I. Power and Sex as Alternate Concerns
Sex becomes a problem when power becomes a problem.
The reason why the Gospels deal so little with sexual concerns derives from
their preferred focus on power issues. Indeed, the New Testament at large has
little over-all interest in sexual ethics.
Sex becomes a central theme as authority and power escalate in importance. If
the power equation in life is balanced, the sexual equation is automatically
adjusted.
Since Jesus resists so regularly power as a defining characteristic of his life,
sex is not of utmost significance in his preaching.
Jesus rejects power for himself in the secular and religious categories of his
day. Notice his behavior.
He does not want to be king when people offer this to him. He does not allow
the sword even when this may rescue him. He tells Pilate he has no interest
in political power but only in a kingdom of love. He keeps a distance from priesthood
and wealth. When he heals, he does not seek submission from others but faith.
The Easter apparitions are not a summons to retribution or redress of injustice
but a call to peace and forgiveness and mission and the Spirit.
The preaching of Jesus is consistent with his behavior.
If the Kingdom of God is within us, then institutional or ecclesial power does
not justify us.
If love is the hallmark of discipleship, then hierarchy is of marginal value.
If forgiveness is a sign of the Spirit, then the heart is where salvation happens.
If we are judged by God in terms of how we treat one another, then vulnerabilities
trigger compassion rather than dominance or advantage.
One sees all this at work quite strikingly in Jesus’ teaching on divorce.
It is not divorce as such that Jesus prohibits.
Matthew and Paul both understand this and write exceptions into the earlier
absolute prohibition of divorce in Mark. The Catholic Church expanded these
exceptions over the centuries of the first millennium.
The intent of Jesus becomes clear when one realizes that Jewish law and custom
of the time defined a married woman as property. Divorce was an exclusively
male prerogative of power over a woman who was juridically his possession. Adultery
is not a sexual but a property, power issue.
The Catholic Church today sees divorce as an essentially sexual issue. A marriage
is not truly permanent until it is consummated. A second marriage after divorce
is allowed if there is no sexual relationship in the second marriage.
Jesus, on the other hand, limits, not sexual options but, rather, the ability
to own, control and dismiss another person.
Power over others, controlling others, is attacked in its very root by the preaching
of Jesus. Hear these themes in the light of later institutional, religious and
gender power over others.
The Kingdom (Reign) of God is within you.
Love one another as I have loved you.
The Master has come to serv.e
Forgive us our sins as we forgive others.
Come, blessed; for I was homeless and in prison…
A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one.
Unless you become like little children, you will not enter the Kingdom (Reign) of God.
Wherever in the whole world this Gospel is preached, what she has done shall be told in memory of her.
Mary Magdalen announced to the disciples: I have seen the Lord.
Blessed are the merciful…blessed are the peacemakers.
Do not be afraid.
The spirit anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
A. A Structural Reflection
Nonetheless, it is naïve, even perilous to suppose that a movement with
a world-wide mission could function without authority and law, structures and
penalties. It is necessary, however, to discern whether these elements have
the same gravity as the Gospel which is being proclaimed. These elements are
indispensable; it remains to be seen what the consequences of resisting them
should be.
Individualism, we know, is an asset of the highest order. It becomes, however,
a liability of immeasurable proportions if it recognizes no responsibility for
the common good.
If one could imagine the primitive Christian community, before hierarchy and
monarchy, before clerical and lay categories, before creedal doctrines and canon
laws, one might ask what its needs for structural survival were.
The community would require a structure to:
preserve its memory (rooted in Jesus and the apostles)
care for its people (through word and sacrament)
provide for its future (by development and new initiatives)
The earliest response to these needs is the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, within
the first generation of Christians after Jesus. There, these three requirements
are addressed and a decision to become a radically Gentile community is formulated.
Later, the first four ecumenical councils will craft the trinitarian and christological
creeds. In the second millennium, three ecumenical councils were especially
significant. The Council of Constance rescued the Church when the papacy failed
and it established the superiority of Council to Pope. The Council of Trent
responded to the Reformation. The Reformation called for a radical rethinking
of how the memory, the pastoral care, and the future of the community should
be considered. Vatican II was a deeper response to the Reformation and an effort
to come to terms with the Enlightenment, modernity, and democracy.
