Grace & Peace!
It is indeed important to make such a distinction. But making this distinction implies that we should know just what it is between which we’re distinguishing.
A platonic relationship isn’t a usual friendship or even a very close friendship. It’s a chaste relationship of intense intimacy in which a Lover looks upon his or her Beloved and the love they share between them as a way of understanding and participating in the Divine. Physical attraction is not indulged, but not dismissed–it gives way, through the maturation of the relationship, to appreciation and love of the Divine in the Beloved, the beauty and attractiveness of whom reflects the beauty of God. In this way, “vulgar eros” (to use Plato’s terms) gives way to “Divine Eros.” Or, to reference the words of Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est, eros blossoms into agape. We find ourselves being for the one we love in a way that is much more profound than simple attraction, and we find that that being for is a way of living into a life of love that is intimately related to the Trinitarian Life of God.
You could argue that such a relationship is impossible or fundamentally immoral for same-sex attracted people–that only the virtues of “disinterested friendship” are available to them in the process of living more deeply into their humanity because the thing in them by which they apprehend and respond to human beauty or human relationships is so fundamentally broken, obscured, untrustworthy or radically disordered that it must be ignored, destroyed or repressed. And if you wish to make this argument, we can explore together the ramifications such an argument has on how we are to understand human desire, concupiscence and theological anthropology more broadly. But suffice to say, I don’t think an authentically Catholic argument for such a position can be made–that is, you can make this argument that a platonic relationship as I have described it is impossible for same-sex attracted people, but after all of the ramifications of the argument have been worked out, you’ll discover that the positions you need to hold in order to make the argument look more like grotesque versions of classical protestant positions than actual Catholic ones.
I maintain that against such a relationship as I have described no legitimate law can be made.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
