Schismatic websites will now denounce this study as scientifically flawed, unreliable, poorly written, heretical, impossible, crypto-Buddhist, intolerant, politically correct, conspiratorial and oppressive, which all goes to show that Obamacare will destroy liberty and the American way of life. Or somethin'.

I take this as further evidence that, like the global Anglican Communion, the RC church IS moving toward truthful acknowledgment of the existence of gay people. From a Roman Catholic, natural law perspective that's the key question - do people 'choose' to be gay or is it something people learn about themselves like other parts of givenness and identity? The official RC claim of 'disordered' (like the pre-Galileo insistence that the earth was the stationary center of the solar system) is actually open to refutation by evidence, and it is so theologically thanks to the classic Roman Catholic insistence on natural theology. Change is coming. It's coming painfully and slowly and it's costing a some good people dearly, but it's coming

"From a Roman Catholic, natural law perspective that's the key question - do people 'choose' to be gay or is it something people learn about themselves like other parts of givenness and identity?"

I don't think that that's quite right. The Catechism specifically acknowledges that a homosexual orientation is not chosen. The difference, as I see it, is that the Catholic Church doesn't infer from the existence of an unchosen desire the conclusion that the object of that desire must therefore be morally acceptable.

Rick, As I understand it the RC church gives its Catechism a middle and somewhat temporizing sort of authority short of conciliar or papal pronouncement. It's a good place for thinking-in-process.

In the largest frame of Catholic theology and the teaching of the church's greatest and mystics, the category of disordered desire is a kind of hedge. Classically desire is how we know God, the place the Spirit meets and moves us. Sarah Coakley writes compellingly of how Gregory of Nyssa lays the groundwork for this, bringing Origen's treatment of desire/eros into mainstream Christian theology here:
https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/33-2_coakley.html

What Gregory (and others) began shaped a Catholic theology of desire. As a long-time admirer of Gregory of Nyssa, I was moved and astonished when I heard how Brian McDermott SJ laid out the classic Catholic position in terms so like Gregory's.

Understanding the continuity between eros and the love of God moves the Roman Catholic church to its cautious position of calling homosexual desire "intrinsically disordered" (as it does at the moment). Catholic theology will do somersaults to avoid calling any desire as such sinful. 'disordered' or even 'mistaken' manage, more or less, to preserve desire's central place in God's address to us.

Now as I hear it, using 'disordered' is a hedge of a sort, trying (and failing) to fall to the full dilemma of calling homosexual desire 'unnatural,' because to do so would imply a settled position of what is the created, natural order.

And that brings us back to Galileo. Looking at the world we see (and not claiming nature is so thwarted by sin and the fall as to hide God's real purpose as Catholic theology does not), we DO find a spectrum of sexual behaviors in animal species and species-to-species variations in gender-bending, gender-switching (literally).

To begin at the end, I think the animal examples have little to do with what we mean by "natural law" (though they do shut down a rather venerable rhetorical theme). Jane Goodall, I understand, has observed with some horror the killing of chimps by other chimps. However much we might have earlier thought this kind of "murder" unique to our species, surely it hasn't, and shouldn't, cause us to rethink natural law objections to homicide.

I do think that you are right that what is needed is a consideration of desire. Unlike our Buddhist friends we do not see desire as something which is, per se, a cause of suffering. Our tradition, as I understand it, promotes a direction, an ordering, of desire, through disciplines which are properly called ascetic.

In this I don't think there is such a gulf between the Augustinian and Eastern approaches. Though the Augustinian formulations are much derided, both traditions emphasize the importance of disciplining disordered desire, whether for sexual satisfaction, wealth, or power, an exercise just as central for married laity as for cleric or monastic.

If, as understand our tradition, the passions themselves are morally neutral, what do with them becomes the Christian's concern. Hence my initial factual point, that, so far as I understand it (and I am neither clergy nor academic) the Catholic Church doesn't consider inborn or developed homosexual desire itself a sin, or its existence a chosen state. I don't see any "refusal to look through the telescope" here.

What is involved is a judgment about the rightness or wrongness of behavior, grounded in the Torah, and confirmed by Tradition. The origin and state of an individual's desires are certainly significant pastorally, and in judging merit and culpability (i.e., there is nothing praiseworthy in my avoiding sins which have no attraction for me). But I think it a category error to look to what is as a guide to what should be. If the injustice to Galileo taught us anything, it should surely have been that "how the heavens go" and "how to go to heaven" are distinct questions.

But I would love to hear more of how St. Gregory approaches these questions; I know much less about the Cappadocians than I should.

Rick, as I am sure you know, the Vatican has referred to gays and lesbians as "objectively disordered." I believe observation suggests to most of us that they are no more so than the rest of us. And not for the reasons that Rome suggests.