CHRISTIANITY, MARRIAGE AND SEX

...As a consequence of the Council's teaching that marriage is a covenanted "relationship in love and life," the Rota or main marriage tribunal of the Holy See has recognized the lack of love as vitiating the marriage bond...

...In this perspective, Catholic theologians have come to realize that the structure of morality built into the human heart is not a static set of regulations constitutive of human nature...

...Somewhere between the metaphysical and the eutrapelic approaches, the theologians should be able to discover a defense that will once and for all destroy the church's preoccupation with venereal pleasure as always on the verge of the sinful...

...Recognizing that it is no longer sufficient to equate sinfulness with a misuse of the procreative function of sex, moralists have rediscovered the ambiguity of sexuality...

...It is against this concept of natural law that most Catholic thinkers have rebelled...

...Sex was for these men an obstreperous element in the human make-up whose only justification was its biological orientation to the procreation of offspring within the confines of marriage...

...They feel that the theory of natural law that the church inherited from Greek philosophy, buttressed by St...

...to be applied writers...

...The latter document condemns the practice outright as objectively a grave sin...

...One immediate consequence of this revaluation is the fact that the new approach to sexuality is not conducive to an unrestrained permissiveness or promiscuity...

...Along with the ability to control fertility, women are vindicating their equality with men in all spheres of endeavor...

...In its most insensitive, preconciliar statement, Catholic sexual morality was summarized: "It is grievously sinful in the unmarried deliberately to procure or to accept even the smallest degree of true venereal pleasure...

...As a dynamic force within man's inner self oriented toward another being, sexuality was recognized by Plato as the imprint on the instinctual level of mankind's ontological relationship to the transcendent Other...

...Visible and tangible things were seen as signs on the way to God and his hidden kingdom...

...He is not in search of specific answers to problems whose parameters far outdistance the knowledge and experience of early and medieval man...

...cipents of 1 The earl fluenced by ing a prop human life...

...It is also the result of a grave reorientation in contemporary sexual mores, for the church does not exist in a vacuum...

...This change has resulted from a deeper understanding of many aspects of human behavior achieved by modern science...

...For others, writing as "ethicists," the relation of their moral discourse to any specific theological principles, or even to a definable religious outlook is opaque...

...What the new morality sees is the requirement that human behavior, to be whole, must engage the complete person...

...The attention being focused on family life in the exploited and depressed areas of the world by missionaries dedicated to spreading social justice as the Word of God, and the redemptive presence of Christ in action has multiplied enormously...

...Conscious of the fact that the Catholic attitude toward sexual morality is a powerful factor in molding the culture and civilization of the modern world, the church is striving to overcome its inner confusion and controversies to present not so much a solid front as a benevolent and positive example of a society at home with its own sexuality...

...With Augustine, a subtle change is introduced in the western church...

...Paul's reference to a "law in our inner being," has given the church a thorough understanding of man as a rational animal endowed with an intellect and free will, whose primary functions are to control human emotions and passions—particularly the carnal appetites—in pursuit of virtue...

...Whether theology is thereby in interaction with these areas, however, is less clear...

...Of considerable interest in this regard is the tolerance for a homosexual style of life expressed by one of the authors of the Declaration in an interview in the Italian weekly Europa...

...For with the contemporary rise of canon law in the western church, the legists made marriage a contract—a property agreement giving the husband full rights over his wife's body and possessions, and the wife over the husband's body...

...The Vatican Declaration adopts a similar, condemnatory stand in regard to homosexual acts...

...Andrew Greeley in Sexual Intimacy and Love and Play has given extended attention to this function of the affective, sexual togetherness...

...What seems obvious is that at least unconsciously, he was influenced by the Stoic notion of contemplation as man's primary purpose...

...In its place, they are seeking a structure that will reflect man's current knowledge of the universe and his in-depth appreciation of the microcosm that is human nature...

...in their < (humanitai concept of amicitia be and wife, to the desii greed, avai and illusioi kinds...

