When Mercy Misleads: The Cost of Softening Scripture

Why Fr. James Martin & Fr. Richard J. Clifford, S.J. are Wrong About the Sin of Sodom

A recent article by Fr. Richard J. Clifford, S.J., published on Outreach, a website led and promoted by Fr. James Martin, S.J., presents a striking reinterpretation of the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course, Fr. Martin is promoting it and proposing Fr. Clifford as a “distinguished Old Testament scholar”. So “distinguished” he implicitly sets his judgment above not only the plain sense of Sacred Scripture, but also the united witness of the Church Fathers, the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium, and the vast tradition of faithful Catholic exegesis. He stands in direct contradiction to voices like St. Augustine, who wrote in The City of God that the men of Sodom were “inflamed with unnatural lust,” and St. John Chrysostom, who described homosexual acts as “worse than murder.” St. Basil the Great and St. Peter Damian issued strong condemnations of such behaviour in both personal conduct and ecclesial life, the latter devoting an entire treatise—The Book of Gomorrah—to warning against the spiritual dangers of sodomitical acts, especially among clergy. In the Scholastic period, St. Thomas Aquinas placed homosexual acts squarely among the sins “against nature” in his Summa Theologiae.

This consensus did not end with the Fathers and Doctors. In modern times, Pope Benedict XVI (as Cardinal Ratzinger) affirmed the same tradition in the 1986 Letter to the Bishops on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, (which is the last authoritative document issued by the Church on this issue, and one that I often recommend anyone affected by this issue reads carefully and regularly) which reaffirms the biblical and moral clarity on this issue. Faithful scholars like Fr. John Hardon, S.J., Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., and Dr. Scott Hahn have continued to defend this understanding in the face of modern revisionism. Even beyond Catholic circles, respected biblical scholars like Robert Gagnon have demonstrated that the plain meaning of the text, supported by both Jewish and Christian tradition, points unmistakably to homosexual behavior as central to Sodom’s offence.