What about vocations for people who experience same-sex attraction?
“My vocation is clear: I’m called to become a saint. That’s the universal vocation, which is fulfilled in different ways. Some people fulfill that call of becoming holy as priests, religious, or in the married life, but that doesn’t somehow minimize or replace the universal call to become like Christ.
The key here is a problem with a myopic (if understandable) self-focus on “what about me?” To be honest, this sort of self-focus is one of the deep wounds I think is associated with SSA. There is a wounded Narcissism that was certainly something I’ve had to work to overcome. One of the biggest helps for me was when I realized that there are far more single men and women who desire to be married and never will be than there are people with SSA in the world.
The great vocation of us all is seen in Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane: not my will, but thine be done. For some people, that will be seen as a lifetime of self-denial. In some sense, I’ve always seen the call of holiness as a theology of “don’t.” Don’t put myself in the place of the Father. But of course, that “don’t” is in service of the great “yes” of saying, “Thy will be done.”
The Catechism has this which is a rich vocation to redemptive suffering: “These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.”
“The challenge was made that since there are “homosexual animals” it “proves” homosexuality is natural. But, given that a few animals seem to demonstrate what might be referred to as homosexual behavior, that in itself, certainly provides no conclusive or foundational basis for the acceptance of homosexual behavior in the human population.
It does not establish homosexual behavior as normal, healthy, desirable or even morally right. Animals can be born with two heads (my friend hatched such a snake a few years ago) and people can be born as Siamese twins, but such aberrations don’t make the condition normal, healthy, or desirable.
If one replies, as you did, that homosexuality is natural because it is found among animals, then we should notice that there are all sorts of activities practiced by animals that we as humans reject as repulsive. There is extreme cruelty among animals: mothers eating their young, mates eating their partners after mating (e.g., the Black Widow spider), animals eating their own feces and vomit (dogs and cats), or urinating on themselves (goats), etc.
Some animals have mates for a lifetime while others have sex with multiple partners indiscriminately. I could go on and on. What can we draw from these facts? That it is OK for people to practice such things because animals do? Heavens no! Just because animals do things that animals do does not make them our model of morality and accepted behavior.
We are in sad shape if we look to the creatures to search for our origins or to find a model for our behavior. Even worse, if we begin to use animals as our model, we as humans can then justify any deviant behavior since many forms of aberrant and repulsive behavior can be found among the animals that share our planet.
St. Paul was no fool 2,000 years ago when he wrote …
Wide Spread Interests 