...Acknowledging the effects of original sin as inducing the passions and emotions to obfuscate the intellect and weaken the will, the church insists that God's Commonweal: 381 T grace supplied through Christ's redemptive death and resurrection is sufficient to enable everyone, and particularly Christians through the use of the sacraments, to advance toward holiness...

...Man, in turn, despite the incidental dynamic of his birth, growth and death, is essentially a replica of his forebears with incidental variations of talent, apprehension and creativity...

...Obviously ignoring this document's directives, the Vatican Declaration characterizes masturbation as "a deliberate use of the sexual faculty outside normal conjugal relations . . . that contradicts the finality of the faculty...

...In the struggle for moral maturity, men and women are not left alone.' Born into brokenness, they are nevertheless the constant object of God's concern and God's grace...

...Encouraging counselors to aim at forming a balanced sexual attitude, the Educational Document warns against the formation of obsessions that could drive the individual further into a narcissistic self-devaluation...

...Involved in this phase of the church's matrimonial thinking is the whole diapason of depth psychology considerations whereby marital relations are seen as a healing and reconciling experience...

...Of even greater import was the fact that in their intransigent opposition to change, they foresaw correctly that the slightest mutation in the church's attitude toward marriage would destroy the structure of sexual morality that marked the perennial Catholic stand against venereal indulgence, hedonism and erotic perversion...

...Among the achievements of the post-conciliar debate is the fact that in its Declaration Regarding Sexual Ethics, the Holy See has accepted the absolute nature of sexuality as the foundation of the human person...

...It is rather the cognitive realization of a pattern of dynamic norms generated by the human social experience in history...

...Despite the Holy See's cautions and objections to what it calls a "contraceptive mentality" the church on the frontier of society is reacting to the new consciousness of woman's dignity and the right to control fertility guaranteed to the family in the Council's documents...

...This offhand assurance by the church's chief custodian of faith and morals—Ottaviani was then the pro-prefect of the ancien Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office—summed up a millennial conviction that has prevented the church from coming to terms honestly and realistically with sex as a primary component of marriage and thus as a fundamental human concern...

...Hence the distractions of the passions and the emotions particularly in the sexual sphere are derogations from the Christian's proper activity—life "in and with and through Christ" to accomplish which Paul "beats his body to keep it in subjection...

...among the downtrodden and the exploited...

...While tl sexual sin, sions, with experience, rhetorical Tertullian echo their In its n the ancient connection and Mani worked out neither a themselves, one's spiri seen as sig 16 June 1978: 382 not insist upon procreation as the purpose of marriage...

...These social changes inevitably demand a new dimension to a morality that sees sinfulness in extramarital sex...

...The Pauline writings reflect this eschatological perspective...

...The process of change in this sphere of moral concern has shocked many of the church's faithful who feel that the slightest modification of Catholic teaching in this matter is a betrayal of God's law...

...Well-meaning advocates of law and order within the church as well as society are suffering under the illusion that Catholic teaching regarding sex and marriage has been uniform and constant from the beginning...

...He defines marriage as a sacrament whose primary elements are fidelity (fides) and procreation (proles...

...It created an erotic atmosphere in the home that enhances generosity and cheerfulness, affecting the readiness to bring a new child into the world, and aiding in the upbringing of those already born...

...While Roman documents by their very nature will continue to proclaim the church as "the pillar and bulwark of the truth," and claim the assistance of the Holy Spirit as she "ceaselessly transmits without error the truths of the moral order," the people of God who constitute that church must give witness to that truth by recognizing the involvement of the church's sexual teaching in solving personal problems honestly, and in providing for the demands of social justice That persons with theological training are writing a great deal about technology and the life sciences is clear to those who read The Hastings Center Report, Theological Studies and many other journals...

...and more recently Fr...

...It likewise narrowed the function of sex to the process of procreation relegating the energy, joy, pleasure and love involved in erotic experience to the realm of the sinful—in thought, word or deed—if indulged outside of marriage...

