'BLESS ME, FATHER ':
O'Brien, Dennis
'BLESS ME, FATHER ....' Seat and the Confessional NORBERTO VALENTINI & CLARA DE MEGLIO Translated by Melton S. Davis Stein and Day, $6.95 Titius and Bertha Ride Again: Contemporary Moral...
...If the nature of confession lies in its personal intimacy, depersonalized confession may have as much relation to the real thing as depersonalized sex has to real intimacy...
...The trouble is that both disputants have truncated, mechanical scenarios...
...Sex keeps moving from the tragic core of a whole life too complex to describe, to a bodily indiscretion too silly for sin...
...A more normal recommendation is to practice mortification and that is the source of the one funny exchange in the book...
...It is as "myocardial infarct" is to "heart attack" or "terminate with extreme prejudice" to "kill...
...If the priests have their own humorless view deduced from theological manuals, the penitents seem to have imbibed of the erotic skill manuals of Dr...
...I can't believe he means that, nor is the distinction well drawn...
...I am not sure what I think about the trickery of the tapes...
...I believe this is a sign of fundamental failure...
...If that is the case, how can one get at the human meaning of sexuality if we insist on talking about it in terms that would look better in the index of Gray's Anatomy...
...Dedek should think on that one again...
...The priests grasp this point formally because they keep insisting that the quality of sexuality is somehow changed by saying marriage vows in the right place at the right time...
...Aside from any theological objections, there is the moral offensiveness of abuse of trust...
...While I realize that there is some need for an antiseptic language of sex lest the confessional tapes sound like conversations in the Oval office, still "conjugal act" bypasses normal love/sex talk almost entirely...
...The former language is invented to sanitize a particular human action for some special purpose...
...The priests say just about what you think Italian priests would say...
...Idyllic romance only takes place in Arden or a midsummer night's dream...
...private attitudes cannot entirely substitute for public affirmation by lovers of the manner in which human pairing affects the texture of all human bonding in a community...
...I wouldn't abandon the enterprise of confessing and advising, but the sacramental absolution in God's hands may be the most real gesture...
...There is more to "conjugal act" than its antiseptic quality...
...The only mildly shocking thing in the book that one would probably not have obtained through straight sociological interviews is occasional advice directed at a supposedly harried male to indulge in prostitutes rather than premarital sex...
...I would commend it to any Italian priest in preparation for future snoopers...
...And what constitutes sexual behavior...
...Romantics "make love," pornographers have a more pungent lingo and if all else fails Cole Porter suggests "Let's do it...
...who cheats on his income tax and wants to know if he has an obligation to report himself and rectify the situation...
...Mishearing, the fake penitent says, "What has multiplication got to do with it...
...Obsession, destructive lust, madness and fantasy are the other part of sexual literature...
...On its face this is a curious defense...
...If we are to continue confessing and advising, John F. Dedek's manual of contemporary moral cases comes as close to hitting the mark on some subjects as one can expect...
...Some priests are caustic, others compassionate...
...Perhaps the authors will next decide that a great deal could be learned about courtship behavior if they would pretend to court various subjects for the benefit of the hidden recorder and the world of science...
...I fear it is a long-held prejudice of mine that clerical moralists usually do quite sensible work on subjects like euthanasia, vasectomy and even sexuality (lately) but seem utterly baffled by the income tax...
...If comedy and tragedy crowd the field of serious sexual literature, then I suspect that confession of sexual sins and the concomitant advice always misses the mark...
...The priestly advice consists of innumerable papal pronouncements writ small...
...Lying to people has been regarded as a moral fault and certainly the researchers in this book are making a profession of it...
...I always wonder whether it is like the Immigration Act or the Hawley-Smoot Tariff...
...That would be loathsome...
...The priests generally undervalue private intentions and attitudes as factors in the meaning of sexual behavior, the "penitents" seriously undervalue public acts (marriage vows) in setting a larger social meaning to sexuality in marriage...
...There is a defense by Pierre Dondaine of this kind of sociological research in a foreword...
...I am not sure that it is any less odious to tamper with the intimate personal commitment of the priest in a confessional...
...Sexual humor is, in turn, the obverse of dark and tragic eroticism...
...We have not entirely reached the Brave New World where taxes are expended on absolute frivolities like escalator tennis just to keep the old GNP on the rise-though C5-A may seem fairly close...
...What is sure is that the human meaning is seriously attenuated in the laundered language...
...If, as I suspect, the information could easily have been obtained just as validly without the titillating tapes, how important is what is revealed...
...BLESS ME, FATHER ....' Seat and the Confessional NORBERTO VALENTINI & CLARA DE MEGLIO Translated by Melton S. Davis Stein and Day, $6.95 Titius and Bertha Ride Again: Contemporary Moral Cases JOHN F. DEDEK Sheed & Ward, $5.95 DENNIS O'BRIEN Sex and the Confessional is 213 pages long...
