WHATEVER HAPPENED TO TONYA HARDING?

Jerry Harkins

Just prior to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, I wrote a short technical note commenting on some potential sources of systematic error in the judging of figure skating. In the process, I had occasion to make sympathetic mention of Tonya Harding, the lady who ultimately finished eighth and in tears. Since I have so little time for matters outside moral theology, I naturally assumed that those who supervise such things would take my insights to heart and that reform quickly would ensue. I missed the 1998 edition in Nagano and caught up with the sport during the 2002 games in Salt Lake City. I was, needless to say, disappointed.

While I was otherwise occupied, a fellow named Ottavio Cinquanta had been sent down from Central Casting to be the head Pooh-bah of the International (Ice) Skating Union. Imperial, dictatorial, condescending, arrogant, capricious and, of course, slightly stupid, he turned out to be a perfect choice for a sport that still keeps score with a system invented by the Red Queen. On his watch, we have been beset by one scandal after another, usually involving the judges or the judging. The most recent flap was caused by one Marie-Reine Le Gougne, a French judge who allegedly conspired to trade votes with the Russians. Maybe she also conspired with her French colleagues. Maybe she was merely pressured by the French, the Russians, the Mafia or the Vatican for all I know. No matter, the Canadian pair won pure and simple. That should have been obvious to everyone. Thus, the fact that the two conspirators were joined by three other judges from China, Poland and Ukraine to give the gold to the Russians is as revealing as the cheating itself. Le Gougne says, pressure or no pressure, the Russians were better and, naturally, the Russian judge agreed. So what we had was a majority of the judges reaching an obviously wrong but preordained conclusion. This happens regularly in the Supreme Court but, at least the justices explain their opinions, however wrongheaded, in writing.

Those of you old enough to remember Tonya Maxine Harding will recall that she placed fourth in the 1992 Olympics and was the U.S. National Figure Skating Champion in 1991 and 1994. But in the run-up to the 1994 games in Lillehammer, two of her hangers-on swatted her opponent, Nancy Kerrigan, on the kneecap with what was always referred to as a “black baton.” She was allowed to compete in the Olympics anyway where a hyped-up showdown between the two ladies—class versus trash—was sure to give the TV ratings a much-needed boost. She appeared in a purple polyester costume while Nancy wore white silk. There was never any thought that the judges would let Tonya take home a medal, and they did not disappoint. She finished eighth, skating her last program with a broken shoe lace. Nancy won the silver. Ironically, she, too, was screwed by a panel of judges who, with blithe disregard for reality, awarded the gold to Oksana Baiul of Ukraine.

But the Tonya story did not die after her fifteen minutes of exposure. As I wrote at the time, prosecutors in three jurisdictions could not wait to get their redemptive hands on her, believing she was fully complicit in the assault. Ultimately, Multnomah County, Oregon won the prize but had to settle for getting her to cop a plea to hindering their investigation of the whacking incident. It is not exactly clear why she was prosecuted in Oregon for a crime committed in Detroit, although it may have had something to do with the political ambitions of the Portland DA. She was given three years supervised probation, two fines totaling $150,000, 500 hours of community service, and $10,000 court costs. On top of that, the U.S. Figure Skating Association “stripped” her of her 1994 National Championship and banned her for life. As time went on, she accumulated a further share of life’s bitter pills — a miserable marriage to a beer-swilling, blood-sucking lout, the repossession of her pick-up truck, the need to auction off one of her skating costumes on e-bay and its failure to meet the reserve, an eviction from one apartment, and the depredations of late night comedians who turned her into an icon of white trash. In February 2000, she punched her boyfriend in the face and threw some rocks at his truck. She pleaded guilty to these sins and got two years probation, two 90-day sentences which were suspended except for three days in jail and 10 days on a work crew. Given this went down in Washington State, the work crew was probably not a chain gang. Part of the probation deal was the stipulation that she was not to drive or drink the whole time. Fourteen months later, though, she crashed her pickup truck into a ditch near a town called Battle Ground and failed a breathalyzer test. The Judge in the case, one Darvin Zimmerman, came under considerable local pressure to collect Columbia County’s pound of flesh which, in this case, comes to 167 more days in jail. While all this was transpiring, Tonya may have hit bottom when the Fox Network arranged a boxing match between her and Paula Jones. Paula, you may remember, was one of the blithe spirits of Bill Clinton’s springtime, and was a last minute substitute for Amy Fisher, the Long Island Lolita, whose parole board thought the whole affair an unseemly television spectacle. At least Tonya won—by a TKO in the third round. I did not watch the event but have been assured that the judging was scrupulously fair. A second bout, this time against one Samantha Browning, was fought in February 2003 on the same card as another ex-con, Mike Tyson. She lost a split decision. I take no position on the seemliness of having ex-cons slug it out on national television.