...Over against the Ottaviani stand, under the prodding of pastors and theologians involved with the excruciating sexual and marital problems of the faithful, a determined group of prelates at the Council gradually came to recognize the need for a thorough revision of the church's attitude toward marriage and its involvement with sexuality as a chief component of conjugal love...

...Thus the Holy See has witnessed to the responsible function attributed by the church to its theologians...

...Ottaviani's attitude betrayed an ecclesial arrogance that had led him and his associates in the papal curia to believe they possessed absolute certainty in their guardianship of the church's moral and doctrinal teaching...

...At the same time, a considerable difficulty arose from the eschatological presumption that underlies much of the New Testament thought...

...Deploring the immorality and sexual excesses in the world about him, Paul specifies the purpose of marriage as a reduplication of the union between Christ and the church, referring to the latter as a great mystery...

...Its obverse is likewise more in keeping with the Pauline admonition that we are to grow into Christ by loving the total person that is the image of God in us, and the image of Christ in our neighbor...

...A thorough reassessment of sexual values is in progress, looking to the needs of the Christian people before the facts of single and married life in an industrialized society and confronted by the contemporaneous pornographic revolt...

...While seemingly vague in comparison to the absolutes "you shall not masturbate, you shall not fornicate, you shall not commit adultery" this requirement of wholeness is actually a more stringent moral absolute...

...The early church placed its emphasis on safeguarding the goodness of the body and the legitimacy of conjugal relations in keeping with the Creator's injunction "Increase and multiply," and with Christ's repetition of the Old Testament's insistence that husband and wife be as "two in one flesh...

...It is this development that will provide the answer to the great breakdown of family integrity that is skyrocketing the divorce rate even among committed Catholics...

...Christ's assertion that in the kingdom there would be "neither marriage nor giving in marriage" and his observations about "eunuchs for the kingdom of God" gave the early Christian morality a severely ascetic twist...

...While stressing the virtue of agape (charity) in their community relationship over philanthropia (humanitarianism), they were not adverse to using the concept of eros as a proper vehicle for the relations of amicitia between friends, and of love between husband and wife...

...How shall we describe adequately the happiness of that marriage which the Church arranges, the oblation strengthens, upon which the blessing sets a seal, and to which the (heavenly) Father gives his consent...

...It should supply the truly Catholic answer to the "anti-life" and hedonistic movements so vociferous in contemporary society...

...Approved authors are beginning to equate the death of love in a marriage with the physical "until death do us part" and consider the bond shattered...

...The document then described this love as "eminently human...

...that it is intimately connected with freedom to preach the good news of God's message...

...The ancient idea that it was a sort of reward for taking on the burden connected with bringing a new life into the world hardly seems adequate as an explanation of so ephemeral an experience...

...While he insists that the celibate state is a more perfect opportunity for living the Christian life, he makes it perfectly clear that the ability to live in that fashion is a special gift of God...

...and in his own apostolic friendships he shows extraordinary respect for the Priscillas, Chloes, Apaphras and other feminine recipents of his greetings...

...What they condemned was an enslavement to the desire for material things—being engulfed by lust, greed, avarice and ambition, and blinded by ignorance and illusion that led to quarrels and disunion of all kinds...

...However, it does distinguish between homosexuality induced by exposure to untoward experiences and homosexuality apparently engendered by innate instinct or a pathological condition...

...In the early church marriage was thus seen as a sacramental covenant with God as a third party and the joys of carnal and spiritual love its primary component...

...They were given a specific determination by St...

...Despite powerful opposition from the highest echelons of the church's governance, a document was hammered out that introduced a fundamental change in the Catholic concept of marriage...

...In his Chastity and the Affective Life, the Dominican Fr...

...And while Paul reflects the Jewish subordination of the woman to her husband based on the Hebraic anthropology detailed in Genesis—the woman taken from the man's side to be his companion—nevertheless he insists that in Christ there is neither male nor female...

...There can be little doubt that Jesus, Paul, and the other New Testament writers took a definite stance against sexual promiscuity and condemned adultery, fornication, and various sexual impurities—porneia—in no uncertain terms...

