A few years ago I had a discussion with Bishop Teodoro Bacani while the TV cameras were rolling.
I said, "There's no word, no verse, no story anywhere in the Bible which condemns homosexual orientation, gay and lesbian love, or same-sex marriage."
The good bishop, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday, then asked, "But what about Sodom?"
The answer to that is simple. There is, however, plenty of material for a longer answer which I present in a two-hour seminar for those who are interested in all the technicalities, including the Hebrew words involved.
The simple answer is: The story is a very ancient myth. It has nothing to do with gays and lesbians. The Bible itself refers to Sodom twenty-some times. Never does the Bible even imply that homosexuality was an issue in Sodom.
Jesus mentioned Sodom in a totally different context, inhospitality.
It's not about homosexuality. It's even more emphatically not about modern day gays and lesbians.
This, of course, is also true of the other three or four verses or words which "they" say prove God's great disdain for gay and lesbian love. The meaning is simply not there.
Many people are so fed up with church prohibitions when it comes to sex, that they just don't bother their heads about it any more. Last week, however, some students from UP Diliman interviewed me. They asked some very sensible questions. I will share a few of them with you.
1. Please give the specific passages that illustrate Jesus' replacement of the Old Laws (including Leviticus) with His law of love. What are the exact passages from St. Paul?
I complimented them on the question because you have to know quite a bit about several things to even ask such a learned question.
St. Paul did teach that Jesus set Christians free from the "Old Law." It is a recurring theme in St. Paul's writings. In Galatians, for example, St. Paul dwells on this subject at some length. He says if Christians live up to Jesus' Law of Love, they are to separate themselves from all the other laws -- and those people who would impose them. For example, that's in Galatians 3:23-25 and Galatians 4:30-31.
Paul insists the Levitical laws, meaning the ones found in Leviticus, have jurisdiction only within the Jewish religion, Judaism. He says that in Christ Jesus the "Law" was put to an end, and Christians are set free.
The final chapters of Galatians expand Paul's doctrine on freedom from legalism, that is, from strict literal conformity to a moral code for its own sake, with no other consideration.
The Pharisees were legalism personified. The Gospels depict Jesus time and again contradicting and condemning the legalism of the Pharisees.
Jesus himself prevented the death penalty when the legalists were about to stone a woman for adultery in accordance with the legalism of Leviticus. That death penalty law is in the same book (Leviticus) which requires in Chapter 20 that "a man who lies with a man" must be put to death. I believe Jesus would have done the same -- stop the stoning -- if it were a bakla being executed for sex with a man.
The theology of St. Paul on Jesus doing away with the legalism of the Old Law is eloquent and beautiful.
For the subject of homosexual love, however, it is only relevant in the general sense that Christian gays and lesbians are set free to love and find salvation, not in the law, but through faith in Christ.
This "liberation" of St. Paul is, on the other hand, irrelevant in regard to the Levitical law of "man with man." These words are not referring to same-sex love anyway. This passage, in a context condemning pagan worship, was a law against temple prostitution. It was telling the Hebrew people, God's people in the Old Law, not to worship Baal and Molech, and in this verse, not to do so by sex. The pagan worship is the focus of the condemnation, not the sex.
Nevertheless, the "New Law" does set Christians free from mandatory circumcision and such things as avoiding pork, prawns, shrimp, red dresses, and sex during menstruation.
2. Why do you think the Roman Catholic Church is against homosexual rights?
It's impossible to answer this question briefly. It's buried in history. I'll just give you a little peek into two millennia of discrimination.
Look at the Church's attitude toward masturbation. It is labelled a sin. Why? Because it breaks the Sixth Commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."
You know and I know masturbation does not even remotely resemble adultery.
Then there's the taboo against condoms (even to prevent AIDS). You know and I know that condoms do not even remotely resemble adultery. Yet, it seems using that little bit of rubber is against Utos VI also.
Loving another man somehow falls under the same law: thou shalt not commit adultery.
In order to try in a few words to sort out these strange bedfellows, we'll skip a lot and start with St. Augustine who was flourishing around the year 400. He had a strong prejudice against sex and bodily pleasure in general. He was very influential, and a lot of people followed him. They forgot that Jesus enjoyed a foot massage from a sinful woman and turned 80 gallons of water into 80 gallons of wine for a party.
This went on for 850 years. Then St. Thomas Aquinas came along and incorporated all the accumulated sex negative concepts into his theology. He was such a powerful influence that his teachings were the backbone of Catholic theology down through the centuries, virtually unchallenged until recent decades.
Unfortunately, some of the greatest minds of the last thirty years, seminary professors, brilliant thinkers and writers, were hounded out of the church for contradicting the 13th century thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Oddly enough, neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas got their anti-sex ideas from the Bible. The Bible is really sex-positive and sex-friendly. They got their sex-is-bad theories from ancient pagan Greek philosophers who taught that "the soul is good" and "the body is bad."
Now, you can readily see that same-sex sex had no chance of approval in a theology that looked with disdain and disapproval even upon opposite-sex sex. Until St. Augustine's time, people we would call gays and lesbians were having weddings in the church, but that got squelched because of the power of people like St. Augustine.
Incidentally priests were still getting married in the Church almost to the time of St. Thomas until that got squelched, too. Priests were required to be celibate, and gays and lesbians were required to be virgins and celibate all their life.
So, St. Augustine and St. Thomas are really the big guns behind two millennia of sex-is-bad theology. Because they also were admirably "holy" men (in other ways), and formulated some of the greatest theological approaches of the Church in other areas, popes and seminary teachers down through the centuries blindly followed them and the tradition of sex-negative theology.
Thus, in short, the answer to your question is: tradition. The Church teaches that "tradition" is almost as important as the Bible. The Church is stuck, stalled, stopped, held hostage to "tradition. For that reason tradition is hard to change. Very hard.
Look at the tradition of prejudice against women. The Church is still stuck in the tradition that they are not equal. But the few inches of progress woman have made are encouraging signs that a more enlightened age might actually recognize that women are equal to men -- even in the church.
It's hard to find even a glimmer of similar hope for gays and lesbians in our crystal ball. The Church just can't let go.
Bad tradition hangs on along with good tradition.
In our country in our times people want to know why murderous hazing continues in the PMA and other universities. Sen. Rudolfo Biazon, a PMA alumnus, gave the answer: "It's a hard tradition to stop."
Even harder is to get the Church to stop its tradition of hazing homosexuals, belittling women, forbidding contraception, condemning masturbation, and imposing celibacy on all priests, lesbians, and gays.
I found my UP student visitors quite impressive and stimulating. Their questions showed insights one might not expect.
I've been on dozens of talk shows on Philippine television. Usually I don't get a chance to answer anything in any depth. And some questions are trivial, such, "Father, do you have sex?"
On the other hand, these university students asked more substantial questions, including some about biblical interpretation which are too technical to answer here. I admired both their scholarship and their inquisitive minds.
For more information about these or similar issues, e-mail your questions or comments to me at saintaelred@gmail.com (just click on the moving envelope)