History shows that the Council is the most sophisticated, inclusive, and influential
way to shape the Church.
Power and authority issues are best solved in a Council. The papacy tends to
use power absolutely and narrowly and it, therefore, gives us some of out most
inept sexual teaching. The Council is more diffuse and even temporary. It is
less likely to seek absolute power and its very structure resists narrowness.
In an age of globalization and instant communication, in a time of democracy
and universal education, the Council emerges even more credibly as the best
structure for the collegial government of the Church. It must meet more regularly
(every twenty-five years the Council of Constance decreed) and automatically
(without a papal veto to delay it). When this power equation is addressed adequately,
the sexual teaching of the Church, deliberated in Council, will be more healthy,
less absolute and narrow.
Unless the power context of the present Church is reformulated, the sexual life
of the Church will be dysfunctional.
Sex, we see, is an ecclesial issue.
The Council is the best guarantor we have that the memory of Jesus, the care
for his disciples, and the future of this community are safe. A sexual teaching,
in accord with these priorities, is best formulated in Council. The papacy is
an interval office, even if permanent, to function between Councils, not a substitute
for them.
B. A Path to Freedom
The point of power or authority over others is their liberation, not their confinement;
their autonomy, not their subservience.
Notice again the behavior of Jesus in this regard.
He sends his disciples on a missionary journey where they are independent of
him. He tells them at the Last Supper that the Spirit will not come unless he
goes. The Spirit leads them to speak from their own hearts rather than in rote
memory of his words. At the end, bread and wine, discipleship and sacrament,
not structures, directives and rules, become the means by which memory is preserved,
care is given, and the future assured . Jesus, at the end, does not lecture
but speaks of faith in God and faith in the disciples.
It is true, of course, that structures and imperatives are not alien to discipleship
and sacrament but the stress ought to be on the capacity of the community and
the individual to find their way without excessive interference from those in
power. This includes the discovery of one’s own sexual path. The integrity
of a relationship assures sexual fidelity far more effectively than institutional
structures.
The Church, seen as institution and structure, is made marginal by the behavior
and teaching of Jesus. In much the same manner, a mother becomes marginal to
a child’s life once adulthood is achieved.
Democracy is a political way of allowing the State to become marginal to a citizen
whose freedom and rights, whose choices and values are paramount. Christianity
does its work best by making the Church marginal to a believer whose conscience
and calling, whose belief and ethics, personally formulated, matter more. It
is not conformity but remaining in the large context of the Church’s tradition
which makes a Catholic truly Catholic.
Thus, stress on the self does not necessarily lead to self-centeredness. Children
do not become egocentric by disengaging from their parents. Democracies do not
engender self indulgence. Nor do they create conditions which destabilize community
structures. Indeed, monarchies are more prone to indulgence and instability.
The Church drifted into monarchical and hierarchical structures not because
they have a biblical mandate but because they reflected the Roman imperial culture
of the time. The Church is far more decisively shaped by history than its administrators
sometimes realize. These aristocratic structures may even have served in their
time and on occasion, pastoral purposes. They are not, however, essential to
the Church and, indeed, in the modern world may well impede its mission.
The parables and metaphors of the Gospel marginalize the Church and address
the heart of the hearer.
It is not obedience to the father but forgiveness of the wayward son which reflects
more deeply God’s will for the Church. It is not conventional neglect
of the wounded, alien Samaritan but the spontaneous human desire to rescue which
sets a pattern for the Church. One must light the lamp of one’s own life,
open the door of one’s own heart, decide whether one has the resources
to build, and search out, on one’s own initiative, the lost sheep even
if it endangers for a time those sheep which are safe and comfortable. It is
not submissiveness but personal calling which leads us to invest our talents
wisely, to love those who harm us and to follow a prophet whom the religious
institution of the day rejects.
Sexual issues, likewise, are dealt with best in a community which does not dominate
and control. The question is not whether sexual activity becomes readily too
self-indulgent in the present but whether it was sufficiently personalized in
earlier centuries.
