THE VATICAN ON SEX
Maguire, Daniel C.
DANIEL C. MAGUIRE The Declaration does not do justice to the subject or to Catholic moral tradition Contrary to the celebrated witticism of Earl Butz, the Pope should speak about sex. Sex is too...
...The Declaration also overestimates the uni-versalizability of principles and norms, ignoring the Thomistic insight that the more you take practical moral principles into the particularities of life, the more likely you are to find exceptions to them...
...1 Cor...
...Surntna Theologica I II, q. 94, a.4, a.5) It also fails to recognize that moral principles are in dialogue with the concrete, empirical human context, and that any claim to infallibility in morals would imply a claim to divine comprehensive knowledge of the morally meaningful circumstances of every case...
...Love and respect are also components of human eating...
...Of course, it is quite possible to have sex and keep the spiritual elements in abeyance just as it is' possible to eat with strangers...
...Thus it is not surprising that the Declaration is outside the mainstreams of contemporary Catholic reflection on the nature of ethics and on the meaning of sexuality...
...Eating with strangers consistently, however, would make them something other than strangers...
...Sex is so man.y things from the instinctual to the symbolic that all witnesses to its meaning must be welcomed...
...But the merit of the document is outweighed by what it did not do or did poorly...
...Their skills in ethics will limit or enhance their contribution...
...This very statement was a theological statement, which shows the impossibility of escape from theology and its evaluations wherever the faith is taught and explained...
...It stresses the reality of guilt in a time when feigned and strained innocence is fashionable...
...As a practicing educator, teacher, and moralist, I might state for the record that I have as yet found none of my peers in theological ethics thematically committed to a licentious hedonism...
...5. In the Declaration, the Vatican returns to its long favored technique of the abominable straw man...
...there must be some very obvious way of making up my mind...
...In sexual intercourse, as Sidney Callahan put it in Beyond Birth Control, "the couple can be refreshed by participating in one of the fountains of reality, irrational instinct...
...There may even be a protracted period of purely recreational sex as Bronislaw Malinowski saw among the Trobrianders, but even with the Trobrianders the intimatizing force of sexuality is eventually felt...
...Paul's practical advice that it is better to marry than to burn...
...There is little of this intellectual modesty in the Declaration which proclaims the objective immorality of all masturbation, homosexual love-making, and premarital sex wherever it may be, in any context, yesterday, today, and forever...
...Morton Hunt in his extensive study Sexual Behavior in the 1970's, which was published by Playboy Press, reports that promiscuous sex "is not typical of the great mass of single young people...
...In our actual context, criticism is and should be seen as a conservative response...
...But there is a power in sex that will out It is a symbol which both signifies and effects friendship...
...Humanae Vitae saw that love, to be genuine, must be fruitful and creative...
...At all events, if I cannot make up my mind for myself, I will act as some good people act, though many other good people might disapprove...
...Sex is too rich in personal and societal significance to be ignored by the spokesmen of any sensitive moral tradition As May and Abraham Edel note, sex "is part of the most central nexus of human social interrelationships...
...Paul says: "I should like everyone to be like me, but everybody has his own particular gifts from God, one with a gift for one thing, and another with a gift for the opposite...
...There is sex and there is more than sex to conjugal friendship...
...The system of Probabilism, for example, came into being to relieve situations where there is doubt and where people disagree on what is moral...
...It has the power to engender and express endearing emotions and exquisitely personal expectations...
...This does not mean that the Declaration should not be studied and taken seriously, since every view deserves a hearing, but it does mean that its limits should be faced...
...It does .concern itself with the serious implications of the sexual encounter in an age when sex has moved from taboo to calisthenics, from mystery to banality, as it is stripped of all mystcial and symbolic power...
...The Declaration also confirms that persons should "discover by the light of their own intelligence the values innate in their nature...
...7:7) Yet when we move with the Declaration to homosexual persons, for example, the precious gift is normative and a necessary condition for salvation...
