Adriano Oliva's Amours: L'Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels — On the Pastoral Implications of Aquinas' Recognition That Homosexuality Is Natural

In my last posting some days ago about Adriano Oliva's Amours: L'Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2015), I noted that Oliva finds Thomas Aquinas teaching that sexual attraction to members of one's own sex is natural for those who are homosexual. As part of the natural order, the homosexual inclination some people have is to be treated with every bit as much respect as is reserved for the sexual attraction that the majority of people display towards members of the opposite sex.

Adriano Oliva's Amours: L'Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels — Aquinas on Inclination to Homosexuality as Natural

As I have promised in previous postings, I'd like to share some more reflections about Adriano Oliva’s book, Amours: L’Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2015). In several recent postings (here and here), I've discussed the first part of Oliva's book, which deals with Thomas Aquinas' theology of marriage and its implications for the debate about how the church should deal pastorally with divorced and remarried Catholics. I've also offered an excerpt from the second part of Oliva's book, which is about how Aquinas treats the topic of what we now understand as homosexuality. Now I'd like to offer some further reflections regarding that second part of Oliva's book (pp. 75-124):

Anthea Butler Responds to Pope's Statement re: Clergy Sex Crimes: "Stop Passing the Buck Onto the People of God Instead of the Catholic Hierarchy"

That's not the issue. The issue is, the cycles of revelation of the malfeasance of the church and the hierarchy in protecting their own at the expense of children and families is hypocritical in light of the theology of the body and sexuality.

— ProfB (@AntheaButler) August 20, 2018

Religious studies professor Anthea Butler responds to the latest papal statement about the abuse horror show, and, as ever tells the God's truth:

I Learn to Read and Am Given a Bible-Story Book: A Southern Baptist Boy in 1950s Arkansas Learns the Facts of Life

I am six years old. I have just learned to read. It is 1956. Television has come on the scene. But we read, tell each other stories, rather than watch it. T.v. is too new to hold much interest for us. Books are more reliable for entertainment and education.

Charles Pierce on Roy Moore as Exactly What Republicans Are All About Now: "Wake Up and Smell the White Supremacist Theocracy"

I'd rather have a pedophile in office rather than a democrat any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Pedophiles only screw kids while democrats screw everyone.

— Carroll Bryant (@CarrollBryant) November 10, 2017

This quote should be hung in museums of American history 50 years from now so people can remember why the Republican Party collapsed. https://t.co/P70omazXeD

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) November 10, 2017

Charles Pierce hits the nail squarely on the head:

"Some People Get Uninvited from Talks. Some People Never, Ever Get Even an Invitation to the Table at All": Mary Hunt, Marianne Duddy-Burke, Jamie Manson NCR Podcast Conversation

I've previously recommended to you Mary Hunt, Marianne Duddy-Burke, and Jamie Manson's essay at National Catholic Reporter entitled "Kick-Starting a New Catholic Conversation." I'd like now to recommend a podcast conversation between the three that NCR published several days ago. I've embedded it above for your convenience in listening. 

In this discussion, Mary, Marianne, and Jamie talk with NCR's Brittany Wilmes about their essay and what they intended in co-authoring it. Some key points that stand out for me as I listen:

Cahill and Wilkinson's Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church on How Humanae Vitae Undermines Sexual Ethic of Catholic Church

As a complement to what I just posted about how the U.S. Catholic bishops and Republican party brought right-wing white evangelicals on board the anti-contraception and anti-abortion bandwagon, I'd like to share a posting I made yesterday to my Facebook friends. I'm now reading the recent ground-breaking, exhaustive study of child sexual abuse in the Catholic church entitled Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports by Desmond Cahill and Peter Wilkinson's of Melbourne University's Centre for Global Research. (Thanks to Sarasi1 for inviting me to do that). When I've finished reading it, I'll have more to say about it, but for now, here's something that leaps out at me as I read:

Opening to "Dialogue" in U.S. Catholicism and the Fracas Involving Father James Martin and Austin Ruse: My Take

I see mention online of some kind of fracas involving Father James Martin and Austin Ruse — or perhaps "fracas" is not the right word. What seems to have happened is that Ruse attacked Martin in an exceptionally ugly way on social media. That's not surprising: Austin Ruse is an exceptionally ugly man representing an exceptionally ugly iteration of Catholicism that has considerable sway within the U.S. Catholic church.

National Catholic Reporter Calls for Dialogue on Sexual Ethics: My Response

My new denomination hosted the counter protest in C'ville; my old one is still complaining about women getting to use birth control.

— Michael Boyle (@mboyle78) August 12, 2017

Meanwhile, in the strange, hermetically sealed, intensely self-gazing and obdurately parochial world of white Catholicism in the U.S., folks are still talking about what the magisterium has to say about human sexuality — as if this is a live issue a full half-century after the papacy commissioned a study of birth control because it knew even then that a large percentage of married Catholic couples were contracepting. And then the papacy chose to ignore the sound, theologically well-grounded recommendations of that commission and reasserted its teachings about birth control knowing full well that those teachings flew in the face of the sensus fidelium.