No one ever promised Ms. Harding a rose garden. Still, things might have been different. Tonya’s story might have—and at one time certainly would have—been read as a female Horatio Alger text: poor kid from an abusive background overcomes every obstacle and through grit and hard work emerges, if not triumphant, then well enough. A bit sappy, perhaps, but a lot closer to the mark than the Tonya-as-Tramp scenario. Sadly, the media are in the business of selling advertising space, not truth. And in the process of adding sizzle to the truth, they keep digging and picking and embellishing until the image they create becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tonya is no saint but listening to Shawn MacPhearson, the Assistant City Attorney of the great city of Camas, Washington excoriate her or Judge Zimmerman sternly threaten her, one recalls the trial of Joan of Arc and the tender mercies of an Inquisitor named Cauchon which, appropriately, means pig in French. One cannot help but wonder what Mr. McPhearson sees in his mirror each morning. Perhaps a future occupant of the oval office who saved the world from the wicked witch?

Tonya is a metaphor for life’s unfairness in a nation without effective or decent libel laws or without even a basic sense of decency. Like many athletes, she is poorly educated but by no means stupid, a distinction lost on our thought leaders. It goes without saying that she is talented, focused and not averse to hard work. In the face of adversity, she remains plucky and optimistic. It does not hurt that she looks good in a skimpy costume. But, by dint of fate, hers played out as the story of a woman abused by her parents, her husband, her state, the press and the governing body of her sport. We have created a sort of reverse Pygmalion—the other side of Eliza Doolittle—to fill a void in our tribal mythology.

Subsequent Events

Nine years after this was posted and twenty-four years after the notorious knee-capping incident, what passes for American thought leadership has revisited the Tonya Harding story and come to the conclusion that its previous judgement was perhaps too harsh and possibly even unfair.  The change of heart was brought about mainly by a well-received movie, I, Tonya, which has done well in the 2018 award season and confirmed by a lengthy and mostly sympathetic article in the New York Times of January 14, 2018 (Taffy Brodesser-Aknew, “Still Nowhere to Run").  Over the years, there have been other revisionist opinions but the combination of a feature film and the newspaper of record is likely to bring some semblance of justice to the much-maligned and very unlucky Ms. Harding.

THE CHURCH TOMORROW
Jerry Harkins

For decades, it has been clear that the Second Vatican Council which met between October 1962 and December 1965 was frustrated in its attempt to modernize church doctrine and practice. Although there are a few surviving cosmetic changes, the idea that papal Catholicism could be reconciled with the humanism of the Renaissance was never more than wishful thinking. The enmity between the church and the modern world had become overt in the aftermath of the French Revolution which had secularized Europe and reduced the church to a pathetic remnant of its former power. The Vatican’s response was disastrous. It raged against what it called “modernism” in all its forms—political, economic, social and cultural. It insisted on absurd new dogmas and proclaimed itself infallible. It rejected science and re-wrote history in the manner of the Soviets to suit its frantic attempts to preserve the civil and spiritual power of the central bureaucracy. The first Vatican Council convened by Pius IX in 1869 elevated a variety of regressive delusions to the realm of divine truth. [1] By the time Pius XII died in 1958, Roman Catholicism faced a paradox: it had never been stronger in terms of numbers and wealth, and had never been weaker intellectually and spiritually.

