Objectively Disordered Affection

Until very recently the word “orientation” meant (a) the activity before a new school year when incoming students were prepared for their new academic vocation in college, (b) the direction in which the priest traditionally faces as Celebrant in the Eucharist – East towards the Orient, and (c) the direction of someone’s interests.

Now “orientation” is often used to refer to the direction in which the supposed “internal wiring” of a human being leads or directs a person in sexual desire, either towards someone of the same “gender” and “sex” or towards someone of the opposite “gender” and “sex” or even towards both. The movement for full rights for people according to their supposed inbuilt, inescapable, sexual orientation made great progress in the Episcopal Church. Their crowning achievement was the consecration of a divorced man, living in a same-sex partnership as the Bishop of New Hampshire.

This followed forty years of continuing and intense debate; resolutions; setting up of study groups; and commissions by the General Conventions. This one subject consumes an inordinate amount of the journals of the General Conventions and for good reason. Of all the innovations promoted during the last forty years, to the most average person, this is a major change. It is a massive change in the way that she or he thought a Church as a moral society should act. Thus there is a “gut” reaction here which is not so obvious with the other innovations.

The majority of the other Provinces of the Anglican Communion asked ECUSA to present a rationale and explanation for its recognition of same-sex unions and its consecration of Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire. A document entitled “Set Our Hope on Christ” was produced. It explained that it may be justified from a careful and sophisticated study/interpretation of Scripture and modern medical and psychiatric study, and how, in personal “experience” it can be a means of holiness unto God and the promotion of the Gospel, together with peace and justice.

Remember, in this whole ordeal, no canon laws or rules were violated at the level of procedure, process, voting and approving. However, there was no actual change in the doctrine of the Church (a) permitting the blessing of partnerships of same-sex persons; (b) providing an official liturgy for this; and (c) allowing a person in such to be ordained as deacon or priest and consecrated Bishop Thus, although technically legal as the act of an autonomous, self-governing Province of the Anglican Communion, the consecration of Gene Robinson was not lawful in a deeper doctrinal sense in terms of the explicit teaching of Holy Scripture. Even though each province in the Anglican Communion is autonomous and self-governing, common agreement on basic doctrines and practices are the glue that holds it together. In this case, change was made against the multiple appeals of many overseas bishops and archbishops to delay or cancel the event.

Fr. Peter Toon wrote a response to the book under the title, “Same-Sex Affection, Holiness, and Ordination”. It shows that the acceptance of same-sex unions was not a development but a corruption of doctrine; that its claimed Scriptural moorings did not truly exist; and that it arose because “experience” in the secular world was used as a source of new revelation and doctrine, which were preferred to traditional teaching. They basically replaced the three legged stool of Anglicanism with a stool with one leg. Scripture, tradition and reason have been replaced by experience.

Vatican teaching on the subject says, “According to the constant Tradition of the Church, only a baptized person of the male sex validly received sacred ordination. By means of the sacrament of orders, the Holy spirit configures the candidate to Jesus Christ in a new and specific way; the priest, in fact, sacramentally represents Christ, the head, shepherd and spouse of the Church. Because of this configuration to Christ, the entire life of the sacred minister must be animated by the gift of his whole person to the Church and by an authentic pastoral charity. The candidate to the ordained ministry, therefore, must reach affective maturity. Such maturity will allow him to relate correctly to both men and women, developing in him a true sense of spiritual fatherhood towards the Church community that will be entrusted to him.”

(More of the Vatican teaching on this subject is included on the insert.)

The proper ordering is of male to female and female to male and with this goes a maturity in affections and emotions. Only the man who shows evidence of having reached “affective maturity” can be a candidate for holy orders, even as a man and woman before entering into holy matrimony should also reach “affective maturity” for, if either or both of them, do not then there will be disorder within their relation. A man who shows a continual tendency to relate sexually to other men is described as not merely “disordered” but “objectively disordered” since God’s plan for human beings includes the complementarity of male and female, for God made man as male and female.

Reformed Catholic teaching wholly agrees with the teaching presented by the Vatican that distinguishes acts from tendencies, calling the first grave sins and the second disordered. Both Roman and Reformed Catholic teaching are reluctant to speak of sexual “orientation.” To do so would contribute to the argument that some people are “objectively ordered” towards the same sex and both catholic teachings consider that situation “objectively disordered.”

Reformed and Roman Catholic teaching part ways on the matter of priestly celibacy. The Roman priest is to be celibate and affectively mature so that as a man he is ordered towards the female sex. The Anglican priest may be either celibate or married. If he is celibate, then he may be described in the same terms as the Roman priest. If married, he, united to his wife as one flesh for life, he is also, in affective maturity, both to love her and to love with her help, in the Bridegroom’s name, the flock of Christ entrusted to his care. From this comes the phrase, “Anglicans get two for the price of one.”

Where “orientation” enters into the description of homosexuality, then the biblical and historic Christian teaching on sexual relations has to be set aside, at least in its fullness, and the door is wide open to changed doctrine, and this is happening right now within Anglicanism worldwide. Another example of changed doctrine was artificial contraception. At one time, Reformed and Roman Catholicism agreed on the subject. In 1930, the Anglican Bishops recommended that artificial contraception be encouraged for use by Christian couples. They have not agreed on that subject since.

People who disagree with the teachings of the Episcopal Church are frequently called homophobic. It is not an appropriate label as we agree with the following Vatican teaching.

It is of course both possible, good and right, as the Instruction states, for the people of God together, and for individual Christians alone, to treat persons who describe themselves as “gay” or “bi-sexual” or “lesbian” with dignity and respect and to make sure there is no unjust discrimination against them. It is also good and right for the Church to seek to understand that which is called “homosexuality” in medical, psychiatric and anthropological terms.

However, the Church can and ought to do these things as it continues, in submission to the Lord our God, to seek to implement and support God’s order for his creation. We regret the disorder in the Episcopal Church as it heads in the opposite direction.

For more details, read “Episcopal Innovations 1960 – 2004” by The Rev. Dr. Peter Toon, M.A., D.Phil.

(Preservation Press of the Prayer Book Society of the USA 2006

Vatican teaching on homosexuality

“From the time of the Second Vatican Council until today, various documents of the Magisterium, and especially the Catechism of the Catholic Church, have confirmed the teaching of the Church on homosexuality. The Catechism distinguishes between homosexual acts and homosexual tendencies. Regarding acts, it teaches that Sacred Scripture presents them as grave sins. The tradition has constantly considered them as intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law. Consequently, under no circumstance can they be approved. Deep-seated homosexual tendencies, which are found in a number of men and women, are also objectively disordered and, for those same people, often constitute a trial. Such persons must be accepted with respect and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. They are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter.”

“In the light of such teaching this Instruction, in accord with the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, believes it necessary to state clearly that the Church, while profoundly respecting the person in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture”.

“Such persons, in fact, find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women. One must in no way overlook the negative consequences that can derive from the ordination of persons with deep-seated homosexual tendencies.”

“Different, however, would be the case in which one were dealing with homosexual tendencies that were only the expression of a transitory problem – for example, that of an adolescence not yet superseded. Nevertheless, such tendencies must be clearly overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate.”