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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
The “natural order” involves might over right, oppression and murder in multiple species, including Homo Sapiens, so if I were you I’d find another argument :-)

- biologist[/quote]

If Natural Law is not a legitimate source of church doctrine, then you have invalidated today's pronouncement, because its central claim is that homosexual sex is "not ordered to the Creator’s plan."  This is a natural law argument, and you just refuted natural law.[/quote]

Natural Law is not the same as biological nature.  You’re confusing concepts and did not engage with the PP’s point.[/quote]

St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224/25–1274) propounded an influential systematization, maintaining that, though the eternal law of divine reason is unknowable to us in its perfection as it exists in God’s mind, it is known to us in part not only by revelation but also by the operations of our reason. The law of nature, which is “nothing else than the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature,” thus comprises those precepts that humankind is able to formulate—namely, the preservation of one’s own good, [u]the fulfillment of “those inclinations which nature has taught to all animals,[/u]” and the pursuit of the knowledge of God. Human law must be the particular application of natural law.[/quote]

This is not a complete and accurate articulation of Aquinas or natural law.  And you’re not even attempting to defend the notion that all animalistic urge are good or should be encouraged, which undercuts your position.[/quote]

I don't have to defend that notion.  [b]I never made the statement that merely because something exists in the world that it must be good.[/b]  But in Aquinas' natural law defense of matrimony, he draws on comparisons between the needs of animals and humans, only establishing the importance of matrimony due to the need of extra parental intervention to raise humans to adulthood.  Therefore it is worth discussing what is observed in nature and whether it is a good.

In Summa Theologiae q153, Aquinas writes: "Wherefore it is no sin if one, by the dictate of reason, makes use of certain things in a fitting manner and order for the end to which they are adapted, provided this end be something truly good. Now just as the preservation of the bodily nature of one individual is a true good, so, too, is the preservation of the nature of the human species a very great good. And just as the use of food is directed to the preservation of life in the individual, so is the use of venereal acts directed to the preservation of the whole human race. Hence Augustine says (De Bono Conjug. xvi): "What food is to a man's well being, such is sexual intercourse to the welfare of the whole human race." "

He goes on to assume that the sole good of sex is procreation.  But now we see many examples of the benefits of nonprocreative sex. [/quote]

Well the OP did and I thought that’s what the thread was about!

Your point is what?  The Catholic Church is misinterpreting Aquinas?[/quote]

I am saying that today's statement relies on a natural law argument which is invalid.  If you dig through your history, your encyclicals, and read through the many footnotes, it comes down to a belief without evidence that the purpose of sex is procreation, and only procreation.  [/quote]

....To quote today's statement:

Consequently, in order to conform with the nature of sacramentals, when a blessing is invoked on particular human relationships, in addition to the right intention of those who participate, it is necessary that [b]what is blessed be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace, according to the designs of God inscribed in creation, and fully revealed by Christ the Lord. Therefore, only those realities which are in themselves ordered to serve those ends are congruent with the essence of the blessing imparted by the Church.[/b]

If they said it's forbidden in the Bible, we could argue the bible.  But no, they argued "the designs of God inscribed in creation."  And therefore we are asked, like Aquinas did, to inspect nature to answer what "end" or ends does sex serve?  [/quote]

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