One of the most disgusting aspects of the Vatican's document is the sanctimonious and hypocritical pretence it gives of caring about gay people, writes Senator David Norris.
Ever since the then Cardinal Ratzinger embarked on his role as the Roman Catholic Church's Grand Inquisitor, the present Pope has been obsessed by homosexuality. His fixation is unhealthy and unbalanced in that it does not lead to honest inquiry, ignores the body of modern understanding of human sexuality and has a nakedly political context which is quite unChristlike.
Eminent scholars originally in good standing with the church, such as Father John McNeill, who investigated the background to Old Testament texts condemning homosexual behaviour and placed them in their correct historical and cultural context, were silenced while attempts were made to stop them publishing the results of their research.
Moreover, the Pope has either himself been the author of, or at least tolerated the use of, violent language about gay people - "objectively evil", "intrinsically disordered", "a virus" - which is a reproach to the very spirit of Christianity.
The latest document to have emerged from the Vatican is all of a piece with this attitude and confirms me in the position I have adopted for the last number of years - i.e. that I will not accept moral instruction from any person who, like Benedict XVI, has never uttered an apology for the fact that he wore a swastika on his armband while people like myself were pushed into the ovens at Auschwitz merely for being gay.
However, the times are a-changing, and it was very interesting to observe the mainstream response to the latest diatribe from Rome as reflected in the national media over the past few days. The Vatican seems to have misjudged the mood of the people (at least in Ireland), and I am heartily glad for that. It is about time, too. Very few of us can have remained unmoved hearing the comments of the sister of a young Donegal man who took his own life in recent weeks partly because of the bullying and rejection he had suffered because he was gay.
To me, one of the most disgusting aspects of the attitude revealed in the Vatican document is the sanctimonious and hypocritical pretence of caring about gay people. The catechism, we are told, distinguishes between homosexual acts and homosexual tendencies - i.e. love the sinner but hate the sin. But sexual orientation is a profound and integral part of the human personality: it cannot be isolated in this manner without great damage to the individual.
The church, we are told, "profoundly respects the persons in question". We must be "accepted with respect and sensitivity". But how do they do that? One may legitimately ask whether the realisation of this admirable rhetoric about respect and sensitivity is accomplished by describing the expression of love between persons of the same sex as "objectively disordered" or "intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law"? And what is natural law? I understand the word "natural" to mean something that occurs in nature as a fairly widespread phenomenon. Homosexual behaviour plainly fits this case.
More than 60 years ago, scientific researchers such as Ford and Beech, as well as Margaret Meade, established that homosexual behaviour was acknowledged and to some extent accommodated in 67 per cent of primitive societies - i.e. man in his natural environment in the majority of cases accepted the existence of homosexual practice.
Moreover, the American scientist Prof Wainwright Churchill, as a result of his research into animal behaviour, states that "homosexual behaviour exists throughout the mammalian order, increasing in frequency and complexity as one ascends the philogenetic scale". In other words, homosexual behaviour is a naturally-occurring variant of sexual activity which is observable in virtually all animals and, as we now know also, in birds, fish and reptiles.
It can only be described as unnatural by employing some special theological form of language. And, of course, whoever controls the language of the debate must inevitably win the argument.
Therefore, I refuse to allow the Roman Catholic Church to redefine the normal use of the word natural in order to disadvantage persons like myself. Indeed, they might profitably remind themselves that no less an author than St Thomas Aquinas himself instanced homosexual behaviour as an example of a phenomenon under which what is natural for the species could be unnatural for the individual, and vice versa.
In the same section of the document we are told, in an apparently mollifying note, that "every sign of unjust discrimination [ in regard to gay people] should be avoided". But, of course, the church would not regard its discriminations as unjust. And, in any case, is it only the "signs" and not the discrimination itself that is to be avoided?
Closer to home, it is a reproach to our own legislators that, within the last couple of years, they allowed the Roman Catholic and other churches to be specifically exempted from the provisions of equality legislation. This was achieved in order to allow them to dismiss from professional posts as teachers or doctors otherwise decent and respectable gay people on the basis of their "life style", and it gives the lie to the frequent assertion that the church is not above the law. And all this while some of those very same church authorities were silencing those who spoke out against sexual abuse and concealing and protecting serial child rapists within their own ranks.
As an ironic footnote, I was astonished during one of the recent programmes on clerical child abuse to see myself in archive footage being roundly condemned by a plump priest with a fatuous, condescending smirk. That priest was Father Seán Fortune.
A little further on, we discover that gay people's sexual orientation "gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women".
How could anybody possibly imagine that this is not an insulting suggestion? What does it mean? I am not conscious of any spectacular hindrance in my ordinary relations with other men and women. I very much resent the implication of freakishness contained in this ignorant comment and would point out that the Princes of the Church have not shown themselves recently as any great shakes at "relating correctly to men and women", not to speak of children.
It is also troubling to see the ease with which the document slides into psychological quackery about some people having homosexual tendencies which were "only the expression of a transitory problem, for example that of an adolescence not yet superseded".
This is the "don't worry, you'll grow out of it" argument that used to be dosed out on the advice pages of women's magazines 50 years ago. It is now totally discredited and exploded and has no place in a serious document, especially one that invokes the "spirit of truth, loyalty and openness".
The language in which the document is couched is stilted, antiquated, pedantic and sometimes obscure and ambiguous. We are told, for example, that the church cannot "admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practise homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the 'so-called gay culture'." I suppose that, since those who practise heterosexuality are equally barred, one cannot claim discrimination on the first ground.
However, the question of the presentation of a deep-seated homosexual tendency is more ambiguous, while the question of support for the "so-called gay culture" is an astonishing ground for refusing admission. It seems indeed like an Orwellian attempt at thought control.
Of course, the Vatican is an old and sophisticated political machine, and statements such as this Vatican "Instruction" do not emerge in a vacuum. There is always the accompanying gloss that is sometimes at least as important as the document itself. In this case, the commentary was provided in the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, by a Mgr Anatrella, a French Jesuit who is also styled as a "psychologist". He says that homosexuality is "a destabilising reality for people and for society".
Apart from the obvious fact that homosexuality makes Mgr Anatrella uncomfortable, I am not sure what this means.
It is difficult to understand how anyone who describes himself as a psychologist can state baldly that homosexuality is "an incomplete and immature part of human sexuality". This flies in the light of the 1974 decision of the American Psychiatric Association that homosexuality could not be so regarded, a decision followed by the psychiatric profession in virtually every other advanced country. I would also deprecate the blunt, callous and untrue statement that homosexuality is "against conjugal life, the life of the family and priestly life". The gay community is moving all the time towards a greater endorsement of committed relationships. Moreover, we are all part of families, and many of us are in fact priests, so the statement is a nonsense as well as being cruel.
I recognise that there are many decent people within the church, including clerics and even some prelates, who are trying to wrestle with the subject of homosexuality and to find in this horrid text some way of wrenching comfort from its weasel words for the gay members of their flock, and I respect them for this. But I have no respect for those like Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, who told Vatican Radio that "homosexuality absolutely contradicts human anthropology and violates natural law, and therefore for the church to deny ordination to gay men is no more discriminatory than if a person who suffers from vertigo is not admitted to a school for astronauts". Let me tell Cardinal Grocholewski that I do not suffer from vertigo, nor do I suffer from homosexuality. What I suffer from is the ignorance and prejudice of prelates such as himself.
No Christian church has ever been honest with its flock or told the truth about human sexuality. Those of us who remain with difficulty within the fold of the Christian church are waiting for a prophetic voice that will declare the truth, however complex, difficult and awkward, and allow us to explore the freedom that comes with honesty.