A Cry From The Cardinal’s Cousin (Cardinal Pell)

“He seems to be locked into some legalistic doctrine focused on lifestyle, and I think that’s sad.” This comment was made by Monica Hingston, a former nun living in a lesbian relationship with another former nun, and directed against George Cardinal Pell, archbishop of Sydney (Australia), because he supports Catholic (and natural law) teaching on homosexuality.

The two women are pictured on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald of January 12, 2004 under the caption: “Cry From the Heart by a Cardinal’s Cousin.” Miss Hingston, a distant cousin of the cardinal, published an open letter to him in the same issue; and her comments reveal a lot about the mindset of those who attempt to defend the homosexual lifestyle. The glaring omissiion is the failure to face the nature of homosexual acts.

She speaks of the many years of service to the poor and marginalized given by herself and her partner in the past, when they were nuns - before their relatioinship. (This is irrelevant to the question of whether the homosexual life is good or bad, but Hingston wants to project the image of two people who care for others.)

She says a lot about the “loving relationship” of herself and her partner, and how, for 19 years, it has been “a partnership of sensitivity and selflessness, of warmth and humor, of wonder and beauty. It is fundamental to personal growth.” (the truth that the relationship involves unnatural acts is ignored.)

Hingston is “appalled and angered” by the Vatican declaring “us to be ‘seriously depraved persons’.” She refuses to recognize that the Vatican speaks of acts that are depraved, without passing judgment on te subjective state of the persons who perform those actions. She says to the cardinal: “And surely you wouldn’t insult my intelligence by prefacing it [adherence to the Vatican statement] with ‘it’s the sin, not the sinner’ stuff.”

What she is doing here is dismissing the essential point - namely, that the homosexual lifestyle is depraved. She should face it ans respond: offering reasons, if she can, for her contention that it is not a depraved way of living. The distinction between the sin and the sinner is a matter of common sense, whether in this matter or other moral questions; but Hingston forestalls its use here by claiming it would insult her intellignence!

In the same vein, she says that “the Vatican is wholly focused on what we do in bed.” Instead, she maintains, the Vatican should note the love and support and beauty found in such relationships. Here again, the vital question is dodged: Is the relationship intrinsically wrong?

“Please don’t quote the scriptures at me - as we both know, ‘the devil’ can quote it [sic] for his own evil purposes.” (Note the lower cases and the quotation marks.) Hingston is here refusing to look at clear passages of Scripture condemning homosexual conduct, with the excuse that Scripture can be misused. There’s no ambiguity about St. Paul’s teaching in romans, chapter 1. “Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (26-27).

“The Vatican prelates,” she declares, “have the audacity to condemn the rearing of children by homosexual couples.” Here, too, the first question must be: Are these couples living in an unnatural way? If their lifestyle is profoundly perverted, it can’t be right for them to raise children. It is an injustice to the children and a form of child abuse.

The reality is that man and woman are made for each other - physically, emotionally, mentally, spirityally. This is obvious, and is seen by most people. Same-sex attraction, therefore, is a contradiction of the natural order; and because marital love of a man and a woman is such a good thing, it follows that the contradiction of it in homosexual relationships is correspondingly bad. Evil is privation of good, so the greater the good, the worse the evil.

Homosexual relations are a parody of marriage with profound effects on those engaging in them. Just as the personal growth of a married couple is fostered by a good marriage, a warping of the personality results from homosexual relations.

Those involved in such relationships will find it hard to acknowledge the objective depravity of what they are doing. They find pleasure in their lifestyle, which easily prompts the delusion that it must be all right. And as time passes, they become more accustomed to that way of living, and more readily deceive themselves with the contention that it is normal.

However, the natural moral law can never be extinguished in a person; it is written in our hearts, as St. Paul points ou (Romans 2:15). It may become obscured; it may be denied; but it is never killed. So, a struggle goes on within the person who lives in a radically unnatural way, a struggle to repress the truth.

It becomes imperative, in the thinking of practicing homosexuals, to convince others that this lifestyle is normal and crush any opposition. But this can’t be done by rational argument, for it is an irrational position. It remains then, to avoid the real issues and appeal to emotion. Monica Hingston does it by talking about sensitivity and beauty and warmth. It can also be done by depicting the homosexual as unfairly discriminated against - as a member of a persecuted minority.

