By: Deacon Keith A. Fournier
© Third Millennium, LLC


Fortunately, the “flap” over an A.P. interview given by the Honorable Senator Rick Santorum has abated.

It was, to borrow a phrase from the “Bard”, “much ado about nothing" as anyone who read the entire interview in context knows.

Much has been written about the entire matter. I have waited until it subsided to raise the question posed by the title to my article. Looking back in retrospect, ” Who is the Real Victim of Intolerance?”

As a faithful Catholic Christian, a clergyman and an American, I say it was Senator Rick Santorum.

The Senator was the Victim…of anti-Catholic bigotry and intolerance. Let me simply isolate one of his responses to the interviewers questions that demonstrates the point effectively:

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“SANTORUM: I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who's homosexual. If that's their orientation, then I accept that. and I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it's not the person, it's the person's actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions.”

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The Senator succinctly stated the clear teaching of the Catholic Church on this vital social issue. In fact, this is the clear teaching of the overwhelming witness of classical Christian teaching for 2,000 years. Consistent with the unbroken tradition of the Jewish influence upon which it was built, it became the framework for the insistence in Western civilization that marriage and family be given a special status in law.

The family is the first vital cell of society and the foundation of all good government. Its' protection and promotion was seen as promoting the common good.

Faithful Christians in contemporary American society are not the first to face the advance of homosexual practice and concerted efforts to give it an equivalency with monogamous marriage. In fact, the early Christian church faced a similar cultural motif and advanced in pagan societies after having first incurred both opposition and wrath.

It was precisely because “the Christians” practiced monogamous heterosexual marriage and believed in both the unitive and procreative dimension of conjugal love within the bounds of marriage, that they often confronted hostility in ancient societies with a different approach. However, their view was eventually embraced and became the framework for what has become the prevalent view of western civilization.

This issue, along with the Christian insistence on the dignity of every human life, at every age and stage, were the pivotal distinctions that led to the clash of worldviews between ancient “paganism” and the advance of Christianity.

Only very recently has any Christian church ever taken any position other than one that defended the inviolable dignity of every human life and the absolute insistence on heterosexual marriage as the first social institution. This is so, not only because it is at the very heart of the revelation of the Christian faith but because Christians insist that it promotes the common good and is revealed by the natural law that binds all men and women.

In the case of Catholic Christians, one has only to look at the unbroken tradition of the Catholic Church, her Catechism and the stream of papal encyclicals, apostolic letters and Council documents, to see the support of this teaching without question. Any Catholic who denies this fact is simply either unaware of what his/her Church teaches (and if so, needs to revisit their catechism) or is choosing to be an unfaithful Catholic (openly or with deceptive intent) by going against the “magisterium”, the teaching office of the Catholic Church.

The “Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith” released an excellent pastoral directive in 1986 concerning this vital issue entitled “On the Pastoral care of Homosexual Persons”, which can be found, among other places, at http://www.ycvf.org , the web site of “Your Catholic Voice Foundation.” Here are a few relevant excerpts:

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“Christians who are homosexual are called, as all of us are, to a chaste life… . With this in mind, this Congregation wishes to ask the Bishops to be especially cautious of any programs which may seek to pressure the Church to ...