...It is the bedrock underlying all other family structures...
...Empirical and cultural variations matter not to the Declaration, but they matter much to any realistic ethics which seeks moral meaning whether found in principle or in context...
...As a drive for intimacy, sex is serious...
...Perhaps we are all primitives in thinking what marriage means, but thoughts such as these point the way to better ground...
...Their credentials for eternal punishment are ready and in order...
...It rejects the normative value of current custom thus championing the right to dissent from the reigning fads and deities...
...For most Americans, especially the young, "sex remains intimately allied to their deepest emotions and inextricably interwoven with their conceptions of loyalty, love and marriage...
...What might have been...
...Persons who dine together are not just intent on the devouring of proteins and carbohydrates...
...Sometimes it will do little more than this...
...When it does so, however, it should do better than the Vatican's recent Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics which does not do justice either to the subject or to the Catholic tradition...
...The Declaration wanted to react to superficial and trivial approaches to sex, but it bogged down in its own negativities...
...it is not merely an in- gestion event...
...And intimacy is a variegated phenomenon that stretches from the sex organs to the heart and even to the mind...
...He says too that-"sexual liberation has not dismantled the romantic-passionate concept of sex and replaced it with the recreational one...
...Homosexual love-making and pre-marital sex may or may not be evil, depending on their circumstances and meaning...
...6. A rather perplexing concept of charismatic gift is implicit in the theology of this declaration...
...When speaking of sexual continence, Jesus said: "It is not everyone who can accept what I have said, but only those whom it is granted...
...The food is actually but a small percentage of what may happen at a meal...
...Criticism, however, should be preferred to the shrug of the many who will dismiss this intervention as another show of archaism proffered by the reigning Vatican theological clique...
...This is a warming thought until we realize that he is predicting a Gotterdamerung...
...Sex modifies it and gives it its special mode...
...Its authors should return to what Aristotle said in his Nichomachean Ethics: "In studying this subject we must be content if we attain as high a degree of certainty as the matter of it ad-, mits...
...While commending some educators, teachers, and moralists for a proper treatment of sexual ethics, the document alludes to the presence out there of some unnamed persons who "have gone so far as to favor a licentious hedonism...
...is not that they outrage some sort of modesty or virtue...
...great friendships are formed in the pursuit of an ideal, in defense of a cause, in the ups-and-downs of research...
...Walter Lippmann wrote years ago that "Love endures only when the lovers love many things together and not merely each other...
...Sex is also a natural liturgy...
...He said that masturbation might be seen as a "cure for concupiscence...
...Toward avoiding that apocalyptic end, it bears heavily upon all of us to let all wisdom converge on the essentials of our faltering socialization...
...In one way it reflects the non-rational and utterly physical in us...
...Sin can, of course, be amply present in the sexual arena, but as Teilhard said: "The gravity of offenses against love...
...The Declaration allows that in the sexual order full and free responsibility may not always be present and so sexual acts outside of marriage may not always be seriously sinful...
...Thus it ends up considering as seriously wrong many things which are not seriously harmful...
...In the eyes of sensitive people, this could only make the God of Love into a God of atrocity...
...The common sense of Probabilism is obviously relevant to the very issues taken up by the Declaration...
...The Declaration also symbolized the post-Vatican II tendency of the hierarchy to ignore "whatever is wrought by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of Catholic theologians, not all of whom could be operating without grace...
...Matt...
...The foundational reality of sex is one place to begin...
...In doing this would we not be but taking the lead from scripture where we find no direct and clear, reference to the subject in all of the Old or New Testament...
...Non-Catholic Christians might repair with confusion to the words of Vatican II: "Nor should we forget that whatever is wrought by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of our separated brethren can contribute to our own edification...
...Complex as the development of this system was, it can be summed up intelligibly and simply as it was by Henry Davis, S.J., in his Moral and Pastoral Theology: In its ultimate analysis, Probabilism is common sense...
