Dr. Alan Fimister has published a wonderful article at the Voice of the Family web site: Of millstones and strange flesh. In it, he addresses the heretical and heteropraxic ravings of a BBC consultant on the subject of Pope Leo and the Catholic Church’s perennial and irreformable teaching on homosexuality.
Here are the opening two paragraphs:
Johan Bergström-Allen is a “lay pastoral minister at Our Lady’s Church in York” and “chairman of the Pastoral Council to support and develop the LGBT+ ministry for the Catholic diocese of Middlesbrough”, UK. He is overtly “gay”. Presumably this means that he experiences “an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex”. Mr Bergström-Allen is consulted relatively frequently about Catholic matters on BBC local radio in York and on BBC Radio 5 Live. In the wake of the election of Pope Leo XIV, he appeared briefly on BBC Radio 5 Live and took the opportunity to call for a change to section 2357 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church which states the Church’s teaching on “relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex”. As the Catechism indicates, this teaching is based upon “Sacred Scripture” and “what tradition has always declared” i.e. that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered acts of grave depravity.
That which is asserted directly in the text of Sacred Scripture is asserted by God Himself and the interpretation of Sacred Scripture which the “tradition has always declared” is necessarily correct else the Church would not after all “guarantee … the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error” (CCC 890). Mr Bergström-Allen, however, thinks “we all have more updated understandings” of such questions today due to improvements in scriptural interpretation and the progress of science. St Augustine (for example) he explains, mistakenly held that sexual activity must always be open to the transmission of life, but he arrived at his benighted interpretation of Scripture because he “didn’t have the advantage of David Attenborough’s documentaries”. Mr Bergström-Allen goes on to explain that “scripture doesn’t always present homosexuality as acts of grave depravity”. Does it then sometimes present homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity?
The article should be read in its entirety.
Here are two other gems, first:
Let us pray for Mr Bergström-Allen that familiarising himself with the irreformable doctrine of the Extraordinary and the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium, the life giving truths of Scripture and the wisdom of the Holy Fathers he will set aside his opinions on this question and conform himself to the teachings of the Catechism and of our Holy Father Pope Leo who just a few days ago reminded us that “harmonious and peaceful civil societies” are founded on the family itself built “upon the stable union between a man and a woman, ‘a small but genuine society, and prior to all civil society.’” [emphasis added by Catholicism.org]
And second, toward the end, he speaks of the important matter — the most important — of salvation, without which lends the whole discussion a note of dire importance:
Those who do not receive the Gospel are lost not because of their ignorance but because, in their ignorance, they lack the means of salvation. To deprive anyone of those means through obscuring the Gospel is a most dreadful thing.
Read Dr. Fimister’s fine article here.
