Some Thoughts on Homosexuality and Integrity
Deacon Douglas McManaman
One stumbling block among many traditional Catholics, when discussing LGBTQ+ issues, homosexuality, and related questions, is that they immediately think in terms of “sex” and seem unable to think outside that framework. When I mentioned this to a former student of mine who is openly gay, she immediately—and with considerable vexation—replied, “That’s so male!” I think she is entirely correct. This is, indeed, a tendency that is often associated with men, and, of course, those who have traditionally written the encyclicals and other Church documents on these matters have tended to be male. She, by contrast, understands that homosexuality and the issues surrounding it are primarily about “relationship” rather than sex, at least for the most part.
Another problem with Catholic discourse on homosexuality is the language of “disorder”. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we read:
The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. (2358, CCC)
I have to agree with all those who strongly suggest that the language of disorder should become a thing of the past; for most people, upon hearing the word “disorder”, think “psychology” (i.e., Borderline Personality Disorder; Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Panic Disorder, etc.), and not “morality”, in which the word “disorder” has a very different and less offensive meaning (i.e., I have a disordered appetite for sweets). I am of the view that Carl Jung was on to something important when he wrote:
In view of the recognized frequency of this phenomenon [homosexuality] its interpretation as a pathological perversion is very dubious. The psychological findings show that it is rather a matter of incomplete detachment from the hermaphroditic archetype, coupled with a distinct resistance to identify with the role of a one-sided sexual being. Such a disposition should not be adjudged negative in all circumstances, in so far as it preserves the archetype of the Original Man, which a one-sided sexual being has, up to a point, lost.[1]
This is not an easy thought to unpack, for there is a world of depth psychology behind it, but what is at least clear is that Jung does not treat homosexuality as a mental illness or pathology. The relationship between this insight and same sex sexual acts is, at least from a Catholic perspective, a bit more difficult to determine, but I believe we need to begin by carefully listening to and incorporating what Jungian psychology has to say about this.
Furthermore, there is a significant difference between the repressed homosexual and the non-repressed homosexual. Over the years in my role as an educator and as a deacon, both among teaching colleagues and fellow clergy, I have met a number of repressed homosexuals, and such repression spawns a degree of misogyny, a resentment of strong and independent women and a corresponding preference for the submissive and sycophantic kind, an inordinate need to control and micromanage, narcissistic characteristics, resentment and vindictiveness. The non-repressed homosexual, on the contrary, is fully conscious of his or her homosexuality, is open about it, has accepted and embraced it (which does not necessarily imply a sexually active lifestyle), and is not ashamed of it. By virtue of that whole hearted embrace, such persons tend not to exhibit the aforementioned undesirable characteristics (i.e., misogyny, the disordered need to control, narcissism, resentment, etc).
Now, if homosexuality is not a disease, then shouldn’t homosexual actions be morally non-problematic? This is a very difficult question to answer convincingly. The best I can do, outside of a very dry and abstract natural law treatment of this question, is to present a case from a theological point of view, which means I will leave many people unconvinced. But I will begin with the fact that man was created to be a “priest of creation”, called to raise up and spiritualize the matter of the universe. Our purpose in this life is to “Christify” matter, and such a task is a struggle on many levels.
A priest is one who offers sacrifice. At the Mass, the ministerial priest raises up matter, namely the bread and wine that were offered by the congregation, in order that they may be transformed by Christ into his sacrificed body and blood, under the appearance of bread and wine, in order to be given back to the congregation as food and drink. Nutrition in general is a raising up of matter followed by a transformation into living tissue. Man takes the matter of this universe and forms it into complex systems that serve a common end, namely the common good of the civil community. But his ultimate purpose is to offer up his life, his own matter, to become Christ (God became man so that man might become god). Human life is a priesthood, and in baptism, this priesthood is elevated and thus participates in Christ’s priesthood, for in baptism a person is anointed priest, prophet, and king. Individuation, in a Jungian perspective, is the integration of the conscious and unconscious mind to become a complete and unified self, and this is an essential part of this human achievement, for one must offer the whole of oneself and the best of oneself.
