The greatest consternation regarding the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, even from some of those who have turned away from the gay lifestyle and are embracing chastity, is centered around the use of the term “disordered” in The Catechism of the Catholic Church. One Jesuit priest had this to say: “In my over 20 years of Catholic LGBT ministry, there is nothing that has sparked more anger and more questions and confusion than the Vatican’s use of the terms ‘intrinsically disordered’ or ‘objective disorder’ to describe, respectively, homosexual acts and homosexual orientation. They are terms that are not easily understood, and, even when they are, they still cause much pastoral damage and misinformation.” But the “disordered” connection to homosexuality goes back further in Church History than just The Catechism. In 1975, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published “Persona Humana: Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics,” which included this statement: “…homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of.” Only, this is not simply a modern construct, for St Thomas Aquinas wrote in “The Summa Theologica:” “Man like any other being has naturally an appetite for the good; and so if his appetite incline away to evil, this is due to corruption or disorder in some one of the principles of man: for it is thus that sin occurs in the actions of natural things.” He continued: “When the lower powers are strongly moved towards their objects, the result is that the higher powers are hindered and disordered in their acts. Now the effect of the vice of lust is that the lower appetite, namely the concupiscible, is most vehemently intent on its object, to wit, the object of pleasure, on account of the vehemence of the pleasure. Consequently the higher powers, namely the reason and the will, are most grievously disordered by lust.” Yet, there is still even an earlier example, from St. Augustine in his Sermons on the New Testament: “So the eye of the heart too when it is disordered and wounded turns away from the light of righteousness, and dares not and cannot contemplate it.”
And, herein, with the wisdom of St. Augustine, is revealed the reason behind such difficulties with the word “disordered:” because we are wounded - we are disordered; and it’s the wound no one wants to deal with. As Augustine finds - when we are hurt and confused, the instinctual response is to turn away - its part shame and part fear: shame for what happened to us; in men, this is an archetypal reaction as masculinity, especially for those who were never fully or properly formed into men, is often falsely based on the notion of strength and impregnable solidity - for this reason, homosexuals are almost always drawn to the hyper-masculine fantasy ideal: strong, sexually potent, but elusive; a highly erratic pattern of seeking out the male then retreating into quick one-night-stands and disease-fueled promiscuity; an indescribable yearning for manhood, but a fear of actually attaining it. Therefore, gay men become trapped in an endless cycle of sexual recklessness and emotional purging: they literally and metaphorically constantly grasp at the next big thing. Eventually, it becomes sad and desperate; and, then, disorder truly dictates over everything. I saw this firsthand as rather shy and reserved boys from the hinterlands of America arrived in gay San Francisco and over a period of a few months descended into sexual deviancy. The current obsession with same-sex marriage, a concept that was firmly disregarded as Victorian mediocrity even in the midst of the AIDS crisis, is a last-ditch effort to make sense out of a lifestyle that has become increasing meaningless. Only, yet again - it denies the cause of unhappiness: the unwillingness to heal; or, to even admit that we need healing; it’s a denial of the disorder in our lives. However, pretending that everything is okay doesn’t make it so. The holding onto self-obliviousness only proves just how mixed-up we have actually become.