...There may be complications about an obligation to give self-incriminating information, but Dedek's argument suggests that there is no prima facie obligation to pay the tax in the first place because of the meaning of modern tax policy...
...A mere linguistic point...
...If one takes Shakespeare as a touchstone on the subject, Masters and Johnson and all their tribe could be recatalogued under "science fiction...
...Let me return to the humorless quality of the confessional talk...
...Publication of the book was the cause of much outrage in Europe where it was regarded as a violation of the seal of confession...
...If there is something distorted in the priests' notion that if only one got all the plumbing maneuvers clearly set forth in the right temporal order the moral worth would be revealed, the putative penitents are equally wrong in believing that physical facts are irrelevant provided one is sufficiently high-minded during erotic operations...
...A final unrelated note...
...Dedek argues that since modern tax policy a la Keynes is not really for the purpose of providing goods and services for the community but is an instrument for managing the economy, Titius need not confess his cribbing...
...Things that people say before, during and after, the sincerity of the sayings, the social setting of the sayings, gestures, costumes, touches, day-dreams, today, yesterday, all enter into the human quality of sexual conduct...
...Sexuality is always too much and too little, too important and too trivial, too ingrained in the personality, too much the bizarre behavior of a disconnected moment to be confined in a confessable act...
...The fact that there is only one slight piece of wholly unintended humor should be a clue that there is something amiss...
...In Dedek's book, Titius is a wealthy orthodontist (are there any indigent ones...
...This is a phrase which occurs as far as I know only in seminary texts and confessional booths...
...Insofar as one attempts to grasp the meaning of sexuality in discrete acts which can be numbered, I think one is on a misleading track...
...Perhaps one could rise above these old-fashioned scruples if the information gained were extraordinarily important and difficult to gain by overt means-national security interests, you know...
...What indeed...
...And I really wonder what most of the conversation engaged in by both sides in these dialogues has to do with the full human meaning of sexuality...
...Ellis and the rest of the sexual Salvationists who crowd the New York Times best seller list and the Marboro remainders...
...I prefer to think of it as an exercise in unmitigated gall...
...The priests keep referring to something called "the conjugal act...
...Given the casuistical bent of standard Catholic thought the physical specifics would necessarily be regarded as important in determining gravity of offense...
...Taxes are, more or less, used to provide goods and services for the public whatever the important secondary effects of government spending on the overall economy...
...Priest and penitent in these dialogues both have a holy belief that the right act in the right place with the right idea will be just dandy...
...I don't see how one can come to a proper assessment of the human value of sexuality without accepting the fact that mankind sees comedy in sexual antics...
...Reuben, Dr...
...In sheer bulk, probably the greatest volume of sexual talk is humorous-from Aristophanes to blue jokes...
...As the examples indicate, the purposes may be good or bad...
...Does any lover or lecher ever say, "I spent last evening doing a conjugal act...
...Dondaine says the book is "daring...
...Twelve pages, more or less, consist of sketchy comment by the collaborative authors...
...Confession, he says, is "an intimate and private dialogue" but when it is "depersonalized" as by these researchers, it becomes a legitimate investigation...
...Properly human sexuality cannot be automatically conveyed by marriage vows or by the high-minded experimental thoughts directed at pre-marital sex...
...There are sex acts, 1 suppose, but the human meaning of sexuality is as much in setting and scenario as it is in anything which can easily be regarded as delimited act, and setting and scenario have very imprecise boundaries...
...It would seem to be the wisdom of sexual humor that sexuality is as much floppy farce as human perfection...
...They are generally death on pre-marital sex, confused about the pill, all for the inviolability of the marriage contract...
...the rest is comprised of full and edited transcripts from surreptitious tape recordings made by the authors while "confessing" various sexual sins to priests throughout Italy...
...My only real sympathy for the fake sinners was with their annoyance about being asked how many times did they do it here, there or nowhere...
...If, as I suggest, there is always an element of farce, fantasy, or utter failure in any sexual course, Dedek's remarks on homosexuality and teenage petting are as commonsensical and compassionate as one could want...
...But I seriously doubt that this sort of electronic peek-a-boo is at all necessary to obtain information about what priests say in confession...
...The authors purport to find a prurient interest in sexual detail on the part of some confessors but that can hardly be established from the evidence presented...
...My guess is that a knock on the parish door would have produced the same answers in the same proportion...
...The argumentative penitents in the dialogue keep insisting to the priests that pre-marital sex is not just a bestial act (as the priests say) because they have certain attitudes which give moral stature to their conduct...
...I imagine that the aim of confession as regards sexual behavior is to assess its human meaning...
...There are no great surprises...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 12
