SEX, THEOLOGY AND LOVE
Jerry Harkins

In an analysis of the pedophilia crisis currently tormenting the Catholic Church, an earlier essay traced the root of the problem to what it claimed is the church’s historic misogyny. All the Abrahamic religions share this sad trait but it has special resonance in Christianity where it seems particularly reprehensible and hypocritical in that it denies Jesus’ gospel of love. The church has always had a problem with love, sexual or otherwise: an all-loving God is an all-forgiving God who does not need the church as an intermediary. More importantly, an all-loving God needs not only to love but to be loved by his or her creation. Without it, God is diminished. Thus, Mary’s claim in Luke 1:46, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Her creator is made greater by his creation. Human love—between husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighbors—is a metaphor for both God’s love and God’s need for love. An all-loving God does not reject any human love but rather rejoices in all love including the love between gay couples. That same all-loving God is the author of sexual love which is a remarkable tool in the service of many ends between lovers. This, of course, is not the God recognized by the Catholic Church or most other western religions.

The markers of love are abstract but certainly include mutuality, sensitivity and commitment. In its fear of irrelevance, however, the church chooses to reduce them to simple rules, doctrines and commandments, thereby ignoring both human nature and the nature of the relationship between God and his creatures. The result is a long list of prohibitions and almost no discussion of what it means to love God and one’s neighbors. Instead, Christians are given detailed catechetical formulas based on the teaching that sexual attraction is almost always morally disordered. Deriving their logic from the most primitive of creation myths, the theologians placed the blame not on the psychopathic proclivities of their God, but on the sexual appetites of women which are seen as divine punishment for the leading of Adam into sin.

The beliefs of the fathers and doctors of the church and their followers in the modern world are absurd on their face. The guardians of tradition know or suspect this but they are afraid to change the teaching. This is not the first time they have been baffled by change and it is important to understand why they are so chained to and by tradition.

If you grew up Catholic in the pre-Vatican II era, you may think that the church has changed radically in your lifetime: the watering down of confession which is now “reconciliation,” the grudging toleration of mixed marriages and meat on Friday, the slightly enhanced role of women and girls in the church and a host of other things great and small, sublime and ridiculous, generous and picayune. The church though remains rigidly dogmatic, convinced that only it controls the keys to heaven even though it no longer overtly preaches that outside itself there is no salvation. (1) Without a shred of evidence, experience or rationality, it clings to the doctrine of papal infallibility enunciated by Pius IX. True, the present Pope, in his former role as chief guardian of doctrine, found refuge in a slightly less foolish category, that of “definitive” teachings. It appears that a Catholic must conform his or her conscience to such teachings or risk eternal damnation, but at least no claim is made that the teachings are actually divinely certified. However one regards these changes they clearly represent the church and the Roman pontiff making modest accommodations to the modern world. As you might expect, there is a community of Catholic “traditionalists” who vehemently take issue with Vatican II and all its spawn. They rant against girls serving as altar “boys,” the mass said in any language but Latin and, more interestingly, against what they see as John Paul II’s “capitulation” to science in the matter of evolution. There is a web site where you can report priests who are liturgically deviant and there are lay cannon lawyers who bring “criminal” charges in church courts against politicians who are deemed doctrinally deviant. (2) There are schismatic movements to the right and left of Rome although they pose less threat to Catholicism than they do to Anglicanism which is truly torn between its liberals and its conservatives. If the Anglican center cannot hold because the controversy involves highly salient issues, the Catholic center is less vulnerable because it is a marshmallow. There is enough give in contemporary Vatican doctrine to accommodate all who are willing to be accommodated. This takes the form of ambiguity and deception.

In 1633, the Holy Inquisition convicted Galileo of being “vehemently suspect of heresy” in that he taught the earth moves around the sun instead of the orthodox view to the contrary. Between 1718 and 1835, it gradually backed off this nonsense by permitting the publication of texts promoting heliocentricity, but as late as 1990, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, commenting on criticisms of the church’s position, said, “It would be foolish to construct an impulsive apologetic on the basis of such views.” In 1981, the Vatican had undertaken another examination of the case and, in 1992, Pope John Paul II said:

Thus the new science, with its methods and the freedom of research which they implied, obliged theologians to examine their own criteria of scriptural interpretation. Most of them did not know how to do so. Paradoxically, Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard than the theologians who opposed him. ‘If Scripture cannot err’, he wrote to Benedetto Castelli, ‘certain of its interpreters and commentators can and do so in many ways.’

This seems very close to acknowledging that Galileo was right but John Paul could not bring himself to say so explicitly for the simple reason that the astronomer had been convicted of heresy which Thomas Aquinas defines as adherence to tenets declared false by the Divine teaching authority of the Church. (3) The verdict had been approved by the Pope. Can a doctrine—heliocentricity—deemed heretical by one Pope be declared true by another? Of course it can but doing so is embarrassing and possibly misleading to those not trained in the subtleties of papal authority.

A similar combination of ignorance and fear of change pervades the more recent history of the church’s encounter with evolution. For seventy years, it was favorably disposed toward Darwin. Unlike its fundamentalist brethren, the Catholic church had only modest difficulties with the notion that life, at least physical life, evolved from lower to higher organisms including human beings. Such a process did not seem incompatible with the idea of an omnipotent God who was the “prime mover.” Major opposition came only when scientists such as the Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller began to promote the idea that evolution can proceed through genetic mutations induced by random encounters between genes and cosmic radiation. In other words, evolution can be accidental. Randomness seemed entirely too capricious, too opposed to the notion of an omniscient God who directed the future of everything. As it turned out, there is no doubt that random mutations do occur and can change the course of evolution but this is exceedingly rare. Almost all mutations are harmful and are, therefore, selected against. Even as Neo-Darwinism brought forth more important and less controversial agents and processes, the church continued to perseverate on its horror of randomness. Then, on October 23, 1996, Pope John Paul II published a formal statement endorsing the theory of evolution "...as more than just a hypothesis." Not, perhaps, an enthusiastic embrace but still too much for Christoph Schönborn, the conservative Archbishop of Vienna, who bemoaned its “misinterpretation.” In an op ed piece he wrote for The New York Times, His Eminence allowed, “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not.”

In his first pronouncement on the subject, Pope Benedict XVI returned to the same theme. The universe, he wrote is an “intelligent project.” He quoted Saint Basil the Great to the effect that, “…fooled by the atheism they carry inside themselves [they] imagine a universe free of direction and order as if at the mercy of chance.” Basil (329-379) is one of the early Church’s greatest theologians, so much so that Rome tends to forget he was regarded as an Arian heretic for much of his career. Benedict seems to be referring to what is known as his First Homily, entitled “In the Beginning…” (4) Basil wrote:

You will finally discover that the world was not conceived by chance and without reason, but for an useful end and for the great advantage of all beings, since it is really the school where reasonable souls exercise themselves, the training ground where they learn to know God; since by the sight of visible and sensible things the mind is led, as by a hand, to the contemplation of invisible things. "For," as the Apostle says, "the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."

In other words, design itself has the purpose of leading us from the world of our senses to a contemplation of the divine. Early in Summa Theologica, Aquinas takes up a similar theme as his fifth proof of the existence of God from unaided reason. He argues that inanimate objects act for a purpose but, since they lack intelligence, that purpose can only arise from the will of their designer. It may be hard to imagine a stone acting at all, never mind purposefully, but both Thomas and Basil are invoking what some contemporary fundamentalists call “intelligent design.”

Evolution and intelligent design are not inherently contradictory. But evolution and Genesis are. The creation story cannot be literally true. It is nothing more than a brilliant myth devised by bronze age sages. Like all creation myths, it seeks to anchor its people in what seems like an indifferent cosmos. It teaches that we are created in the image of the creator but have fallen from an ideal state because we sought to become gods ourselves. But the church struggles with the idea of the bible as myth and metaphor because it sees uncertainty as its enemy. Change itself is the evil if you believe that Truth is absolute and cannot change. Which brings us back to the point of this essay. Anything that challenges the teaching power of the church is seen as threatening to the whole fabric of religion. The church fears being caught up in error even on trivial issues because the threat of error erodes its claim to the keys of heaven and thus its power on earth. Science deals with evolving truth. It revels in the identification of error. It rejects the notion of eternal verities. The church, on the other hand, is imprisoned by them.

In the case of love and sex, theology is driven exclusively by the primitive theories about reproduction and property rights held by biblical tribes in the millennia before Christ. It is uninformed by biology and psychology and it cannot be so informed without grave risk to the power or even the relevance of the hierarchs. Thus, the church substitutes doctrine for love as the covenant between God and humanity to guarantee its own position as intermediary. It was, therefore, with considerable interest that I read the first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est—God Is Love. (5) Once again, critics of the church are confronted by a brilliant Pope. He is more logical and less abrasive than his predecessor and so far he has avoided the distortions of history—what Gary Wills calls the “structures of deceit”—that have long characterized papal pronouncements on controversial subjects.

The new encyclical is a far reaching, thoughtful meditation on love but what attracted me was a relatively minor point that bears on the theology of that subject. It is the distinction the Pope makes at the outset between eros and agape, the former defined primarily as carnal love and the latter a more embracing spiritual virtue. (6) He begins by responding to the charge that the church set out to destroy eros. Yes, he says, it has sometimes seemed to be true. However, what it has actually opposed is the distortion of eros which occurs when passion overwhelms reason. He says, “The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness’ which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness. All other powers in heaven and on earth thus appear secondary…” I would take issue with the last sentence. Eros even in its ecstatic state would seem to heighten our awareness and appreciation of all heavenly and earthly things. But that is not the central point. What really seems to exercise the Pope is the “divinization” of eros, a process of shrouding its lustful expressions under a mantle of divine inspiration or worship perhaps in order to justify it. He writes, “…this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it.” He refers the reader to the temple prostitutes common to many religions and to the Bacchanalian orgies celebrated in several cultures both of which he implies are undignified and inhuman. Fair enough as long as he understands that he is referring to the most extreme, most distorted expression of a morally good attraction created by God. In fact, to some believers, eros is divine and should be seen as a metaphor for the passionate love that God engages in with his creation.

Benedict makes a very similar point. “Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.” (7) The “pinnacle of our existence” refers to heaven and the “fleeting pleasure” is apparently the ordinary sex drive leading to climax. For the Pope, “true eros” is eros purified and disciplined. This is not yet agape but it is more than animal lust. It is not the use of unconsummated erotic foreplay to achieve Buddhist enlightenment although it may be akin to the Hindu or left-handed version of Tantric sex which does allow for climax. Whatever it is, “…it tends to rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing.” Okay, eros is a powerful metaphor for divine love but only when it has been purified. The process seems to involve a gradual rebalancing of the eros-agape equation so that eros should lead to the realization of the true nature of love in which the lovers seek first the happiness of each other. There are, no doubt, other ways to encourage this evolution, including the ministry of non-sexual love to which priests are called. Might it be that other forms of eros outside conventional marriage might lead toward a similar pinnacle?

This “purification” business is refined asceticism, remote from the experience of ordinary people and, I think, from the descriptions of eros given by Saints Augustine and Jerome. It is also remote from the church’s traditional teaching. For more than 1,500 years, the church has sought to circumscribe the experience of eros and to “purify” it according to an eccentric understanding of virginity, chastity and celibacy. The church thought it had to combat an either/or choice: true eros or ecstatic debauchery. It greatly feared the latter because, as the Pope says, that is a (competing) form of religion, “…which represents a powerful temptation against monotheistic faith.” A credible threat to monotheism is not obvious but more important is the alleged competition between ecstatic sex and religion, especially if that competition is defined as between joy and the fear of hell.

To me the argument is a strawman. I do not feel compelled to choose between sexuality and religion any more than I have to choose between chocolate ice cream and a Beethoven symphony. Sex and faith are different in kind. I can make separate and independent decisions on each and each exists for me on a broad spectrum. The church, however, is caught on the horns of a dilemma. In this as in many things it sees the truth as the moth sees the flame. It is irresistibly attracted but it cannot consummate that attraction for fear of its own immolation. Benedict’s encyclical is a small but progressive hint that the church needs to rethink its longstanding teachings about sex and love. And, contrary to the traditionalists’ insistence on the permanence and immutability of truth, it would not be the first time a basic doctrine underwent significant revision.

Ever since it emerged from the catacombs, the Catholic church has tried to micromanage the sex lives of its adherents. (8) It has generally regarded sex as the punishment for the original sin of Adam and Eve. It is an upside-down kind of punishment which tempts with great pleasure but leads inevitably to hell. Until quite recently, theologians were convinced that, in the garden of Eden, sex did not involve lust or pleasure. Many of its best thinkers taught that it is always sinful except between married people in the service of procreation with no deliberate enjoyment. At the beginning of the third millennium, its fundamental position is that “…it is necessary that each and every marriage act remain ordered per se to the procreation of human life. ” (9) After that the logic becomes murky. The church believes this necessary openness to procreation derives from, “…the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.” (10) This would suggest that there cannot be procreation without unitivity and vice versa, both of which propositions are absurd. Still, such an “inseparable connection” is central to the church’s current position, so crucial that Paul VI emphasized that it—the inseparability—was “established by God.” Pope John Paul II addressed the same issue in 1984. His prose is even more opaque than Paul’s but this is a fair paraphrase:

Since [by its very nature] the marriage act [simultaneously] unites husband and wife in the closest intimacy and makes them capable of generating new life, then it follows that the human person must [recognize both functions] and also the inseparable connection between them. (11)

The emphasis on the “unitive” significance of sex is a recent development although the idea itself is said to trace back to Eden and God’s observation that “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.” (12) Saint Augustine hints that marriage promotes the goal of mutual support and love but he still contrives to believe that sex, for any purpose other than procreation, and with any pleasure beyond what is minimally essential, is sinful. Many medieval theologians were convinced that sex is so tainted that children born out of wedlock are forever doomed, but Jerome seems to have thought that even legitimate children, especially females, were damned unless they remained virgins. Saint Peter Damian taught that sexual intercourse under any circumstance and for any reason inside or outside marriage is inherently sinful. By the twelfth century, several commentators were talking about what is now called the “unitive” function of sex. Some such as Hugh of St. Victor were quite eloquent on the subject but all remained cautious. Hugh thought married couples were well advised to moderation and conjugal chastity in the service of procreation. It is not clear what “conjugal chastity” means but it probably refers to sex with no or little pleasure.

The notion that sex tends to bring people together is obvious enough. But the two functions—unitive and procreative—are quite different. There is a great deal of sexual attraction in the world that is unconsummated and a great deal of sex that does not unify couples. The church does understand that blameless sex can occur between married lovers who, for one reason or another, cannot, do not or do not want to conceive (as long as they do not employ “unnatural” contraceptive means). This concession implies that the two functions are logically and biologically independent. I would argue that this renders them morally independent also. Once the unitive and procreative ends of sex can be separated, the church’s entire teaching collapses.

Human sex is complex and is as much a mental as a genital process. Contraception allows partners to respond more effectively to this complexity and in this sense the church’s teaching on contraception is immoral. It condemns out of hand an action that has many good results including the prevention of serious diseases and the spacing of children. The fact that the church permits what it considers “natural” contraception is hypocritical in that Vatican Roulette is nothing more than a feeble effort to separate the unitive and procreative functions of sex. A hierarch who believes that careful monitoring of a woman’s estrous cycle is “natural” is only betraying his lack of experience and understanding.

Ultimately, all this theology is simplistic and the church relies as it always has on its teaching authority and the fear of hell. Even before Humanae Vitae, Paul VI fell back on the last argument of fools and kings: because I say so. He wrote, “…sons of the Church may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law…spouses should be aware that they cannot proceed arbitrarily, but must always be governed according to a conscience dutifully conformed to the divine law itself, and should be submissive toward the Church's teaching office” What divine law? The one the Holy Spirit whispers in the ear of the Pope.

In 1864, Blessed Pope Pius IX issued his “Syllabus of Errors,” a compendium of eighty “propositions”—ideas—prevalent in the modern world which were said to be both wrong and evil. It may have been the most radically reactionary document ever published up to that time. It condemned among many other things democratic government, separation of church and state, opposition to the Vatican’s temporal power or its use of force, and freedom of religion. Forty-three years later, Saint Pope Pius X added sixty-five more propositions and said anyone who defended any one of them would be excommunicated. Today, some of these Popes’ complaints seem obscure but the general thrust of these documents is clear: they are meant to promote the view that the world was a better place before the Renaissance and the Reformation. This would be laughable if so many lives were not adversely affected. A healthy embrace of sexual pleasure promotes both family and societal values, attenuates life’s vicissitudes and liberates the human spirit from existential alienation. The traditional teaching of the church is, in this respect, constricted and obscene. It is simply not true that everything outside the church’s extremely stringent sexual morality is libertine.

The root of the problem is the church’s obsession with what it loosely calls “modernism” and its insistence on swimming against the tide of history. The psalmist tells us, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and exalt in it.” These are the times the Lord has made, let us not reject them.

Notes

1. The doctrine that “Outside the church there is no salvation” was stated in the papal bull Unam Sanctam by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302. It was effectively nullified by both Vatican II and Pope Paul VI in the resolution of the case of Leonard J. Feeney, SJ. Father Feeney (1897-1978) had argued that either Unam Sanctam was valid dogma (which he believed to be the case) or the Pope was not infallible. He was excommunicated in 1953 but reconciled in 1972 without having to recant his beliefs.

2. Those interested in exploring these issues might want to begin by going to the website patrickpollock.com. Mr. Pollock, a 28-year old who lists theology as one of his hobbies has a list of 101 heresies committed by Pope Benedict XVI cross-referenced to the sources of the infallible truth. Number 93 claims that the Pope has lent support to the heretical doctrine of evolution. In another section, he presents his proposal to develop a “Strategic Offense Initiative” which seems to be a first strike version of Star Wars. Mr. Pollock is by no means the most extreme traditionalist. The prolific Robert Sangenis (catholicintl.com) goes him one better insisting on six days of 24 hours for creation. He also tells us that the earth does not rotate on its axis but rather all of the stars circle the earth every 24 hours. Thus, Coperncus’ theory was heretical and the condemnation of Galileo was correct. And these examples do not begin to give the flavor of the end-of-days folks.

3. Thomas’s teaching on heresy (Part II, Section 11) is not without its own ambiguity but it seems clear enough that one who does not believe that Saint Patrick led the snakes out of Ireland is not a heretic. Heresy is generally thought to deal with important, defined doctrines of faith. Still, the church had Joan of Arc burned at the stake for the heresy of cross-dressing.

4. Basil wrote a series of meditations on the Gospel of St. John of which this is the first. It explicates the first verse, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and God was the Word.” Basil is referring to Paul’s epistle to the Romans 1:20, which, in a more comprehensible translation, reads, “For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Paul, in turn, is paraphrasing Psalm 19: 1-2: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. / Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” Finally, as noted, Thomas Aquinas uses a similar argument as his fifth proof of the existence of God.

5. I have used the English translation published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Deus caritas est can also be rendered “Love is God,” a formulation Benedict did not intend but which I prefer. Nor would I distinguish between kinds of love because to me agape includes eros as well as the love of three oranges. One of the saddest things of the post Vatican II era is how the concept of agape has been debased by New Age Catholics.

6. Agape is a difficult word to define. The oldest use of it, in Homer, refers to brotherly love but it has evolved to mean charity—not in the Latin sense of love, but more in as what English speakers think of, alms-giving. Post Vatican II Catholics took over the word to refer to the communal meal which is the Eucharist. Pope Benedict has the broadest meaning of all—the virtue of good feeling among people of good will. Eros, of course, means passion in the sense of sexual desire.

7. The idea that sexual love is a metaphor for God’s love, while very much a minority position, is, nonetheless, quite ancient. In our own times, its most eloquent expounder is the priest/philosopher/novelist Andrew M. Greeley. The admirable Father Greeley manages to be simultaneously a humanist, a mystic and an empiricist but on this subject he often seems to be grasping at straws.

8. What is true of the Catholic church is generally true of the entire Christian enterprise. In the Protestant world, there are sects that are both more conservative and more liberal on specific issues but all consider sexuality a domain of special religious concern. Sexual ethics, of course, is an important subject but few clergy members have the training or experience to expound on it in anything like a definitive fashion.

9. Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, Chapter 11.

10. Ibid., Chapter 12.

11. Pope John Paul II, “Morality of Marriage Act Determined by Nature of the Act and of the Subjects,” General Audience Of 11 July 1984.

12. Genesis 2:18. This is, at best, a weak reed on which to hang a heavy doctrine. There is no evidence that Adam and Eve enjoyed sex in the garden. On the contrary, it seems God invented sex to punish them for their transgression. He tells Eve, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over you (Genesis 3:16).

13. Pope Paul VI, Gaudium et Spes, Part II, Chapter 1, Paragraphs 50 and 51, December 7, 1965. This document is the pastoral constitution adopted by Vatican II and is widely regarded as liberal in tone. A careful reading of II:1 suggests that it does in fact leave substantial wiggle room on the matter of birth control. Pope Paul then convened a special commission of lay people and experts who recommended that the ban on “artificial” birth control be lifted. Humanae Vitae was a thorough going rejection of that advice.

SEX, THEOLOGY AND MISOGYNY
Jerry Harkins
Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for such is the kingdom of God.
Mark 10:14


My intention here is not to make fun of the church’s teachings on sex or its current dilemma arising from the concupiscence of its priests. I have done all that elsewhere and have decided that it is too much like shooting sitting ducks. Over a period of some 2,000 years, a whole corpus of teachings—a magisterium—evolved from what I take to be the morbid fantasies of elderly celibates. If the current crop of hierarchs now scurry about the darker recesses of the Vatican talking in worried whispers about the unspeakable erotic perversions of priests, well, who will say anything other than that they are hoist on their own petards?

No, here we address a more serious question, to wit, how can the church extricate itself from its very grave crisis? The short answer is it probably can’t and, if it fails, it will wither away regardless of what Jesus said about the gates of hell (1) and his promise to be with it, “all days until the end of the world.” (2) It is already difficult to credit an institution whose preachings about sex are routinely ignored by all but a small if vocal minority of its members. Sadly, until recently, the church was led by an exhausted old man who was not in full possession of his faculties and by an inbred cadre of his loyalists. John Paul II, in a long and eventful reign, tried to perpetuate and, in some cases, amplify a variety of foolish and harmful theories that will be hard for a successor to undo. But the church is decaying and time is short. If there is to be any hope of a solution, it must begin with a clear definition of the problem.

The root of the pedophilia crisis, simply stated, is sex itself and sex is divided into two problems of long standing. First, the church does not approve of it because it is seen as a mortal danger to one’s hope of salvation. Just as the moth knows that, for all its danger, the flame brings light into the world, the church knows that sex is necessary to fulfill God’s first commandment to, “Be fruitful and multiply.” (3) But it is determined to extinguish any non-reproductive expression of sexuality and strictly control what it does accept as a necessary evil. It has never been successful and has never learned from its failures. Second, the prelates don’t have a clue as to how to respond to a crisis when there is no prospect of burning their enemies at the stake or even of excommunicating the malefactors. All they can think to do is issue anathemas from the pulpit, failing to notice that the pews are empty. They have not yet adjusted to the humanism of the Renaissance so it is not surprising that the sexual revolution has thrown them into a tizzy.

Intercourse—within a lawful marriage and open to reproduction—is the single exception to the overall teaching that any sexual expression is morally disordered. Even within marriage, intercourse is permissible (5) only if the couple takes no direct action to impede conception, and foreplay is acceptable as long as pleasure is not an end in itself. (6) Unfortunately when God created sex, he or she created a vast range of pleasurable possibilities of which “licit” sex is only a tiny sample. After nearly two thousand years of trying, the church realized that it could not extricate pleasure from reproduction but it has done its best to correct the rest of God’s mistakes.

The specific prohibitions that derive from the church’s revulsion are comprehensive and stringent: fornication, masturbation, pornography, prostitution, homosexual acts, bestiality, the donation or use of sperm or ova, surrogate pregnancy, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, cloning, adultery, divorce, polygamy, incest, abortion, contraception, and the sexual abuse of children are all explicitly condemned. (7) The church is not alone in all these prohibitions but it has allowed them to metastasize beyond all reason. Adultery has come to include necking by teenage couples. The church regards in vitro fertilization as seriously disordered, not because it gives pleasure but because the procedure does not use all the embryos it cultures and is, therefore, tantamount to abortion. A similar logic leads the theologians to declare that embryonic stem cell research of every description is evil. The Bible condemns homosexual intercourse which it defines as a man lying with another man as with a woman. To the church however it also includes two men holding hands. The Bible makes no mention of lesbians (8) but the church regards female homosexuality with horror. This radiation of prohibitions is a reflection of its underlying fear of and revulsion to carnality which, in turn, flows from a profound misogyny. Sex is seen as corrupting and woman, ever since Eve, is the temptress. Woman is a constant and dire threat, an “occasion of sin.” The female excites male passion and renders the will incapable of exercising restraint. The male is in immanent danger of either being seduced or committing rape. This loss of control—the very idea of being dominated by a force greater than reason—is simply too much to contemplate.

Now you can understand why Mary had to have been a virgin. (9) As Thomas Aquinas, following Augustine, explains, it would not have been fitting for him who came to free us from corruption to have been the cause of unleashing Mary’s sexuality by “corrupting” her virginity. (10) But the mainstream theology has always taught that Jesus was fully human and fully divine without contradiction. It has never explained how a person conceived without half the required chromosomes could be fully human. It was a miracle, an event said to be above reason but not contrary to it. If a virgin birth is not contrary to reason, it is only because the believer, like the Red Queen, is making up the rules of reason. Of course, even Joseph did not believe Mary’s story until an angel came to him in a dream. (11) But the point is that only by preserving Mary’s virginity can the church make her an exception to its misogyny.
The church is obsessed with virginity. In the modern era, this manifests itself in the teaching, “How great is the dignity of chaste wedlock.” (12) But it began with and evolved from the doctrine enunciated by Paul of Tarsus. He allows sex between husband and wife “as a concession, not a command” but wishes that “all men were as I am” which is to say, unmarried. “But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn.” (13) His preferences are clear:

So then, he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does even better. If anyone thinks he is not treating his daughter properly, and if she is getting along in years, and he feels she ought to marry, he should do as he wants. He is not sinning. He should let her get married. But the man who has settled the matter in his own mind, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and who has made up his mind to keep the virgin unmarried–this man also does the right thing. So then, he who gives his virgin in marriage does right, but he who does not give her in marriage does even better. (14)

This is the line of thought that will gradually mutate into full blown misogyny. In the Book of Revelation, it is said that only 144,000 people will be saved and that these will all be celibate men “who did not defile themselves with women, for they kept themselves pure.” (15) Tertullian shared Paul’s views and took them a step beyond in his admonition to women to dress modestly:


You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is death—even the Son of God had to die. (16)

You see the power of woman: the devil himself was afraid to confront the magnificent god-like Adam who could be seduced only by Eve. Tertullian famously thought of woman as “a temple built over a sewer,” a metaphor Augustine explicated in referring to the female genitalia as “inter faeces et urinam nascimur.” (17) Given such an excretory fantasy, it is not surprising that he welcomed the advice he got from a voice in the clouds declaiming, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” Augustine’s contemporary Jerome, Doctor doctoris, suffered from vivid erotic dreams through much of his life and became fixated on virginity. He wrote a letter on the subject to Eustochium Julia who was sixteen at the time. He told her that the only reason he approved of marriage was that, without it, there would be no new virgins. He tells Ms. Julia:

I do not today intend to sing the praises of the virginity which you have adopted and proved to be so good. Nor shall I now reckon up the disadvantages of marriage, such as pregnancy, a crying baby, the tortures of jealousy, the cares of household management, and the cutting short by death of all its fancied blessings. Married women have their due allotted place, if they live in honorable marriage and keep their bed undefiled. (18)

That last phrase is cubile immaculatum in Jerome’s Latin, literally an unstained marriage bed, one that has not suffered the indignity of a bleeding hymen. Shortly after this letter was written, Jerome, Eustochium, her sister and her mother Paula went off to live in the desert with a full retinue of female disciples. For a person with such a rich fantasy life, it had to be an ever-present temptation to Jerome but somehow all four of them became saints.

