Five confused Dominicans claim Aquinas endorses ‘homosexual love’
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| St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), the eponym of Thomism. Picture by Fra Angelico (c. 1395-1455). (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Five Dominicans, four friars and one sister, have jointly
published a short but sharp refutation of the thesis of another son of Saint
Dominic, Fr Adriano Oliva, who has published a book claiming that homosexual
love justifies homosexual acts even though plain sodomy is still a grave sin.
His sophistry is put bare by Fr. Bernard Blankenhorn, Sr. Catherine Joseph
Droste and Fr. Efrem Jindráček, all of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas
Aquinas (the “Angelicum” in Rome) and Fr. Dominic Legge and Fr. Thomas Joseph
White of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. Their text was
published on Friday by First
Things.
A few months have passed since Fr. Adriano Oliva, an Italian
Dominican friar working in France, published his book claiming homosexuality is
“natural.” InAmours (“Loves”, its French title) he claims Saint Thomas Aquinas
recognized that the homosexual act, insofar as it is lived out between
genuinely homosexual people in “unique, gratuitous and faithful love,” is not
only morally acceptable but should be blessed and supported within the Catholic
Church. The book came out simultaneously in French and in Italian – in
which language, revealingly, it is called L’amicizia più grande: “The greatest
friendship.” That is how St. Thomas Aquinas qualifies conjugal love…
A few months have passed but the scandal created by
Fr. Oliva in Italy and in France has gone all but unnoticed: apart from an
in-depth study by the French lay philosopher Thibaud Collin, published among
others in the French bishops’ daily La
Croix, and a few more or less critical papers in the Italian press, his book
has barely stirred up any controversy. Fr. Adriano is still the president of
the Leonine Commission set up by Leo XIII in 1880 to publish critical
editions of St. Thomas Aquinas’ works and a week ago he presided at a
colloquium on Saint Thomas and the 750th anniversary of the Summa
Theologica in the Dominican order’s monumental library in Paris, Le Saulchoir:
no one seems to care.
Neglecting Oliva’s outrageous claims might seem to be the best
way to rid them of their importance. But the scandal he has created – in the
sense that scandalizing someone means to push that person into acting sinfully
by one’s bad example or teaching – surely deserves clarification. Three
months on after the publication ofAmours, the Dominicans’ honor has been saved
by the five who decided to take on the challenge of contradicting their wayward
brother. The challenge, it must be said, was objectively not an exceedingly
difficult one as Oliva’s sophistry is only too crude, but it needed to be done
insofar as it is widespread both in the Church and out.
They make that clear in their conclusion: “The popular genre of
the book has the potential to create major confusion among the Catholic
faithful. For this reason, we sense a strong moral obligation to respond to
Oliva’s claims.”
The five Dominicans point out that the “Gay Thomism” Oliva is
promoting is “rooted in a new interpretation of Thomas Aquinas,” first and
foremost in “separating the bond of marriage from the good of children.” Where
St. Thomas clearly states that “the bond of matrimony has a two-fold purpose:
1) the pro-creation and raising of children, and 2) the couple’s growth in love
and mutual support through their life together,” Oliva reads something
completely different: “For the heterosexual couple, each person is called to
transcend him- or herself in love of the other, and this not through openness to
pro-creation, which is not part of the essence of marriage, but through
indissoluble love for one’s spouse.”
This is nonsense, the Dominicans show: “None of this is found in
Aquinas. Instead, the Angelic Doctor insists that ‘the good of children is the
principal end of marriage’.”
Adriano Oliva is a genuine specialist of the Aquinate: he cannot
seriously pretend to ignore this, especially as Catholic doctrine has been
traditionally very clear on this point: sexual acts should take place within a
marriage that is open to procreation, and marriage can only exist between a man
and a woman in a union that is not in its essence infertile (“accidental”
sterility, linked to the fertility cycle, illness or old age is not an obstacle
to marriage).
Oliva, on an Italian blog – Ilregno-blog –
set up to accompany the Synod on the Family, wrote on October 3: “Retrieving
certain elements in the doctrine of Thomas on human love, the Church, after
Vatican II, has recognized the primacy of the unitive dimension over the
procreative one when considering the exercise of sexuality between spouses,
separating it from the necessity to procreate.” He even quotes Humanæ Vitæ in
order to make that point. Any reasonably attentive reader of Paul VI’s
encyclical can easily demonstrate the contrary.
The Dominicans’ article in First Things goes on to show the
“second misreading” of Oliva, showing that “the pastoral consequences of this
claim are far-reaching.” Separate marriage from children and anything can be
okay: since “sexual union is not part of the essence of marriage, as the
Catechism of the Council of Trent and Vatican II teach, consequently, the
exercise of the sexual act between divorced and [civilly] remarried couples
does not harm the existing sacramental bond.”
Given the premise, it is indeed true that the absence of the
procreative end turns marriage into something very different from what the
Catholic Church teaches: that is certainly why justifying contraception
ultimately leads to justifying homosexual unions when the pursuit of pleasure
and a form of unity becomes the main object of the sexual act.
