1. Always to be ready to obey with mind and heart, setting aside all judgment of one's own, the true spouse of Jesus Christ, our holy mother, our infallible and orthodox mistress, the Catholic Church, whose authority is exercised over us by the hierarchy. (Source)
Awesome wisdom - not to restrict or inhibit us, but to protect us. We are stupid sinners, and it doesn't take much for us to veer off into unsafe territory. Pride, willfulness, inflated sense of intelligence, inordinate desire to live in "freedom" - singly or in combination, these can cause significant harm to our spiritual life. And before you know it, you're no longer on the narrow path to salvation.
Case in point: compare that Rule of Thinking with the Church with the following excerpt from The Sour Patch Kids'* blog, from a post titled "And the Word became one of us, and dwelt among mankind": (emphases mine)
Another matter to consider is that Jesus, being the Word Incarnate experienced all the same feelings, emotions, desires, and pains that we did. However, He experienced all these things without sin. Just as we are tempted Jesus never gave in or was susceptible to the wiles of evil. Experiencing all that we do, even sexual feelings (although, to the best of our knowledge modern scholarship continues to prove that Jesus was probably not married), it is highly probable that Jesus could have had homosexual feelings at one point or another during His life upon this earth. Scripture speaks of St. John as being Jesus’ “beloved” disciple and the one whom He loved. We are even told that during the Last Supper John rested his head upon the chest of the Lord, in a gesture of both intimacy and adoration. Jesus, with the very wellspring of Love itself aflame within His Sacred Heart, did not spurn John’s gesture but rather welcomed it. This is of course only spectulative on my part, but how can we not ask what this gesture says to us?
Love itself does not turn away the affections of another man but rather welcomes them, even if it was not His destiny to experience them. Love welcomes another expression of love and approves of it and blesses it by accepting John’s embrace.
This is what happens when you don't think with the Church. His "speculative thinking" is spiritually dangerous. It seems he's relying on his speculation rather than Church teaching, perhaps to justify personal behavior, or to support an agenda contrary to Church doctrine in the area of homosexuality. Whatever the reason, the writer is clearly off-base in his speculation.
While same-sex attraction in and of itself is not sinful, the Church still teaches that the inclination is intrinsically disordered. Thus, to suggest that Christ may have been intrinsically disordered is ludicrous. Yeah, Christ could have had allergies, or diabetes, or maybe even halitosis - but same-sex attraction?
Once you leave the narrow path of Church thinking, you'll soon wind up on the wide path of anything goes. And we know where that leads.