In the aftermath of the fall of Rome, the debate about sex turned to the question of whether or not priests should be and remain celibate. The ecumenical Council of Nicea (325) had declined to rule on the subject but succeeding local councils enacted every imaginable barrier, if not to marriage itself, then to sex within marriage. Eventually, the Council of Pavia (1018) even ruled that the wives and children of clergymen should be enslaved. (19) Such strictures were, however, widely rejected and clerical marriage and concubinage persisted well into the middle ages, even or especially among the hierarchy. In 1492 Rodrigo Borgia engineered his own election as Pope Alexander VI. He already had several children by various mistresses and his dalliances did not cease with his elevation. He appointed his daughter Lucrezia’s son Giovanni to the College of Cardinals. It was said at the time and is still believed by many historians that Alexander was Giovanni’s father which would make him simultaneously the lad’s grandfather. (20)
What the church said and what its priests did were getting further and further apart. The two ecumenical Councils of Lateran (1123 and 1139) had taken a number of steps designed to institutionalize misogyny. Canon 27 of the Second Lateran (21) went so far as to forbid mixed choirs of nuns and monks. Soon the church extended this to a prohibition against all singing by women in public, and by 1600, they were castrating young boys so men could sing the soprano parts required by the new polyphonic music. Even by the standards of the time, this was blatant child abuse and it went on for a long time. The last castrato died in 1922. There were several reasons for the persistence of this policy of mutilation. First, of course, it meant not having to sing with women thereby exposing oneself to eternal damnation. Second, it was doing the Lord’s work by fulfilling Jesus’ admonition, “For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have made themselves eunuchs because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it." (22) In spite of all this, what is most interesting is the fact that Deuteronomy prohibits castrated males from entering the “assembly of the Lord.” (23)

Misogyny, then, is the basis of both priestly celibacy and the exclusion of women from the priestly class. The resulting all male, celibate, woman-fearing clergy provides fertile ground for distorted thinking and perverse dogmas. The perversions include the church’s socially repugnant politics pressed on behalf of censorship and against sex education in the schools. It adds significantly to the sum total of misery in the world by opposing divorce in all circumstances and through the disfellowship of divorced persons who remarry. In the name of its eccentric understanding of chastity, it has turned generations of Catholic adolescents into Clintonian hair splitters fretting about the exact boundaries of its fire and brimstone morality. It makes mockery of both logic and ethics by ranting against any use of condoms, preferring to expose people to sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and abortion. Its argument is that anything that makes sex safer also increases the incidence of what it considers illicit sex. (24) It invokes medieval sorcery, equating a blastocyst with a human being, to lobby for laws criminalizing life saving stem cell research. Worst of all, it encourages extremists to harass vulnerable women trying to enter abortion clinics. Then it is offended when it is said that the priests approve of bombing the clinics and assassinating their doctors.

The church is by no means alone in all this foolishness, nor is it unique to religious institutions. (25) Misogyny is a prominent feature of all the Abrahamic religions (26) and, in each case, the more orthodox the cult the more dogmatic is its hatred of women. Christianity was supposed to change all that and, therefore Christian misogyny is not only immoral in itself, it is also hypocritical. The message of Jesus Christ was supposed to be love and tolerance. He told his followers to “…love one another as I have loved you” (27) and Paul took it a step further by teaching that of all the virtues, “…the greatest of these is love.” (28) To the consternation of the Pharisees, Jesus said, “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (29)

The message of love evolved very gradually through the Old Testament and, when it blossomed in the teaching of Jesus, it seemed truly revolutionary. It sought to replace the tooth-and-claw, might-makes-right basis of the primitive social contract with a gospel of cooperation and mutuality. Remember, the God of Genesis was vengeful and brutal. By the time of Job, though, he was beginning to learn that he and his creation are interdependent and that mutual forgiveness is essential to a decent relationship between them. When David sinned egregiously against the Mosaic commandments prohibiting adultery and murder, God did not destroy Israel as well he might have in Genesis. He punished the king by killing Bathsheba’s first born but he ultimately responded to David’s prayer for forgiveness. Of course, no one would suggest that killing an infant son for the sins of the father is anything but psychopathic. But it is at least not as capricious as what he had done to Job merely for the sake of winning a whimsical bet with Satan. (30)

Judged by the historical behavior of the institutional church, the gospel of love was a failure. For every Francis of Assisi, there were a dozen Joans of Arc (31) burned at the stake; for every John XXIII there were a score of vicious, bloodthirsty popes preaching genocidal crusades. As a matter of fact, John XXII was immortalized by Umberto Eco as the Pope who put down the Franciscan Spirituals by burning their leaders at the stake for preaching the gospel of poverty. What happened? Specifically, how did the teachings about sex stray so far from the actual texts and how did the standard of love become so disfigured? How did an institution defy the obvious dictates of natural law and produce a repulsive, anti-intellectual theology of necessary evil to explain away the goodness of one-half of the human race? The answer is complex and controversial. It begins with the fact that Jesus himself was not without ambiguity. (32) This is usually glossed over by saying he hated the sin but loved the sinner. He protected and forgave the woman “caught in adultery.” (33) But then, in the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (34)

Now the commandment that Jesus was “fulfilling” already had a long history of emendation. In addition to adultery which is the only sin explicitly prohibited, the Law had also come to ban coitus interruptus, (35) incest, (36) bestiality, (37) homosexuality, (38) and cross dressing. (39) Jesus explicitly added only male ogling to the list of abominations. A careful and sympathetic reader would be embarrassed by such blatant nonsense. But the church has concluded that if the son of God felt that strongly about ogling he would certainly have been opposed to necking and petting. (40) Which is logical—a logical extension of an inanity. To compound the cruelty, it went on to embroider a fiction based on what Jesus didn’t say. Had he intended to banish the misogyny of the Old Testament, their logic went, the Sermon on the Mount gave him the perfect opportunity. Since he did not take advantage of it, the Church, as we shall see, felt justified in extending its own doctrine to place the blame on women. This logic, of course, is seriously warped. And they know it. (41) But they are reasoning to a foregone conclusion. They realize that it is an incendiary conclusion, so they lie about it by engaging in the worst kind of double talk. Consider what John Paul II said in his 1995 “Letter to Women:”

As I wrote in my Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem, the Church "desires to give thanks to the Most Holy Trinity for the 'mystery of woman' and for every woman—for all that constitutes the eternal measure of her feminine dignity, for the 'great works of God', which throughout human history have been accomplished in and through her…I know of course that simply saying thank you is not enough. Unfortunately, we are heirs to a history which has conditioned us to a remarkable extent. In every time and place, this conditioning has been an obstacle to the progress of women. Women's dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude…And if objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry.

Misrepresented? How about trampled upon? Members of the church? How about official church doctrine? Mulieris Dignitatem is full of empty rhetoric stressing the glorious role of women throughout history. At great length, the Pope traces the church’s thinking on women to Eve, a sinner, and Mary, a virgin. When he comes to explaining God’s punishment of Eve (“Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (42)) however, he betrays himself:

… This "domination" indicates the disturbance and loss of the stability of that fundamental equality which the man and the woman possess in the "unity of the two": and this is especially to the disadvantage of the woman…[But] even the rightful opposition of women to what is expressed in the biblical words "He shall rule over you" (Gen 3:16) must not under any condition lead to the "masculinization" of women. In the name of liberation from male "domination", women must not appropriate to themselves male characteristics contrary to their own feminine "originality". There is a well-founded fear that if they take this path, women will not "reach fulfillment", but instead will deform and lose what constitutes their essential richness.

Okay, here’s the payoff:

It is indeed an enormous richness. In the biblical description, the words of the first man at the sight of the woman who had been created are words of admiration and enchantment, words which fill the whole history of man on earth. (43)

There you have it. The essential richness of woman is her attractiveness to man, and this must be preserved over all other values, even including equality. This richness is so important that the Pope resorts to an obvious lie about what the Bible says to reinforce it. It’s all right, he seems to be saying, to be upset about the injustice done by an avenging God but, if you fight it, men will no longer ogle you. The Pope struggles to say something good about women, the sex he will later declare to be a sacerdotal nullity. But all he can manage is a warning against the temptation of feminism. Whatever does he mean by “masculinization?” Exactly what male traits does His Holiness regard as abominable in a woman? Intelligence? Assertiveness? Facial hair? The ability to pee standing up? How does he reconcile the attraction the woman has for the man which he says is good, with the attraction that constitutes a constant occasion of sin which, of course, is bad? To ask these questions is to answer them: the Pope is merely betraying the ugly stereotypes that substitute for reason in Vatican Think. His misogyny is so deeply ingrained that promoting it trumps any desire to be logical or reasonable or even truthful.

