The following comes from a March 16 LifeSiteNews article:

 

As San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone faces a coordinated attack on his efforts to promote Catholic identity in his schools, a Notre Dame professor has penned an op-ed in the New York Times urging him to back off because the Church, he says, is “overdue” for revising its views on sexuality.

 

University of Notre Dame Philosophy Professor Gary Gutting argues that natural law actually confirms the goodness of homosexuality in his March 12 column, titled “Unraveling the Church Ban on Gay Sex”.

 

“The church needs to undertake a thorough rethinking of its teachings on sexual ethics, including premarital sex, masturbation and remarriage after divorce,” he said.

 

Gutting wrote that he understood Archbishop Cordileone is not in a position to deny “what is still an official Church doctrine.”

 

“But there is nothing that requires him to vigorously enforce a teaching that is so dubious even in terms of the church’s own view on the two sources of truth,” he writes, referring to divine revelation and reason.

 

Gutting contended that for both heterosexual and homosexual couples alike, “sex is a powerful and unique way of building, celebrating, and replenishing intimacy.”

 

He dismissed Church teaching that the marital act is meant to be open to life, arguing that sexual acts that block the creation of life could “still play a positive role in a humanly fulfilling life of love between two people of the same sex.”

 

He also discounted Biblical condemnations of homosexual acts, attributing the conflict between divine revelation and reason to “our failure to understand what either God or reason is saying.”

 

He claims that most clergy and even some bishops have followed his path of logic in rejecting Church teaching on contraception, which is also supported by a natural law argument.