I regularly receive newsletters from an American organisation called Catholics for a Free Choice: and a more oxymoronically named organisation I will be unlikely to find until I run into a member of SS Simon Weisenthal or find myself in the company of the Gerry Adams Loyal Orange Lodge.
The point, surely, about being a Catholic, is that one doesn't have a free choice. The point, indeed, about belonging to any organisation, even an anarchist one, is that one doesn't have a free choice - even anarchists must agree to meet at the same time and same place, not wherever and whenever each anarchist feels like.
But for Catholics in particular, the choice is not free; and that there is a well-organised movement in America demanding a woman's right to choose abortion, demanding homosexual priests, demanding samesex marital unions as Catholics suggests that an awful lot of people haven't quite got the hang of things. Because it is not what one personally wants which counts, but what the rules, style, intent and purpose of a particular organisation are.
Individual conscience
If I want freedom of choice, the Presbyterians can be quite relaxed about the individual conscience; so too the Quakers; most of all, the Unitarians, who seem to demand nothing of their adherents save they follow their consciences. For Christians unhappy with Catholicism, there are many places to go - and many, indeed, in Ireland are opting for the Church of Ireland.
But I hardly expect such people who have made that journey to start demanding car maintenance classes in Church of Ireland services, or insisting that the Church of Ireland should permit ministers to have homosexual relationships. There are rules in all organisations - and obedience within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is what is expected of adherents of Rome.
Freedom of choice is not an option anywhere in any organisation; and for Catholics to demand that priests marry samesex couples or permit women to have the "right to choose" is to misread and misunderstand the Catholic Church, which does not feel it is on this earth to let people do whatever they want. Quite the reverse. One of the few places in the world where people do genuinely feel free to do almost whatever they want to whomever they want - and do - is Africa; the reaction to that is for vast numbers of people there to flock to the disciplines and moral certainties of Catholicism.
Most civilised people today would agree that the criminalisation, marginalisation and ostracism of homosexuals has been one of the great crimes of Western civilisation. But that is not the same thing as saying that the Catholic Church should conduct marriages between homosexuals, for the first and most powerful reason that within its own rules it cannot, no matter what evidence of fringe-practices by certain priests is revealed in a book by John Boswell - the subject of recent writings by Jim Duffy and Senator David Norris.
Medieval papacy
Priests are as prone to stray from the rules of their calling as are journalists from theirs. The medieval papacy was at times so steeped in evil as to permit almost anything. In more recent times, Catholic priests have blessed departing Panzers, have showered holy water on tanks bound for Abyssinia, have revelled in the genocide of Serbs, and in this country have given absolution to murderers that they might further slay with a clean conscience (Michael Collins would send his killers to one particular curate, in order to cleanse themselves before they murdered again.) Beside all this, the blessing of same-sex unions is benignity itself.
But of course the Catholic Church, when it is in its senses, and not seized by the sort of delinquency referred to above, cannot judge deeds by the standards of such atrocious departures from what Catholicism in its heart knows what it stands for. It is unreasonable to expect it to contradict the vast bulk of its own moral inheritance merely because it makes homosexual couples feel better. The Catholic Church is about a far vaster historical mission than catering to the particular requirements of some of its members; and that mission is served by its rules for all.
What do I think? Of course, I know some homosexual couples who are far more loving and devoted than many of their heterosexual friends. Should the Catholic Church marry them? Well, the truth is that by its own rules it can't, no more than it can "marry" two extremely good friends who want the church to recognise the special quality of their friendship.
Sacraments
Marriage is a holy sacrament within the Catholic Church. Whether or not I agree with the emphasis it places on this sacrament is irrelevant; as indeed is my opinion of the tenets of Islam to a Muslim. For sacraments are not pleasing little playthings for the Catholic Church to toy with according to the mood of the moment: they are the very reason for the existence of the church and its priests, and the conferring of a sacrament is a divine occasion in which the priest is merely the human mediator of the hand of God.
This is what the Catholic Church believes. If you are a Catholic who understands the meaning of Catholicism, you are unlikely to want to trifle with occasions of such awful majesty without a monumental amount of thought and care.
That thought and care will, one day, permit the ordination of women priests; will also permit priests of either sex to marry. But there is nothing whatever in the moral theology of the Catholic Church which could permit the hand of God to confer divine and sacramental grace on homosexual acts, no matter how loving and loyal the couple concerned might be. The Catholic Church, being the Catholic Church and not the San Francisco Collective for Free Love, is obliged to defend and promote the primacy of heterosexual marriage. Only idiots who believe that Catholicism is about choice could believe otherwise.