Germany’s Catholic bishops are officially launching their first commission for “queer” pastoral care. Auxiliary Bishop Ludger Schepers of the troubled Essen diocese, the commission’s inaugural chief, is already urging a change in the Church’s teachings on homosexuality. “In the coming months, there will certainly be a lot of things that can be openly discussed,” Schepers said in a radio interview last week. The bishop claimed that the Church has long “suppressed” discussion of homosexuality, but that he sees Pope Francis’ recent promulgation of Fiducia Supplicans, which allows an ambiguous form of “blessing” for same-sex couples, as “an opening” for broader discussion of the Church’s age-old position on homosexuality.
Last month, the German Bishops’ Conference named Schepers its representative for “queer” pastoral care, a position that had previously only existed at the diocesan level but now carries the full force and endorsement of the Bishops’ Conference. Schepers himself noted in an interview last year that LGBTQ pastoral groups have sprung up among the German Church with surprising speed over the past five years. “There are [now] commissions for queer pastoral care in more than 20 dioceses,” he bragged. “So a lot has happened that we can be proud of.”
Like many LGBTQ advocates within the ranks of the Catholic clergy, Schepers has had to contend with the Church’s perennial moral teachings on sex and marriage, often reinterpreting clearly promulgated moral standards and even outright rejecting them. For example, Schepers has argued that the Church must consider (or, rather, reconsider) its guidelines for sexual activity outside the context of sacramental marriage. “It can’t just be about sexuality in marriage[;] it has to be about sexuality in the relationship,” the bishop quipped. “What matters in a relationship is honesty, authenticity and mutual respect.”
Unfortunately for Schepers, the Catholic Church and its greatest thinkers and defenders have already considered and addressed such arguments. The Church holds that human beings are created with a purpose — chiefly, to know, love, and serve God and to be united with Him in Heaven for all eternity — and that the actions we take throughout the course of our lives either help or hinder that purpose. (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Revisiting a Catastrophe: A Cardinal’s Blueprint for the Next Pope)
Sexuality, too, was designed with a purpose — chiefly, procreation, which homosexual sexual activity biologically and incontrovertibly precludes; other goods, such as intimacy and pleasure, are secondary in the eyes of the Church and are, in fact, only good when serving that chief and primary purpose of procreation. This is why the Church condemns such acts as masturbation, which also precludes procreation, as disordered acts, because they attempt to rearrange the order instituted by God, valuing sexual pleasure above the generation of new life.
The Church also clarifies that sex is only permitted within the context of marriage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains: “By its very nature conjugal love requires the inviolable fidelity of the spouses. This is the consequence of the gift of themselves which they make to each other” (CCC 1646). Sexual activity outside of marriage is spiritual and even physical robbery: It presumes to take for oneself the gift of the other without first pledging oneself to the other in the indissoluble, covenantal sacrament of marriage. Again, the Catechism explains, “Love seeks to be definitive; it cannot be an arrangement ‘until further notice’” (CCC 1646).
Same-sex couples cannot enter into the sacrament of marriage, since the very nature of such a relationship contradicts God’s design for marriage, the family, and sex itself. “Sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and soul,” the Catechism explains. “It especially concerns affectivity, the capacity to love and to procreate, and in a more general way the aptitude for forming bonds of communion with others.… Physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity are oriented toward the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life” (CCC 2332–2333). God created both man and woman “in His own image” (Genesis 1:27), which one might say makes sex a mode of “completing” the imago Dei, uniting both the masculine and the feminine in a mirror image of God, who is, as C.S. Lewis so simply and wisely put it, “Love Himself.”
Two men cannot “complete” the imago Dei in such a way, nor can two women. The Catechism declares homosexuality to be “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law” (CCC 2357). As the reference to the natural law indicates, homosexuality is disordered because it “close[s] the sexual act to the gift of life,” but also because it does “not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity” (CCC 2357). That is to say, God made man to be given, body and soul, to woman, and woman to be given, body and soul, to man; He did not make man to be given, body and soul, to man, nor woman to be given, body and soul, to woman.
Sexuality, the Catechism further explains, “is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such” (CCC 2361). This line is crucial to understanding the errors of redefining or reshaping the Church’s teachings on sexuality. In his commentary on Corinthians, St. Thomas Aquinas added a further degree of clarity when he wrote, “Anima mea non est ego” — “My soul is not me.” In his Summa Theologiae, the great philosopher built on this fundamental truth when he explained that humans are neither bodies that have souls nor souls that have bodies; we are, instead, essentially body-soul composites. That is, the body is just as essential to being human as the soul is; the unity of the two is our essence.
Lewis echoes and simplifies this truth in The Screwtape Letters, when the senior demon writes to his inept nephew, “[F]or [humans] constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.” Perhaps nowhere is this immutable maxim more gravely and solemnly felt than in the realm of sexuality. To engage in homosexual acts — or, on an even more hubristic plane, in transgenderism, with its horrific drug regimens and brutal surgeries-cum-mutilations — is in truth to deny the essential relationship between body and soul, to declare either that what the body does doesn’t affect the soul or that the soul has no relation whatsoever to the body or is, perhaps, only part of the body.
The Catechism declares that those who do have homosexual inclinations “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.… These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition” (CCC 2358). To that end, an initiative to offer pastoral care and counsel to those who identify as LGBTQ sounds like a good idea. Such an effort may encourage and equip those struggling with disordered desires to live chastely, to seek Christ’s presence in their pain, to master their own passions, and to offer them as a sacrifice to Christ crucified. Especially in an age steeped in degeneracy and sexual sin, such a ministry indeed seems necessary.
Sadly, it looks as though Germany’s bishops have chosen to ignore the wise words of Aquinas and even the declarations of the Catechism. The soul is to be ignored and left to wallow in confusion, misery, hunger, and unsatisfactory self-worship. The body is to be encouraged to run rampant — and if it happens to trample 2,000 years of Catholic wisdom and divine instruction, so be it. Through their heterodox devotion to “queer” and LGBTQ initiatives, the German bishops have demonstrated once again that they worship at the altar of the zeitgeist: No Communion is chalice is offered, but souls are sacrificed.