...III...

...In explaining its teaching about conjugal love, the Council insisted that sexuality gave expression to mutual affection, making the partners more sensitive to each other, more concerned, more selfless, and more tender...

...H. Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology 2 (London, 1962) 182...

...Although it recognized the all-pervasive nature of sexuality in the human make-up, it failed to pursue the implications of this realization in regard to the full diapason of human eroticism from infanthood on...

...this is clearly the case for the most prolific and polemical of the Protestants, Paul Ramsey...

...While the Council reiterated the church's traditional condemnation of the sins that characterized human behavior in the misuse of sex in defiling marriage, it stopped short of analyzing the psychological ills that frequently subsist beneath human waywardness in these matters...

...Rome has always had an intelligent response when asked for such specifics: "Consult approved authors...

...In the past, the Judeo-Christian ethic took its criterion from the subordinate status of women, the importance of children, and a definite hostility toward sexual pleasure...

...It is when one becomes aware of the vast majority of contrary opinions that constitute the church's interpretation of its moral imperatives in the sexual order that a new light is shed on the Council's achievement in proclaiming a pluralism in the theological order as proper to the freedom of the sons of God...

...For all practical purposes, Paul's teaching about the mystery of Christ's love in the covenant between husband and wife was lost sight of...

...and an acknowledgement that carnal love was endowed by the Lord with "special gifts of healing, perfecting and exalting" in grace and charity...

...Much of the writing in the field is by persons who james M. gustafson teaches in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago...

...While the Holy See and the hierarchy more generally are exercising great caution as is their function as conservers of tradition, committed faithful are facing up to all phases of sexuality as it affects the growth of the individual and the well-being of Christian marriage...

...It thus falls back into a biological moralism that was discarded by the Council when it spoke of a morality determined by the "nature of man and his acts...

...In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas attempted to correct that unhappy impression...

...But he so platonizes the element of love in marriage that he saddles the church with the impression that carnal love is so dangerous as to be inevitably sinful...

...The early Christians, following Paul, and greatly influenced by Platonic ideals, were concerned with achieving a proper scale of values and a right ordering of human life...

...The utter irreality of this development was reached in a sexual casuistry exemplified by a "how far can we go...

...In its reaction against the public sexual license of the ancient world, and particularly its fear of the close connection between sexuality and religion in the Gnostic and Manichean cults, the early Church eventually worked out a view of bodily and earthly things that was neither a complete acceptance of them as ends in themselves, nor a rejection as evil and hindrances to one's spiritual life...

...This task is now being pursued by the moralists and theologians whose divergent approaches are causing considerable confusion within the body of the church...

...Despite the Conciliar achievement in inaugurating this moral revaluation, an obsessionistic reluctance to accept new directions still affects Vatican officials, many bishops and pastors, and a large number of well-to-do Catholics...

...But while Paul makes no effort to confront the psychological problems caused by sexual difficulties other than a mysterious reference to demoniacal influences, he does deal with the actuality of passion and the priorities of conjugal love...

...Any other use— in thought, word or deed—was peccaminous...

...He was only partially successful...

...What he is seeking is a framework of Christian experience against which to measure his current endeavors...

...mentality...

...Thus behavior that concentrates exclusively on the sexual, on the intellectual or on the physical to the exclusion of other human interests, or that attempts to utilize another person exclusively for selfish purposes is a disorder, and potentially sinful...

...For some writers the theological authorization for the ethical principles and procedures they use is explicit...

...An area that still needs exploration at some length is the function of pleasure as such within the exercise of sexuality...

...While there is a streak of neurotic obsession with sexual sin, including pruderies, repressions and perversions, within certain manifestations of the Christian experience, preoccupation with sex is actually more of a rhetorical exercise in such irascible churchmen as Tertullian and Jerome whose anti-feminine diatribes echo their Stoic oratorical models...

...It was epitomized in the fact that in preparing the agenda for the discussion of marriage at Vatican Council II, the curial-dominated preparatory commission relegated the notion of love to a footnote...

