Catholics and “Sodom and Gomorrah”

During the current and long stretch of Ordinary Time, the famous towns of Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned several times during the Readings for Mass.

When Catholics today hear “Sodom and Gomorrah,” what comes to mind? I worry that, for many, it’s an empty phrase. Its moral and theological significance is lost. Like calling every disagreeable politician “Hitler,” the label “Sodom and Gomorrah” may carry emotional weight but little actual content.

Early in Jesus’s ministry, He sent His disciples ahead of Him to “prepare the way” by preaching and healing. He instructed them to venture out simply, relying on Providence and the goodwill of their potential hearers. Those who were receptive should have received a blessing.

But what about the towns that were not receptive? We read:

Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words—
go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.
Amen, I say to you, it will be more tolerable
for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment
than for that town.” (Mt 10:14-15)

Considering that Sodom and Gomorrah were incinerated by fire and brimstone from heaven, that was no minor threat.

Historical ignorance allows turning a public figure whose policies range from tough to coercive into a Hitler. That happens even if, in reality, very few come close to the programmatic genocidal mania that Adolf Hitler embodied. Theological cowardice turns “Sodom and Gomorrah” into places you might not want to visit, although why they were punished often seems surrounded by a vow of silence.

Christian tradition attributed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to their sins. The whole account begins with Abraham seeing off his three visitors after they come to his tent, and the promise that Sarah would be a mother within a year. As they depart, the Lord says to Abraham:

The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, that I must go down to see whether or not their actions are as bad as the cry against them that comes to me. (Gen 18:20-21).

Bargaining then ensues between Abraham and God as to the minimum number of “righteous” people for whom God would spare the city. They settle on ten, which we later find still exceeds Sodom’s population of the good.

And what did Christian tradition identify as the sin for which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed? Sodomy, the sin that took its name from the place. For much of the Christian tradition, the connection between Sodom and sodomy was self-evident.

That, of course, does not tally with contemporary efforts to rehabilitate homosexual activity as compatible with Catholic morality. Those ready to engage in that contradiction generally take one of two tacks: redefining the sin or ignoring it.

Redefining the sin usually means that Sodom was punished not for sodomy but for “inhospitality”—its inhabitants were unkind to guests. But the biblical text is clear. When the three angels in the appearance of men who visited Abraham go to Sodom and lodge in Lot’s house, the Sodomites demand to abuse them. Sensitive to the guests’ rights to security, as hospitality was a matter of life and death in the ancient Near East, Lot even offers his daughters to satisfy the Sodomites’ lusts. (I’m not defending it, but simply citing what Scripture says and what the mind of roughly 4,000 years ago thought the lesser evil). They refuse, set on their same-sex desires to the point that–barring divine intervention–they would have invaded Lot’s house.

Yes, the Sodomites weren’t nice to guests, but their lack of “niceness” had a specific and sexual contour.

The other attempt to circumvent Genesis 19 is to accept it as is, but then to say we have grown beyond this time-bound moral assessment. Sure, the argument goes, it’s there, but unlike what earlier generations of Jews and Christians thought, it has no normative moral bearing for us.

The first path has God annihilating Sodom because their lack of niceness was tied up with them wanting sex without consent, with the latter mattering but the former irrelevant.

The second has God destroying Sodom because He, too, apparently was complicit in a time-bound morality. Over time, apparently, we got a kinder and gentler God.

Such semantic gymnastics are, of course, motivated by efforts to erase the constant Catholic assessment of homosexual activity as “intrinsically disordered” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2357). Until enough time passes to dismiss what the Church has “always” taught, the interim tactic is omertà, a conspiracy of silence.

It is why I wonder if the average Catholic, in hearing of Sodom and Gomorrah, is still aware of what in the tradition constituted the basis of their moral ill repute.

Central to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans is his theology of sin and redemption. All people, not just Jews with the Law, are sinners. All people, Jew and pagan alike, have sinned because the Law they violated was not just written on stone tablets but on stony hearts. Humans cannot extricate themselves from sin.

Indeed, left to their own devices, they sink ever lower in it: Paul names sexual sins, explicitly “shameful lusts” and substituting “natural sexual relations for unnatural ones” (Rom 1:26-27; see also Jude 1:7) to make his point. Some moderns want to write this off as cult prostitution, but the natural meaning of the text is the degenerative effect of sin. Period.

If there’s any cult here, it’s Eros. It is the worship of a false god, by refusing to hear the call to metanoia–to “change one’s mind” about one’s way of living—that Jesus connects with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and thus to the rejection of the Good News (Mt 11:23-24). It’s not because the “towns and villages” weren’t nice to His disciples or gave them lousy food despite them “being worth their wages.”

It was because (as with those who, Paul tells us, cling to “shameful lusts) it is to sin against the Holy Spirit by being unrepentant, therefore branding the wrong as right and the right as optional.