Misogyny is not a monomaniacal rejection of everything female. It is, as has been suggested above, very much like the moth and the flame; the misogynist is simultaneously and irresistibly attracted and repelled. Both the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper were misogynists who nonetheless craved heterosexual gratification. The church’s preference for virgins suggests that it recognizes degrees of misogyny, virgins being morally superior to non-virgins. From the time of Paul, the church’s favorite metaphor for itself has been “Bride of Christ,” surely a virgin bride. (44) Writing to the church at Corinth, Paul says, “I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him.” (45) This is truly sick imagery on many levels (46) but it is consistent with what Paul recommends to husbands and wives as models for their private relationships. “Wives,” he enjoins, “submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.” (47) Husbands, of course, are told to love their wives for the simple reason that, “no man ever yet hated his own flesh.”

If the church’s teachings on marriage constitute a mockery of the sublime, its position on altar girls belongs to the ridiculous end of the spectrum. Ever since Vatican II, the Curia has vacillated about girl servers although, at the moment, Cardinal Ratzinger’s (48) dictum is ascendant. He essentially condemned the practice on the theory that boys, being as misogynist as he is, will not want to serve with girls. Thus, the church will be denied one of its best sources of future priests (at least if one disregards the possibility that girls might be just such a source). The prelates are not ashamed to say this as bluntly as I have, but they are equally capable of obfuscating it in theological double talk. Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit, the self-styled “Warrior Priest,” and a former student of Ratzinger, says the same thing this way:

The Church only becomes the Body of Christ in the mystery of the two in one flesh by which, initially bride, by being joined to her Groom she becomes one body with the head. The Eucharist, the center and summit of the Sacraments, involves a sacred place, a sacred time and a sacred person both symbolically setting apart the orders of grace and redemption from the order of creation and making really present the Divine Person of Christ in Word and Sacrament. For this reason, many theologians (e.g., de Lubac, Von Balthasar, Bouyer) hold, in keeping with a long and unbroken ecclesiastical tradition, that there is an absolute prohibition of women as recipients of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. (49)

Say, what? Ignore the surrealistic imagery about the Body of Christ being also the Bride of Christ which is, after all, exactly what Paul was saying. Assume that the business about her (the church’s) body becoming one with the head is nothing more than an especially opaque metaphor. Grant that the Eucharist is a sacred mystery. But pay attention to the phrase, “For this reason…” How can even a Jesuit conclude that girls can’t be priests from these two statements? The answer is, he can’t. If this paragraph means anything sane, it is the exact opposite of what Fessio says it means. The bride is the female part of the mystical union. Therefore it is the human female who is exclusively qualified to exercise the priestly function. Of course, such babbling is equally mad. In fact, what you have here is another of those foregone conclusions being dragged around by an inane metaphor and an irrelevant theory. It is, in short, the perfect Christian fallacy. Florynce Kennedy observed that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. To which I add, if a woman could be Pope, people like the John Paul II, Joe Ratzinger and Joe Fessio would be correctly labeled as heretics.

There are some within the church who are quite ready to descry the excesses of the clergy and even look forward to changes they are sure will come in the next generation. There are others who think the problem can continue to be managed without outside help and without cooperating with secular authorities. (50) There are some, too, a substantial majority I would think, who place the blame on the sinners and think the institution itself remains pure and beyond error. If there is a context for the sins, it is not something rotten within the church, but in the modern world with its licentious pursuit of pleasure. This is often seen in apocalyptic terms as a sign that the end of days is upon us. What all these Christians share, however, is belief in the immutability of the church. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away.” (51) This and other divine promises assure the Catholic fundamentalist that the institution is safe. And so it has seemed for 2,000 years. The current crisis is not the first challenge the church has faced and not even, from a moral perspective, the most threatening. It survived the early heresies and the Great Schism, the Crusades and the dynastic wars of the Holy Roman Emperors, the Protestant Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, the slow death of the divine right of kings and the rapid emergence of the middle class. It has even survived the last fourteen Popes who, with a single exception—two if you insist on including Leo XIII—were disastrous as theologians and pastors, and who spent their energies declaring themselves, against all evidence, infallible, tilting at such bogey men as modernism and freemasonry, and averting their eyes from genocide and pedophilia. The institution has to be strong to suffer such insults. But today that strength has been drawn down and the institutional church is weaker than it has ever been and is getting weaker every day.

The church tries to compartmentalize the scandal. It is one of several discrete agenda items for meetings of bishops in countries where it has escaped from its hiding place under the rug. Rome treads gingerly, managing the problem with circumlocution, evasion and self-deception. No one dares tell the prelates that this is different. People understand what has been going on and realize that it is not new and is not confined to a few Bacchanalian districts. Worse, they know that it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of institutional Christianity—the betrayal of the gospel of love. It is a fatal cancer in the process of destroying the whole edifice. And the fools in charge don’t know it yet.
In North America, the church is in financial ruins. Of 194 dioceses, only a handful are showing an operating surplus and not a single one has access to significant liquid capital. (52) Three have already declared bankruptcy, the first three dioceses to go broke in two thousand years. Schools are being closed, vocations have been in free fall for 30 years, and the average age of priests is now 65 and climbing. Seminaries are attracting only the most rigid young men. There is no doubt that strong emotional bonds remain between the laity, the local parish, and the abstract ideal of “Catholicism.” But the laity are irrelevant. They are, in the phrase of another beloved metaphor, the “sheep of the flock.” Which is to say, they are good for fleecing. But no longer good enough to insure solvency. Already, Catholics contribute less as a percentage of income than do adherents of any other religion, at least in America. As pedophilia settlements approach the billion dollar range, there is no hope of paying the victims. Real estate fire sales and bankruptcy protection will wreak havoc with operations and only the universities and some of the hospitals are likely to survive. The American church will look nothing like its old self in just a few years. Self-governing, loosely federated parishes may continue to function in the Baptist fashion, but Martin Luther’s revolution will be triumphant. And as the American church goes, so goes the universal superstructure that depends on it. The Vatican is likely to be a theme park within the lifetime of people now living. Time is short and the river is rising.

Is there any hope of redemption? As I said at the outset, the short answer is not much. Surely not as long as the hierarchy persists in its Wonderland fantasy, as long as it fails to get a grip on reality. In its legal responses to the pedophilia crisis, it typically invokes the allegation of contributory negligence. This is a common tactic in tort law. It says, “I may bear some of the responsibility, but so do you.” The plaintiff almost always calls this blaming the victim. The problem in these cases is that the victim is often six years old. As for the child’s parents, their only negligence was in trusting their child to the care of a priest. The church’s position, then, is not only immoral, but, in arguing that parents should not trust priests, it is terrible public relations. This is both immoral and suicidal.

The failure of the American hierarchy ultimately became apparent even to the Vatican apparatchiks who summoned the American Cardinals to Rome for a dose of woodshedding. (53) Unfortunately, the Americans could not agree among themselves, one faction supporting the popular “one strike and you’re out” policy and the other favoring strict due process and forgiveness for a single past misdeed. Among lay intellectuals, Garry Wills supported the former policy while William F. Buckley favored the latter, citing the gospel of Luke to the effect that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just men. (54) Buckley, however, seriously misreads one of the New Testament’s most profound messages. The line is an exaggeration used to introduce the Parable of the Prodigal Son which is a remarkable disquisition on forgiveness. As the father explains to the older son, “…this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” (55) The father has no choice but to forgive the son, even when the sinner may not merit forgiveness, seek it or even desire it. The reason is because forgiveness is the only way to restore the father himself to wholeness. In the current situation, then, forgiveness is the province of those who need to be made whole again—the victims—and whatever the bishops decide to do as a matter of discipline is entirely irrelevant. But these men are hopeless. As they gathered in Dallas to plot their strategy, their best idea was to arrange a 48 hour continuous adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, not for themselves, but for the victims who came to picket the hall. They published a 48-page booklet of vigil prayers, the first of which was the Fifty-first Psalm. This is David’s classic plea for forgiveness, the one that Bill Clinton alluded to at the height of Monicagate.

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.

So while the bishops communed with each other, they recommended that the victims should pray for forgiveness. Is anybody home?

The Declaration of Dallas was a bitter pill and many credited the bishops for taking a strong stand. Others thought that coming out against pedophilia did not require a heroic amount of moral courage. And a few cynics figured the bishops knew the Vatican would bail them out. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. True to form, Rome said the bishops had raised some concerns that needed further study by a committee to which it would name half the members. Ultimately, the committee merely reasserted the primacy of Rome and something it called “the rights of the accused” which would be hard to argue with except, in the whole history of the church, it has never before been known to be solicitous of any rights but its own. Ultimately the church has dug itself into a hole without an exit strategy. Its first impulse was to do nothing and hope that the hole would go away before the rains came. Better minds blamed the shovel. The most righteous seem ready to learn to love the hole.

The hole is not pedophilia which, at worst, is the sin of a degenerate minority. (56, 57) The hole is not the much larger percentage of oath-breaking fornicators and statutory rapists. Nor is it the bishops who have sired children by long time mistresses or have purchased the silence of gay lovers with church funds. The hole is misogyny. It is a sick view of women that attracts sick men some of whom inevitably seek other, less threatening outlets for their sexuality. It should not surprise anyone that some of these men are gay. The incidence of warped sexuality among gays and straights is probably identical. (58) The priesthood disproportionately attracts warped men, straight and gay. (59) It also attracts men, straight and gay, who remain celibate because they think it will somehow bring them closer to God, or free them to give of themselves wholly to their flock, or, of course, simply because they fear sex. Even if you think any of this is laudable, it is by no means normal. The priesthood does not attract normal men and it never will as long as its defining characteristic is freedom from women. (60) Abnormal psychology is a mark of the Roman clergy and it persists as priests become bishops become cardinals become popes. It is, therefore, impossible to expect them to judge one another and unlikely in the extreme that they will change their minds.

The church tries to ban gays from becoming priests in the first place but, until the pedophilia crisis, this rule was honored more in the breach. In the new environment, the Vatican is taking steps to enforce the ban rigorously even against gays who are celibate. As usual, the prelates are poorly informed and self-destructive. Reverend Donald B. Cozzens, former President-rector and professor of pastoral theology at St. Mary Seminary in Cleveland, has written that, “…the priesthood is or is becoming a gay profession.” But the theory is said to be that seminaries are all-male environments which pose a special temptation to gays. This is nonsense of course but, even if it did have a shred of respectability as an argument, the solution would be to admit women or, given the demographics of vocations, to bar straight men.

Sadly, the Pope has taken the issue of women as priests off the table. (61) His favorite Inquisitor, Ratzinger, wrote that the Pope’s musings on the subject are as close to being infallible as a disciplinary ruling can be. Together they have tried to slam the door on change forever. The only light coming through the cracks is the light of a laity that ignores the rantings coming from Vatican City, and the light of the decent priests, straight and gay, on the front lines of the struggle against darkness.

Afterword

It has been the argument of this essay that the church’s current pedophilia crisis is one of the direct results of its historical attitude toward sex which, in turn, is based on its dogmatic misogyny. There are two obvious problems with this analysis. First, women have always been the church’s most stalwart, most loyal and most selfless supporters. Second, the church has always been seen, by its communicants and its enemies, as itself feminine. Holy mother the church. Bride of Christ. But it goes well beyond language into the extremely fraught arena of gender identity. Most people, I think, perceive most priests as effeminate—not necessarily homosexual, but characteristically (or, if you prefer, stereotypically) female in dress, demeanor and values.

It cannot be denied that women have been complicit in their own subjugation. (62) The same can be said about patriarchy generally: that it wouldn’t work unless women let it work. Such an idea is well beyond the scope of the present paper. But I suspect that feminism and misogyny can co-exist on different conceptual levels. Certainly for the individual it is possible and even common for a macho self-image to co-exist with a despised or suppressed feminine “side.” And certainly also, there is value for women in promoting any institutional force that may occasionally temper the power of men. But whatever combination of forces may be working here, the end result is almost identical to that of the Stockholm Syndrome in which, over time, hostages come to empathize with the objectives and even the tactics of their abductors. And therein lies a resolution sufficient for present purposes: the psychology may be complex but the morality is not—the victim remains a victim, the abuser an abuser.

Which leaves us with the gender identity of the church itself. Why would holy mother the church persecute her daughters? Any realistic answer must begin with a restatement of the obvious: we are dealing here in the realm of abnormal psychology. It’s like asking why a psychotic bangs his head against the wall. My own guess is that the church, like a psychotic, compartmentalizes its metaphors and its fantasies. It obviously enjoys its role as the bride of Christ and the behaviors—for example, cross-dressing—that let its priests act out the metaphor. All the while real women remain mysterious and fearful. I may be wrong about this but the fact on the ground remains that, over 2,000 years, the morality of the Catholic Church with respect to women has been no better than the morality of the tyrant, the bondsman or the terrorist. God forgive them.

Notes

1. Matthew 16:18.

2. Matthew 28:20.

3. Genesis 1:28.

4. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000, Paragraphs 2351 and 2366.

5. Permissible should not be taken as an enthusiastic endorsement. In contemporary pronouncements, the Church seems to have discovered that sex has a “unitive” in addition to a procreative purpose. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Church is saying that sex brings people together. As obvious as this is, it does represent a step forward insofar as it suggests that intercourse may be licit for a couple that cannot conceive for biological reasons. Still, the act must be theoretically “open to” procreation, which is to say that the act could lead to conception, however improbable. But, if an elderly man contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, he could not use a condom to protect his elderly wife.

6. The precise boundaries of “foreplay” are hard to discern except that the couple must intend it to lead to vaginal intercourse. If orgasm occurs by accident before intercourse can take place, the absence of intent to sin renders the act morally neutral. If it occurs intentionally and intercourse does not follow, it is clearly sinful. What is the case, you may wonder, if it occurs intentionally but licit intercourse follows after a brief respite? Or if licit intercourse is attempted but fails? Or was intended but not attempted? Moral theology is a subtle discipline and amateurs are well advised to act with extreme prudence.

7. Catechism of the Catholic Church , Op. cit. Paragraphs 2352, 2353, 2354, 2355, 2359, 2376, 2377, 2380, 2382, 2387, 2388 and 2389.

8. In Romans 1:26-27, Paul comments unfavorably on pagan women who have substituted unnatural for natural intercourse and men with inadequate imaginations have always assumed that this must refer to lesbianism. It may but it is equally probable that he is referring to oral or anal sex or masturbation. Whatever he is talking about, however, is clearly defined as meriting punishment meted out by God.

9. In addition to its sexual meaning, the word virginity is generally associated with such traits as docility, malleability and sweetness. One is, therefore, not surprised at the vast majority of titles Mary is given in her Litany: mother most amiable, mystical rose, comforter, queen of peace. But she is also called virgin most powerful, and it has been pointed out to me that, for a short time before the Renaissance, it was this power that attracted the attention of leading artists. Giotto, for example, depicted Mary as a stern, uncompromising and very powerful personage in “Madonna in Glory” (c. 1311). I do not know why this was so although it may be related to the terrible harshness of life in the middle ages.

10. Summa Theologica, Volume III, Question 28, Response 2. Aquinas, the supreme rationalist, had a great deal of trouble with sex. Consider, for example, his explanation of why incest is condemned. “Since the intercourse of man and wife carries with it a certain natural shame, those persons should be prevented from such intercourse who owe one another a mutual reverence on account of the tie of blood. And this is the reason touched on in Leviticus 18” (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III, Question 125). The “natural shame” associated with sex may be acceptable between husband and wife but not between people who must revere each other. The Angelic Doctor is so flustered that he invents his reference to Leviticus 18 which says no such thing. Nor does he pause to contemplate the blasphemy involved in postulating a God whose “increase and multiply” commandment must be implemented by an inherently shameful act.

11. Joseph was not a virgin, having fathered six children by his first wife, Melcha. He is said to have been 90 when he married Mary. It is easy to accept his initial certainty that the baby was not his, but harder to understand why he believed a dream rather than the rational conclusion—his original conclusion—that his wife was pregnant by another man.

12. Pius XI, Casti Connubii, 1930. In fairness, the Pope may have meant something different than you do when he used the word “chaste.” The official Catechism says, “Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being” (Paragraph 2337) and, if that helps, God bless. But you have to wonder how the priest integrates his sexuality. Is he not chaste?

13. See I Corinthians 7:9. Some modern translations render the last phrase “burn with passion” but there is no hint of this in the Vulgate. At this early date, the church did not worry about replenishing the stock of humanity because everyone thought the Second Coming was imminent. Paul presents problems for all Christian apologists. Some have taken to interpreting his pronouncements on sex as a sort of proto-feminism in the sense he was trying to subvert the ancient custom of early arranged marriages. But, seen in the light of his attitude toward women—that they should keep the hair covered and their mouths closed in church, for example—this is a hard opinion to sustain.

14. Ibid 7:35-38. As is often the case, Paul’s prose is better than his logic. If it is better for a man not to marry a virgin, his choice is narrowed to widows and wantons. (In case it is not clear already, I have a great deal of trouble with Paul whom I regard as a heretic and a fool. He spent entirely too much time contradicting Peter and the other eye witnesses to Jesus’ teaching. His foolishness derives from his unshakeable conviction that the Second Coming was at hand. The real disciples thought so too but didn’t make such a fetish of it.) Still, this did become the official position of the church. Pope Gregory the Great, a patrician who became a monk in his thirties, wrote that, although sex between married people is not technically sinful, carnal pleasure cannot be blameless under any circumstances.

15. Revelation 14:4. The idea that God would create billions of people destined to suffer eternally in the fires of hell is truly the fantasy of a madman. But this remarkable verse was taken quite literally by John Calvin and other reformers although it is not so much emphasized today. It should be noted that predestination itself is mentioned or implied in many Biblical passages which suggests that this vale of tears is nothing but a futility.

16. De Cultu Feminarum (Concerning the dress of women), Book 1, Chapter 1. This and many other writings of the early Fathers will be found on the remarkable web site: www.ccel.org. Tertullian is regarded as one of the Ante-Nicene Fathers even though he became an apostate late in life. He joined the Montanists, the fundamentalists of the late Second Century and left them to found his own even more rigorous sect.

