by Fabian Bruskewitz

About the author: Fabian Bruskewitz is the bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska.

The official doctrine of the Catholic Church on the morality of homosexual acts is set out with brevity and clarity in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms throughout the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity...