On The Evasion Of Argument And Accountability

Guest writer: Pilgrim.

(A special thanks to Pilgrim for his continuing contribution to the blog, especially this week, as I was a bit under the weather).

A Note on Pastoral Displacement as a Conversational Strategy

Introduction

There is a move that recurs in contemporary Catholic discussion of sexual ethics with such regularity that it deserves its own name. Let’s call it “pastoral displacement.” It is the substitution of tone, motive, and social effect for the actual examination of contested theological claims. It is not always dishonest. It is sometimes a genuine expression of pastoral instinct and concern. It is, however, consistently evasive, and in theological discussion evasion has consequences that good intentions do not cancel.

Todd Flowerday’s contributions to the discussion on a recent article illustrate the move with unusual clarity. He is plainly thoughtful and well-intentioned, and this makes the illustration all the more instructive. This is not what bad faith looks like. It is what undisciplined good faith looks like, and in some ways, that is the more important thing to examine.

What makes this pattern worth examining is that it is becoming more widespread in contemporary Catholic discourse. There is a tendency to move from ontology to pastoral sociology without acknowledging the transition. The argument begins on the level of being, truth, and moral order, and then slowly moves to the level of experience, feeling, and social effect, as though these were continuous rather than distinct registers. The migration is rarely announced. It simply happens, and the conversation follows it without noticing that the question has changed. What started as “Is this teaching true?” has become “Does this teaching produce good outcomes?” and then, almost imperceptibly, “Teachings that produce bad outcomes are probably not true.” Each step feels natural, and the cumulative movement is enormous.

Todd Flowerday illustrates the pattern with unusual clarity, not because he is uniquely evasive, but because he is genuinely representative of a mode of theological reasoning that has become so habitual in certain Catholic circles that its practitioners are often unaware they are doing it.

Pastoral Displacement

The pattern in Flowerday’s responses is consistent enough to be worth tracing in detail. A theological claim is advanced. In this case, the Catholic account of sexual complementarity and natural-law teleology is coherent and worth examining on its own terms. Rather than engaging with whether this claim is true or false, the response continually shifts register. Bullying exists in parish settings. Augustine was a man of his time. The phrase “objectively disordered” feels harmful. You seem preoccupied with sex.

Each of these observations may be true, and some of them actually do matter. Yet none of them constitutes an answer to the question actually asked.

The question, put as plainly as possible, is this:

Does the Catholic account of sexual complementarity actually cohere as a description of human sexual meaning, or does it fail? Is it true? Or is it false? And if false, where precisely does it go wrong?

Flowerday was asked this question directly, in several different formulations, across multiple exchanges. What came back was this:

The Church needs a broader account of married fruitfulness. Augustine has one voice. Certain phrases should be consigned to the scrap heap. I care about keeping struggling Catholics close to Christ. These responses gesture toward genuine concerns, but they refused, every time, to do the one thing the discussion required, i.e., identify what specifically might be wrong with the substantive theological claim, rather than describing how it feels, who may have deployed it badly, or what pastoral effects it has produced.

This matters because these distinctions are important. There are three substantially different positions available here.

First, the Catholic account of sexual complementarity is substantially true but has often been expressed harshly, incompletely, and sometimes cruelly.

Second, the account is substantially true but requires development, including a broader theology of fruitfulness and a richer account of vocation.

Third, the account is wrong. Its claims about natural-law teleology, bodily complementarity, and the intrinsic meaning of sexual acts are incoherent and/or false.

The first two positions are compatible with orthodox Catholicism. The third represents a fundamental rupture with and revision of what the Church has consistently taught.

The problem with pastoral displacement as a conversational strategy is that it allows a person to imply the third position, through sympathy, tone, and suggestions that certain formulations should be discarded, while never committing to it in a form precise enough to be examined or answered. The positions remain permanently blurred, which means the conversation can continue indefinitely without ever arriving anywhere …. and they did.