17. “Fittingly situated between the feces and the urine.” One cannot gainsay Augustine’s importance but his enthusiasm for Plato led him to propound certain extreme and rigid doctrines such as predestination. More importantly, he taught that the domination of flesh over soul would be absolute without the grace of God. Man is naturally sinful and can do nothing to save himself. Woman is the source of much of that sinfulness. This formulation would seem to be at odds with Genesis 1:27 which tells us, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Did God err, or is she as bad as Augustine says her creatures are?

18. “De Custodia Virginitate,” (“The virgin’s profession” also known as Ad Eustochium) Part IV. See: Select Letters of St. Jerome, translated and edited by F.A.Wright, Harvard University Press, 1933, Page 57. Wright translates immaculatum ambiguously as undefiled, implying perhaps free from adultery. But there is perfectly good Latin word for adultery, aduterium. When the church speaks of the Immaculate Conception, it is referring to the belief that Mary herself was conceived without the stain of original sin. Jerome was slightly more liberal than Augustine. Even while he railed against Pelagius, he found it hard to embrace predestination.

19. It should be noted that the Council fathers were more concerned with the possibility that the widows and children of clerical marriages might actually inherit church property.

20. This story is irresistible. Lucrezia was six months pregnant with him when it became politically expedient to have her declared a virgin which was promptly done by a papal scientific panel. She had conceived the little bastard during an interval she was staying in a convent during her divorce from her first husband. It was said that the father was the Pope’s messenger Perotto who was killed before he could deny it. Alexander later issued not one but two papal bulls, one claiming that he himself was the father, the other that the father was his brother Cesare. Some kind souls said this was only a little white lie to make the child legitimate and therefore eligible to become a duke and a cardinal. Which, in the fullness of time, he did. Those of us who are committed to papal infallibility believe Alexander was the real father even if only retroactively. We also believe poor Giovanni could not have been legitimate whoever his father was since his mother was not married at the time.

21. Called mainly to clean up the mess left by the antipope Anacletus II, this council that was exercised by clerical marriage as a sort of sidebar. Canon Six clearly stated that the reason for its opposition was that marriage and sin are evil. “We also decree that those in the orders of subdeacon and above who have taken wives or concubines are to be deprived of their position and ecclesiastical benefice. For since they ought to be in fact and in name temples of God, vessels of the Lord and sanctuaries of the holy Spirit, it is unbecoming that they give themselves up to marriage and impurity.”

22. Matthew 19:12. Garry Wills (Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, Doubleday, 2000, p. 125-127) reads this passage very differently, giving it a much kinder interpretation in arguing that it cannot possibly apply to the ministry. My view may be overly harsh and excessively literal and I would agree that it does not apply only to ministers. But those in the third category are “called [to it] by God” and only they have an option to accept it or not. They can always say no to God I suppose, unlike my castrati who were made eunuchs for God by order of the church. It should be noted that the church did not itself perform castrations. Rather, it extended a loving welcome to those who swore that they had lost their testicles in an accident. Such accidents were arranged by upwardly mobile parents who knew they and their sons would be taken care of by the local bishop. I worry about my interpretation because Professor Wills knows more about the Bible and church history than I do. Still in this instance I think my reading has the virtue of parsimony and should be treated in accordance with Ockham’s Razor.

23. Deuteronomy 23:1.

24. The church also insists that condoms do not protect their users against AIDS, thereby hoping to avoid precisely the criticism leveled here. This, of course, is a lie, deliberate and blatant. It is reminiscent of the tobacco companies saying there is no evidence that smoking causes cancer. Just as the politician promotes the clearcutting of trees and calls it forest fire prevention, it is based on a fundamental dishonesty and total disrespect for the audience at whom it is aimed. As Garry Wills says, Vatican moral theology is based on “structures of deceit.”

25. One secular institution that comes to mind is the United States Air Force Academy where the official policy seems to be that any female cadet who complains of being raped is not suitable material for an Air Force commission. It is at least arguable that this sort of attitude would be less prevalent in a society whose churches believed, preached and practiced the equality of the sexes.

26. Just why this is so must remain speculative. It is tempting to say that it started with the patriarch himself who abused both his first wife Sarah and his concubine Hagar. His grandson Jacob didn’t do much better by either his two wives or their slaves.

27. John 13:34. The members of The Jesus Seminar believe this passage (a) applied only to the apostles, and (b) was not a commandment of Jesus but a later embellishment of his followers. They also think that the commandment to, “love they neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39, et al.) is of questionable attribution. Paul, on the other hand, had no doubt whatsoever about its authenticity (see, Romans 13:9). If the doubters are right, it remains true that Christianity is marked by the gospel of love. To the point that this gospel was the result of an evolutionary literary process, the same commandment will be found in the writings of Hillel, the father of Talmudic Judaism and a contemporary of Jesus. Ref: Funk, Robert W. and Roy W. Hoover, The Five Gospels, Macmillan, 1993.

28. I Corinthians 13:13.

29. Matthew 5:39. See also Luke 6:29. This injunction is part of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is moderating here the old law of an eye for an eye. The Jesus Seminar claims all of this also postdates Jesus.

30. I realize this sounds like I think there is a sentient God who acts in history. I do not. What was really happening in the Old Testament was that the Jews were refining and humanizing the idea of monotheism that they had borrowed from the Babylonians.

31. Joan of Arc is the perfect illustration of the church’s misogyny. Its dealings with her were in every important respect driven by politics not theology. In 1431, French inquisitors convicted her of a variety of crimes and ultimately turned her over to the English to be burned at the stake for what amounted to cross dressing. About twenty years later, it occurred to the French that if she had been a witch and a heretic, then Charles VII whom she had crowned could not be a legitimate king. She was therefore “rehabilitated” by the church in 1457. In the Nineteenth Century, the church-state conflict in France led both sides to claim her as a national hero and an effort was begun by church authorities to have her canonized. After obtaining Queen Victoria’s permission, the Vatican instituted sanctification proceedings but the Congregation of Rites rejected her because they said she was not entitled to be called a maid. In other words, it considered her a whore. The church ultimately overcame this problem in a deal involving the restoration of diplomatic recognition between France and the Vatican. With no objection from the English, it canonized her on May 16, 1920. In case you’re wondering why the church needed Queen Victoria’s permission, you have to understand that, technically, the Inquisition was not authorized to burn people. It therefore turned them over to the secular authorities who, in this case, were the English.

32. There is an ancient belief that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had at least one child, a daughter. This story has been resurrected recently by the author Dan Brown in his best selling novel The DaVinci Code. The church suppressed the Magdalene story in part by making her out to have been a prostitute, a slander that has no support in the Bible. It seems unlikely that such a celebrity marriage could go largely unnoticed for so long. Judging from Jesus’ behavior, it is at least equally tenable that he was gay. However, some respected biblical scholars believe that Mary was in fact the “beloved disciple” described in the Gospel of John and that she was the real author of that gospel. The Gospel of Mary Magdalena is part of the Gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammadi but it casts little light on the question of her relationship with Jesus except that it was obviously a close one.

33. John 8:11.

34. Matthew 5:27. In the same vein, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” was expanded (5:21-22) to include being angry with one’s brother.

35. Genesis 28:8-10. Contrary to what you may have thought, this was the sin of Onam.

36. Leviticus 20:11.

37. Exodus 22:19. See also, Leviticus 18:23.

38. Leviticus 20:13.

39. Deuteronomy 22:5.

40. That ogling is serious business is evident from what Christ’s words say to Pope John Paul II (The Theology of the Body, p. 338). “Christ did not stress that it is ‘another man’s wife’ or a woman who is not his own wife, but says, generically, woman… Even if [a man] looked in this way at the woman who is his wife, he could likewise commit adultery in his heart.” Only in Christian Wonderland, can a man commit adultery with his wife.

41. Leo Jozef Cardinal Suenens of Belgium was one prelate who knew it and regarded church doctrine on the subject as stupid. Suenens was no lightweight radical. John XXIII had entrusted to him the writing of the agenda for Vatican II, and Paul VI had made him one of its four proctors. He literally begged Paul not to release Humanae Vitae which extended the church’s prohibition of contraception. He also believed that the church was wrong on both the ordination of women and the question of married priests.

42. Genesis 3:16.

43. This is ahistorical bullshit and a blatant lie. All Adam said was, “Now this at last: bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh! This shall be called woman for from man was this taken.” (Genesis 2:23). This. My bones. My flesh. And he was talking to God. There is no record in the canonical Bible that Adam ever said anything to Eve or even about her other than the line just quoted. There is no hint he found her attractive. In fact, as long as they were in Eden, they did not experience sexual attraction. The Pope here is worse than Bill Clinton in thinking he could get away with perverting the truth. Why did he try? Well, according to Garry Wills (see Note 21), the Vatican has erected “structures of deceit” to protect the eternal validity of each and every one of its doctrines. It should be noted that there are two non-canonical Books of Adam and Eve and even in these Adam has little to say to Eve that is not an admonishment of one sort or another.

44. On March 16, 2002 a Vatican congregation led by Jorge A Cardinal Medina Estévez sent a lengthy Recognitio to the group that drafted up a common text of the Roman Missal for the English speaking world. It raised a host of issues, many of them objecting to “inclusive” language. It did not want to substitute mankind for man in translating the Latin homo. It objected strongly to referring to the church as it instead of as “our mother and Christ’s bride.”

