A House Divided
The Cost of Calling Homosexuality “Objectively Disordered”
A few years ago, Fr. James Alison was leading a retreat for gay priests in the Diocese of Rome. Among the retreatants were a number of monsignori—senior clergy who worked in the various congregations of the Holy See. One evening, as they sat together at table, Fr. James turned to one of these eminent priests, a high-ranking official of the Congregation for the Clergy, and asked what he made of the fact that so many of their fellow clerics had come to the retreat with their boyfriends.
The monsignor’s response was striking:
“That’s how we know they are the sane ones!”1
It was an offhand remark, but one that reveals far more than it might seem. At the most basic level, it is a tacit acknowledgment that the Church’s official teaching on homosexuality is worlds apart from the lived reality of queer Catholics—even clerics living and working in the shadow of St. Peter’s. But beyond that, the monsignor’s words hint at something far more tragic: the impossible situation of those Catholics who attempt to live as the Church commands, fully repressing their capacity for love and intimacy. These are the ones who suffer most. And in the view of at least one Vatican official, they are the ones who go mad. Those who find a way—however imperfectly—to integrate their love into their lives are, paradoxically, the ones who remain whole.
The Church, for her part, publicly insists that there is nothing to see here, no tension between the teaching and pastoral praxis. Her official doctrine holds that gay people are to be treated with compassion and respect, even as it classifies their very capacity for love as “objectively disordered.” She teaches that queer Catholics are not broken, even while declaring that their fundamental experience of desire can never be rightly ordered to the good.
This post, however, is about the tension.
If we take the Church’s doctrine seriously—if we follow its premises to their logical conclusion—then we must ask: What does it really mean to say that homosexuality is objectively disordered? Can the Church avoid the conclusion that homosexual people are, in some fundamental way, irreparably broken? And if not, what does that mean for Catholics of conscience?
The Theological Contradiction: A Sexuality That Cannot Be Ordered to the Good
One of the foundational principles of Catholic moral theology is that human sexuality has a divinely ordained purpose—an intrinsic teleology, as articulated in natural law. According to this framework, sexual desire is rightly ordered when it remains open to the gift of life (the procreative end) and fosters the union of spouses in marriage (the unitive end).2 These two dimensions of human sexuality are inseparable, as affirmed by St. Paul VI in Humanae vitae and upheld by the Church’s magisterium.3 Any sexual act that fails to align with these intrinsic ends of human sexuality is considered “disordered.” That’s why, in the Church’s view, contraception, masturbation, extramarital sex and homosexual acts are all morally problematic.
In reality, though, homosexuality is a problema sui generis within Catholic moral theology. Unlike heterosexual acts, such as fornication, which the Church considers gravely sinful but still capable of being rightly ordered within marriage, homosexuality itself is said to be “intrinsically disordered” (intrinsece inordinatus).4
This distinction is significant. A heterosexual couple engaging in premarital sex commits an act that is morally illicit due to circumstance, but their sexual desires themselves remain oriented toward the good because they are—in principle, if not in fact—ordered to procreation and unity within marriage. Homosexual acts, on the other hand, are considered disordered, not because of circumstance, but by their very nature. The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes this abundantly clear:
“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.”5
To be sure, the Church does consider some heterosexual acts—contraceptive sex within marriage, for instance—to be intrinsically disordered as well. Contraception deliberately frustrates the procreative end of the sexual act. Thus, even within marriage, such acts remain gravely sinful. Yet there is a crucial difference: heterosexual couples are not themselves considered disordered simply for experiencing sexual attraction to one another or for acting on that attraction in an illicit way.
By contrast, the Church teaches not only that homosexual acts are intrinsically evil, but also that the homosexual orientation itself is “objectively disordered.” Homosexuality is a “more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,”6 an inclination that, by its very nature, leads exclusively to acts that can never be rightly ordered.7 No possible context or circumstance, no relationship, no covenantal bond could ever render a same-sex sexual act morally good or even neutral.8 According to the Church’s moral teaching, such acts can only ever be classified as “acts of grave depravity.”9 It follows logically that the inclination to those acts is equally depraved.
A Hidden Ontological Claim
The Church insists that this teaching does not mean that homosexual people themselves are disordered. This apparent distinction, however, collapses under scrutiny, due to recent developments in the Church’s own theological anthropology.
The Catechism states that “sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and soul.”10 St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body expands on this claim, insisting that human sexuality is not merely an incidental feature of our nature, but integral to what it means to be human. It is precisely through our sexual embodiment as male and female that we learn to give and receive love, to enter into communion with others, and to participate in the divine mystery of self-gift.11
Ironically, perhaps, the development of the Church’s theology of human sexuality under St. John Paul II reveals the fundamental incoherence of the Church’s under-developed teaching on homosexuality (much of which was articulated during his papacy). If the central claims of Theology of the Body are held alongside the doctrinal assertions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the inevitable conclusion is that gay people are missing something essential to their humanity.
Indeed, the Church’s teaching suggests that gay people occupy a unique position in the spectrum of human brokenness. By way of contrast, a person with a disability might experience certain limitations in their relationships, but disability itself does not render someone incapable of love, communion, or self-gift. Likewise, a person struggling with addiction, mental illness, or any number of other human frailties may experience profound distortions of their desires—but they remain capable of love.
According to the doctrine of intrinsic disorder, however, a gay person’s very capacity for love is fundamentally misaligned with the moral order. According to Catholic doctrine, they are, in effect, both called to love and forbidden from loving. They share in the universal human vocation to self-gift, yet they alone are told that any sexual expression of that gift—at least in a way that is naturally congruent with their being—“can never be approved.”12
Thus, the Church’s official teaching on homosexuality contains an implicit and inevitable ontological claim. Gay people are not merely wounded by sin, as all human beings are; they are uniquely defective. Unlike their heterosexual brothers and sisters, they are not simply tempted to illicit acts from time to time; their very sexual identity is constituted by desires the Church deems intrinsically disordered. Because homosexuality is not just a fleeting or peripheral inclination, like Aquinas’s curious example of the man who irrationally craves dirt to eat.13 Rather, for the three to four percent of the population who experience sexual attraction primarily or exclusively to members of the same sex, homosexuality constitutes a stable and enduring feature of their humanity. It is the natural way in which they experience that dimension of love and self-gift which Theology of the Body calls the most fully human aspect of our nature.14
This is where the Church’s official position becomes untenable. On the one hand, it affirms that gay people are made in the image of God, possess inherent dignity, and are capable of holiness. On the other, it teaches that their fundamental experience of love, desire, and intimacy can never be aligned with the moral order. It is a contradiction the Church refuses to name—but a conclusion from which its current expression of doctrine cannot escape.
The Pastoral Contradiction: A Call to Dignity or a Sentence of Shame?
The Catechism states in no uncertain terms that people with “homosexual tendencies” must be treated with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity,” and that “every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”15 Yet this teaching follows immediately after the assertion that a gay person’s deepest experiences of love and desire are intrinsically disordered.16 Their capacity for intimate communion, which is the deepest mark of the imago Dei within the human person, is so distorted that it can never be rightly ordered toward the good.
This push-and-pull tension between the Church’s pastoral impulse and doctrinal claims places gay Catholics in an impossible bind—a contradiction between the dignity the Church claims to affirm and the harsh reality of its own theological anthropology.
The Burden of an “Objectively Disordered” Identity
As anyone who has spent five minutes on the internet can tell you, the most common pastoral response to homosexuality among orthodox Catholics can be summed up in six words: “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” The problem with this tired old formula is that it treats homosexuality as the equivalent of heterosexual sins and temptations when, as we have seen, the Church’s own doctrine regards these as completely non-equivalent categories.
For a heterosexual person, the Church distinguishes clearly between temptation and identity. A man who struggles with lustful thoughts about women is not “ontologically disordered.” He simply experiences concupiscence, like all people wounded by sin. His desire for union with a woman remains fundamentally good, even if it is sometimes misdirected. He is called to educate and integrate his desire, to rightly order his love, not extinguish it.