Pope John XXIII understood this. In convening Vatican II, he had three overlapping goals in mind: to bring the church into the modern world (aggiornamento), to encourage the natural evolution of doctrine in concert with the surrounding evolution of knowledge generally, and to restore the church to its biblical and pastoral roots (resourcement). Most of the bishops and virtually all of the experts were in sympathy with the Pope’s goals and the sixteen final documents they produced reflected that agreement. But after everyone went home, the bureaucracy was determined to reassert its traditional power. The Curia struck a mighty blow against change in 1968 when it persuaded Pope Paul VI to issue a reactionary encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae.

The Council had clearly suggested that it was time to change the blanket prohibition of “artificial” birth control. Paul temporized waiting for the report of a special commission appointed by his predecessor. The commission recommended that the church’s ban be lifted and it offered a way the Pope could do so with minimum embarrassment. It was widely expected that he would gratefully follow its advice but instead he reaffirmed the traditional teaching. He thought he was responding to the prompting of the Holy Spirit but others saw him as caving in to the frightening visions of his curial colleagues. Change, they told him, would diminish his power and that of his successors. Thus, in a single document, the Pope restored the discredited philosophy and theology of Vatican I and rejected both modern biology and the relevance of modern science.

The reaction to Humanae Vitae was far greater than Rome ever thought it would be, reflecting the poverty of its understanding of sex. It expected docile obedience. What it got was disdain. Once people realized that they could ignore the preaching of the uninformed, rebellion spread to other issues. There was a mass exodus of both clergy and laity, leaving the church more conservative than it had ever been. During the long reign of Pope John Paul II, only the most conservative and loyal men were made bishops and cardinals until there were no progressive voices left in the hierarchy. Seminaries became redoubts of reaction. Pope Benedict XVI has spoken of all this shrinkage as a good thing. A smaller but more pious church in thrall to the hierarchy is now seen as the basic objective of his pontificate. This leaves him free to restore the Latin mass, renew the issuance of indulgences and ignore the efforts to heal the many rifts within the Christian world. Having lost its intellectual and spiritual credibility after Vatican II, the church now has shed countless adherents throughout the developed world. It flourishes only in Africa with a unique blend of conservative dogma, animist liturgy and a sexually active clergy that includes married bishops.

Maybe the Pope is right and all the decline and decay—or, as he would have it, the purification—is for the best. It is at least arguable that the institutional church has historically been a socially destructive force wherever and whenever it has managed to gain influence. As the English historian (and devout Catholic) Lord Acton said in reference to Pius IX’s power grab, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The signs of corruption are everywhere. Christendom has become fragmented into hundreds of sects split along every conceivable doctrinal fault line. The priests and bishops rant and rave about trivia such as female altar servers, the granting of indulgences and the return of the Latin mass. The Pope flies off to Africa and announces that condoms increase the transmission of HIV/AIDS. The Vatican Bank has been involved in global laundering of Mafia drug money and has been credibly accused of laundering assets of Holocaust victims. The Pope offends Muslims and Jews not deliberately but through ignorance and negligence. Unspeakable sexual perversities have been uncovered among the clergy of country after country. It is hard to imagine that any of this is what Jesus had in mind. It is however the historical reality. The issues change but the lust for power has been a constant from the beginning.

Ever since the church emerged from the catacombs after the Edict of Milan in 313, it has been ruled by a small self-perpetuating coterie of mostly Italian churchmen who acquired riches and power by threatening illiterate peasants with eternal damnation. The popes claimed temporal dominion over most of Europe by virtue of the so-called Donation of Constantine, a document forged in 752 for Pope Stephen II. They crushed the Gospel of Love and replaced it with a God of fire and brimstone, a God whose mind only they understood and a God from whom they alone held the keys to salvation. It was all a fraud, a monumental scam perpetrated on humanity’s most important idea, the existence of a personal God who acts in history. The Judeo-Christian version of that idea constitutes the wellspring of western civilization, the great foundational myth of nearly one-third of the human race. Even in its contemporary weakened state, it is the most important force holding society together and making culture possible. As Jung wrote, without myth the individual “…like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.” [2] The idea that any institution would attempt to hold this heritage hostage as its exclusive birthright must be counted one of history’s great crimes.

