Sexuality: Playing catch-up with a quiet revolution

There is a recognition and growing acceptance within wider society that human sexuality is not one-dimensional, writes TP O’Mahony

The statement by Apple CEO Tim Cook that he’s proud to be gay is yet another indication of the growing recognition that heterosexuality is not the sole morally and legally acceptable form of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The public declaration, in an essay written for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, makes Cook the highest-profile business CEO to come out. “I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me”, Cook wrote in his essay.

“When I arrive in my office each morning, I’m greeted by framed photos of Dr Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy. I don’t pretend that writing this puts me in their league. All it does is allow me to look at those photos and know that I’m doing my part, however small, to help others. We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.”

Tim Cook, 54, comes from Alabama, a state that does not recognise same-sex marriage, and does not offer legal protection on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Homosexual acts are still classified as criminal offences in around 80 countries and territories around the world.

Established institutions in the West — the churches, legislatures and courts, in particular — are playing catch-up with a quiet revolution: the recognition and growing acceptance within wider society that human sexuality is not one-dimensional.

The reality was always there, of course, and indeed there was an acknowledgement among the ancients in Greece and Rome as far back as the 5th century BC that sexuality was polymorphous — it had more than one form.

However, since the rise throughout the West of Constantinian Christianity from the 4th century AD onwards, the Judeo-Christian insistence that heterosexuality was the only morally valid form and expression of human sexuality has held sway.

This belief became deeply embedded in Western culture. Under the Emperor Constantine and his successors, and especially since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the process by which, in the words of Diarmaid McCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, “the new imperial Church asserted itself as the one version of the Christian truth for the world to follow” accelerated.

Having become in effect the State religion of the West, Christianity, mainly through the agency of the Papacy, was able to harness and rely on State support for the dissemination and enforcement of its doctrines. Indeed, the Papacy itself was also beginning to acquire imperial trappings. “By now,” as John Julius Norwich put it in his book The Popes: A History, “the Bishops of Rome had developed a quasi-monarchical position of dominance in the West.”

This dominance would grow and grow, albeit confined to Catholicism in post-Reformation Europe, until in 1870 the First Vatican Council, convened by Pope Pius IX, would formally declare not just the primacy of the Pope over the universal Church, but also his infallibility in matters of faith and morals.

Over a hundred years later theologians started to warn against “creeping infallibility” — the tendency on the part of some Vatican functionaries to claim that certain papal statements should be regarded as ipso facto infallible — even though the Pope had not signalled in advance that they were to be regarded as such (an ex cathedra pronouncement).

Was the 1968 anti-contraception encyclical Humanae Vitae infallible? Its author, Pope Paul VI, never made that claim for it, yet the manner in which successive popes appear bound by it (even though it has been ignored by millions of Catholic couples) suggest it has an exalted status in their eyes.

In December 1996, the secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, published an article in L’Osservatore Romano (the official Vatican newspaper) in which he asserted that certain papal statements should be regarded as infallible, even in the absence of a formal ex cathedra statement. He mentioned three papal documents, one of which was Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendor of Truth”), the 1993 encyclical from Pope John Paul II.

John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter (now with the Boston Globe) commented on the significance of this: “Because Veritatis Splendor specifically proclaims the intrinsic evil of the homosexual condition, Bertone’s argument marks the first time that a church official, albeit indirectly, claimed that this teaching is infallible”.

Ten years previously, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later to be Pope Benedict XVI) released, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a letter (Homosexualitatis problema) on the pastoral care of homosexual persons to the bishops of the world. It contained the following key passage: “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder”.

Positions such as these represent a sizeable stumbling block for those who want to address how many homosexuals have been driven out of the Church because of Catholic doctrine their condition is “intrinsically evil”.

The search for a new pastoral outreach to gay Catholics received a setback at the recent Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in Rome.

Two important developments leading to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in this part of the world were the publication of the Wolfenden Report in Britain in 1957, which recommended that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults should no longer be a criminal offence”, and the Norris case in Ireland in 1984. Although David Norris failed to establish in the to the satisfaction of the Irish courts that the State had no right to legislate in relation to the private sexual conduct of consenting adults, his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights was successful in 1991.

Then just last month, a long-running action against the State by Dr Lydia Foy came to an end when the Government promised that this country’s transgender community will be given official recognition. The Gender Recognition Bill will be published before the end of the year and enacted in 2015.

So how is this “right” to be interpreted in 2014? Is it to be an inclusive right? Does “every human being” have this right, or just some human beings? The answer to that has already been given in jurisdictions where legislation recognising and endorsing same-sex marriage has been passed.

The Irish people will face a similar test at some stage, with a referendum pending on same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, there is to be another Synod of Bishops in Rome next year. After the last Synod, the question of many minds was: what does Pope Francis want?

So far, he has sent conflicting signals, but pressure is going to mount from gay and transgender communities for equality and inclusion. Sooner or later the Church must fashion a pastoral strategy to respond to this in a new and positive way.