The Catechism’s section on homosexuality (ccc 2357-9) cites from Genesis 19 the story of Abraham’s nephew Lot, a ‘just man’ living in the sinful city of Sodom. Clearly, Cardinal Ratzinger and his colleagues, when drafting the Catechism, interpreted the sin of Sodom as sexual.

Two angels lodging at Lot’s house aroused the lust of a crowd of men assembled at Lot’s door. The crowd demanded that the angels be brought out so that they could have sex with them.

Lot’s strange offer

But Lot, anxious to protect his guests, offered his two virgin daughters to the crowd instead. Lot was willing to prostitute his daughters!

That is strange behaviour for a supposedly just man, you may think. What’s more, the two guests, being angels, were presumably not only beautiful but also androgynous, neither clearly male nor female in appearance.

One cannot unequivocally classify the crowd’s lust as homosexual, therefore.

So could Cardinal Ratzinger and his team not come up with more convincing biblical justification for the Church’s traditional hostility towards gay sex? In particular, what, if anything, did Jesus say about it, or about Sodom’s sin?

What Jesus said

Jesus says nothing about homosexuality in any of the Gospels. He does mention Sodom, however, in three passages: Matthew 10.15 and 11.23-4, and Luke 10.12.

The contexts relate to towns which either reject Jesus’s message when his disciples first try to deliver it, or, after initial enthusiasm, lapse into indifference (as Bethsaida, Capernaum and Chorazin did). Jesus has learnt the hard way about human back-sliding.

But what does this have to do with homosexuality? Nothing at all!

For Jesus, the sin of Sodom relates not to sex but to being inhospitable.

Echoes in Scripture

This interpretation echoes two other Bible passages. In Wisdom chapters 12-19 the heinous crimes of the Egyptians are compared in flowery language with the supposedly less serious crimes of other peoples.

For example, the Egyptians, in enslaving the Israelites after previously welcoming them, are worse sinners than ‘others’ who were unwelcoming from the start. These ‘others’, ‘struck with blindness … at the gate of the upright’ (Wisdom 19.17) are clearly the men of Sodom outside the door of the just man Lot.

And Egypt and Sodom are similarly linked in Revelation 11.8, as ‘the great city known by the symbolic names of Sodom and Egypt, in which their Lord was crucified’. Inhospitable behaviour is here pushed to the limit.

The Catechism’s silence

What do the authors of the Catechism say about these passages in relation to the ‘sin of Sodom’? Incredibly, nothing at all!

They prefer to ignore what Jesus says rather than acknowledge that it does not support the Church’s blanket condemnation of gay sex.

It is high time for the Vatican to apologise for this mistake.

• Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy is a former professor of linguistics at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. He is the author of Zeus, Jupiter, Jesus and the Catholic Church: What Good Is a God? (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2021).