If, for example, sex is a man’s prerogative and a woman’s obligation,
if sex favors the creation of male children, then sex is already depersonalized
even, of course, before Christianity comes on the scene. Christianity often
reinforced male privileges and, furthermore, defined propagation as the essential
value which legitimized sex. Abortion, contraception, homosexuality, masturbation
will be rejected because they impede propagation.
Christianity adds to the burden of sexuality a number of especially dysfunctional
impediments. It teaches over the centuries:
the evil of pleasure in sexuality and the need to reduce this pleasure or eliminate it altogether
the transmission of original sin through the sexual acts which lead to conception (St. Augustine)
the ideal of an utterly sexless life (Council of Trent)
the validation of all these teachings as God’s will and, indeed, the necessity of compliance with these directives if one hoped to be saved
For many Christians, over many centuries, it was not their lack of faith and
love
which seemed to determine their salvation but their sexual behavior. Indeed,
this behavior never admitted what was called “poverty of material”.
The slightest sexual pleasure, even a thought too long permitted, was grave
matter, mortal sin, and merited eternal damnation.
The marginalization of the Church in the life of believers has been a persistent
and irreversible tendency through the Middle Ages to the modern period. It is,
I believe, the response of the Spirit to the unwarranted expropriation by the
institutional Church of the lives and consciences of its members.
If the Church is seen as central to salvation and as the unique locus for God’s
Revelation, if this Church makes sexuality a central theme of its teaching,
then sexuality is profoundly depersonalized and, indeed, becomes not a gift
form God but something perilous in the extreme. Sexuality must become decentralized
in Church teaching and the Church itself must become marginalized in all our
lives.
The sexual revolution of the twentieth century was possible because the Churches
lost their legitimacy in defining sexual behavior and mediating spirituality
exclusively. Although no responsible person endorses the excesses of this sexual
revolution, no responsible person, I suggest, wants to return to the sexual
repression and negativity of previous centuries. Nor indeed to the dominance
the institutional Church once had.
Women could not be liberated until sex was liberated from ecclesial confinement
and until the Church itself was liberated from its divine illusions. This is
one reason why the sexual revolution and women’s liberation happened outside
the Churches. The first casualty, even if not the intended target, of these
freedom movements was a Church which saw itself as central in everyone’s
lives and as indispensable to God’s plan.
Revolutions, nonetheless, never bring us utopia. The marginalization of the
Church and the personalization of sexual choices have their own liabilities.
We shall see later how the Church itself still has an important role to play
in our lives and how sexuality must still be subjected to some community standards.
For the moment, it is necessary to stress that the marginalization of the Church
and the sexual liberties of the present age are not necessarily evils or signs
of decadence or even secularity but are signs of grace, development, and virtue.
It is not only improper sexual expression but, even more tellingly, enforced
repression which creates sexual abuse. A system which claims that all pregnancies
must come to term, that all acts of marital intercourse must be open to conception,
that masturbation is always intrinsically disordered and homosexual activity
essentially perverted, a system which claims all this and allows no exceptions
or qualification, no nuance or resiliency, a system which insists, furthermore,
that this is God’s will for everyone and that it knows this infallibly
and that salvation itself is at issue in these directives, such a system, I
believe, does incalculably more damage to people than sexual permissiveness
does. Neither rigid sexual control or license is the ideal but one, I submit,
is far worse than the other.
Correlatively, the repeated teaching that only one religion is salvific and
that only one Church is true is an invitation to arrogance at best and violence
on occasion.
If unrealistic and depersonalized sexual norms oppress the individual, “true”
Churches oppress the human family. Depersonalized sexual norms make individuals
the victims of biology or of Church policies. “True” Churches oppose
the spirituality of which the human family is capable, a spirituality which
enriches everyone when it is honored and harms everyone when it is dismissed.
Sex, is, indeed, an ecclesial issue. It is, however, as we shall see now, even
more than this.
III. Sex is a Christological Issue
If the point of Christology is a revelation of our fundamental anthropology,
then here too we gain insight into our sexuality. The Christological question
is, therefore, not marginal for either Christians or, indeed, for the whole
human family.
