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Saturday, January 01, 2005
Further Thoughts On Sex And Catholicism
Here's a relevant passage from George Weigel's The Truth Of Catholicism, a recent book considered by many to be one of the best contemporary Catholic apologetics:
Catholic teaching on issues of sexual morality is incomprehensible outside the Church's conviction that there is a vocation to sexual love that must be understood like any other Christian vocation: as a means of living the Law of the Gift, the call to self-giving inscribed in the human heart. The vocation to sexual love is one of the ways in which Christians become the kind of people who can live with God forever.When we locate sexual ethics within the broader horizon of a genuinely humanistic ethics, an ethics of beatitude, the first moral question shifts from "What am I forbidden to do?" to "How do I live a life of sexual love that conforms to my dignity as a human person?" From inside the context of human dignity, certain things that abuse the truth of sex are still not to be done, but they are to be avoided because they demean our dignity and wound the communion of persons that chaste sexual love is needed to enhance.
If sexual love is an expression of giving and receptivity between persons who have made a profound commitment to each other, premarital sex violates the dignity and integrity of love. Christians, as one moral theologian nicely puts it, make love only with people to whom they have made promises -- and serious promise making, of the sort involved in the complete gift of self that sexual love represents, is not transitory or serial. Self-abuse, or masturbation, is sexual solipsism, and for that reason violates the integrity of the person and the integrity of love. When love is confused with self-pleasuring, our capacity to give ourselves as true lovers to another withers. Pornography is an abuse of sexual expression that reduces other human beings to objects for the viewer's gratification. In the illusory world of pornographic sex, a world in which women are the primary victims, no one can learn the virtues of self-giving love. Rape is the clearest example of what the Church means when it says that there are "intrinsically evil acts": acts that are evil in themselves and that no combination of circumstances can justify. The forcible violation of another person is perhaps the most profound assault on human dignity imaginable; it is, in fact, a form of torture. By its very wickedness it illustrates the truth it denies: genuinely human sexual love is always self-giving love between free human beings.
[...snip...]
Catholic teaching on homosexual sex has been bitterly assaulted by gay rights activists, not only because most active homosexuals flatly reject what the Church teaches, but because the Catholic Church seems to be the primary institutional barrier to the legalization of gay marriage and to the legal acceptance of homosexuality as the equivalent of race under civil rights law. The Church does in fact teach that homosexual acts are morally wrong because they violate the iconography of sexual differentiation and complementarity that make sexual love possible as an act of mutual giving and reciprocity, and because they are, by nature, incapable of being life-generating. The Church does not teach that homosexuality, as an orientation, is itself sinful. It does teach what many, perhaps even most, homosexuals experience: that this form of sexual attraction is a trial and a burden.
Gay activists often charge the Church with a willfuil failure to acknowledge their difference and with antigay "prejudice." But there is no prejudice here. The Catholic Church flatly rejects the prejudiced claim that homosexuals are, somehow, inhuman or subhuman. In the Catholic view of things, homosexuals are human persons called to live the Law of the Gift inscribed in the human heart just like everyone else. Just like others, homosexuals in today's society will struggle to live chastely -- to live the integrity of love in self-giving and to avoid sexual acts that are, by their nature, morally disordered because they are acts of self-assertion rather than self-gift. No serious Catholic imagines that this is easy for anyone. In their struggles, homosexually oriented men and women ought to find support in the Catholic Church, a Church of sinners from the beginning of its existence.
This passage, which does accurately reflect Catholic doctrine on sexual conduct, is filled with much beauty and grace -- but to what extent are its dicta mandated by normative statements from Christ? To what extent is it a compendium of recommendations and idealistic would-that-it-were-always-sos?
One of the imperatives of opinion-editorial is that, when discussing a controversial phenomenon, one must always make clear whether one is for or against it. Your Curmudgeon is a Catholic by mature choice and after much hard consideration and self-examination. He regards the Catholic sexual exegesis as very good, a set of guides to living well that could hardly be bettered by any alteration or expansion -- but does that mean that in departing from them, one has sinned in the eyes of God? Who has said so, and on what authority?
This isn't the first time your Curmudgeon has ventured into the sexual minefields. It probably won't be the last. The central problem is whether the Roman Catholic Church -- or any other Christian faith, for that matter -- has gone ultra vires in its pronouncements on the subject. It's the sort of question your Curmudgeon, innately suspicious of arbitrary claims of authority, is incapable of leaving alone.
Comments
FP,
Can you send me a pointer to more information concerning “The Law of the Gift”?
ThanksPosted by Gerard Van der Leun on 01/01/2005 at 01:32 PMAs you point out, there is a lot that is admirable about the church’s teachings on sexuality. There is also a history of the church using it’s power in an ill-advised manner. As my theology professors often said to me; there are times when following the law of the church is in itself sinful, you must act with an informed conscience. The only way to have an informed conscience is to exercise it often. And everyone screws up. Your relationship with your creator is up to you, not the church.
Posted by og on 01/01/2005 at 02:02 PMDear Gerard,
Here is another George Weigel article, mostly about John Paul II, in which he alludes to the concept as one of the Holy Father’s key formulations. I have yet to find the essay in which the Pope first articulated it, though. Research continues.
All my best,
FranPosted by Francis W. Porretto on 01/01/2005 at 02:04 PMI’m not a Catholic and the Christian religion of my childhood was protestant (as low as you can get on the “low church” scale), so I have only a cursory understanding of Catholicism and its “requirements.”
I never found this stance, however, to be at all hypocritical. The vow of chastity for priests, monks, and nuns was wholly consistant with the prohibition on homosexual acts. I always understood that all sexual acts (be they homosexual or otherwise) was only to occur when certain requirements were met. The vow of chastity was never stated as being easy--in fact, it was damned difficult. The most difficult, in fact, because it is a daily battle against the “man self” versus the “better or God-like self.”
What I find so interesting is that many religions (beyond Christianity) have celibacy vow type things, or pledges of some sort to abstain from carnal or “flesh” pleasures.
I get this, even though I’d never choose it.
Since, last I looked, Catholicism was optional (no Spanish Inquisitors on U.S. soil for quite some time), I do not see why anyone gets upset with Catholic doctrine (or any religion’s doctrine in these matters). If you want to be a member of that club, then you have to comply with that club’s rules. If you don’t want to comply with the rules, don’t join the club, or form one of your own with different rules.
I can respect anyone who makes a pledge and takes a vow, even if I’d not take the same one.
My Granny, back in the days, became a member of the Temperance Union. She took a vow. Long after the public morays on drinking changed, and prohibition came in and out, she never drank--EVER. She’d made a pledge and taken a vow. It didn’t matter that things changed. She was a woman worthy of tremendous respect, even if you disagreed with her choices.
Posted by Mrs. du Toit on 01/01/2005 at 02:24 PMI enjoyed this post and responded to it here.
http://northwesternwinds.blogspot.com/2005/01/truth-beauty-and-doubt.html
(Trackbacks aren’t working tonight)
Posted by on 01/03/2005 at 01:42 AM
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