Catholics & sex

...Our age is clearly weird where sex is concerned...

...Now technique, not intention, became the debating point...

...Nobody is very clear about this mysterious and fascinating mess...

...Nor is the attitude which regards any suffering, inconvenience, or call to sacrifice as an evil to be got rid of...

...And it has created a vacuum...

...The sixth and ninth commandments were the only two which didn't seem to have any venial sins attached - everything in this area was fraught with eternal peril...

...In any good marriage restraint and self-denial will show up often enough without having to build them into the system...

...there are at least as many with the mentality which finds contraception simply an evil...

...This was a radical change...

...Beyond that, I really don't know...

...While there was some talk of sex as beautiful and holy it was pretty ethereal...

...Catholics who had tried for years to follow church teaching in matters relating to sex and marriage decided not to bother...

...It could be argued that the current state of our knowledge ought to require some humility here, and an acknowledgment that there is a lot we simply do not know...

...The obituaries of the nineteenth century are full of women who died in childbirth, and of men who died after having been married three or four times, fathering several children by each wife...

...but it has to be demonstrated that there is a good reason to prefer a less effective means of preventing conception to a more effective one, because the unstated assumption behind this argument is that it is better to do without sex on a periodic basis than it is to make love, and, given the contraceptive intention of both rhythm and artificial contraception, it has to be shown why this ought to be preferred...

...Their hearts are where the hearts of people using artificial contraception are...

...Some of them involve sex...

...Childbear-ing led to the death of many of those women...

...Heterosexuals assume that homosexuals are sick...

...Pope Paul said that the church was not in doubt, but that part of the church most intimately involved in the sacrament of marriage plainly did not accept his reading of the mind of the church...

...Despite its legalism, Humanae Vitae said some things about the contraceptive mentality which needed to be said...

...The hope of people practicing natural family planning is that this particular sexual act, while it might in some technical sense be "open to the transmission of life," won't really be...

...The problem with legalism here is that it does not address the whole of a human situation...

...No one denies the need for the hierarchy, but their place in the church is clearly not what it was from the time of the counter-reformation until Vatican II, and it won't go back to being what it was...

...Sex had less to do with love and commitment (not to speak of mutual pleasure) than with picking your way across a minefield of possible mortal sins...

...Catholic moral theology never said that it was wrong to be homosexual - in this it was more humane than fundamentalism...

...Although Humanae Vitae is considered a dead issue by many, because everyone seems to have come to a firm opinion about its absolute ban on artificial contraception, its arguments and their widespread rejection remain important...

...We have to remember that after more than a million years of evolution, including the evolution of human sexuality, the human race has had only a comparatively few thousand years of the sort of culture which asks questions about itself...

...Is a monogamous homosexual sicker than a heterosexual Don Juan...

...it has led, to give one example, to a belief that a pregnancy must be either a deliberate choice or a contraceptive failure...

...The problem is that there are important questions which have pastoral implications, and they are not being dealt with well...

...Aside from such obvious things as condemnation of adultery and a general rejection of divorce, the New Testament has very little to say about sex, which is probably just as well...

...The context in which Humanae Vitae was issued made its acceptance unlikely...

...Since homosexuality, like heterosexuality, is not primarily a matter of choice, the fact of being homosexual cannot be considered a moral problem...

...The argument against the rhythm method had been that these things ought to be left to providence...

...Natural law got stretched very thin in some of these arguments...

...For one thing, the authority of the hierarchy to speak in a binding way in the area of sex and marriage was quietly rejected by most married couples, without an apparent crisis of faith...

...For one thing, it condemned the belief that one must always be in control of one's life...

...In the years before Humanae Vitae there was a widespread feeling that the church" was headed towards change on this issue, and indeed it was, although the change is not quite what anyone anticipated then...

...While it makes more room for the unexpected, and calls on people to make sacrifices, the sacrifices are sometimes much too severe and would not be considered blessed in another context...

