledge that two persons of the same sex have made use of that unjust law.Sure.
- But we also do not recognize that such are actual marriages. They simply cannot be.
- And we cannot go against our conscience and say they are or approve of them.
- We respect PERSONS and from that respect we also must not LIE to them. Or support them in gravely disordered actions. We respect persons and more than that we love them. We cannot though violate our conscience and say or do something contrary to such.
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Little_Sheep
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I very much appreciate this honest, well-reasoned response. Thank you, pnewton.
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Little_Sheep
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I get this intuitively and I feel the same way. But I know several older people who married and have no sexual contact whatsoever. I also know one couple who had sex one time before they were married and then got married and never had sex again and that suits both of them well. They are my age now (49) and have been married for 20 years and raised a child they adopted from Russia. All of these situations I describe are marriages in my eyes, though perhaps not in the eyes of the RC Church, which I believe likes matrimony to be consummated.
But certainly these irregular marital relationships I have noted have value and would not be “questioned” down to the vocabulary used to note a spouse by others.
The rest of your post discussed something I agree with - that most same sex marriages have and want to have and intend to have sexual relationships. I get this (and it has never struck me as disgusting or bothersome or an offense to God) because this is the way that homosexual persons are objectively ordered, courtesy of their Creator. I understand that this is not the official Catholic position and that some Catholics will disagree with me. But please know that my objective observations on the matter are written into my heart by my Creator.
Again - a thin thin thin teaching by a Church that is anything but.
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Rau
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I think we share an acknowledgement that they are in some sense departures. Further, sexual relations would have a normal and natural place in these relationships at any time the parties to them chose. It is not possible / logical to declare that any close, loving relationship without sex can be a marriage by reference to these exceptions.
Of course not. The couple were eligible to marry and chose to do so. Their intentions to have sex or not are in most cases private matters unknown to others. And while an intention to act to entirely avoid children (eg. no sex) puts the validity of the marriage at risk, that can change at any moment.
I don’t doubt your sincerity, but I do question whether your reasoning here is objective and sound. Persons who experience homosexual attractions exhibit desires that run contrary to the fact of their bodies. It is not possible to attach any rationality to the objective act whereby one man transfers his semen to another. It involves mutual closeness and pleasure sharing, a powerfully experienced attraction for sure, but it is objectively dissonant with the body. We do not know the cause of homosexual attractions, but the inconsistency with the body would appear to send a strong signal that something is amiss. There is no foundation to conclude that the creator intended anyone to experience sexual desire for a person of the same sex, or indeed for a child, much less to act on either of these desires. The fact of these desires does not serve to validate them as good.
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Thorolfr
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Your assessment seems rather simplistic to me as if body parts only have one proper function and one way of being used which is dictated by biology when in reality, the behavior of humans and the ways we use our bodies are much more complex and are not always dictated by biology.
That is also true of our closest relatives such as chimpanzees. For example, in his book Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 134, the Dutch primatologist, Frans de Waal, describes how male chimpanzees “fondle” each others scrotums, which he says is “a common form of reassurance among male chimpanzees.” Now is that the proper biological use of scrotums for them to be fondled by other males? Obviously this fondling serves a social function among male chimpanzees because champanzee behavior, like that of humans, is more socially complex than that of most other animals.
The sexual behavior of humans is also very complex and cannot be reduced to the simplicity based only on biology that you described above.
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Rau
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It may be simplistic, but I take the simple view that one’s sexual faculties are built for the opposite sex. This is self-evident to all with eyes to see, and yes, biology has a great deal to do with that. But biology can fail in various ways too - as it does when our desires take us in patently erroneous directions. And while there are multiple purposes, or fruits, of the sexual act, they are bound together by the nature of our body.
And some animals eat their young, perhaps when food is scarce, or to demonstate something “social”
Ain’t that the truth.
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Thorolfr
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The problem with comparing how many animals devour their young including rats, prairie dogs, insects, fish, reptiles, etc. to the chimpanzee social/sexual behavior I described above is that the devouring of the young is obviously a very primitive and instinctual type of behavior common to most animals whereas the chimpanzee sexual behavior is a more complex social behavior just as humans also have more complex social behaviors. That complexity is one of the things that truly distinguishes great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans) from behaviorally less complex animals and is one of the things from which our own humanity arises.And some animals eat their young, perhaps when food is scarce, or to demonstate something “social”
Ain’t that the truth.
Another way that great apes (including humans) are different from, say, insects, is that we have culture,and even chimpanzees have primitive culture, behaviors that are learned and passed on from one chimp to another and are not based on instinct or biology. For example, in his book, The Real Planet of the Apes (Princeton Univeristy Press, 2016), David Begun points out that chimpanzees from one area or place can make primitive tools or have their own specific way of doing something like cracking nuts that other chimpanzees from a different area don’t have or do differently. That is because these are learned behaviors specific to one group of chimpanzees and is part of that group’s own culture (primitive as it might be). And culture is one of the things that also sets humans apart from most other animals.
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