"Love is Love"?

Gospel Reflection for October 29, 2023 - Matthew 22:34-40

And now the Pharisees, hearing how he had put the Sadducees to silence, met together; and one of them, a lawyer, put a question to try him: Master, which commandment in the law is the greatest? Jesus said to him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind. This is the greatest of the commandments, and the first. And the second, its like, is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments, all the law and the prophets depend. (Matthew 22:34-40 Knox Translation)

“Love is love!”

This is one of the many rallying cries of the LGBT movement today, one which all of us likely hear on a regular basis, particularly anytime someone attempts to correct this false ideology. The sentiment behind it is: so long as an action comes from a feeling of love, how can it be immoral? Accordingly, we are told that people who perform such sexual immorality should have Pride in their intrinsically disordered lifestyles, precisely because they supposedly derive from love and thus cannot be wrong. With this mentality, anyone who condemns popularly-accepted forms of sexual immorality are labeled as intolerant bigots who only want to spread hate and to prevent good people from loving others, simply based on old-fashioned prejudices and superstitious conceptions of right and wrong.

Sadly, this misunderstanding of the true nature of love and of Christian charity is not only limited to the young and ill-informed or to non-Catholics. Today, even many in the Church, from the highest levels of the hierarchy down, believe that LGBT lifestyles should be considered “differently ordered” rather than “intrinsically disordered,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church currently describes them, and some even propose to change this language so that the Church can seem more open-minded and “loving” to the secular world. Even if, as they explain, certain sexual acts are objectively immoral, those who perpetrate them usually do so out of “love,” and so we should “reverence” such acts, as some have demanded, not condemn them. This love can supposedly reduce culpability to the point that, despite the objective sin of their acts in themselves, no subjective guilt is imputed to them and in fact their “loving” relationships should be blessed by the Church.

It goes without saying that this is a revolutionary trend in the Church without precedent in Catholic history, though this betrayal of Tradition does not seem to count as too strong of a dissuasion. But, in light of Our Lord’s teaching in this Gospel reading, is the modern understanding of “love” true? Do we “love our neighbor as ourselves” so long as we feel any kind of affection for them, thus justifying whatever form of expression we desire to give? Many today would answer in the affirmative, but nothing could be further from the truth of Christ’s words and the eternal truth of Scripture which He affirms.

St. Thomas Aquinas defines charity as “to will the good of another.” Caritas, the Latin form of the Greek agape, is distinct from the kind of affection most often associated with love today, which is closer to another form of love, eros. Ancient peoples, as Pope Benedict XVI explains, “considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness’ which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness… In the religions, this attitude found expression in fertility cults, part of which was the ‘sacred’ prostitution which flourished in many temples. Eros was thus celebrated as divine power, as fellowship with the Divine.” But this understanding of eros was a “warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it… An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in ‘ecstasy’ towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man.” (Deus Caritas Est) For this reason, the Bible emphasizes charity rather than mere erotic affection – not, however, because affection is wrong, but because it must be purified and held up to the standard of charity.

Unlike eros, which is only a feeling and so can be easily misled by bodily urges, charity is an act of the will, a selfless desire for and action toward the good of another. Indeed, this kind of love even applies to oneself, as Christ indicated, since “if Whoso loveth iniquity hath hated his own soul, (Ps. 11:5.) it is manifest that he does not love his neighbour as himself, when he does not love himself.” (Origen, Catena Aurea) This love, then, is rooted in objective goodness rather than feeling. To love someone means to want what is best for them, not what will make us feel good, much less to use someone else for our pleasure. Through charity, eros is disciplined, like the other bodily passions, providing support and encouragement for the authentic love proposed by the will. In the end, the only way to love others in truth and charity is to love them for God’s sake and according to His natural and divine law. Only by knowing how God has designed us, what purposes He has given for human sexuality and relationship, can we know how to love others as we ought, even if this means denying ourselves and correcting our disordered appetites.

While it is important to oppose these popular errors in culture and particularly in the Church, it is equally or more important to know what charity truly is, its real and divine importance and its necessity for our salvation. As St. Paul reminds us, “I may speak with every tongue that men and angels use; yet, if I lack charity, I am no better than echoing bronze, or the clash of cymbals. I may have powers of prophecy, no secret hidden from me, no knowledge too deep for me; I may have utter faith, so that I can move mountains; yet if I lack charity, I count for nothing. I may give away all that I have, to feed the poor; I may give myself up to be burnt at the stake; if I lack charity, it goes for nothing.” (1 Cor 13:1-3) The whole of that chapter is a school in the true meaning of love. We must not be bound by political parties or political correctness in our love, nor should we allow the correction of error to lead us into hatred, unjust violence or any other sin against charity. We should always work for the good of others for God’s sake, as Christ showed us throughout His life, even to the point of death on a Cross, particularly through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. We can never indulge or approve of sin, but neither should we ever lead others further into sin by our scandal and impatience, as we will also be judged in “the coming wrath” by how we have loved God and neighbor in our lives.

He that loves men ought to love them either because they are righteous, or that they may be righteous; and so also ought he to love himself either for that he is, or that he may be righteous. And thus without peril he may love his neighbour as himself. (St. Augustine, Catena Aurea)