“Oliva’s astounding claim has nothing to do with Aquinas, the
Catechism of Trent or Vatican II. (…) He even appeals to Paul VI’s encyclical
Humanae Vitae (paragraphs 8-10) to argue that the exercise of sexuality by a
legitimately married couple is separated from the necessity to pro-create. In
other words, Pope Paul VI teaches that sex need not have anything to do with
babies. We find this claim to be simply outrageous. A student’s paper that
contained such a conclusion would earn a failing grade at any theology faculty
worth its salt,” write the Dominicans.
They then go on to criticize Oliva’s “third misreading,” that
leads him to say that “divorced and remarried couples do not sin when they fail
in continence”: their guilt, he says, disappears because of attenuating
“circumstances” that he does not go into. “Such a proposal evidently renders
any effort to promote continence among the divorced and civilly remarried
useless. Oliva’s work is pastorally irresponsible,” say his critics.
But what about the “indissoluble love for one’s spouse” Oliva
was talking about earlier? Well, here he is obliged to complicate his reasoning
one step further, saying that in fact true “unique, faithful, gratuitous” love
can be found in a second union rather than the first marriage celebrated in a
church. So it’s all a question of subjective “feel-good” situations.
That being posed, the “fourth misreading” evidenced by the five
Dominicans follows of itself: “homosexual acts can be natural and wholesome.”
Attributing this sort of claptrap to St. Thomas who on the contrary, considers
homosexual activity to be gravely sinful insofar as it makes man reject even
his own animal nature.
If Oliva makes the “daring” statement that homosexual acts can
be “ethically good,” it is because of a sophistic interpretation of St. Thomas’
reflections on wrongful pleasures that can under certain circumstances
correspond to the personal “nature” of a given person as corrupted by habit,
illness or bad “customs” – such as cannibalism.
The Dominicans set out St Thomas’ true thought:
The passage in question (I-II, quesiton 31, article 7)
considers pleasure from a metaphysical perspective. Thomas takes up the
question because he wants to explain how someone can take pleasure in something
that, properly speaking, is contrary to the person's nature. He explains that
some delights are especially tied to the body: food, sleep, etc. Such things
are good for all animals, and not just human beings. Other delights find their
origin in the soul, that is, they are not found among most animals, or even
among none, except us. Next, it can happen that what is unnatural for human
beings in general can turn out to be somewhat “natural” for certain
individuals, because their nature has been altered. For example, some sick
persons enjoy eating earth. This is not really natural for them, Aquinas
explains, but is more properly understood as a corruption of their nature.
They then explain Oliva’s error:
Oliva celebrates this text. He thinks it shows that
homosexual acts are natural for homosexual persons. And what is natural must be
good! Also, for Oliva, Aquinas places the origin of the inclination for gay sex
in the soul of the homosexual person. That is, this inclination comes from the
most intimate part of his being, and it moves all the way to sexual union.
Oliva concludes that we can distinguish between gay sex sought simply for
physical pleasure, and the tender gay sex that comes from the homosexual
person’s most intimate self. Indeed, homosexual persons are called to live out
the inclination which is natural for them, namely, in fidelity to another
person of the same sex, and enjoying sexual acts not primarily for pleasure but
as expressions of love.
While St. Thomas speaks of the “bad customs” that in a way
alter the soul, Oliva claims that because homosexual people don’t choose to be
that way, then their homosexuality is their “nature.” The Dominicans note:
Now if, as Oliva proposes, Thomas means that the
homosexual inclination comes from the most intimate part of the person’s soul,
then the same reading must apply to Aquinas’s mention of cannibalism and
bestiality. Yet this is clearly absurd. Aquinas cannot mean that cannibals and
practitioners of bestiality are following the inclinations of their most
intimate selves. That is precisely why Thomas mentions custom.
In his pre-Synod blogpost mentioned earlier, Fr. Adriano Oliva
admits that St. Thomas called sodomy “a sin,” but claims that the medieval
philosopher and theologian had a genius’ intuition that allows “the separation
of sodomy from the expression and the exercise of homosexuality.” Oliva writes
that it is enough to separate moral judgment from the “metaphysical standpoint”
that an “unnatural pleasure” can exist and is “connatural” to the person with
homosexual leanings even when it goes against the “general specific nature of
the human being,” insofar as human nature only exists in its concrete form in
such or such a person. Oliva does not deny that in his time St. Thomas went on
calling sodomy a sin, but for him the argument of personal nature is enough,
and “should apply to bisexualism and transsexualism,” as long as sexuality is
expressed in a context of “unique, faithful and gratuitous love.”
Fr. Adriano Oliva made abundantly clear that his reflections and
his book had the purpose of participating in the Synod debate. And in fact, his
blog post was published on Saturday, October 3, the very same day that Msgr.
Charamska, the now-former official in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith, broadcast the fact that he was in a homosexual relationship, using much
the same arguments as Oliva.