45. II Corinthians 11:2-3. In fairness, Paul characterizes this fantasy as “foolishness.”

46. In his recent book (Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, Doubleday, 2000, p. 105), Garry Wills explains the logic of this metaphor as follows: “…to signify the mystical marriage of Christ with his church, the priest must play the male bridegroom, representing Christ, while the church is the female bride…[But] the priest also represents the church, the female partner…and therefore, the priest can only be the bridegroom even when he is the bride.” You have to love the kind of double think represented by that therefore. Why must the priest “play” the bridegroom? And if he is the groom, what role does Jesus play? And why does the need to play the bridegroom necessitate playing also the bride (that therefore)? All metaphors limp but this one is truly crippled unless you want to imagine a marriage of hermaphrodites.

47. Ephesians 5:22. At various periods of its history, the church has encouraged a cult of Mary featuring papal proclamations of new titles for her. Several of these have positioned her as the intercessor between Christ and the church using the metaphor “neck of the body.”

48. At the time this was written, His Eminence was Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the arbiter of theological orthodoxy. This organization was founded in 1542 as the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition. Ratzinger later became Pope Benedict XVI.

49. This quotation refers, of course, only to women as priests, not explicitly to altar girls. However, the context of what Father Fessio was saying is that, since females can’t be priests, they can’t be altar servers either and he goes on to bemoan the fact that most American parishes are in direct defiance of the Holy Father on the altar girl issue. Fessio may be the most conservative Jesuit working in the vineyards of the Lord today, and most of his colleagues probably think he’s bonkers. If so, he is heir to the niche of Leonard Feeney, SJ, another warrior priest who was willing to be excommunicated for his belief that there is no salvation outside the church. Fessio publishes widely and his work appears, perhaps without his approval, on an obscure apocryphal website called, The End Days: Catholic Prophecy on the Coming Chastisement and Personal Salvation. Among other things, the site’s authors believe that modern history is a Communist conspiracy financed by the Rothschild family and its shock troops, the freemasons. It is not clear what is meant by the Coming Chastisement which is said to be either World War III or a great comet, the so-called Ball of Redemption which Jesus prophesied on June 18, 1986. The Virgin Mary had a different take on it in her prophecy of November 20, 1978. "666 is Lucifer [and his army], with five powerful demons plus Lucifer is six; and the six days of terrible suffering from the Chastisement; and the six that will be punished—Lucifer and his hordes, his ogres, for their terrible atrocities upon mankind."

The three theologians Fessio cites in support of his pathetic idea that there is an absolute prohibition of women serving at the altar are considerably more competent scholars than he. Perhaps one or more of them really did think what he claims, but it is hard to imagine three less likely people engaging in trivial pursuits. All three were traditionalists, associated with the post-war French Jesuit réssourcement movement but they lived on a much loftier plane. Henri Cardinal Lubac, SJ was actually a liberal who actively supported Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ when that remarkable paleontologist and mystic was silenced for the last 35 years of his life. Lubac was also a mentor to the young Father Fessio. Charles Bouyer, an Oratorian priest, was an arch conservative who usually found himself in opposition to Lubac. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar is an ex-Jesuit who specializes in the nature of grace and who was a reliable supporter of Lubac. Fessio wrote his doctoral dissertaion on Balthasar under the direction of Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

50. See: Goodstein, Laurie, “A Vatican Lawyer Says Bishops Should Not Reveal Abuse Claims,” The New York Times, May 18, 2002, p. A1

51. Matthew 24:35.

52. It has been estimated that the Church in America has about $790 million assets, almost all of it in real estate. This probably does not include such assets as universities and hospitals almost all of which are controlled by independent boards. It is also not clear what part of the remaining assets might be available to settle law suits. The Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon filed for protection under the federal bankruptcy law in July, 2004. It maintains that it itself does not own any parish assets under canon law but that such assets are owned by individual parishes. On the face of it, this seems to be an absurdity and the petition does not spell out the relevance of canon law to a federal legal proceeding. Given that dioceses open, close and consolidate parishes all the time with or without the consent of parishioners, clergy or board members suggests that Anglo Saxon common law will have no trouble identifying the owner of Our Lady of Perpetual Health’s assets.

53. The Vatican’s PR operation has treated the whole pedophilia affair as if it were an American anomaly in a desperate effort to protect the rest of the family. Of course this is pure fantasy. There are similar scandals all over Europe, including England, Ireland, Poland, Austria and France. In Africa, priests have had to abandon their prostitutes because of the AIDS epidemic. For several years, they have been taking their sex with nuns.

54. Luke 15:7. Buckley’s position was explicated in a letter to the Editor of The New York Times published June 11, 2002, p. A28. It is classic Buckley. Citing the divine joy over a single penitent, he refutes Wills’ argument and ends, “God, meet Garry Wills.”

55. Luke 15: 24 and 31.

56. Indeed, this is the favorite excuse of Cardinal Ratzinger and other ostriches among the hierarchy. It is technically true but is misleading in that it ignores an important aspect of the horror, the fact that priests are in positions of power and trust. Moreover, it is not such a small minority. The Attorney General of Massachusetts conducted a comprehensive review of church records and concluded that at least 789 children had been abused by at least 237 priests between 1940 and 2000 (The New York Times, 7/24/03, p.1). The Times (1/12/03, p. 1) had previously tried to document all allegations of abuse in the U.S. and found 1,205 accused priests and 4,268 alleged victims. It calculated that the incidence of pedophilia among priests is about 1.8%. Assuming that two-thirds of cases go unreported, these figures would imply 3,615 abusers, 12,805 victims and a rate of 5.4%. The truth is likely to fall between these two estimates. [After this paper was written, the American church published statistics prepared for it by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. They were able to document 10,667 victims of 4,392 priests between 1950 and 2002. On the assumption, again, that two-thirds of cases go unreported, that would imply more than 32,000 crimes committed by 13,189 priests. This would be an incidence of 16.2%.]

57. “Degenerate” is a term of anger more that a scientifically accurate diagnostic characteristic. The sexual abuse of pre-pubescent children is widespread but there is a distinction to be made between true pedophiles and opportunistic offenders. Epidemiological data are notoriously unreliable, especially with respect to opportunistic crimes which are less likely to be reported. Data regarding true pedophilia (defined in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 1987 as, “recurrent, intense sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies of at least six months’ duration, involving sexual activity with a pre-pubescent child") suggest that, among pedophiles, heterosexuals outnumber homosexuals by about 2 to 1. This suggests that the incidence is higher among gays who constitute considerably less than 1/3 of the population. However, it must be borne in mind that homosexual offenders are probably more vulnerable to detection and exposure simply because many people consider them deviant in the first place. This is a common problem for crimes committed by all minorities.

58. An interpretive report prepared by an appointed panel of lay people at the time the John Jay study was done claimed that a large majority of the reported incidents, rising to 86% during the 1980’s, were homosexual in character. This, however, does not mean that 86% of the perpetrators were gay. As the Jay researchers pointed out, priests have more access to adolescent boys than girls and, like prison inmates, they take their sex where they find it.

59. Celibacy also attracts women who are sexually warped although perhaps not in the same numbers. What are we to make of the abuse of orphans and other children by both the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy in Ireland. These victims suffered unspeakable violations in conditions that can only be defined as slavery. Nor were such crimes confined to Ireland. Similar stories have come out of Nazareth House in Brisbane, Australia, the Boston School for the Deaf in Massachusetts and, most infamously, the Hospital de la Miscericorde in Montreal. There virtually all the boys were christened Joseph and the girls Marie. They—there were at least 3,000 of them—were fraudulently declared mentally ill and used not only for sexual gratification but also as guinea pigs in medical experiments involving the use of chlorpromazine, the so-called “chemical lobotomy” drug. His Eminence Jean-Claude Cardinal Turcotte, the Archbishop of Montreal, has declared that these abuses were not systematic.

60. In an op-ed piece he wrote for The New York Times (March 3, 2004), Father Andrew Greeley argued that celibacy, far from causing pedophilia, is something priests say is not a problem at all. The basic problem he says is priestly incompetence which is fostered by, “…an envy-ridden, rigid and mediocre clerical culture.” Well yes, that too. But it is hard to see how incompetence causes pedophilia. As much as priests might cherish celibacy, it is by no stretch of the imagination the sexual norm. Sadly, Greeley falls back on Ratzinger’s defense that the sinners are a tiny minority (4%). But see Note 57 above.

61. In his encyclical Sacerdotalis Ordinatio (1994), this is what he said: “…in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance…I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, and this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” No authority? What about Matthew 16:19? “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Whatsoever seems broad enough to cover almost anything the church wants to do. Whatever. A definitive judgment is not an infallible pronouncement unless it regards a matter of faith and morals.

62. In the United States, for example, there is an organization called Women for Faith and Family which is active in supporting the traditional Vatican view of Catholic life. It’s 1984 Affirmation says, “…we recognize that the specific role of ordained priesthood is intrinsically connected with and representative of the begetting creativity of God in which only human males can participate. Human females, who by nature share in the creativity of God by their capacity to bring forth new life, and, reflective of this essential distinction, have a different and distinct role within the Church and in society from that accorded to men, can no more be priests than men can be mothers.” As usual, the logic of repression is fatuous. Men cannot be mothers because they lack the necessary anatomy. Women cannot be priests because the church has changed its original rule. You simply cannot say in one sentence that only human males can participate in the begetting creativity of God and, in the next, that females share in the creativity of God by their capacity to bring forth new life.