C.S. Lewis’ little booklet The Abolition of Man is about proper responses. Lewis was fired to write it by a declaration in a new school-book that when a person says that a waterfall is sublime, he is telling nothing about the waterfall but only about his personal feelings. He declared that this is false, and that when fed to schoolchildren it is destructively false. He told that in reality the beholder was not merely testifying to how he felt when he gazed on the waterfall, but implying that, because of the way we are made and the characteristics of the particular waterfall, those feelings are the proper ones to have, and the waterfall should seem to any and all of us to be sublime. Extending the precept, he argued that there is a natural law, and within that there is human nature, by authority of which there are proper ways we should feel about a great array of things.

Lewis humbly instanced himself as a negative example, in one regard. He noted that the proposition, “little children are delightful”, holds true even though he himself found small children merely annoying; and that because it is true his inability to perceive them as delightful was a defect and an objective disability, something which was wrong about him.

He made a most perceptive observation regarding the well-intentioned, unrecognised indoctrination of schoolchildren by the authors of the offending book. He declared of the ordinary schoolchild,

 

It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

 

Is that not prescient of the present?

Now, sodomy, or buggery, is unnatural sexual intercourse. It can be heterosexual, homosexual or bestial, and it is disgusting. By that I do not mean simply that I find it disgusting, or even that I necessarily do find all instances of such behaviour disgusting rather than, for instance, merely laughable, but that – as Lewis would have said – the proper response for anyone and everyone to such behaviour is to feel disgust at it. A person who is homosexual by inclination should feel disgust at the prospect of homosexual sodomy even though he is attracted to it. I remember a very fine Catholic man, now deceased, who was prominent locally in the (Canberra) Knights of the Southern Cross, Australia’s equivalent of the Knights of Columbus, was married with several children, but was slightly effeminate (which most homosexuals are not). When on one occasion the subject of homosexual behaviour was touched upon he expressed deep disgust yet, I noticed, gave an involuntary little thrill-shiver which revealed that he simultaneously felt attracted to it. His response was the proper Christian one: the attraction to sodomy he couldn’t help, but his disgust at such behaviour arose from his deep appreciation that it is nonetheless innately wrong and disgusting

At that time I used to do a lot of book reviewing for the now-defunct Melbourne Catholic weekly the Advocate, and was given to review a well-received book on Australian society by a very prominent Melbourne Catholic layman. He was certainly orthodox, and in the mid-1950s had been the last president of one of Australia’s most spectacularly influential lay organisations, the Campion Society. I reviewed the book favourably, but noted that at one point he touched on homosexuality and represented it as natural, but spoke of disgust at homosexual sodomy as if it was regrettable and not natural. He was quite cut, and responded in the next issue with the declaration that not all homosexuals are sodomites and not all sodomites are homosexual – which is, of course, true but was utterly irrelevant.

He was a psychologist and was routinely used by the archdiocese to vet candidates for seminary life; and recently I discovered, from the scurrilous but useful “Broken Rites” site, which catalogues Australian Catholic priests, religious and Church lay employees who have provably sexually abused children or persons under their care, that in the 1980s some candidates and seminarians who felt same-sex attractions and were sent to him he gave “emotional release” therapy by encouraging them to masturbate in his presence, and on occasions helping them do so. That does not mean his Catholic orthodoxy was a sham; it simply means that he deceived himself at a time when the Church seemed to have quietly abandoned all its teachings on sexual sins and much else, and to be keeping them on its books as dead letters. It is very easy for us to deceive ourselves when we feel strong but wrong sexual attractions, whether heterosexual or homosexual; and it has been a great wickedness among the Church’s authorities that, under the excuse of “pastoral sensitivity” and “non-divisiveness”, they have for decades deprived the ordinary, sinful faithful, whether priests, religious or laity, of the authoritative Catholic and (thus) Divine teachings, taught authoritatively, that we need and until post-Vatican II or post-Humanae Vitae always had as our strongest bulwark against sexual temptation.