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.
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A warranted historical scriptural analysis of the truth of Sodom and Gomorrah as God’s wrath against a most egregious evil, homosexuality, and the trend to deny that truth due to fear of social reprisal, including the placating of the evil itself.
Placating the evil is aptly described by Thomas Johnson regarding “The Bishop [who] pointed his finger at me and forcefully asserted that the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality, the sin was that of forceful domination of one person over another”.
This false premise is widely held. A perfect example of denial by prelates who reject Church doctrine and generally defend deviate sexuality.
I’ve never heard that premise before but I’ve heard others, Fr. Peter. People can get pretty creative spinning away the obvious.
Indeed mrscracker. The art of the disingenuous.
It is scary how in the last 20 to 30 or so yrs these sins are accepted not by the secularist, but in some protestant churches like Lutherans, Anglicans and the like. It it has extended to supporting the Trans mania. Even in the Catholic Churches the push back is muted by the fear of not being kind, and just not being able to say that this is sinful. One has to wonder what punishment is in store for acceptance of this situation.
Some good news in this crazy upside down secularist culture was reported in the Catholic Vote Site. It reported that the US largest Trans Gender Inducing Hospital, located in California (where else) is closing down, after I think it said 20 yrs of its insidious operation trying to make Boys to girls etc. Yea!
Wow. 20 years of mutilations.
😣
Truthful and timely. In a discussion with a Bishop several years ago, on the subject of the vulnerability of the Church to lawsuits, the subject of sexuality came up ( specifically how standing for the reveled morality of the Church in our age will see conflict in the world, the Bishop pointed his finger at me and forcefully asserted that the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality (I had not mentioned Sodom or homosexuality at that point). He asserted that the sin was that of forceful domination of one person over another. I allowed, in the context of Genesis, that could have been a possibility to be discussed, but then to accept that one would need to throw out the epistle of St Jude, where the sin of Sodom is specifically mentioned…..
Yeah. One of the big problems today is that the Church pays too much attention to Magisterium, sometimes treating it like a trump card over logic or the very words of Christ (“… lead us not into temptation …”), and too little attention to Sacred Tradition. For example, it is just barely POSSIBLE, based on the text alone, to interpret Genesis 1:2 the way the NAB does: “… while a mighty wind swept over the waters.” All that is required is to ignore 2000 years of the Church consistently interpreting the “mighty wind” as the Spirit of God, aka the Holy Spirit.
Perhaps John Henry Newman’s statement can be extended: “To cease to be deep in history is to cease to be Catholic.”
The large city closest to where I live had its annual gay pride parade a couple of weeks ago. The news media reported over 200,000 participants. Were they parading against inhospitality? the Bible and the CCC lists four sins that cry to heaven. Inhospitality is not one of them, but sodomy is.
True, but don’t underestimate how important hospitality was in the ancient world — especially to envoys. Pro tip — if the Great Khan sends envoys to your city, DO NOT ABUSE THEM. Actually, the cases of Sodom and Otrar have enough parallels to be illuminating.
But let’s be clear: the “inhospitality” shown to the angels had everything to do with the fact that the city attempted to do something not merely wrong, but over-the-top wrong. Also, Sodom was notorious for wickedness BEFORE the angels were sent there. Just what could the extravagant wickedness that was notorious before hand have been?
Homosexual acts are indeed sinful. That said, same sex attraction (SSA) is not. It is a cross to be born by those so afflicted. We should be encouraging and helping SSA people towards celibacy. A celibate gay man can be a good Catholic.
A good analogy can be found with pica, which induces people to eat things that are inedible, like hair.
Some “dirt eating ” can make sense in *very* small measures. Calcium is present in certain soils I think and nutritional deficiency can inspire people to do that. Especially in pregnancy. Obviously in larger amounts it can be a detrimental and dangerous thing.
I’ve used food grade lime (Calcium Hydroxide) to make pickles and also to treat children with runny tummies.
Lime pickle recipes available on request. 🙂
We read: “he 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).”
Sodom and Gomorrah,
So damn, no more uh!
When you read the account about Lot and the angelic visitors the entire town, “all the people to the last man,” were at Lot’s door demanding to have sexual relations with the angelic visitors. The answer to Abraham’s pleas to God was that there were no righteous people in Sodom.
I recently wrote to Pope Leo XIV, asking him to revised the USCCB’s breviary and lectionary to include those portions of scriptures that gets cut off and in particular Romans 13:13-14: “let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the LORD Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.” Watch how often in the breviary that verse 14b is cut off. It is inconceivable and scandalous beyond belief that Francis and now Leo are okay with priests “blessing” same-sex couples or couples who have been married without a Church annulment. May God have mercy.