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I know
many gays and lesbians who are very nice persons. So why should they be rejected
by the Catholic Church?
 , too, know many gays and lesbians
who are nice persons. But being a nice person—or a good person—in
the secular social sense does not mean that someone lives a holy
life.
“Nice”
People
Many individuals will present
themselves socially as cooperative and accepting so as to hide their dark
unconscious feelings of anger and
victimization,
and under their mat of welcome you can find quite a bit of
dirt.
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In contrast,
individuals of true holiness are “men of good
will” (Luke 2:14): those who keep God’s commandments in chastity
of body and mind and whose inner purity diffuses its peaceful fragrance into
the world around them. |
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Being “nice,” therefore,
doesn’t really amount to much spiritually.
Mortal
Sin
Consequently, it can be said
that many persons who live in mortal sin are “nice”
persons.
And why can this be said? Well,
mortal sin is not limited just to egregious
social offenses such as murder, assault, and robbery. Sexual and reproductive
sins are also mortal sins.
And why are they sins? Well,
let’s find out.
Sins of
Narcissism
As Saint Paul said (1 Corinthians
6:12–20), sexual and reproductive sins are offenses against one’s
own body, the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Psychologically, these offenses are acts of
narcissism,[1]
and narcissism, by definition, is the psychological
defense of self-love. Self-love, when reduced
to a psychological defense, is a sin because it offends true
love: it places one’s self above love of God,
Who made heaven and earth—including our bodies. The sin of self-love
makes the temple into a brothel, so to
speak.
So, yes, persons who use artificial
birth control, who have abortions, who get remarried
after divorce, or who engage in acts of sensual gratification that deny the
reproductive function within Holy Matrimony (e.g., acts such as masturbation;
oral sex; anal
sex;[2]
and interrupted coitus, or “pulling out”) may all be nice persons,
but they are also guilty of the sins of self-love.
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Artificial birth control is
narcissism because it renounces fertility. That’s self-love placed before
love of God who created us to be fertile. |
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Abortion is narcissism
because it makes life into a piece of garbage. That’s self-love placed
before love of God who created life itself. |
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Remarriage after divorce
is narcissism because it renounces a holy covenant. That’s self-love
placed before love of God who made a holy covenant with us to rescue us from
our sins. |
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And any activity that reduces
the sexuality of the body to something no more than a form of
entertainment is narcissism because it
seeks to make yourself seen through your desire
for another person. When you look at another person with desire, you do not
see a soul enrobed in chaste beauty; you see only the exuberant fantasy that
your aching throb of loneliness might be alleviated through someone’s
body. Narcissism makes your pleasure in having your body fondled
the focus of your satisfaction. It makes your pleasure in playing
with the body of another person—turning God’s temple into your
toy—into the focus of your satisfaction. That’s
self-love placed above love of God, isn’t it? |
So where does all this self-love
placed above love of God lead us? It leads right into
disobedience.
Disobeying
God
Consider here how the
devil tempted Eve to disobey God (Genesis
3:1-6).
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First, he led her to doubt God
by making Him seem irrational: “Did God really tell you not to
eat from any of the trees in the garden?” |
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Then he led her to doubt that
God was being honest with her: “You certainly will not
die!” |
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Consequently, Eve saw that the
fruit was good for food and looked really nice. It was
natural, so it had to be good for her, she thought.
So, she disobeyed God’s command and satisfied her
desire. |
And the
devil continues to tempt us in the same way today,
convincing us to doubt God so that we will ultimately
disobey God’s commands. And so we look with desire
at behaviors that separate us from a holy life, saying to ourselves, “How
can there be anything wrong with anything that seems so
nice?”
Rejecting the
Church
So those who defile chastity
(and all the holy obligations it entails), for the sake of self-serving pleasure,
persist in narcissism. It’s not a matter of the Church rejecting them;
it’s they who reject the Church, for by placing self-love before love
of God they refuse to
repent their sins, thereby falling into
unforgivable sin and preventing themselves
from accepting God’s merciful call to
forgiveness.
___________
1.
Narcissism, in its psychological meaning, refers to making oneself
seen and noticed; its operations are concerned entirely with the self
and its satisfactions, such that all motivation begins with the self and
returns to the self.
In complete opposition to this self-centered orientation, Christ,
who is the Word, calls us out of ourselves, to listen to Him, and to follow
Him. He is the good shepherd, the gatekeeper who opens the gate, “and
the sheep hear his voice, as he calls his own sheep by name and leads them
out. When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the
sheep follow him because they recognize his
voice ” (John 10:4).
See Jacques Lacan, “The Partial Drive and its Circuit”
and “From Love to the Libido.” In The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981):
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“.
. . The root of the scopic drive is to be found entirely in the subject,
in the fact that the subject sees himself. . . . in his sexual
member. . . . Whereas making oneself seen is indicated
by an arrow that really comes back towards the subject, making oneself
heard goes towards the
other” (pp.
194–195). |
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2. Acts or fantasies of bondage, rape, and anal
penetration pull us away from spiritual responsibility into a realm of anger
and self-loathing, reflecting—or even compulsively re-enacting—those
times when we weren’t unconditionally accepted as infants or
children. The erotic element of such fantasies is directed toward the feeling
of defiling the other, or being defiled yourself, and it derives from the
anger of having been made into an
object—indeed, a piece of garbage—as
a child, in which all human dignity was surrendered and defiled. These acts
or fantasies, therefore, lead you right into the psychological dead-end of
sado-masochism, for in their deepest psychological sense they represent a
“worship” of putrefaction and death as a
psychological defense against the fear of death,
and consequently they defile any responsibility
to life itself.
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