Flowerday at one point says directly that “objectively disordered” may need to go. Now, granted it may need to be replaced as it is often misunderstood or misrepresented, but this is not a simple pastoral observation about rhetoric. The phrase names a moral and metaphysical judgement about whether certain acts are ordered toward or away from their proper end. To reject the category of morally disordered does not just revise tone but also question the entire conceptual framework beneath it. Yet when pressed to identify what specifically is wrong with that underlying reasoning, the answer retreated again to pastoral instinct. This pattern of deflection is not occasional. It is consistent. Every invitation to be more specific has been deflected, avoided or declined.

The Naturalistic Slide

There is a related manoeuvre also worth naming. At points in the discussion, Flowerday implies that same-sex attraction is morally normalised by the fact that it appears to be innate and occurs across nature, with his left-handedness analogy being the clearest instance of this. The argument, such as it is, runs as follows. Left-handedness is natural, innate, and morally neutral. Same-sex attraction appears similarly natural and innate. Therefore, it too is possibly morally neutral, and acting on it may not be intrinsically disordered.

The problem is that this argument claims too much and proves nothing. The naturalistic inference, from “this occurs in nature” or “this is unchosen” to “therefore it carries no moral weight,” is not an argument about Catholic sexual ethics. It is an assumption that replaces Catholic sexual ethics. The Catholic tradition has never held that the moral status of an act is determined by whether the inclination toward it is innate or freely chosen. Inclinations toward violence, acquisitiveness, and self-deception also appear to be deeply natural and, in some people, constitutionally strong. That tells us something important about the human condition after the Fall. It does not tell us that acting on those inclinations is therefore morally neutral.

The left-handedness analogy fails for a more specific reason. Left-handedness is a variation in motor lateralisation that carries no intrinsic moral significance because handedness is not ordered toward anything beyond its own function. Catholic sexual ethics, by contrast, is precisely a claim about the ordering of sexual acts, that they carry an intrinsic structure and meaning that is not simply a matter of preference or variation. To show that the analogy holds, one would need to demonstrate that sexual acts are similarly unordered, that the body’s sexual form carries no inherent significance beyond functional variation. That is the claim that needs to be argued. Invoking left-handedness assumes the conclusion.

What “it occurs in nature” and “it appears to be innate” can legitimately establish is that same-sex attracted people are not choosing their attraction. They deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion. Pastoral responses built on shame or coercion are both unjust and ineffective. The Catholic Church actually agrees with all of this. What these observations cannot establish, without a great deal more argument, is that acting on the attraction is therefore morally equivalent to acting on heterosexual attraction within marriage. The gap between “this inclination is unchosen and real” and “therefore acting on it is ordered toward human flourishing” is precisely where the theological dispute occurs. Asserting or implying the first does not resolve the second.

Fidelity, Affection, Sacrifice, Tenderness, Fruitfulness, and Identity

There is a stronger version of the argument available, and fairness requires engaging it. Flowerday at several points gestures toward the richness of what love involves: fidelity, affection, sacrifice, tenderness, fruitfulness, and identity. These are not trivial goods. They are genuine human goods, and anyone who has observed a long and faithful same-sex partnership characterised by mutual sacrifice, tenderness, and fidelity will recognise that something real and morally significant is present. The implicit argument is that where such goods are genuinely operative, the relationship that embodies them, even when sexual, cannot be dismissed as disordered. The goods themselves seem to attest to something positive that a purely negative moral categorisation fails to capture.

This is a serious challenge to the Catholic framework, and it should be acknowledged as such. The Catholic response is not to deny that these goods are real. Fidelity, tenderness, sacrifice, and care are genuinely goods wherever they are found. The issue is not whether they are present but whether their presence determines the moral character of the relationship that contains them. And here the Catholic tradition claims that the goods of a sexual relationship do not simply accumulate until they override its form. A relationship can contain real goods and still not be a marriage. A friendship can embody extraordinary fidelity, sacrifice, and tenderness without thereby becoming sexual. The presence of goods associated with marriage does not constitute marriage, because marriage is not simply a collection of goods but a specific kind of union with a specific form and ordering.