For a gay person, however, the very structure of their sexual desire per se is seen as fundamentally and permanently broken. They are not merely tempted toward sin, as all people are, but are inclined in a more or less permanent way toward a form of love that is intrinsically disordered. Unlike their heterosexual peers, there is no pathway for their desires to be integrated, no positive vision of love that can be affirmed.
When the Catechism states that “homosexual persons are called to chastity,”17 what it means is perfect and perpetual continence. Unlike heterosexual persons, who are called to gradually integrate and mature their sexual desire within the framework of marriage,18 with plenty of space allowed along the way for moral growth, failure, and redemption, gay people are given no such framework for integration. Their only option is lifelong abstinence—not simply the avoidance of certain illicit behaviors, but the wholesale negation of their capacity for romantic love and relational intimacy.
This is where the pastoral contradiction becomes unbearable. The Church effectively says at one and the same time to every gay Catholic:
“You are loved, but your love is disordered.”
“You are called to communion, but your desire for communion is intrinsically misdirected.”
“You are made for self-gift, but any attempt to live out that gift in a way natural to you is a moral evil.”
What can it mean to tell someone they are loved, dignified, and called to communion while simultaneously condemning their deepest capacity for love and self-gift? The most charitable reading of this contradiction is a kind of ecclesial schizophrenia, an institution speaking in two voices at once, unable to reconcile its own messages. At worst, one might be tempted to call it gaslighting: an insistence that these teachings affirm dignity, even as they require a person to see their most intimate longings as broken beyond repair.
Shame, Self-Rejection, and the Impossible Double Bind
The reality is that pastoral rhetoric cannot outpace theological anthropology. If homosexuality is officially defined by the Church as “intrinsically disordered,” and if this is the teaching handed on by pastors of souls, then gay Catholics will inevitably be shaped by this doctrine in ways that lead to shame and self-rejection.
A gay person who takes Church teaching seriously is left to wrestle with questions that have no easy answers within the Church’s moral framework. If their deepest longings are intrinsically disordered, what must that mean for their sense of self? How can they embrace the dignity the Church claims to affirm while simultaneously rejecting their natural capacity for love? Their very desires for intimacy and communion—so central to what it means to be human—become a source of conflict rather than grace, shame rather than freedom. At what point does the person become indistinguishable from the so-called disorder? Are they only acceptable to God if they suppress a part of themselves that feels integral to who they are?
This tension creates an impossible double bind: either live in isolation and loneliness, or embrace love at the cost of one’s moral integrity. The result is that, in practice, the Church’s call for “respect, compassion, and sensitivity” often rings hollow. It offers no path toward wholeness, only a perpetual call to self-negation, a mandate to “unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.”19 This is not integration, but erasure—an unlivable paradox disguised as pastoral care.
The Psychological and Existential Reality: When Doctrine Becomes Identity
If a person is told that their deepest experiences of love, desire, and intimacy are inherently disordered, how can they avoid seeing themselves as fundamentally broken? No matter how strongly the Church insists on the dignity of homosexual persons, a doctrine that denies their innate longing for love and communion can ever be rightly ordered must inevitably deform their sense of self. However virtuously they live, gay Catholics must forever relate to their sexuality as something defective—an aspect of their humanity that can never be fully integrated into their flourishing.
This is not merely a theoretical dilemma. It is a deeply personal and existential crisis for countless queer Catholics who strive to reconcile their faith and identity, only to find that such reconciliation is, officially speaking, impossible.
For many, this struggle produces profound psychological distress. Studies show that LGBTQ+ individuals who internalize negative religious teachings about their identity are at significantly higher risk for depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Research published in the Journal of Homosexuality has demonstrated that internalized homonegativity—especially when reinforced by religious teachings—leads to significantly higher rates of psychological distress among gay individuals in faith communities.20 Another study found that LGBTQ+ youth who are taught that their sexuality is sinful are far more likely to experience severe mental health struggles, including suicidal behavior, compared to those who receive affirming messages.21 The Church claims to oppose unjust discrimination against gay people, yet what could be more harmful than a theology that instills self-rejection at the deepest level of one’s identity?