...A sex-obsessed age assumes that celibates must be neurotic or undersexed, and celibates are seen as people who could not possibly have chosen their way of life freely...

...There is still something ugly here...

...Still, despite our lack of knowledge, there are things which need to be said...

...I know: the same book would have said that it was wrong for the husband to be abusive and drunk...

...there is no new form of authority or question-answering which can...

...While there are certainly problems with the contraceptive mentality, important ones, an anti-contraceptive mentality carries its own set of problems as well...

...The life that happens by "accident" or despite "precautions" is felt to be less valuable...

...Once, by coincidence, I ran across references to Catholic guilt, Jewish guilt, and Protestant guilt during a three-day period...

...so was Augustine's...

...The reason may be that after Vatican II there was a dawning sense that the laity were not merely clients of the clergy but were the church, every bit as much as those ordained to administer the sacraments...

...A strictly therapeutic, value-free approach to sex is one extreme, finally a heartless one, but the way a lot of us were taught is another...

...Karl Barth wrote to Paul VI to suggest that one problem with Humanae Vitae was that it raised natural law philosophy to the level of revelation...

...I know of at least one moral theologian who has rejected contraception on the grounds that its logic leads to an acceptance of the possibility that homosexuality may not require celibacy...

...If the acceptance of the rhythm method was the camel's nose under the tent, a whole caravan began to force its way in behind the first camel...

...That plays hell with people who want to be legalistic about matters which have to do, finally, with compassion and tenderness...

...The problem is that consenting adults can agree to defraud, deceive, rob, mug, or torment others...

...Here a law which ought to have been a protection for the wife (you marry someone, find out after the ceremony that he's impotent...

...The radical nature of this rejection has implications that go beyond the question of marriage: if the hierarchy aren't authoritative here, are they in other matters...

...The commission recommended changes in the traditional teaching...

...This sort of probing used to be the preserve of Catholic intellectuals...

...Humanae Vitae spelled the beginning of (he end of this attitude...

...At the practical level there were manuals of moral theology which insisted that unless a sexual act could lead to impregnation it was illicit, and which said that a woman had a duty to submit sexually to a drunken or abusive husband...

...The fact that a commission was asked to do this was understood as a clear indication that contraception was an open question...

...A definitely vile bunch has argued recently that children are fair game for adult sexual advances...

...the scientistic notion that we are most human when we are absolutely in control was pointed out as a danger...

...this also is absurd...

...We talk a lot about needs when we mean powerful wants...

...A lot of what we regard as Christian doctrine on this subject comes from Greek philosophy, which was at odds with the Jewish acceptance of the flesh as good...

...Because he could not have a normal sexual relationship with his wife he couldn't have a wife at all, according to the priest who refused his permission for the marriage...

...Catholics really don't have a monopoly on the phenomenon...

...People who want clear behavioral guidelines are in for a bad time these days...

...One of them involves homosexuality...

...This implies that life, to be of value, depends on our choice, our welcoming...

...For too many years celibates told non-celibates what they ought to be about, sexually, without listening much to the people whose experience included years of lovemaking...

...No one is objective about sex...

...it was not, before Humanae Vitae, common at the parochial level...

...And guilt has its uses: there are times when I ought to feel guilty, because I've behaved badly...

...Sexuality, however private it may be, has a social resonance and leads to social obligations which go beyond the tiny circle drawn around two consenting adults to include a wider set of relationships...

...The encyclical's real insights were easily ignored, because so much emphasis was given to the rejection of artificial contraception...

...I haven't been in a Catholic high school classroom for years, but I wouldn't be surprised if fewer adolescents ask their teachers how far they can go...

...But the problem goes deeper than that: if the rhythm method was allowed because it enabled people to limit their family's size, the other side of that coin is an acknowledgment that sex is a good thing, or at the very least not a bad thing, quite apart from its reproductive possibilities...

...Our guidelines include loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, and forgiving one another as we have been forgiven...

...In many respects the picture of Catholicism as a uniquely awful school of sexual guilt is a caricature...

...If there is any rule about sex it must involve those things, and unselfishness, and fidelity to the commitments you've made, as well as an awareness of the possibility of self-deception, which is the easiest thing in the world to fall into...

...The old form of authority can't fill it...

...If rhythm, with its use of that physical thing, time, was a permissible way to limit family size, why not other means of arriving at the same result...

...The problem is not the confusion of people who would be set straight by clear and unambiguous answers, as some conservatives argue...

...Some eighty percent of married Catholic couples of childbearing age who regularly go to communion also use some form of artificial contraception...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...During that time we have produced Buddhist monastic writings which say that monks who have erotic dreams have failed their discipline, Jewish proscriptions against making love to menstruating women, Biblical fundamentalists who insist that a man must be his wife's master, Catholic manuals of moral theology which say that masturbation is mortally sinful...

...people break up marriages on that ground...

...This is hardly news, and it had been celebrated in the wider Catholic culture for years, but its official acknowledgment opened all sorts of problems with traditional Catholic approaches to some difficult sexual questions...

...Can what they say in any area be accepted without question...

...There are other reasons, though, and they have to do with the encyclical itself, and the context in which it was issued...

...Guilt, when it isn't the morbid and never-ending sort, is the heart's way of telling you not to behave badly again...

...In trying to see these questions clearly we have to admit, first of all, that we can't...

...The separation of sex from reproduction has not been an unmixed blessing...

...This is not a healthy or decent attitude...

...but that would be impossible to know, since if homosexuality were simply the sexual equivalent of left-handedness, as some have suggested, we would have to see it without the layers of prejudice with which our culture has surrounded it...

...Is anyone completely healthy here...

...A very short time thereafter the bishop of the diocese said that the couple could marry after all, but not before the country had been offered an embarrassing look at the legalism which poisons too many Catholic approaches to sex and marriage...

...It is argued that the use of natural family planning demands restraint and self-sacrifice...

...Humanae Vitae addressed those questions, but because its legalistic conclusions didn't square with the experience of the people to whom it was addressed it was dismissed, its genuine insights deserve rescuing, and an evangelistic, rather than legalistic, presentation...

...And there were other questions: isn't time in its way a physical thing...

...I don't think anybody does...

...Hydraulics rather than the heart was the locus of moral concern...

...When the rhythm method was declared to be an acceptable way to limit family size, a contraceptive intention was also accepted...

...There are problems with the contraceptive mentality...

...The emphasis on natural family planning is an attempt to keep us from severing our link to a world we are part of, not simply in charge of...

...They were refused permission to marry in the Catholic church on the grounds that a spinal injury had left the man impotent...

...people who want clear and unambiguous answers will always be able to find them...

...But moral theologians did maintain that homosexual acts -like the acts of heterosexuals which are not "open to the transmission of life" - are sinful, and more or less for the same reason: because they cannot be procreative and are therefore unnatural...

...it is their method that is different...

...Its recommendations were ignored, Humanae Vitae was issued, and in its turn it too was ignored...

...The decline in confessions makes it clear that they also do not regard this as a matter which requires absolution...

...now it was "considered all right to limit the size of your family, so long as the technique was an acceptable one...

...There are people whose implicit argument is that sex is the one area in which there can be no prohibitions, the one area of life in which anything done between consenting adults is OK...

...you should have a way out) was turned against a couple who knew the score in advance and still wanted to be together...

...The Vatican itself was plainly affected by this feeling, and encouraged it with the formation of a papal commission which looked into the issue...

...This may be deplored by those for whom the hierarchy's unquestionable authority represented security, or it may be celebrated by those who believe that the hierarchy's function involves a more profound listening than the history of Humanae Vitae reveals, but it is a fact of Catholic life in either case...