...Today these societal factors are changing rapidly...

...The consequence could be enormous in removing what Morris West called the "scandal in the assembly"—the in-, numerable so-called bad marriages that have destroyed the spiritual life of millions upon millions of Catholics...

...IV Slowly but surely the church as the people of God under the tutelage of its thinkers and concerned apostles both clerical and lay is reacting in a healthy fashion to the demands of the sexual revolution affecting both the church and society...

...and societies are concluding that instead of populating their territory, it is rapidly becoming necessary to control population growth...

...Had the Declaration stopped there it would have contributed an exceptionally positive element to the current debate...

...In evaluating the current struggle to provide the Christian with a new perspective on his or her sexuality, there is no need to enter the debate over the particularities constituted by the older prohibitions of fornication, adultery, homosexuality, masturbation, preand post-marital sex, promiscuity and the sexual divagations lumped under the biblical porneia...

...Indeed, in response to a query from a friend (who is a distinguished philosopher) about how the term "ethicist" has come about, I responded in a pejorative way, "An ethicist is a former theologian who does not have the professional credentials of a moral philosopher...

...while the former cautions that "fears, threats, or spiritual intimidation are best avoided" when dealing with this youthful disfunction...

...It was at once a response to the scriptural urging that the "betrothed and the married nourish and develop their wedlock by pure conjugal love and undivided affection...

...His most recent book is Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for Rapprochement (University of Chicago...

...It has also thus legitimized a pluralism of opinion among the advocates of diverse schools of moral and doctrinal theology...

...Against this law man can rebel, but as it reflects the divine essence it never changes...

...In dealing with the intimate relations between husband and wife, Paul insists on mutual respect and love indicating clearly that the man and the woman are to provide for each other's needs in the flesh as well as in the spirit...

...In the struggle for renewal it is to the early church that the contemporary moralist must look for both inspiration and justification in his attempt to redimension Christian moral values dealing with sex and marriage...

...Presiding over man is an eternal law implanted in his rationality that is unchangeable...

...Even the most sophisticated biblical exegete finds it difficult to mitigate the force of the logion attributed to Christ: "A man who looks after a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart...

...While denying the possibility of accounting such a relation as conjugal, he judged it the lesser of two evils if it satisfied the mutual desire for affection, stability and peace...

...Tertullian in the third century witnesses to the fact that marriage was then considered a covenant of love and fidelity leading to great joyousness...

...What has actually been achieved thus far is a remarkable liberalization—that is, a conditioning in keeping with the human and psychological factors involved —of the church's marital laws...

...Instead of defining "procreation as the primary end of marriage" the church's Pastoral Constitution described marriage as a "togetherness in love and life...

...Vatican Council II has now recognized this function of human sexuality as somehow touching on divinity not merely by its relationship to procreation, but in its witness to man's own inner truth...

...secondly, it is equally sinful to think, say, or do anything with the intention of arousing even the smallest degree of this pleasure...

...In this perspective likewise, there is great leeway in interpreting the seeming absolutes of recent Vatican documents dealing with marriage and sexual morality...

...And this orientation is being supplied by the psychological insights into the essence of the human person— an individual who is achieving his or her physical, intellectual, affective and spiritual dimensions within the social, economic, political and religious parameters of a particular society...

...Finally, by insisting that conjugal love is the source of fidelity and underwrites the quality of indissolubility, the Council introduced a mystical note suggesting that such love merged the human with the divine...

...According to contemporary scientific research, the human person is so profoundly affected by sexuality that it must be considered as one of the factors which give to each individual's life the principal traits that distinguish it...

...What is interesting is that Paul, while indicating that woman's salvation is connected with child-bearing, does not insist v But he do wife with for his bod Both Jes man's righi Paul reflec to her hust tailed in < side to be 1 Christ then apostolic fr the Priscill...

...But he does equate the mutual love of husband and wife with the great mystery involved in Christ's love for his body, the Church...

