Persona humana

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Persona humana ( Latin for the human person ) is a declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of December 29, 1975, in which the foundations of the sex doctrine of the Catholic Church are developed. In it, human sexuality is treated as a central element of the human personality, because it gives human life the fundamental differentiating characteristics. The basic idea is based on theobservationmade in the Declaration Dignitatis humanae of the Second Vatican Council : "God makes man partake of his law, so that under the gentle guidance of divine providence man can more and more recognize the unchangeable truth." this "divine law is accessible to our knowledge", moral judgments could not be made solely on personal whims. The Declaration deals with premarital intercourse, homosexuality and masturbation.

The act of bodily devotion receives its dignity from finality (procreation). Therefore, homosexuality stands in contradiction to the function of sexuality in the natural order, as it teaches the church in the natural law doctrine of Thomas Aquinas . Therefore, "homosexual acts are inherently out of order" and their acceptance contradicts church teaching and morality. The difference between the sexes is a constitutive part of the natural order. Sexual pleasure is then disordered "when it is striven for for its own sake and is detached from its inner order to the transmission of life and to loving union." According to this, sexuality finds its meaning and its dignity only in marriage and only if it is basically geared towards reproduction.

Reference is made to a distinction between people "whose tendency is derived from a wrong upbringing, from insufficient sexual maturity" or other non-biologically justified and as curable causes and those "who are caused by a kind of innate drive or a pathological predisposition “Are incurably homosexual. The opinion that this second category, due to its natural cause, can be seen “as a justification for their homosexual relationships in a marriage-like sincere community of life and love” is rejected because a moral justification cannot depend solely on the “acts as having according to their personal constitution ”, while according to the“ objective moral order ”they are“ deprived of their essential and indispensable regulation ”.

Jeffrey Siker criticizes the fact that homosexuality is referred to as an “anomaly” from which homosexuals “suffer” as a negative linguistic connotation and contrasts with more neutral or even positive interpretations of homosexual orientation in the following decade. In the 1986 letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the pastoral care of homosexual persons , Joseph Ratzinger points out that the description of homosexual acts as intrinsically disordered (“inherently not in order”) was sometimes misinterpreted as that homosexual tendencies would be presented as "indifferent or even good". However, this is an "extremely benevolent interpretation" and it is made clear that homosexual inclinations are already "objectively disordered". This formulation was also adopted in the catechism.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Second Vatican Council (ed.): Dignitatis humanae. Declaration on Religious Freedom . December 7, 1965 ( online version ).
  2. ^ Franjo Šeper : Persona Humana. Explanation on some questions of sexual ethics . Ed .: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith . Rome December 29, 1975 ( online version ).
  3. ^ A b c Franjo Šeper : Persona Humana. Explanation on some questions of sexual ethics . Ed .: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith . Rome December 29, 1975, chapter 8 ( online version ).
  4. ^ Libreria Editrice Vaticana (ed.): Catechism of the Catholic Church . Vatican City 1997, Section 2351 (Article 6: The Sixth Commandment. Violations of Chastity) ( vatican.va ).
  5. ↑ Jeffry Siker: Homosexuality And Religion: An Encyclopedia . Greenwood Press, Westport, CT 2007, pp. 163 .
  6. ^ Joseph Ratzinger : Letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on pastoral care for homosexual persons . Ed .: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith . Rome October 1st 1986 ( online version ).
  7. ^ Libreria Editrice Vaticana (ed.): Catechism of the Catholic Church . Vatican City 1997, section 2358 (Article 6: The sixth commandment. Calling to chastity) ( vatican.va ).
  8. ^ Michael L. Coulter: Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy: Supplement . Scarecrow Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-8108-8266-9 , pp. 273 ( limited preview in Google Book search).