Michael Coren has again published an article that is long on feelings, but short on reason regarding the sinfulness of homosexual acts. This should come as no surprise, as it is symptomatic of his previous emotive reactions, for example, with Cardinal Ambrozic. Vox Cantoris has published a highly relevant analysis.
In his recent book, "Mercy", Walter Cardinal Kasper has some excellent words on the problem of "pseudomercy" which is a detachment of mercy from truth, leading to ambivalence, misunderstanding and eventual perversion of mercy into a '"fabric softener" for the Christian ethos' (p. 145).
Following the Pauline tradition, the Cardinal notes that mercy and love join together in fraternal correction of the wayward, and such correction is known as "spiritual mercy". Mercy indeed can be painful - just as surgery may be - but such mercy is to help and heal. Persons who indulge in homosexual activity need the help and healing that only Christ can afford them through repentance and confession.
The teaching of the Church in the Catechism on the intrinsically disordered and sinful nature of homosexual acts may indeed be considered by those who have same-sex attraction as painful, but, the Church proclaims this truth to provide help and healing to the person so inclined. To dismiss the Church's teachings, to claim that one of the four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance is not a "particularly important subject", is absurd.
In claiming that "love" triumphs over "judgment" Coren has committed a grave misunderstanding of love and mercy: we cannot ignore God's commandments; in doing so we undercut and abrogate His law, try to detach mercy from truthfulness. Authentic love and mercy will always express the truth (yes, with pastoral tact), and therefore draw the person towards Christ (c.f. Kasper, pp. 147-148). False love leads to sentimentality, relativism, corrupts society opening it to license, a false conception of liberty and freedom, and opens the gateway to covert or eventual overt totalitarianism.
Coren, who expresses many a strong opinion on education, inadvertently indicts so-called "private" neo-Pelagian Catholic education (be it at Mary, Mother of God or De La Salle College), that, seemingly was unable to teach and inspire his children with enough Christian truth to reject the monstrous falsity of "gay marriage" (an "ideology of evil" c.f. Pope John Paul II).
When it suits him, Coren is prepared to speak of "sin". And he indicts himself; about the disgraced Scottish Keith Cardinal O'Brien homosexual acts, Coren writes: "It’s about sin, folks, sin. Plain and simple, black and white. Those who want to flood the argument with grey are not looking for nuance, but anxious to drown the truth".
Yes, It is sin indeed. The question still remains: why is Coren trying to "drown the truth"? Why is it "sin" for Cardinal O'Brien, but not for others?
From Coren's most recent article:
...I can no longer hide behind comfortable banalities, have realized that love triumphs judgment, and know that the conversation between Christians and gays has to transform...
...I am not prepared to throw around ugly terms like “sin” and “disordered” as if they were clumsy cudgels, or marginalize people and groups who often lead more moral lives than I do. I am sick and tired of defining the word of God by a single and not even particularly important subject...
Coren's full article can be read here.