The root of the Catholic church's difficulties with gay people
is that it misunderstands sex in exactly the same way that women's
magazines do. Both the pope and Cosmopolitan think that there is a right way and a wrong way to have sex, and that the difference can be shown with diagrams.
Of course, they disagree completely about what the right way is.
The Catholic church teaches that it is perfectly straight intercourse without anything to block conception. Cosmo believes it's everything but that.
But for both parties there is a particular meaning attached to particular acts.
If you do it in the missionary position you will please God; if you do it with your ankles round your ears and a vibrator in your butt you will infallibly experience the double latte with added sprinkles orgasm discovered, this month only, by the tireless researchers of the Cosmo labs.
Of course, people who actually have sex with other people realise soon enough that both attitudes are nonsense.
What matters is not anatomy, but meaning and communication.
Love can be expressed in the oddest of ways, and so can dutiful resentment or narcissistic isolation.
What makes sex worthwhile is that it's a communicative act between people (in my experience, two people. Others report research involving more).
What has this to do with solemn pronouncements about gay sex being intrinsically disordered made by men dressed in beautiful frocks?
The answer is again that the current tradition in Roman Catholic moral thinking is fixated on acts.
Gay sex is wrong, by this reasoning, because it involves acts that can't make babies.
This is solely determined by asking which bits go where and do what. The people behind and inside the bits are quite irrelevant.
When this style of reasoning was applied to artificial contraception in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, it was overwhelmingly rejected – laughed out of court – by the lay people who were supposed to follow it.
The pope cannot force his opinion on lay Catholics in most of the world, so the encyclical is a dead letter – except, most tragically, for the one group to whom it should not apply: the supposedly celibate Catholic priesthood.
Pope John Paul II had been, as a cardinal, one of the ideologues of Humanae Vitae and as pope he made adherence to it a test of promotion. This meant that for the past 30 or 40 years hardly anyone has become a bishop, still less a cardinal, who has expressed any doubt about this ludicrous way of thinking about sex.
That means the church is now run by men who have solemnly and deliberately affirmed a position that makes it impossible to think honestly or clearly about homosexuality.
If all that matters is where the willy goes, rather than who put it there, and why, then it's impossible to see any homosexual acts as truly loving.
Yet this is what seminarians are taught – and at least a third of them are themselves gay men.
In some seminaries the proportion is more than half.
Despairing attempts to cut this figure down, by distinguishing between "deep-rooted homosexual tendencies" and just being normal for the Vatican, are like putting elastoplast on a skin ulcer.
What's underneath festers and eats into the flesh around it.
Yet for the Catholic church to change its teaching to fit the facts of homosexuality would also involve admitting publicly that its teaching on contraception is wrong and inhuman as well.
No wonder the pope feels it safer to agree with Cosmo girls than real women, or his real priests.