...One can only conclude that consultation was sought only where concurrence with this particular view was anticipated...
...In this view, then, masturbation would seem to be one way of fulfilling some of the goals of the Declaration...
...It is unfortunate that these people feel so bereft since the Catholic tradition itself has much to offer in the solution of moral quandaries...
...Aside from giving physical release and restoration, it reaches for the spirit...
...it is a system used in practical doubt by the majority of mankind...
...Teilhard de Chardin also addressed the need of a marriage to be more than a form of joint egoism...
...For the heterosexual person the Declaration recalls St...
...That practical solution of doubt is common sense, and it is Probabilism...
...But it goes on to stress that full and free responsibility may indeed be present and mortal sins may regularly be committed...
...This, he said, is "a mark of the educated man and a proof of his culture...
...In his words, "it avoids protracting the tension for lengthy periods of time and thus avoids filling the young mind with a morbid preoccupation with sex...
...It hits at the vacuity of the notion that science is the only legitimate form of knowledge...
...Thus Teilhard could see chastity as "a virtue of participation and conquest, and not a schooling in restriction and avoidance...
...By its aloofness from the empirical base of ethics, the Declaration departs again from Aquinas who knew that "human actions are good or evil according to the circumstances...
...People rightly say: I am not going to debate all day before acting in doubtful matters...
...The same holds true for persons who are, for good reasons, pre-marriageable but sexually mature...
...The Declaration's absorption in denying the latter possibility a priori distracts it from its proper task...
...Personal eating is social and socializing...
...The table is not a trough...
...In effect, it manages to represent only one view, and that an extremist one, from the many legitimate theologies operating in today's Catholicism...
...Similarly, sex meets special physical needs such as relaxation, release, and distraction...
...What is marriage...
...If anything had to be said on the subject, the Declaration might have followed the Most Reverend Francis Simon in his Cross Currents article in 1966 when he was Bishop of Indore, India...
...This, of course, will vary culturally and circumstantially, but in no culture does sex remain frivolous and merely physical...
...This in-house document was preceded by no known effort to consult with the broad range of Catholic theologians throughout the world...
...Grandmotherly admonitions to stop masturbating obviously do not meet the needs or opportunities of these times...
...As liturgy it is quite comparable to another natural liturgy, the meal...
...We do not, normally, invite people there because they are notoriously hungry...
...Ethics is the art-science which seeks to bring sensitivity and method to the discernment of moral values...
...19:11) Speaking of his own celibacy, St...
...Contemporary sexual naivete" is missing much of this...
...They may or may not fritter away the universe's reserves of personalization...
...What is needed now is not a hackneyed list of nays but an imaginative response to the real desire for a better experience of sex and marriage...
...The Vatican Declaration was an attempt to respond to the growing difficulties of bishops, pastors and faithful in discovering a wholesome sexual ethics...
...Friendship is the paramount term in that description...
...Though attitudes are changing today, the situation is not one of galloping licentiousness...
...In the Gotterdamerung which overwise science and overfoolish statesmanship are preparing for us, the last man will spend his last hours searching for his wife and child...
...Since ethics does not enjoy the precision of much of science, "we must be satisfied with a rough outline of the truth" and not look for more precision than is available...
...This reflects the allocution of Pope Pius XII on March 23, 1952, in which he said that it is erroneous to think that even in the young passion is ordinarily sufficient to take away grave guilt...
...In Catholic theology, celibacy has been seen in the term of Vatican II as "a precious gift...
...Marriage may be described as the ultimate form of friendship achievable between sexually attracted persons...
...Therefore, let mastur-bators and pre-marital or homosexual lovemakers take heed...
...Sexual pleasure, she says, is a way "of recovering and enjoying the unconscious dimensions of man which are not tapped in rational, purposive activity like work or abstract thought...
...He writes: "The ancient trinity of father, mother, and child has survived more vicissitudes than any other human relationship...
