Is homosexuality a sin?
Devout Christians instinctively say yes. The Bible, the Church Fathers, the Catechism of the Catholic Church – all are very clear on this issue.
But recently it’s become fairly common, in Catholic circles at least, to see devoted members of the Church argue that homosexuality is not a sin. And they invoke the Catechism in their defense.
They’re not denying the traditional teaching – simply trying to bring some needed nuance to one of our most gripping cultural issues. They emphasize that the Catechism clearly differentiates between the homosexual inclination and the homosexual act. While the latter is always ‘gravely depraved’, according to the Catechism, the former is not sinful of itself but merely an objective disorder in the sexual faculty. The inclination only becomes sinful when embraced.
These commentators are identifying the word homosexuality with the inclination rather than the act. If this is right, clearly homosexuality is not sinful.
But how does the Catechism use the word homosexuality?
2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex.
Relations – in other words, the act.
So if anything, we’d have to say that the Catechism affirms the traditional language that homosexuality is a sin.
Some might suggest this is merely sloppy language from a bygone era that’s now in need of more nuance. The Catechism was put out in 1992, after all, as the homosexual issue was only just beginning to take hold in Western culture.
Certainly I believe it’s important to make the appropriate distinctions in discussing the issue, a discussion many of us must often take up nowadays. In a time when many so easily equate opposition to homosexuality with hatred of homosexual persons, I fully recognize the need to distinguish between inclination and act, between the dignity of the person and the evil of their sin.
But it’s imprudent to start reworking our traditional categories of language to respond to one issue at one time, no matter how pressing the issue is. The distinction between inclination and act is not limited to homosexuality – even though it’s the only sin where the Catechism explicitly draws it out. We can distinguish between the inclination to deceive and the act of deception, the inclination to steal and the act of theft, and the inclination to gluttony and the act of gluttony. But we still speak of deception, theft, and gluttony as sins. If we’re instead speaking of the temptation to gluttony, then we spell that out. But calling gluttony a sin does not imply that it’s a sin to be tempted to gluttony.
So, if we’re going to object to people calling homosexuality a sin, then we’ll have to be consistent and stop calling deception, theft, and gluttony sins as well.