You’re asking me once again about homosexuality. I’ve always so far answered in private, and now for the first time I’m doing it here. I want to be faithful both to the Church and to reality in my answer. For the Church a homosexual condition means no inferiority in any way, but it cannot be put into practice without sin. The Bible explicitly rejects homosexual practice both in the Old and in the New Testament. I was brought up in that same attitude of rejection at a time when homosexuality was hardly mentioned. But now it is talked about, it is known, it has concrete names attached to it, and we have to keep in touch with reality. The situation has changed. 

The English Catholic weekly The Tablet proposed in a recent number a comparison I may be allowed to quote. According to the article, the game of football was first invented, and one of its rules is that, apart from the goalkeeper, the players cannot touch the ball with their hand. If they do, the referee whistles and it is a fault. Rugby came later, and is similar to football, only that in it players can touch the ball with their hand, but the referee knew nothing about the new game and went on whistling as in football when any player touched the ball with his hand, so that the game of rugby became impossible. Eventually the referees came to know about the new rules for the new game, and rugby became possible. Similarly, according to the paper, sex was formerly only heterosexual, at least openly, but now homosexual sex has come into the open, and the referee goes on whistling according to the football rules. British humour. For the referee’s attention.  

Now more in earnest. It is hard to believe that God, from birth or through the circumstances in which the person grows up, puts into the mind and the body of the homosexual person a radical, intense, deep tendency, and then tells them that if they act according to it he will take it as a grievous offence to himself and will have to send them to hell for all eternity unless they go to confession. True confession entailing a resolution never to do it again. Not easy to understand.

I read about a cardinal who said that when God makes a person a homosexual, he gives them a vocation to celibate life. The cardinal’s saying is against the facts.