to divert their attention from these things by fulminating against their sins and from now on any sexual sin is utterly condemned; sexual sins, in fact, become almost the only sins. And this situation lasted until the present century. Any sexual act outside marriage, and any sexual act within marriage which could not lead to procreation, is sinful. Disobedience to Christ's supreme command to love one another is no sin at all.

Two world wars and a general slide from religion have led in our own days to a general abandonment of these narrow standards. Only the Catholic Church today maintains her old teaching, and every Catholic priest knows that that teaching (especially in regard to contraception) is disregarded by numbers of her faithful adherents. Only when it is a case of homosexuality do the old thunders still sound forth and that even where no homosexual act is performed. One whose inclinations are homosexual is ipso facto an emissary of the devil, unfit to live.

Why is this? Partly no doubt because the heterosexual is usually quite unable to understand the homosexual --and what we do not understand we fear. Partly because we all tend to condemn in others aspects of our own personality which we refuse to recognize in ourselves. And partly because to denounce the homosexual provides a scapegoat and removes the necessity for looking too closely at heterosexual sins.

Is there in fact any justification in Christian teaching and theology for regarding homosexuality as superlatively evil? Certainly none that I can find. If we accept the traditional teaching that any sexual act not capable of leading to conception is sinful, then any homosexual act will be sinful. I am not here arguing the rights or wrongs of this view: I am

concerned here only to po nt ou that if this is so, there are any other sex acts which are far ore inful than an act between two consenting adults of the same sex, especially if that act is an expression of mutual affection. Adultery today is taken almost for granted, yet it is obviously far more sinful than the homosexual act, if only because the rights of other parties are being usurpel. I myself would argue that masturbation is more sinful than a homosexual act, inasmuch as it is an act of solitary gratification and, therefore, selfish. Contraception, at least to a Catholic, should be a much graver sin since by deliberate act a potential child is thereby deprived of the possibility of existence. In fact a careful examination of all the sexual sins will show that the sexual union of two adults of the same sex, drawn together by love (and God is love), is, at worst, a less grave sin than any other sexual sin. Yet many of the others are committed regularly by good Christians without any feelings of guilt, and without any serious condemnation. And it needs to be remembered, too, that sexual sins, springing as they do from our human nature, are in themselves far less serious than such grave sins as hatred, anger, malice and uncharitableness which many Christians never seem to recognize as sins at all.

I am a Catholic priest. I accept my Church's teaching. I believe that every unmarried man and woman should ideally live in complete chastity. But chastity is a positive state -not a mere negative state of neurotic repressions--and it can be attained only by those who have advanced far along the path of spiritual attainment. For the average Christian it is not yet possible. Why should we condemn the homosexual and not the fornicator? Why should we condemn anyone? Christ condemned hypocrisy

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