Recently in the Church a particular way of talking about homosexuals has become popular. Talk of perversion, sins against nature, and so on, has been less to the fore, giving way to a quasi-medical vocabulary, and a way of talking about gay people has developed which is more consonant with modern thinking. Now they are not so much wicked as sick; they suffer from something called ‘the homosexual condition’. It is not so much that they commit horrible and disgusting sins as that, unfortunately and through no fault of their own, they have a tendency or disposition to perform such acts. It is still a morally bad thing if they actually give way to this tendency, but it is not sinful that they have it; it is like a tumour in their moral insides. Thus homosexuality was described as a ‘condition’ in the 1975 Vatican Declaration on Sexual Ethics:

There are many kinds of condition; we speak of social conditions, economic conditions, conditions of hygiene, and so on. But here it is the medical condition that is being taken as a model for homosexuality. That is clear from the reference to possibilities of cure and to ‘pathological constitution’.