How have they gotten away with it for so long? In the first instance, they rely on Mathew’s report of a conversation in which Jesus asked the apostles what people were saying about him. They gave various answers and he then he asked what they themselves thought. Peter answered for them (Matthew 16:16-20):

Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ. [3]

This is a breathtaking grant of absolute power. Taken literally, it makes Peter a God. Remember, God had mocked Job with the questions (Job 38:33), “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?” Peter can answer, “Yes, I can.” If Peter could pass this power to his successor Linus and so on down to Benedict XVI, then it follows that whatever any of them promulgated was bound in heaven. Whatever. Does that include all those medieval incumbents who claimed the Donation of Constantine was genuine? In a word, yes. Obviously, a land grab, however flamboyant, is not a matter of faith and morals but the church is not relying on the notion of papal infallibility. Rather, it simply asserts that it enjoys, “…the absolute fullness of this supreme power….over all and each of the Churches and over all and each of the pastors and faithful.” [4] The ellipses in that sentence are not misleading; they are meant to cut through the underbrush of Vaticanspeak which contains enough ambiguity to sound slightly more reasonable.

Matthew is the most rigid of the three synoptic gospels and is the only one that includes anything remotely like the “Peter” clause. The scholars of the Jesus Seminar reject the quotation absolutely. [5] There is no question that Peter was regarded as “first among equals” of the apostles but there is no early tradition that he ever acted as the bishop of Rome. There is not a single shred of evidence that he even knew a man named Linus or thought he could pass on his absolute power. The church cites the last sentence of Matthew (28:20), “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” But this is the last thing Jesus says and he says it to reassure his frightened apostles. They certainly took it to mean that the end of the world was imminent. [6]

If though you want to take Matthew 16 as the literally true word of God, I will not be able to dissuade you but I will be able to accuse you of blasphemy. To say that God would support each and every pronouncement of the Popes down through the ages is to say that God is willing to accept a very long list of sins from simony to genocide. To give a single example, consider Pope Innocent III’s Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) and the Inquisition that followed it. Tens of thousands of Cathar “heretics” were slaughtered in the name of orthodoxy including at least 1,200 women and children who took refuge in the Cathedral of St. Nazairethe in Beziers on July 22, 1209. Anyone who thinks that the slaughter of innocents was bound in heaven or that the Christian God of Love approved or accepted this barbarity is surely saying that said God is a criminal psychopath.

As an institution, the Roman Catholic church cannot and does not deserve to survive. There will always be Catholics because, as Father Greeley says, the people love the stories, the saints and the unmatched pageantry. They need the mythology whether they believe it or not. The Poles need their Black Madonna of Częstochowa and need to believe it was painted by the evangelist Luke in the home of the Holy Family. Mexicans need Our Lady of Guadalupe and need to believe that her image appeared miraculously on the back of a peasant’s cloak in 1531. Pope John Paul II needed to believe that he was protected from an assassin’s bullet through the intervention of Our Lady of Fatima. It must have made him feel very special that the mother of God thought it necessary to spare his life. In all such cases, the "belief" is defended vigorously specifically because it is fragile.

Nevertheless, the institutional church is fast becoming an empty shell, a whited sepulcher run by a little man with a big megaphone like the Wizard of Oz. Certainly that’s been the drift of things since Giovanni Montini was elected pope in 1963. When we reach the “tipping point” the collapse will be quick. Even now, the Vatican has all the trappings of a theme park and the major landmarks of European Catholicism are little more than tourist attractions.

It is hard to predict the future of Christianity except to say that the good news of the gospel will continue to play a role in the lives of many people. It seems likely that Protestant denominations will continue to divide and multiply. The Catholic church might work as a loose confederation of diverse congregations sharing a commitment to the Gospel of Love and a heritage of liturgies and stories. This is the Quaker model and would be appealing to people willing to take an active interest in theology. We might also see the emergence of non-episcopal federations whose congregations “called” their own ministers and whose members looked to leaders generally recognized by large segments of the community. This is the Jewish model, more organized than the Quakers and more likely to promote broad agreement on theology and belief. However structured, some such congregations, perhaps most, will call married priests and women to the pulpit, embrace a more liberal sexual ethic and encourage gay marriage. Such deviations will be seen as schismatic and, perhaps even heretical, by the remnants of the old church and the new movement will itself be subject to divisions similar to those that arose (and continue to arise) in Anglicanism and Lutheranism.