What are some of the insights that the incarnation of God in human life offer
us?
We might say immediately that incarnation means that human life is essentially
divine and sacramental. If in the depths of our being, grace and the presence
of God are possible, then our humanity exceeds our capacity to quantify and
secularize it. In this sense, human rights are not only politically and civically
grounded, they flow from our very humanity. These rights are not a privilege
but an imperative. There is no sufficient human life without them. If God is
present in human life, then God is worshipped as human life is served and as
its essential integrity is preserved.
Christology tells us that the human heart is more sacred than our Scriptures
or sacraments or Churches. God creates the human heart. Biblical, ritual, religious,
institutional developments come later. The whole human family knows the human
heart. The later developments are less known and frequently divisive.
There is no adequate way of defining human life except through sexual categories.
Sexuality forces our definitions to become concrete and rescues them from abstractions.
It gives God the human face Christology requires.
Without sexuality, there is literally no future for the human family. Without
sexuality, our sense of love is less intense. Without sexuality, our definition
of God is less intimate. Without sexuality, God cannot be defined as lover,
spouse, mother, father but only as friend, companion or, more remotely, overseer
and judge. God as creator is conceived of very differently if we ourselves have
no capacity to conceive life.
Human rights, then, demand reproductive rights. These reproductive rights honor
us as creators and, indeed, as saviors. Salvation means to rescue and preserve.
The most enduring and universally comprehensible image of salvation is the parent
rescuing and preserving the child the parent sexually generated. The giving
of one’s own life for one’s children is understandable in every
part of the world. Such a parent is honored everywhere. A God who might do the
same for us is a God we can hardly keep from loving.
The divinity and sacramental dimensions of human life are Christology’s
first revelation to us.
There is more, however. This, too, is insightful for the whole human family.
Christology tells us that the motive behind incarnation is, love, not truth
or the elimination of error or the removal of sin but love. All other consequences
of incarnation must follow love. Otherwise we have a God who is a philosopher
or a supervisor but not a lover. And, then, we have no Christology.
If God is a lover of us, then, God has always been human. Love, therefore, is
as much a human event as it is a divine initiative.
If a tree falling in a forest makes no sound unless there is an ear to hear
it, so love coming from God is not love unless it is embodied in a human heart.
In this sense, the resurrection of the body is essential for the humanity of
God and for the preservation of love as an essentially human event. The risen
body of Christ is not only a human achievement but a divine event and is, therefore,
sacramental since this is what sacraments are, namely, human achievements and
divine events.
Lest we become too abstract, let us see how this plays out, so to speak, for
the whole human family.
If the point of the incarnation is love and if love is essential to our humanity,
then love is the essence of our sexuality. It is not incidental that sex is
called “making love” and that sexual fidelity grounds all our relationships.
Sex is preeminently the sacrament of life. All know this. It is also love’s
privileged expression. In the modern world, we have come to understand this
better than we did in the past. This understanding drives the reform of our
Churches and of our gender definitions. It has led us to redefine marriage and
ourselves and morality and God.
Sex abuse, then, is a crime against humanity, a Christological violation, an
ecclesial assault, a profound rejection of the humanity of the other and of
the divinity within them.
When our sexuality is handled badly, it is, therefore, not sex which is disordered
but our very humanity. Sex is dealt with dysfunctionally not only in overt abuse
but in covert repression. A repressed sexuality is a repressed humanity. It
leads to abuse and anger, to power games and rape, to a lust for dominating
and controlling, to self-righteousness and hypocrisy. At the heart of all ecclesial
corruption is sexual corruption. At the core of all Christological heresy is
the violation of the human heart. At the center of all human crime and sin and
evil is the denial of our human and reproductive rights.
Sex is kept in check, so to speak, given the boundaries all human deeds require,
not by norms extrinsic to it but by its own essence, which is love. Love is
the only issue which truly interests us; it is the experience which most fascinates
and attracts us; it is that before which we are perennially vulnerable and always
moved. Sex intrigues us so much because we were made for love.
The point of falling in love is making love. The point of making love is keeping
us from falling out of love.
