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Catholic Magazine Editor Responds to Priest's Homily Critical of Vatican Same-Sex Unions Document

Fr. Alphonse de Valk says "Wrongdoing and sin do not have rights"

This was originally published as an opinion piece in the Aug. 31 Toronto Star.
Republished with permission of the editor

The issue of same-sex marriage is one of human rights, we are told. It may be a sin in the eyes of the Church, but that's because the Pope is narrow-minded, some say. Moreover, he should leave Canadians to follow the courts.

Ontario's Appeal Court ruling of June 10, 2003, started the conflagration about same-sex "marriage" that is still blazing.

Roy McMurtry, James MacPherson and Eileen Gillese decided that homosexuals have a right to the ceremony of marriage; that the definition of marriage of one man and one woman is unconstitutional and to be scrapped; that the new definition is that of a union of two persons; and that in Ontario lesbians and gays may "marry" immediately.

British Columbia judges did the same thing shortly thereafter. No debate in Parliament, no appeal, the case is settled, forge ahead. So, the government decided to legislate the judges' diktat into law.

A great many Canadians will have none of it; why not?

Let us go at once to the root of the evil: Homosexual activity rages against God's will.

God ordained the institution of marriage (Genesis 1: 27). He intended that it should be a permanent, lifelong commitment between husband and wife (Matthew 19:5-6); and, He ordained that marriage should exist for loving and cherishing one another and for co-creating children who are protected and nurtured in a family.

What God wills, is reflected in nature.

The family is not a product of culture; that is to say, not something of man's making. The family is, as great sociologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski in Sex And Repression In Savage Society (1927) have shown, "the starting point of all human organization" and "the cradle of nascent culture."

The family is what distinguishes man from animal in social culture.

Animals, like human beings, have sexual and parental instincts. It is only when these instincts transcend their purely biological function into a permanent social relationship that we speak of marriage and this can only occur among human beings.

Throughout history the family has been defended by the strongest moral and religious sanctions. The idea that man and woman can be free from restraints is a naive distortion.

Human virtue is not instinctive: It has to be developed by a continuous moral effort. This requires the subordination of natural instinct and individual impulse to the common social good.

That was and is the message of the Mosaic code, revealed by God to the Hebrews and the world, not out of spite but out of love, not to frighten us with irrational taboos but to free us from slavery to our own passions.

This message is not "subjective," or "for Catholics only," or "just a private opinion"; rather, it reflects the moral law written in nature and therefore based on, and in harmony with, that human reason which reflects divine reason itself.

Homosexuality rejects the above. It surrenders to instinct and impulse.

It admires self, as did Narcissus, the Greek youth who fell in love with his reflection in the pool. It struts on the streets flaunting naked bodies and muscle. It denies social purpose, and consequently, also denies God's will in marriage and family.

By demanding equality of status under civil law, it corrupts that law. By insisting on protection for its unnatural and pathological sexual activity, it perverts society.

In the past, homosexual activists have mocked marriage as a corrupt, bourgeois institution. They wanted it blown to bits. And now three judges lead the way in doing just that.

Some people ask what harm same-sex "marriages" can do. What a question, when the very first step requires throwing the age-old legal concept of marriage into the trash bin.

The court's claim that there is a right to same-sex marriage is false.

Supreme Court Justice Peter Cory was wrong in the 1995 Canada vs. Egan case when he asserted that sexual orientation (meaning homosexuality) is analogous to the items mentioned in Section 15 (1) of the Charter such as race, ethnic origin, colour, and sex. It is not, and has never been so; instead, the homosexual act is an act of the free will.

The Church is right. The homosexual condition is a disorder, and homosexual acts are grave moral aberrations.

Those in a homosexual relationship do not have a "right" to have that relationship enforced in law. Wrongdoing and sin do not have rights.

Stealing can never be a right. Adultery can never be a right. Nor can sodomy. Virtue has rights; vice does not.

Father Alphonse de Valk is editor of the monthly magazine Catholic Insight.
See http://www.catholicinsight.com/

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