The urge to justify the unjustifiable is a major driving force in the promotion of homosexuality. It is an urge caused by the deep depravity of homosexual activity, a depravity that must be denied if the person is to retain some kind of fragile peace with himself or herself. The state of mind is manifested by irrationality and intolerance of opposition. It can’t stand people like Cardinal Pell who tell the truth.

By contrast, people trying to overcome homosexual tendedencies welcome the truth. A member of a religious order who works with homosexually inclined men trying to live a chaste life, told me that these men were pleased when Pell became archbishop of Sydney, because of the support and encouragement his stand on this issue gave them.

An excerpt from Culture of Vice:

"The homosexual cause has moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest. As Robert Reilly notes a society can withstand any number of person who try to advance their own moral disorders as public policy. But it cannot survive once it adopts the justifications for whose moral disorders as its own. This is what is at stake in the culture war...
For any individual, moral failure is hard to live with because of the rebuke of conscience. Habitual moral failure, what used to be called vice, can be lived with only by obliterating conscience through rationalization. When we rationalize, we convince ourselves that heretofore forbidden desires are permissible. We advance the reality of the desires over the reality of the moral order to which the desires should be subordinated. In our minds we replace the reality of moral order with something more congenial to the activity we are excusing. In short, we assert that bad is good...
It is often difficult to detect rationalizations when one is living directly under their influence, and so historical examples are useful. One of the clearest was offered at the Nuremberg trials by Dr. Karl Brandt, who had been in charge of the Nazi regime's Aktion T-4 euthanasia program. He said in his defense: “...when I said `yes' to euthanasia I did so with the deepest conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was right. Death can mean deliverance. Death is life.”
Unlike Dr. Brandt, most people recover from their rationalizations when remorse and reality set back in. But when morally disordered acts become the defining centerpiece of one's life, vice can permanently pervert reason. Entrenched moral aberrations then impel people to rationalize vice not only to themselves but to others as well. Thus rationalizations become an engine for revolutionary change that will affect society as a whole.
The power of rationalization drives the culture war, gives it its particular revolutionary character, and makes its advocates indefatigable. It may draw its energy from desperation, but it is all the more powerful for that. Since failed rationalization means self-recrimination, it must be avoided at all cost. For this reason, the differences over which the culture war is being fought are not subject to reasoned discourse. Persons protecting themselves by rationalizing are interested not in finding the truth, but in maintaining the illusion that allows them to continue their behavior. For them to succeed in this, everyone must accede to their rationalization. This is why revolutionary change is required. The necessity for self-justification requires the complicity of the whole culture. Holdouts cannot be tolerated because they are potential rebukes. The self-hatred, anger, and guilt that a person possessed of a functioning conscience would normally feel from doing wrong are redirected by the rationalization and projected upon society as a whole (if the society is healthy), or upon those in society who do not accept the rationalization.
The homosexual movement's rationalization is far more widely advanced in its claims. According to Jeffrey Levi, former executive director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “We (homosexuals)_ are no longer seeking just a right to privacy and a right to protection from wrong. We have a right - as heterosexuals have already - to see government and society affirm our lives.” Since only the act of sodomy differentiates an active homosexual from a heterosexual, homosexuals want “government and society” to affirm that sodomy is morally equivalent to the marital act. “Coming out of the closet” can only mean an assent on the level of moral principle to what would otherwise be considered morally disordered.
And so it must be. If you are going to center your public life on the private act of sodomy, you had better transform sodomy into a highly moral act. If sodomy is a moral disorder, it cannot be legitimately advanced on the legal or civil level. On the other hand, if it is a highly moral act, it should serve as the basis for marriage, family (adoption), and community. As a moral act, sodomy should be normative. If it is normative, it should be taught in our schools as a standard. In fact, homosexuality should be hieratic: active homosexuals should be ordained as priests. All of this is happening. It was predictable. The homosexual cause moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest. How successful that conquest has been can be seen in the poverty of the rhetoric of its opponents. In supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, the best one congressman could do was to say, “America is not yet ready for homosexual marriage,” as if we simply need a decent interval to adjust ourselves to its inevitable arrival.
The homosexual rationalization is so successful that even the campaign against AIDS is part of it, with its message that “everyone is at risk.” If everyone is at risk, the disease cannot be related to specific behavior. Yet homosexual acts are the single greatest risk factor in catching AIDS. This unpleasant fact invites unwelcome attention to the nature of homosexual acts, so it must be ignored."

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