On the "Incorrect" "Homosexual": The Catholic Magisterium, Father Dwight Longenecker, and Asking the Wrong Questions in the Age of Trump (2)

There's a reason my previous posting built to a question about what kind of institution produces people who think about gender and sexual orientation at the puerile level of moral awareness exhibited by Catholic magisterial thought regarding these matters, especially when that institution professes to shape moral thinkers. My posting asked,

"The Donald Took Evangelicals to a Very High, Huge, Really, Just the Best Vantage Point on Trump Tower and Showed Them All the Riches": Commentary on the Wreckage That is White American Christianity After Trump

Evangelical crypt keeper Pat Robertson excuses the misogynistic talk in Trump tapes as "macho" https://t.co/u1jIiDChpQ

— Jonathan Merritt (@JonathanMerritt) October 10, 2016

When We Already Know That Every Zygote Is a Baby, Why Waste Time Looking at Scientific Evidence? A Footnote

I have a few more things to say about about the dishonesty of those who want to use natural law theology to argue that a zygote has unique genetic material indicating its ontological status as a full human person, but who simultaneously want to pretend that the fact that the majority of zygotes are aborted naturally has no importance in the natural law discussion of abortion. I'm adding to what I wrote yesterday about these matters. You'll encounter this morally dishonest argument frequently among right-wing "pro-life" Christians, and notably among right-wing Catholic ones, precisely because natural law theology appeals to nature and the Creator of the natural world as it builds its moral arguments.

Questions from a Ewe Responds to Archbishop Chaput About Excluding the "Irregular" from the Sacraments: "Here's What I Suggest. Walk Up to Your Local Priest and Ask about His Sex Life"

In recently published commentary on Archbishop Chaput's newly released guidelines to deal with "irregularities" in dispensation of the sacraments in his archdiocese, the blogger writing at Questions from a Ewe notes with her usual panache and verve that it's exceedingly odd that Chaput is concerned with "irregularity" of a sexual sort — well, with some folks' "irregularity — when it's well known that 50% of U.S. Catholic priests and an even higher percentage than this in other parts of the world are sexually active. All those priests are, in other words, leading the kind of "irregular" lives for which Archbishop Chaput wants to bar only openly LGBTQ Catholics and divorced and remarried Catholics not living together as brother and sister from the sacraments.

Colleen Kochivar-Baker on Michael Voris Story: "Voris Very Much Reminds Me of the Donald . . . a Walking Talking Personality Disorder"

Colleen Kochivar-Baker's stellar comment here yesterday, in response to the story about Michael Voris revealing his gay past that I posted on Friday:

Michael Voris of Church Militant Addresses His Gay Past in Shocker Video Statement

Does this come to the rest of you as the shock it is to me? 

Adriano Oliva's Amours: L'Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels: Book Notes

I've just finished reading the new book by the noted French Dominican Thomist scholar Reverend Adriano Oliva, Amours: L'Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels (Paris: Cerf, 2015), and would like to offer you today some notes about this important new study. Oliva is a distinguished student of the very important Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, on whose understanding of natural law much Catholic theology has been built over the centuries. He is president of the Leonine Commission, the group charged with producing and publishing faithful critical editions of Aquinas's work, and is a research fellow at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, and a researcher with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), both in Paris.

Religión Digital Publishes Interview with Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa: "The Church Preaches Mercy, But Does It Not Keep on Persecuting Homosexuals?"

Yesterday, the Spanish journal Religión Digital published an interview with the gay Polish priest who came out of the closet in a public way prior to the synod on the family — Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa. Those following this story will know that Msgr. Charamsa was quickly defrocked by his bishop (in sharp contrast to the many priests who have abused minors and have been permitted to remain in ministry, have been moved about from parish to parish and hidden from public scrutiny).

Leah Mickens: "Reason Why Feminists and LGBT People Get So Much Crap from the Hierarchy and Their Conservotrad Enablers Is Because They Demand Honesty in Sexual Issues"

Brilliant commentary from Leah Mickens of the blog Extra Ecclesiam Est Libertas: Leah's writing in response to my previous posting today, which ends by pointing readers to a surrealistic conversation the blogger who maintains Questions from a Ewe had recently with several African priests about matters of priestly celibacy (they don't necessarily heart it) and the synod and holding the line on the gays and divorced folks (they do heart holding that line).

A Reader Writes: Nothing About Us, Without Us: No One Should Discuss *Any* People Designated as "Others" Without the Robust, Respected Contributions of Those "Others"

Mary O'Grady writes in response to my posting yesterday about Father William Grimm's question, When Catholics talk about LGBT people, what would the arguments look like if real people were part of the evidence?:

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: What Would the Arguments about Gay and Trans Folks Look Like If Real People Were Part of the Evidence?

What would the arguments look like if real people were part of the evidence?, Maryknoll Father William Grimm asks, as he looks at the typical responses of many Catholics to gay people and same-sex marriage.