...Thus does hell loom...
...There is no evidence that any edification was perceived as needed or sought in the preparation of this document...
...This is nominalism, which the Catholic tradition in its high moments roundly rejected...
...Since it is clear that the Declaration holds that homosexuals can sin, and thus that they have the power not to sin, a question arises...
...7. Finally, on the subject of masturbation, is it not past time to declare a moratbrium on the discussion of that subject in Catholic ethics...
...The subsequent indigestion will bear witness to the need for more than foodstuffs and a table to make a meal...
...It is that they fritter away by neglect or lust, the universe's reserves of personalization...
...The image of God fares poorly in bad theology, as in this instance God is put in the position of vindictively allocating massive retaliation for sexual acts many of which do no perceptible harm...
...It did not see that, although children are a unique and marvelous form of marital fruitfulness, there are other creative expressions of married love...
...If this seems detachedly poetic, then consider what happens when you eat with someone you seriously dislike...
...When churchmen enter herein, as they should to explore and share their experience and beliefs, they must know that they have not created this enterprise, nor can they claim immunity from the criticism and dialogue that is of its essence...
...To cite some of them: it departs from the tradition of ethical realism by separating the idea of moral "disorder" from the' notion of harm...
...On the side of ethical method, the Declaration has serious deficiencies...
...Anthropologist Ralph Linton stresses the enduring nature of the family...
...If celibacy is mandatory and feasible for homosexual persons, is their state a charismatically graced one, and are they endowed by the Creator with gifts of containment only rarely given to heterosexual persons...
...And it repeats the affirmative of Vatican II that everyone, including "children and young people have a right to be encouraged to weigh moral values with an upright conscience, and to embrace them by personal choice...
...What is sex...
...2. The Declaration admits to being an intervention in the field of ethics...
...Catholic Christianity should address it from its specific historical perspectives...
...Not that the Declaraion is devoid of all value...
...Sex can not easily be , reduced to "screwing...
...Beyond this, there are opportunities today for positive and creative thought regarding marriage that the Declaration in its woeful mood could not see...
...Acted out here is what Pope Paul, on October 1, 1966, told a group of theologians in Rome, viz that the magisterium could teach and protect the faith without the help of theologians (absque sacrae Theologiae auxilio), relying on the assistance of the Holy Spirit...
...Here is where the Vatican document could have spoken meaningfully in pointing out the resources of Christian moral idealism and the shaping of the "new world...
...Like the encyclical Humanae Vitae, the Declaration on Sexual Ethics had good intentions...
...Hell, in Vatican theology, would still be fundamentalistically conceived as a state of unending vindictive punishment awaiting those who die in mortal sin...
...to witness to the strengths of Catholic Christianity where these strengths are relevant to the moral evolution of sexuality and marriage...
...4. The idea of hell is not spoken of in the Declaration but it is insistently present there by ominous implication...
...Serious criticism is in order, though this is not what the Vatican invited...
...Proteins and carbohydrates they will find, but these are the substratum of so much more that is symbolized when humans eat...
...I II q. 18, a.3) Finally, the Declaration uses philosophical tools such as nature, dignity, and finality with no apparent recognition of the tedious but necessary distinctions needed to ease the abstractness of these terms and identify the cultural presuppositions with which they are inevitably freighted...
...For homosexual and pre-marriageable persons, there is no alternative to burning . . . unless, of course, they are all charismatically gifted...
...It is personally as well as physically interpenetrating and copulating...
...3. The Declaration has no room for doubt or ambiguity in its conclusions...
...Other theological interpretations of that dogma are not entertained in those quarters...
...They may augment those reserves...
...1. The Vatican's Declaration was conceived in secrecy...
...To say the least, it is not the fairest offspring to issue from the ecumenical nuptials...
...Their development is not so much a permeation of 'one by the other as a joint progress through a new world...
Vol. 103 • February 1976 • No. 5