However it works itself out, Catholicism will become a bottom-up religion rather than the top-down one it has been for most of its existence. Ultimately, Christianity itself may become prey to a long and painful period of fading belief and cultural irrelevance. To prevent this will necessitate the development of a new theology for the twenty-first century. This is not as strange as it may sound to the ears of a Catholic raised on the immutability of truth. Indeed, there may be a good start on such a theology in the thinking of Harvey Cox. Cox has developed a Christian theology rooted in the realities of the modern world, by which he means primarily what he calls “secularization.” Over the years, his ideas have been refined but his point of departure is a celebration of modernism which he sees as the rise of urban civilization and the related collapse of traditional religion. Secularization refers to the way people understand their relationships with one another and it is not surprising that the massive dislocations brought on by urbanization have profoundly affected this understanding. As he stated it in the introduction to his first book:

What is secularization? The Dutch theologian C. A. van Peursen says it is the deliverance of man, “first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and his language.” It is the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed worldviews, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols. It represents “defatalization of history,” the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that he can no longer blame fortune or the furies for what he does with it. Secularization occurs when man turns his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time (saeculum = “this present age”). It is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1944 called “man’s coming of age.” [7]

It will surprise no one that this was and is not well received by conservative Christians including Catholics. It cuts too close to Nietzsche's "God is dead" philosophy which concludes that religion is no longer capable of acting as the source of morality. For Cox, though, the question is what causes the secularized person to be alienated from the traditional idea of God. “Is it the loss of the experience of God, the loss of the existence of God in Christianity, or the lack of adequate language to express God today?” He agrees with Nietzsche that religion can no longer pretend to offer “…an inclusive and commanding system of personal and cosmic values and explanations.” But he differs in proposing that modern man still encounters God in the “events of social change” which include both momentous transformations such as the civil rights movement and ordinary daily transactions with lovers, clients, co-workers and others.

A new religion might take many forms but it would certainly be based on at least three theological premises. First and most important, God is a personal, unique and transcendent experience, not a corporate rule book. Second, God is ultimately love and love relationships without exception are the only metaphors through which we can experience and relate to God. Finally, God is our destiny, the “Point Omega” toward which we and all history are somehow directed. This, however, is not a matter of faith or belief but of hope.

In any such formulation, the role of the specialist—the one called to minister—is to help each individual find his or her pathway to a satisfying relationship with the instinctive sense of the divine in the here and now. In the words of the old folk hymn, “There’s a road that leads to glory / through a valley far away. / Nobody else can walk it for you, / they can only point the way.”

Notes

1. Pius IX was highly regarded by his successors several of whom moved to have him canonized against the wishes of the Italian government. John Paul II finally beatified him in 2000. His incorrupt body is displayed in a glass tomb in the Basilica of Saint Lawrence outside the Walls in Rome.

2. Symbols of Transformation translated by R.F.C. Hull from the fourth Swiss edition of 1952. Reprinted in Violet Staub De Laszlo, (editor), The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, The Modern Library, 1993, p. 5.

3. New International Version, 1984, International Bible Society. The word “Hell” is “Hades” in the original and in many other modern translations. I believe this is because the Greek term hades was used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew term sheol. But the term hades always refers to the abode of the dead in general, rather than the abode of the wicked.

4. The Dogmatic Constitution Pastor aeternus issued by Vatican I, July 18, 1870, Chapter 3, Paragraph 9.

5. Robert W. Funk and Julian V. Hills (General Editors), The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, Macmillan, 1993, pp. 206-207.

