Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, (publisher of my magazine, Catholic World Report), was on PBS’ “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” last night debating Fr. James Martin, SJ, on the Instruction.
Fr. Fessio scored all body blows, rhetorically speaking, on Fr. Martin and came out way ahead. The transcript shows Fessio’s skill at explicating the Church’s teaching. He even went into some explication of the Trinitarian significance of human sexuality.
MARGARET WARNER: Father Fessio, explain the reasoning here. If a man, a young man or a middle-aged man, for that matter, has been celibate for some time and is vowing to remain celibate as the Church requires to be a priest, why does it matter to the Church if in his heart he is homosexual or heterosexual?
REV. JOSEPH FESSIO: Margaret, that’s a wonderful question. First of all, it should be clear to people that the Catholic Church has taught from the beginning that homosexual acts are intrinsically immoral, against God’s plan, against the natural law and are serious sins, and that, therefore, a tendency to indulge in those acts, or desire for them, is an objective psychological disorder.
Now that is a hard saying. It’s something that goes against what a lot of people think but that’s what the Church teaches. Now the reasons for that are very deep and more than we can go into here but they go to the very Trinity itself of God as being both union and fruitfulness and Christ incarnate, the Son of God being the bridegroom of His Church.
The Church has a very, very high view of sexuality in marriage. Paul expresses that in his epistle to the Ephesians that it’s a great mystery, a man and a woman, Christ and the Church. And so the document at the very beginning says that when a man is ordained, he doesn’t just perform the functions of a priest. He actually becomes united with Christ, the bridegroom of the Church, and, therefore, to have a relationship to the Church’s bride, which is an ordered relationship, you have to have someone who has got that kind of affective maturity who also has an ordered relationship as a man to the bride which is his Church. So those are the fundamental reasons for it.
MARGARET WARNER: Meaning he would be heterosexual in orientation, though celibate?
REV. JOSEPH FESSIO: Yes, because that’s the normal orientation that corresponds to the finality of human sexuality.
Exactly,Dom! That’s what I was referring to in my earlier comment below.
In the brief time one has in such interviews (though the News Hour gives more latitude than most…) it is very difficult to distill complex issues into short, meaningful sentences. Fr. Fessio succeeded in doing that brilliantly I thought.
We need to hear more from him and the Fr. Shaughnessys of the Church and less from the Martins, McBriens and Reeses.
That’s all well and good, but Fr. Fessio’s argument about the implications of being configured to Christ were not emphasized in the instruction. These issues were relegated to footnote 5. If this had been fully emphasized in the instruction, there would have been no “prudential judgment” wiggle room left for bishops and seminaries to ignore it.
One comment by Fr. Martin is particularly telling:
“[W]hile it does change nothing that’s been on the books, it does change the actual practice of many seminaries and religious orders who in the past thirty or forty years . . . .”
This was in response to Fr. Fessio’s statement was consistent with millenia of Church teaching. It demonstrates the typical American Catholic dissenter’s approach to the Church. If I don’t like something, I will ignore it or deny it, and in time the doctrine will change. You would think after nearly 50 years of trying this tactic they would give up.
You would think after nearly 50 years of trying this tactic they would give up.
But it HAS worked on a local level. If a dissenter can get his bishop to go along with his error or even enforce it, then he has indeed changed the doctrine of that part of the Church. Granted this change is local and temporary, but it is enough of a victory to set these guys dreaming of doing the same to Rome.