What the Catechism Means by Intrinsically Disordered
One of the first things I did when I was in high school trying to figure out what I was going to do about my same-sex attractions was look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There's a little section there titled "Chastity and Homosexuality" that I turned to, and one of the things that I saw there seems to throw a lot of people off.
The later part of paragraph 2357 says this:
Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
Intrinsically disordered.
This phrase is where most people get bent out of shape about the teachings on homosexuality as a whole. Our friend Fr. James Martin wants this reworded, saying that this phrasing is too harsh and cruel.
When I first read this back in high school, I wasn't too sure what those big words meant put together like that, and was too lazy to look them up, so I wasn't too bothered by it.
Now, I understand that this teachings is so good, so true, and so beautiful, and I want to explain to you why.
Words are powerful, which I heard Fr. James Martin state in an interview not too long ago. And he is absolutely right! God spoke the words, "Let there be light," as we see in Genesis, and there was! Words do hold a lot of power and forcefulness, and the words "intrinsically disordered" are no different.
But, before we go saying that the Catechism should reword this passage, let's look and see what these two words mean.
According to Dictionary.com, the word "intrinsic" is a adjective which means "belonging to a thing by its very nature." It then gives the example, "the intrinsic value of a gold ring."
A gold ring has such a high value because it's gold! (Ladies, we know this.) Gold has a high value! How infinitely more valuable is the human person than gold, my dear friends?
Moving right along, the word "disorder" is a noun that means "lack of order or regular arrangement; confusion." Adding that "-ed", the word "disordered" is defined as "lacking organization or in confusion; dissarranged."
If something is not correctly ordered, by definition, means that it is disordered.
Saying that same-sex attractions are disordered, is simply saying that according to the Natural Law of Love written on the hearts of all man by his Creator, homosexual acts can in no way fulfill the person's desire for love.
God should know. He kinda placed that desire there.
This phrase isn't harsh language used to scare or bully people with same-sex desires so as to put them in their place; it's language that acknowledges the dignity of the human person as a whole, the authentic love that the human person was created by and for, and condemns any action that threatens to hinder the human person from receiving that love.
One of my favorite prayers right now, is the Prayer to the Indwelling Most Blessed Trinity, composed under the guidance of Our Lady by Sr. Mildred Mary Ephrem Neuzil. In the last line of the prayer, Sr. Mary uses a beautiful title for God that I've never heard of before. She calls Him, "my Truine Love."
Our God is a Trinity, my dear friends! Is THE Trinity, in fact! I think we can sometimes forget just what this means.
Our God is Three Divine Persons in one God -- a communion of Persons, if you will.
We have this overwhelming desire for community and companionship because we were made by a community! We can't escape this desire. Without authentic love and intimacy, we cannot survive.
The very same rule goes for people with same-sex desires, and yet the one thing that I see when Pro-LGBTQ+ advocates try and attack the Catholic Church's teachings on homosexuality time and time again, is they will say things like, "you can't expect LGBTQ+ people to remain chaste! You are forcing them to be celibate! You're saying that they can't fulfill their primal desires!"
Oh yes we can, just not in the way that society assumes.
The sexual embrace isn't what's going to fulfill us, ladies and gentleman. The sexual embrace isn't the height of authentic love.
For married couples, the marital union is the second closest way that they reach Heaven on earth.
Second to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
There is where Love is. There is where God is! Authentic love is life giving, sacrificial, and was shown in the most powerful way by Christ on the Cross.
There is no greater love than that, my friends, and that's what society can't seem to get.
Those two words are not saying that the human person who experiences SSA is disordered, or somehow not a good or whole person. It's saying that the desires are.
And it says this for a reason: only the perfect love of God can fulfill us, and anything that could take us away from that love must be avoided for us to be fulfilled.