The sexual drive is fundamentally a drive toward unity and integration, and the sexual act itself is in many ways ordered to help in the integration of the anima in the man and the animus in the woman.[2] He gives himself to her sexually, but in doing so receives her; she in turn receives him and in doing so gives herself to him. Not only is the result a reproductive completeness, but the beginnings of a psychological completeness. If the two have become a one flesh union and this act expresses that one flesh union, then he has become more completely himself insofar as he has become integrated with or joined to this woman, and vice versa.
The sexual act is indeed an act of marriage, an expression of conjugal love. If God calls a person to be married, he calls that person to participate in the Paschal Mystery in a particular way, to leave behind a world closed in on itself, a world in which a person caters to his/her own individual needs and wants, and henceforth turns to another. One sees the other romantically in the true sense of “romantic”, that is, with the divine vision (Dante), but at the same time with the real vision of the other’s imperfections, and the two help one another towards achieving that eschatological perfection. He gives himself to her completely, totally, for her sake, for the sake of that perfection that he beholds, and she as well.
Moreover, the sexual act within marriage is a priestly act, a genuine exercise of that baptismal priesthood, in that the act of sexual union between husband and wife is an offering. Priesthood is about offering to God matter–in some cases a sacrificial victim, in other cases the first fruits of the harvest. The married couple offer themselves to one another. This offering, however, is at the same time an offering to God, because this is how God has called the two to love Him, that is, by loving one another. And so, just as the ministerial priest offers to God bread and wine that he may change those substances into the substance of Christ, to return them to us as the Bread of Life, in the act of sexual union husband and wife offer their matter to God, so to speak (sperm and egg), and God receives what is offered and changes it, infuses into it a human soul, so that it becomes a person. What God does with that offering at that moment is out of the couple’s control; they can only hope that this offering will be completed in the conception of a child; they exercise no dominion over it. That, of course, does not mean that the couple must intend to conceive a child every time they engage in the sexual act. There is a two-fold aspect to the sexual act that corresponds to the two-fold nature of marriage: it is a community of love and life.
But every married couple gets to the point where they must move beyond the physical sex act (for example, the libido naturally wanes, or one of them becomes incapacitated in some way, i.e., develops Alzheimer’s, or just becomes too old), but unless their relationship has been fundamentally self-centered throughout, life’s struggles and an unrebellious relationship to those struggles have prepared and disposed them to love one another for their own sake, not for the sake of what they do for one another sexually. And this is what makes human life meaningful. Lasting joy in this life–which is not the same as pleasure–stems from a kind of seeking whose direction is away from the self towards the other’s good. This seeking involves a loss of self, a forgetting of self. This is the meaning of ecstasy, which describes a joy that is out of this world (ecstatic). It comes from the Greek word ekstasis, which means a displacement outside the self, a standing outside of oneself. The self is left behind, as it were. The result is an “other worldly” joy that comes upon a person without knowing where it came from. It’s a joy we have no control over. There’s a sense in which this joy is larger than we are, for it embraces us from all sides, like the womb that embraces the child within it.
This is what Christ meant when he said anyone who saves his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. If our life is motivated primarily by the kind of desire in which we directly seek the satisfaction of the self on whatever level, we will lose it. We’ll never find rest. But Christ said: come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest. That begins with leaving ourselves behind and going in search of him, not for the sake of our own satisfaction, but because he is good, he is the divine mystery, the Incarnation of Goodness Itself.
A married couple who are well past the physical/sexual are so much one body that love of self means love of the other. The rising above the physically sexual act is an essential part of this final spiritualization of matter, that is, the raising up of one’s matter (body) to become Christ most fully. To pursue the sexual act outside of this context of conjugal union will leave a person spiritually incomplete and unfulfilled.
