Tea at Trianon: Catholics Cannot Accept Same-Sex Unions

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, October 8, 2021

Catholics Cannot Accept Same-Sex Unions

From Crisis:

Opponents of Catholic teaching immediately claim that the Church is a “hater.” Is the Church a hater? Most emphatically, she is not. True, each member of the Catholic Church is a sinner; and no doubt most Catholics have hated someone at some time; even unspeakable crimes have been committed by Catholics. But we are speaking about the Church’s teaching and action, not about the renegade actions of laymen who hate others or of prelates who water down, dilute, or deny the Catholic truth.

As I argue in False Mercy: Recent Heresies Distorting Catholic Truth, the Church firmly condemns all violence against human persons for whatever reason. Consistently, she condemns violence and hatred directed against those with same-sex attraction. Still, she is clear that the homosexual orientation is a disorder because the actions to which it points are sinful: “The proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” art. 10). Equally consistently, the Church condemns the various forms of sodomy, from masturbatory sodomy to homosexual sodomy.

The Church teaches that homosexual sodomy is unnatural, intrinsically evil, and gravely evil. She has always taught this, and her teaching is firmly grounded in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Genesis 19:1–11 expresses the wickedness of homosexual sodomy. Some Catholic scholars reject such a reading, reducing the sins of the men of Sodom to inhospitality. They were indeed inhospitable, but their chief crime was sodomy, as the CDF teaches clearly (see “Pastoral Care,” art. 6). St. Paul presents the sin of sodomy as the nadir of the historical devolution of human depravity (Romans 1:18–32). In 1 Corinthians 6:9, Paul presents sodomy as a sin that excludes one from the Kingdom of God. In short, sodomy is a mortal sin. (Read more.)