6. This is obvious from the Acts of the Apostles and is made explicit by Paul in 1 Crointhians 15:51: “Behold I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed.” In this context, “sleep” means “die.” Paul expected that Christ would return in glory within the lifetime of people then living.

7. The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, Revised Edition, Macmillan, 1966.

THEOLOGY OF CONTRACEPTION

Jerry Harkins

Quadragesimo Anno is the title of an encyclical letter of Pope Pius XI which explicated what became one of the principal themes of Twentieth Century Catholic teaching, the notion that capitalism and communism pose equal threats to society, the church and individuals. The title refers to the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s first tentative invocation of that theme which was immediately and forever overshadowed by its daring and unexpected embrace of the rights of labor. In the year of grace 2008, there was no celebration of the anniversary of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s tragic and unexpected condemnation of “artificial” birth control. [1] The occasion, however, was marked by a New York Times op-ed piece which noted that, “Today polls show that Catholics, at least in the West, dissent from the teaching on birth control, often by majorities exceeding 80 percent. But at the official level, Catholicism’s commitment to Humanae Vitae is more solid than ever.” [2]

The tragedy lies precisely in that moral chasm between Catholics and their leaders. The Times essay says that forecasts of the demise of Catholicism as the result of that encyclical, “…badly underestimated the capacity of the Catholic Church to resist change and to stand its ground.” But such optimism flies in the face of what has already happened: Catholicism may still be alive but the institutional church is in its death throes. Everywhere it is closing doors and selling off assets. Nowhere can it attract new priests in anywhere near the numbers needed, nor can it make the priesthood more attractive. Humanae Vitae was, far and away, the most important cause of this decline. Moreover, it was unnecessary and even foolish.

Ever since it emerged from the catacombs, the Catholic church has tried to micromanage the sex lives of its adherents (and everyone else but that is another story). [3] It has generally regarded sex as God’s punishment for the sin of Adam and Eve. Many of the church’s best thinkers have taught that any sexual expression 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. ” [4] 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.” [5] 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 emphasizes 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." [6]

The emphasis on the “unitive” significance of sex is a recent development and the notion that God established an inseparable connection between it and procreation is even more recent. Between Vatican I and Vatican II, the “traditional” teaching was that procreation alone was the primary end of marriage and that there were two secondary ends, a remedy for concupiscence and the mutual help of the spouses. Vatican II came close to reversing these priorities. Gaudium et Spes ultimately retains the primacy of procreation but speaks glowingly of the marital bond, “…this many-faceted love, welling up as it does from the fountain of divine love and structured as it is on the model of His union with His Church.” The church began to further enhance the role of the unitive function when it became necessary to conform two antithetical positions, the limited but essentially liberal teaching of Vatican II and the reactionary strictures of Humanae Vitae. It said that the idea traces 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.” [7] The logic here is elusive but need not detain us.

I have been unable to discover exactly what the church means by “unitive.” Literally, of course, it means that sex tends to bring people together which seems obvious enough. Perhaps it is meant to suggest that sex can actually strengthen the love between people, another obvious notion that you can find in recent pronouncements. Even 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. And that remains the root position of the Catholic Church.

The increased emphasis on unitive is welcome. Many medieval theologians were convinced that sex is so tainted that children born out of wedlock are forever doomed, and Saint 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. 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. [8]

Of course sex brings people together. But the two functions—unitive and procreative—are quite different. There is a great deal of sexual attraction in the world that is unconsummated (i.e., non-procreative) and a great deal of sex that does not unify couples. If the modern church were entirely candid, it would admit that it grudgingly accepts the unitive function of sex only because it thinks it must to strike a rational note in its otherwise absurdist teaching on sex. It 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. If sex can sometimes be employed for unitive purposes only, then it follows that unitive and procreative are morally independent.