Jesus taught that a tree is known by its fruit (Matthew 7:16). If this teaching were truly life-giving, then we would expect to see it bear good fruit in the lives of those who try to live by it. We would see gay Catholics flourishing within the Church, living joyful and integrated lives in accordance with its moral vision. But that is not what we see. Instead, we see an overwhelming pattern of shame, loneliness, psychological distress, and alienation. We see people who take the teaching seriously struggling to reconcile their dignity with the demand to suppress their most natural capacity for love and intimacy. We see many who walk away, not out of selfishness or lack of faith, but because the cost of staying is the slow erosion of their very sense of self. And we see others—many others—who never make it out at all.
The Church refuses to admit that its doctrine might be responsible for this suffering. It prefers to imagine that the pain gay Catholics experience is caused by a hostile culture, by secular temptations, by a misunderstanding of the teaching rather than the teaching itself. But the cold light of reality reveals the true cost of calling homosexuality “intrinsically disordered.” A doctrine that requires people to disown an essential part of themselves in order to be acceptable before God cannot be reconciled with the claim that God is love. A theology that systematically produces shame, self-hatred, and despair cannot reasonably be called “good news.”
Conclusion: The Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore
All of this background is necessary to understand why the Vatican monsignor’s offhand remark during James Alison’s retreat carries such weight. When asked what he thought about the large number of gay priests who had come with their boyfriends, he answered without hesitation: “That’s how we know they are the sane ones.” Those who found a way to integrate their love into their lives, however imperfectly, were the ones who remained whole. And by implication, those who attempted to follow the Church’s teaching to the letter were the ones at risk of losing themselves.
This observation is borne out in the lives of countless gay Catholics who have tried to suppress their love in order to conform to doctrine, only to find that the result is not holiness, but self-destruction. The cost of obedience is too often unbearable isolation, a deep fracture between body and soul, a slow withering of the ability to give and receive love in any meaningful way. For gay clerics, in particular, the repression of their sexuality frequently finds an outlet in ever more desperate forms of illicit behavior—a reality the Church itself struggles to acknowledge, even as it wrestles with the consequences.22
What, then, are Catholics of conscience to do?
This question is not easy to answer, because it is not merely a matter of theological debate but a question of real lives, real suffering, and the cost of a doctrine that collides so spectacularly with human experience. It is, ultimately, a question the Church itself must confront if it is to remain a credible witness to the Gospel of grace.
When that day comes, the Church will need to do more than acknowledge the harm caused by its teaching. It will need to reckon with the fact that the teaching itself is built on an error. As I have argued elsewhere, homosexuality is a naturally occurring, non-pathological minority variant of the human condition. The doctrine that homosexual attraction is “intrinsically disordered” is not just pastorally damaging—it is anthropologically false. The Church will need the courage not only to correct this error but to think through the doctrinal consequences that follow from it.
In the meantime, perhaps the best we can do is try to live as the sane ones within the structural insanity of the Church’s doctrine on homosexuality.
This anecdote was related to me in a private conversation, although it is recounted publicly by Fr. Alison on the podcast Profanáticos, Season 6, Episode 34: “De gustibus non est disputandum / Entre putos no hay disgustos,” June 9, 2022.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §2360–2363.
Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1968), §12.
CCC §2357. See also Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona Humana: Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics (Vatican City: CDF, 1975), §8.
Ibid.
CCC §2358. See also Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Homosexualitatis Problema: Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons (Vatican City: CDF, 1986), §3.
See John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993), §80.
CCC §2357.
Homosexualitatis problema, §3.
CCC §2332.
John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), General Audience of January 16, 1980 (Insegnamenti, 3, no. 1 [1980]: 148–52).
CCC §2357.
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 31, a. 7, ad 3.
John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, General Audience of March 5, 1980 (Insegnamenti, 3, no. 1 [1980]: 517–21).
CCC §2358.
CCC §2357.
CCC §2359.
CCC §2339.
CCC §2359.
Ilan H. Meyer and David M. Frost, “Minority Stress and the Health of Sexual Minorities,” Journal of Homosexuality 59, no. 5 (2012): 674-699.
Caitlin Ryan et al., “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults,” Pediatrics 123, no. 1 (2009): 346-352.
For a treatment of this topic that can only be described as epic in scope, see Frédéric Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019).