A non-repressed and openly gay man or woman who renounces genital sexual acts is in some ways ahead of the game and has the unique vocation to witness to the archetype of the Original Man, so to speak. This does not mean that his or her life will not be a struggle, but they are not the only ones who are called to sexual renunciation–virtually everyone is at one point or another. Rising above the physically sexual to a love that is ecstatic and selfless is the end to be achieved in this life, for this life is about learning to love and be loved. It is very difficult to convince others that the call to sexual renunciation is actually a positive, a gift in fact. In many cases, only life experience will bring a person to that realization. But who is the Original Man but Christ himself? [3] G. Studdert Kennedy writes:
…if He was the warrior and the women blent into the unity of a new creation in whom there was neither male nor female because He had worked out within Himself that higher human harmony of both in which their age-long creative discord is destined finally to be resolved, that harmony was no easy miracle. In this, as always, He learned obedience by things that He suffered, and worked out His harmony as we must, after His example, work out ours, using the sex relationship and the poignancy of its appeal as one of our chiefest means of grace. It is in this perfect unity in Him of the Warrior and the Woman that I find the keystone to the quality of His life. He was the man woman, the mother father, the creative warrior complete.[4]
This is why I believe that those Cardinals such as Pietro Parolin and Blase Cupich are right to call for a new paradigm with respect to certain moral questions. As in sense perception, there are certain angles that simply do not permit one to ask the questions that lead to new data that make possible certain insights that are otherwise missed. I believe most people today readily see that homosexuality is not a pathology, but if we as a Church continue to operate within a pathological model, I think we can reasonably expect faithful Catholics who are gay to repress it, which inevitably leads to a host of negative projections, such as those listed above. A natural law paradigm is fine as far as abstract moral problem solving goes, but a deeper and more psychological paradigm is necessary if we are going to begin to understand homosexuality more accurately and hope to stop driving away gay Catholics who choose to return to mass until they are finally shamed from the pulpit by “pastorally challenged” clergy, never to return. A non-repressed and openly gay Catholic is one who can live that faith without looking at women as inferiors, but as equals, who is free from the need to create and control an environment that fuels an unhealthy narcissism that exploits others, and who lives in hope and with a healthy self-esteem, and yes, a certain degree of pride.
Notes
- Carl G. Jung. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9/1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 71.
- “Jung believed that within every person there are elements of the opposite sex. This contrasexual core, which Jung calls the anima in the male personality and the animus in the female, performs the specific psychic function of connecting the conscious male or female ego-identity with the deeper regions of the unconscious which Jung calls the objective psyche. Jung calls this deep unconscious layer of the psyche objective because our subjective ego-consciousness gradually emerges out of its prior existence and continues to experience that existence as other than itself, alien to its own subjective ego-territory. In contrast to what Jung calls the personal layer of the unconscious, whose contents consist of repressed memories and traits which can be recalled to consciousness and experienced as belonging to the ego, the contents of the objective psyche, the archetypes, are more impersonal and collective in nature and hence harder to integrate into conscious adaptation…. Thus, to the conscious ego the anima or animus seems to be an impersonal “other” that confronts the ego from outside itself. Somehow the ego must learn to bring this force into connection with its own personal identity. Jung coined the word “anima” and “animus” as a result of observing in countless patients split-off sides of the psyche recurrently appearing in personified forms as male or female figures. One common example was the overly rational male who consistently dreamed of being confronted by an emotional and sexy female who tempted him into “irrational” behavior. On awakening, the dreamer still felt possessed by the mood of this dream anima-figure, invaded by a bittersweet mixture of excitement and longing. This anima-lure is typical of the way the unconscious tries to acquaint the one-sided ego with affects and impulses it has excluded from its conscious functioning. This is what Jung means when he says that the function of the contrasexual factor is to lead us to the deeper realms of the objective psyche. The anima-figure points the way, in this example, to the split-off nonrational side of life.” Ann Belford Ulanov. “C. G. Jung on Male and Female” in Male and Female: Christian Approaches to Sexuality, edited by Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Urban. T. Holmes, III. New York: Seabury Press, 1976, pp. 197-199.
- “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creatures. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created, things visible and invisible. All were created through him; all were created for him. He is before all else that is. In him everything continues in being. It is he who is head of the body, the church! He is the beginning, the first-born of the dead, so that primacy may be his in everything. It pleased God to make absolute fullness reside in him and, by means of him, to reconcile everything in his person, both on earth and in the heavens, making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1, 15-20).
- G. Studdert Kennedy. The Warrior, the Woman and the Christ: A Study of the Leadership of Christ. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1929, pp. 159-161.