Fr. Z's Blog

Jesuit-run (who else?) Amerika ran a piece by – and this still has me shaking my head – Card. McElroy of that key See of San Diego, suffragan to Los Angeles.  The Amerika piece is a dreadful obfuscation of Catholic moral teaching and defined doctrine, wrapped in a fog of cliches about synodality (“walking together”) and buzz words like “inclusion”, “dialogue”, “pastoral”.

In effect, McElroy wants to change the Church’s teachings on homosexual acts, sexual activity outside of marriage and admission to Communion and the ordination of women.  The real basis of his arguments?  “Because!  Spirit!”

At The Catholic Thing there is concise unmasking of McElroy’s essay, which I warmly recommend that you look at.  “A Road To Nowhere” by Stephen P. White.  HERE

Somewhat less diplomatic is Rod Dreher at American Conservative who penned a note called Cardinal Screwtape.  HERE

One of McElroy’s premises deserves special recognition.  He will go on to claim that those who hate homosexual acts that a sinful really hate the sinners, not the sins.  That’s, of course, a plain lie that we reject with scorn.  Here’s McElroy:

It is a demonic mystery of the human soul why so many men and women have a profound and visceral animus toward members of the L.G.B.T. communities. The church’s primary witness in the face of this bigotry must be one of embrace rather than distance or condemnation. The distinction between orientation and activity cannot be the principal focus for such a pastoral embrace because it inevitably suggests dividing the L.G.B.T. community into those who refrain from sexual activity and those who do not. Rather, the dignity of every person as a child of God struggling in this world, and the loving outreach of God, must be the heart, soul, face and substance of the church’s stance and pastoral action.

It is a “demonic mystery”.  Since McElroy brought up demonic, which he pins on those who think homosexual acts are sinful, let’s bring in another voice.

In her Dialogues (ch 124), St. Catherine of Siena’s conversations with God, the Doctrix of the Church writes that the Enemy, demons, incite people to unnatural sins (homosexual acts) but that they don’t stick around to see it happen, because those acts  are too repulsive even for them.

Those acts are so contrary to nature that they offend their angelic intellect, even though they are fallen and apostate.   They want the sin to take place and they incite it, but it is so offensive to them that they absent themselves when it is happening.

Here she describes demons inciting men to these acts.  GOD is talking at this point.

“I wish thee to know, dearest daughter, that I require in this Sacrament from you and from them as great purity as it is possible for man to have in this life. On your side you ought to endeavour to acquire it continually. You should think that were it possible that the angelic nature should be purified, such purification would be necessary with regard to this mystery, but this is not possible, for angels need no purification, since the poison of sin cannot infect them. I say this to thee in order that thou mayest see how great a purity I require from you and from them in this Sacrament, and particularly from them. But they act in a contrary way, for they come full of impurity to this mystery, and not only of that impurity to which, through the fragility of your weak nature, you are all naturally inclined (although reason when free-will permits, can quiet the rebellion of nature), but these wretches not only do not bridle this fragility, but do worse, committing that accursed sin against nature, and as blind and fools with the light of their intellect darkened, they do not know the stench and misery in which they are. It is not only that this sin stinks before Me, Who am the Supreme and Eternal Truth, it does indeed displease Me so much and I hold it in such abomination that for it alone I buried five cities by a Divine judgment, My Divine justice being no longer able to endure it. This sin not only displeases Me as I have said, [NB:] but also the devils whom these wretches have made their masters. Not that the evil displeases them because they like anything good, but because their nature was originally angelic, and their angelic nature causes them to loathe the sight of the actual commission of this enormous sin. They truly enough hurl the arrow poisoned with the venom of concupiscence, but when their victim proceeds to the actual commission of the sin, they depart for the reason and in the manner that I have said. Thou rememberest that I manifested to thee before the plague how displeasing this sin was to Me, and how deeply the world was corrupted by it; so I lifted thee with holy desire and elevation of mind above thyself, and showed thee the whole world and, as it were, the nations thereof, and thou sawest this terrible sin and the devils fleeing as I have told thee, and thou rememberest that so great was the pain that thou didst receive, and the stench of this sin, that thou didst seem to thyself to see no refuge on this side of death, in which thou and My other servants could hide so as not to be attacked by this leprosy. Thou didst see that thou couldest not remain among men, for neither small nor great, nor old nor young, nor clerics nor religious, nor prelates, nor lords, nor subjects, were uncontaminated in body or mind by this curse.

God made it pretty clear to St. Catherine what the truth is about sodomy and all the other unnatural acts that fall into that fell category.   So hideous, so offensive are those sins that even demons who provoke them won’t stick around while they are being committed.  Demons can, however, and will, stick around the places where those acts were committed.

This is clear, charitable talk.  It is not the vague and slippery lulling of certain homosexualist activists who are so very popular with those who have given into the wisdom of the world.