...This is definitely the teaching of the early churchmen such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria who portray Christ as the divine pedagogue, guiding men and women as infants out of the pitfalls of their impatience and waywardness, and healing the hurts of their interior being...

...Both Jesus and Paul condemned the custom of the man's right to repudiate his wife at will...

...The early Christian sexual mores were a direct inheritance of the Jewish ethos...

...In the context of the quality of life, there is great cooperation between the missionaries and humanitarian organizations dedicated to uplifting the downgraded to a level where they can bring children into the world with some hope of giving them the essentials of human dignity...

...It is rather a strengthening of the biblical ideal of becoming "two in one flesh...

...Essential to this vision is the presence of Christ, the Divine Redeemer, in the people of God reaching out to encompass the whole of mankind...

...I. In a famous TV interview during the debate on marriage at the third session of Vatican Council II (1964), Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani said that the church's teaching on marriage would never change since it was based on "the natural law and a few texts of Scripture...

...Conscious of the transcendental parameters of human consciousness, these thinkers believe that the Divine Being is creatively and redemptively present in this process of human growth by which men and women become more truly human and assume more consciously their responsibility for the future of mankind and the world...

...In the attempt to achieve a reorientation of the sexual divergences that constitute fornication and adultery, moralists now concentrate on the aspect of wholeness and growth that is to be achieved or hindered by these relationships...

...At the basis of this concept is a structure of the cosmos as a static creation reflecting the mind of the Immobile Mover, the Eternal Now...

...Under the gentle disposition of the Divine providence," the Council asserts, "mankind can come to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth," even in the sexual order...

...It is st engage the ust as instant of community nt or supernages, stories than alien to leology grows / in life and reflection and af mankind's understandachieved by rave reorienthe church E moral confaithful who olic teaching . What does literally milnaelstrom of i a less than adequate and, perhaps, an erroneous interpretation of God's law that has grown up in the church over the centuries due to a failure to examine human sexuality in all its aspects...

...Using the insights of depth psychology they have come to distinguish the destructive drives, the attempt at domination, possessiveness, anger and hostility that not infrequently accompany sexual indulgence both in and outside marriage and vitiate what should be an expression of love and affection penetrating to the depth of the person...

...This sacramental view was applied particularly to marriage...

...A good instance of the plurality of options within the thinking of the Holy See itself is provided by two documents dealing with masturbation—the 1974 Instruction emanating from the Congregation for Catholic Education and the 1975 Declaration on Sexual Ethics...

...In fact it is from sex that the human person receives the characteristics which, on the biological, psychological, and spiritual levels, make that person a man or a woman, and thereby largely condition his or her progress towards maturity and insertion into society...

...Instead, it reiterated the absolutes of previous ages, contributing to the confusion rather than the enlightening of the church...

...What does not seem to bother them is the fact that literally millions of Catholics have been caught in a maelstrom of interior spiritual problems consequent upon a less than good at that, nt triumph in age as adults, ig of Catholic icular, renders have all been :, not to take he particular, ve are waiting ¦ sophisticated merate within jth theology...

...At the same time the Church at the ground level is reacting positively to the notion of love as an essential element in marriage by insisting on a proper preparation for marriage and encouraging movements such as Marriage Encounter and other family associations as well as counseling services and clinics...

...To his Wife, 2.8...

...It must likewise reach out after the hidden things of man's destiny of which sexuality is a symbol...

...While intended primarily as a reason for declaring the situation invalid from the beginning, this Rotal decision cannot but be applied to the situation in which love that once existed in a marriage has been totally eradicated and replaced by hatred...

...Gradually the mediocrity of legal precision outlawed considerations of carnal love and eliminated the redemptive qualities of conjugal grace by reducing the church's preoccupation with marriage to the legitimacy of consent and the performance of the coital act as the binding force setting indissolubility into possession...

...Paul whose reflection on the teaching of Jesus brought into focus the eschatological perspectives of the Christian belief and molded Christ's marital teaching into a doctrinal synthesis...

...Daniel Pie has paid considerable attention to the Thomistic discussion of pleasure...