The Catholic bishops of England and Wales did not experience first-hand the super-heated reaction of the mass media, whether accurately reflecting public opinion or not, to Pope Benedict’s attack on the “unjust” consequences of British anti-discrimination legislation. For they were in the room with him when he said it, at the end of their routine ad limina visit to the Vatican.

Aggressively secularist groups like the National Secular Society seized on the incident to whip up support for their campaign against Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain in September, which his address was mainly about. But the larger jury, the British public, will not yet have made up its mind and can still be persuaded either way. That is why the Church must take seriously, and ponder deeply, the underlying reasons for this week’s furore. It is a pity the bishops missed it.

The focal point of this reflection needs to be the Catholic attitude to homosexuality, for it was this that sparked the explosion. Public opinion on homosexuality is becoming more tolerant, as the British Social Attitudes Survey recently reported, and that poses an ever greater challenge to the Church to put its case across. In its dealings with the Government over the implementation of the Sexual Orientation Regulations in 2007, which effectively squeezed Catholic child-welfare agencies out of the all-important work of adoption placement, the ­bishops stood by the principle that children need a parent of each of the sexes, not that homosexual men or women are unsuitable parents per se because of their “unnatural” sexuality.

It was the better argument and many people agreed with them, but this approach left the specific issue of homosexuality unexamined. The debate about the Equality Bill, on the other hand, did raise the issue. The Government’s decision this week to back down over the bill and no longer insist on its more precise criteria for when discrimination was allowable, has let the Church off the hook, but not very comfortably. It still allows the Church’s enemies to accuse it of anti-­homosexual prejudice, even bigotry.
 
IMPECCABLE ORTHODOXY
There can be no reasonable expectation of a change in church doctrine on homosexuality, at least in any relevant timescale. That means there will continue to be certain posts in the Church, such as head teachers in Catholic schools, where public dissent from this teaching is a disqualification. That dissent could be by campaigning against official teaching, or more likely by living in a manner that is visibly at odds with it – in short, being a gay man or women in a gay relationship which is admitted to be sexual.

But to let that be all the Church has to say on the subject is to invite the animosity that was on display this week and to lose the sympathy of wide sections of the public. What gay Catholics say is that it is not so much the Church’s disapproval of their sexual activity that hurts and damages them, as its inability to comprehend and value their emotional lives, their relationships. The deepest human desire of all is to love and be loved. Many have found that desire realised in one other person of the same gender as themselves. They are adamant that their sexual and emotional orientation is a discovery – something that was there before they realised it – rather than an invention.

Is the Church able to move beyond a sterile state of dis­approval that is in danger of becoming part of its public profile? Fifteen years ago, the late Cardinal Basil Hume issued a ground-breaking statement of impeccable orthodoxy which included the passage: “In whatever context it arises, and always respecting the appropriate manner of its expression, love between two persons, whether of the same sex or of a different sex, is to be treasured and respected … When two persons love, they experience in a limited manner in this world what will be their unending delight when one with God in the next. To love another is in fact to reach out to God, who shares his lovableness with the one we love.”

And elsewhere he said that just because two men or two women love each other does not mean they have to be assumed to be in a sexual relationship – which suggests that even being in a civil partnership does not necessarily imply defiance of church teaching on sexual activity.

There is also a context supplied by the present Pope, in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est. He asks, quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, “Doesn’t the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Doesn’t she blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?” His subject is eros, and the task he sets himself is the reintegration of erotic love into Christian spirituality, rather than, as Nietzsche thought, its denigration and rejection. The role of eros in homosexuality the Pope leaves alone, but it has a direct relevance in the light of what Cardinal Hume had to say.

A HEAVY BURDEN
In his recent speech to the clergy of Dublin at the invitation of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP prophetically declared: “We have told families with large ­numbers of children that no contraception is permitted, and young people who cannot afford to get married that their sexual behaviour must be strictly controlled, and gay people that nothing is permitted – and that they should be ashamed of their sexuality. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of church teaching, this has been experienced by our people as a heavy burden.”

There is enough of a basis here for the Church to move on with confidence, if not doctrinally then at least pastorally. The fundamental principle has to be that homosexual people must not be defined negatively by their sexuality, but positively – if it is necessary to define them at all – by their affections. There are those among them who demonstrate a constancy and a stability in their partnerships that, rather than causing scandal, set an example to their heterosexual friends and relations. This might seem radical, but if it follows logically from well-grounded theological positions – as in the case of the Pope, the late cardinal and Fr Radcliffe – it is compelling.

And such a basis would utterly refute the underlying charge against the Catholic Church this week, that it hates gay people and wants to banish them from its sight. It does not, it cannot, and it should not. It must accept them, respect them, love them and indeed, with a minimum of caveats, employ them. If the Church had been seen to be doing that already, before this week’s events, the furore would never have happened.