But Church Teaching ...

Natural Law

The concept of natural law has its origins in Greek and Roman philosophy and is essentially an idea that human beings have a natural inclination to what is good and that there is some form of law which all human beings aspire to which is based on this innate sense of what is right. Thomas Aquinas describes this concept as follows: "Man participates in eternal reason through which he possesses a natural inclination to a fitting act and end. Such participation on the part of a rational creature in the eternal is called natural law." Attempts to state what the actual rules or principles of natural law are have, however, proved futile. The result is that natural law arguments are circular: it is necessary to make assumptions as to what is right and wrong in order to formulate the principles of natural law, based on those assumptions. In the days when society consistently condemned same sex acts natural law arguments were used to justify that social view. In a society where such relationships are valued, and discrimination is considered immoral, natural law arguments tend to point in the opposite direction.