Any reflective married couple could explain to the church that love is (a) real, (b) a sublime and comforting force during life’s pilgrimage, and (c) that it changes over time, becoming deeper and more complex. Sex plays a role in this but that role is destructive as often as it is constructive. Sex is not love and is not the cause of love. It is a concomitant certainly. It is a constant, often urgent, often distracting presence. Desire may ebb and flow but sex itself is a constant aura in our conscious and subconscious lives. It is there whether or not we are “in love” and the church’s morality should begin with the proposition that God put it there. There is a marvelous story about Pope Paul VI’s Birth Control Commission. A very conservative Jesuit, objecting to any change in the teaching, asked, “What then with the millions we have sent to hell if these norms were not valid?” An American expert, Patricia Crowley, replied, “Father Zalba, do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?” [9]

Sex between humans is a complex dance, as much mental as genital. Contraception allows partners to respond more effectively to this complexity and in this sense the church’s teaching on contraception is immoral. [11] 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, not to mention his latent misogyny.

All the theology is simplistic and ultimately 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” [10] What divine law? The one the Holy Spirit whispered in the ear of the Pope. Because I say so.

That’s all, folks. That is the theology of contraception as taught by the Catholic Church. There is no grand theory, no compelling logic, no biblical support and certainly no scientific evidence. Of course, as with other doctrines, there is the theory of “natural law” as propounded by Thomas Aquinas. If there is such a thing then either everyone knows its specific provisions or some law giver has to say what they are. Aquinas himself was not shy about assuming the latter role and in this modesty he is part of a long line of teachers that includes John Calvin, Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart. The church relies on its own “teaching office” or magisterium. It claims a mandate from Jesus to teach all nations [11] and an assurance that what it teaches will be binding. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” [12] Whatever covers a lot of ground. The church burned Joan of Arc for the heresy of cross-dressing and condemned Galileo for the heresy of writing that the planets revolve around the sun. Were either of these actions “bound” in heaven? Of course, both were more or less rescinded and so, presumably, became unbound. Now maybe you think the Spirit protects the church only when it speaks on matters of faith and morals. But (a) it gets to say what constitutes faith and morals, and (b) if the motion of the solar system was not faith and morals, why was heliocentricity heretical? Not to mention cross-dressing. Throughout its history, the “teaching office” has been a bureaucracy of Wonderland and most of the popes have been servants of the Red Queen.

Many individuals and institutions have claimed to be infallible. The aforementioned Pat Robertson, for one, has regular communications with God who tells him the most horrifying things. “This Page,” the editorial voice of The New York Times, issues some 1,500 dicta every year on a dazzling variety of subjects. As far as it can remember, it has never experienced the heartbreak of error. But there is something especially frivolous about a small group of elderly celibates purporting to dictate universal sexual morality. Frivolous and embarrassing, dangerous to believers, and, in its defiance of the divine wisdom it purports to believe in, just possibly blasphemous.

Notes

1. There have been several lesser recognitions of the event, all of them invoking similar language and logic. Perhaps the most important of these was the address of Cardinal James Stafford, the Apostolic Penitentiary, to the 27th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Fertility Care Professionals, June 11, 2008. The title of the speech which may be found on the Vatican website is “The Year of the Πειρασμός [peirasuos] – 1968.” Peirasuos is the Greek word for temptation and refers to the heroic virtue of His Eminence when, as a young priest, he had been tempted to agree with others at a meeting of Baltimore priests called to denounce Humanae Vitae. AAFCP is an organization dedicated to promoting the Creighton version of the rhythm method of birth control. This method appears to require elaborate record keeping and it promotes “selective” rather than “spontaneous” intercourse.

2. John L. Allen Jr., “The Pope vs. the Pill,” July 27, 2008.

3. What is true of the Catholic church is generally true of the entire Christian enterprise. In the Protestant world, there are sects that are 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.

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

5. Ibid., Chapter 12.

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

7. 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)

8. The definitive work on this subject is Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe by James A. Brundage (The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

9. For a definitive account of the work of the Papal Birth Control Commission, see: Robert McClory, Turning Point, Crossroad, 1995.

10. The medieval canonist Gratian considered that contraceptive actions were minor sins on a par with excessive eating or oversleeping. This is interesting because Gratian was among the most conservative of the commentators on matters of sexuality.

11. Matthew 28:19-20.

12. Matthew 16:19. See also Matthew 18:18. There are similar mandates in Mark 16:15 and Acts 1:7.

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.