Carlo Cardinal Martini, the 85-year-old emeritus archbishop of Milan, has written a short book in which he posits his disagreement with the Church’s opposition of same-sex relationships. “It is not bad,” he writes, “instead of casual sex between men, that two people have a certain stability.” Surely this is true, if we limit ourselves to these two choices. Stability and faithfulness always trumps casual sex with multiple partners.

But by limiting himself so much, the cardinal makes a serious mistake which is comparable to what the media thought Pope Benedict XVI said about the use of condoms being allowed in some cases. The Holy Father presented the use of condoms by a male prostitute as an example of ethical progress, but not ethically sound in its own right. And much the same may be said about the opinion of Cardinal Martini. Surely a stable same-sex relationship is better than loose, possibly unsafe, sexual contacts, but it does not make the relationship itself something that the Church can support, just like it can’t support prostitution, homosexual or otherwise, with protection or not.

And that is Cardinal Martini’s mistake. Despite his assumed good intentions, the cardinal is wrong when he says that because one thing is better than another, it must be inherently good. Two wrongs don’t make a right, as the saying goes. This is an argument of details without taking in the larger picture, and that is that the Church rightfully teaches that same-sex attraction is intrinsically disordered, but that’s a topic for another time.

This article on LifeSiteNews, from which I took the above quotation from the cardinal’s book, offers some more aspects of the argument against this position.

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