page_title: History of the Catholic Church and homosexuality
section_title: Pope John Paul II
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Catholic Church and homosexuality / Modern Age / Modern-day popes / Pope John Paul II
caption_attribution_description: English: Pope John Paul II at old Yankee Stadium, New York City, in October 1979
context_page_description: The Christian tradition has generally proscribed any and all noncoital genital activities, whether engaged in by couples or individuals, regardless of whether they were of the same or different sex. The position of the Roman Catholic Church with regards to homosexuality developed from the writings of Paul the Apostle and the teachings of the Church Fathers. These were in stark contrast to contemporary Greek and Roman attitudes towards same-sex relations which were more relaxed.
  Canon law regulating homosexual activity has mainly been shaped through the decrees issued by a number of synods, starting from the 5th century Council of Elvira. Initially, proscriptions against "sodomy" were aimed simply at ensuring clerical or monastic discipline; and were only later widened in the Middle Ages to include laymen. By the Middle Ages, the Catholic clergy increasingly encouraged the pious to hunt out those committing homosexual acts, and to hand them over to secular authorities for punishment. The Spanish Inquisition tried nearly a thousand individuals for sodomy, where near 500 cases were of sodomy between persons, with only a few cases where the couple were consenting homosexual adults.
context_section_description: Homosexuality received no mention in papal encyclicals until Pope John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor of 1993, which "specifically proclaims the intrinsic evil of the homosexual condition" and rejected the view of some theologians who had begun to publicly question the basis upon which the Church had condemned homosexuality as morally unacceptable.
  John Cornwell believes that the pontificate of John Paul II increasingly saw sexual morality as a paramount concern, and homosexuality, (alongside contraception, divorce and illicit unions), as a dimension of "the 'culture of death' against which he taught and preached with increasing vehemence".
  In John Paul II's teaching, gay sex is regarded as a utilization of another's body, not a mutual self-giving in familial love, physically expressed by the masculine and feminine bodies; and such intercourse is also performed by a choice of the will, unlike homosexual orientation, which he acknowledged is usually not a matter of free choice.
  On 5 October 1979, John Paul publicly praised the bishops of the United States for stating that "homosexual activity ... as distinguished from homosexual orientation, is morally wrong". He argued that, instead of "[holding] out false hope" to homosexuals facing hard moral problems, they had upheld "the true dignity, the true human dignity, of those who look to Christ's Church for the guidance which comes from the light of God's word".
  In 2000, he criticized the inaugural WorldPride event scheduled for Rome in that year as "an affront to the Great Jubilee of the year 2000" and as "an offence to the Christian values" of Rome. He also spoke of his "bitterness" after church officials had lobbied and failed to cancel the festival. He also cited the Catholic catechism that "homosexual acts go against natural law" but "every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided".
  In response, the Dutch gay magazine Gay Krant and its readership initiated a case against him in the Dutch law courts, arguing that his comment that gay sex is contrary to the laws of nature "give rise to hatred against, and discrimination of certain groups of people" in violation of Dutch law. This came to an end when the court ruled that he was immune from prosecution as a head of state (the Vatican).
  In his last personal work, Memory and Identity, published in 2005, John Paul II referred to the "pressures" on the European Parliament to permit "homosexual 'marriage'". He wrote: "It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man".
caption: Pope John Paul II in Old Yankee Stadium, 1979
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