What the Catholic account requires Flowerday to engage is not whether same-sex relationships contain real goods, which they manifestly can, but whether the presence of those goods is sufficient to determine the moral character of the sexual acts within them. That is the claim that needs to be argued. And once again, the argument gestures toward it, through the invocation of fidelity, communion, and sacrifice, without ever arriving at the explicit claim that these goods are sufficient to resolve the question of intrinsic ordering. The goods are real. The argument from goods to moral equivalence remains unmade.

The Infertility Objection

Flowerday also places considerable weight on infertility as evidence that sex serves purposes beyond reproduction, implying that if the Church permits sexual intimacy within infertile marriages, it has already conceded that the generative structure of sexual union is not essential to its moral meaning. If an infertile couple may have sexual relations licitly, the argument runs, then generation cannot be what justifies the act, and therefore other loving partnerships, including same-sex ones, are not morally different.

This is the most philosophically serious move in the discussion, and it deserves a serious answer.

The Catholic response has never been that every sexual act must be capable of producing a child. It is that every sexual act must be of the kind that is ordered toward generation, that it must retain the structure and form of the generative act, even when, through age or circumstance, generation does not and cannot follow. An infertile marriage is still a sexual union of the kind that is naturally ordered toward new life, even when new life does not result. The form of the union is generative even when the outcome is not.

This distinction between the kind of act and its outcome is not special pleading invented to protect a conclusion. It runs through the whole of classical moral philosophy. We do not say that a promise made in good faith but accidentally broken was not really a promise. We do not say that a courageous act that fails in its object was not really courageous. The moral character of an act is not exhausted by its consequences. It is also a function of its intrinsic form and ordering.

The infertility objection, to work as Flowerday needs it to work, must show not only that infertile unions are permitted, but that this permission dissolves the distinction between acts ordered toward generation and acts that are not so ordered. That is a much stronger claim, and it is never presented. The Church’s permission of infertile marriage does not imply that sexual form is morally irrelevant. It implies that the form, the kind of union, matters even when the outcome is unavailable. Far from undermining the Catholic framework, the infertility case actually illustrates it. What matters is the ordering of the act, not its statistical result.

Once again, the argument gestures toward the third position, the claim that Catholic sexual ethics rests on a mistaken anthropology, without ever arriving there explicitly or defending it directly.

Conclusion

The honest version of the position Flowerday seems to be approaching would say something like this: I think the Church’s account of homosexuality is wrong, for the following specific reasons, and I think the pastoral harm it causes is a symptom of that error. That would be a claim one could examine, test, argue with, and potentially refute or accept. What we have instead is permanent implication without assertion, strong enough to shape the conversation’s direction, but too vague to be held to account.

Pastoral instinct cannot do the work of truth-evaluation. It can tell us how to speak. It cannot tell us whether what we are saying is true. And a discussion that refuses to distinguish between these will remain, as Flowerday himself almost acknowledged, a series of parallel monologues. Not because the participants lack intelligence or goodwill, but because one of them has repeatedly and consistently declined to say what he actually thinks is false.

That refusal is worth naming. Not to score points, but because clarity about what is actually being disputed is a precondition for any conversation worth having.

It is possible, of course, that this entire essay is a misreading. Flowerday has said so, more than once, with some feeling. The most charitable thing one can do for a man who says he has been misunderstood is to invite him to be understood. The invitation stands. If the position is not the one described here, then the remedy is straightforward, and the space is open. Say what the position actually is. Identify which claims in Catholic sexual teaching are false and why. Explain what “objectively disordered” should be replaced with, and on what grounds. Engage the infertility argument on its own terms. Show where the left-handedness analogy holds, and the Catholic account fails.

That would be a conversation worth having. It might even be the one Flowerday has been trying to have all along. If so, the door is not merely ajar. It is wide open. But someone has to walk through it.