Celibacy is useless as sexual control. It is only helpful when it, too, becomes
an act of love and approximates as closely as possible sexual love. Celibacy,
therefore, must be free and therefore provisional, intimate and tactile (even
if not genital), committed to community and rooted in that fidelity by which
we give ourselves to others. Celibacy cannot be juridically imposed in a healthy
manner. Like sex and marriage, it is existentially vitalizing or it is vitiated
in its very essence. Celibacy is the prolongation of the sexual intervals one
finds in all marriages for as long as this is required for the freedom and integrity
of the celibate. Celibacy, by any other means, is sexual abuse.
We may choose not to exercise our human and sexual and reproductive rights
but they cannot be justly taken from us.
A Church which makes a business of sexual repression and mandatory celibacy
creates disorder in its structures and dysfunctionality in the Christology it
proclaims.
It is impossible to have a community without pleasure. The pleasure of eating
makes eating a social bond. The pleasure of sex makes sex an act of love. Indeed,
the pleasure of not having sex when this is appropriate makes celibacy and friendship
a graced possibility.
There is no community without pleasure. Therefore, there is no marriage, except
in the most bizarre juridical definition of it, when the pleasure of eating
together and sleeping together are gone. It is naïve, of course, to suppose
that there is never distress and distance in a marital relationship. The over-all
environment of marriage, however, must give pleasure if that marriage is truly
what it claims to be.
The body is radically relational (we see this most clearly in sex and in pregnancy)
and it is, therefore, radically sexual.
It is not pleasure which is dangerous but the refusal to connect.
If Christ gives us a model of poverty, chastity and obedience, it is not because
possessions and sexual pleasure and autonomy are vices. It is because love,
of its very nature, turns concomitantly to frugality and generosity. Poverty
increases the joy of possessions; restraint makes sexual pleasure more intense;
listening to another allows one’s own voice to find its expression. Restraint
also allows the other possessions and pleasure and a hearing. In just such a
manner is community engendered, not by rules but by the sheer force of its own
love.
The fundamental value of all Christology is human community. When that community
is authentic, humanity discovers its divinity and the demons of power and sexual
dysfunctionality are expelled. Unless there is a viable human community, our
Christology has nowhere to go and incarnation becomes an impossibility.
IV. Experience and Revelation
Experience is the way we become human. It is constantly revelatory, from
consciousness to knowledge, through reason and moral awareness, into mysticism
and memory.
The most convincing testimony of the truth, today, is not authority or logic,
Scripture or tradition.
Experience is more persuasive than anything else.
Let us look briefly at what experience reveals to us of responsible sexuality
and the role of religion.
First, responsible sexuality.
The Global Ethic, promulgated by the Parliament of World Religions, makes clear
that all religious systems call for responsible sexuality. No culture has given
total endorsement to all sexual activity or allowed individuals to determine,
purely on their own authority what we may do with our sexuality. There are sexual
norms and prohibitions even without religion. Sexual guidelines originate from
our experience, long before they are institutionally formulated.
Contemporary experience stresses, as never before, that reproductive rights
belong to the individual and that their responsible expression requires mutuality
and community standards. There have always been community standards, as we have
seen. The new awareness in our experience of sexuality is a stress on rights
and on mutuality. If community standards seem less stringent today, rights and
mutuality are emphasized as never before in history. Rights pertain to the individual;
mutuality, to the other person.
Reproductive rights declare that the individual makes the decision for sexual
experience and determines the timing and number of children. These rights do
not require, as in the past, that pleasure and bonding be subordinated to propagation.
Rights must be exercised in the context of mutuality and community norms. This
context cannot deprive the individual of the very rights it is meant to foster.
An analogy might be made here with free speech. People have a right to speak
freely. This right cannot be justly abrogated. It must regard the mutuality
of the other’s right to free speech and it must fit in with community
norms. For example, one has no right to defame or degrade the other. Free speech
intends self-expression and integrity, not an assault on others.
The Global Ethic recognizes the imperative to speak the truth and the prohibition
of lying. The parameters by which all the particulars are safeguarded are set
by community norms. These norms emerge most appropriately from a free play of
ideas and dialogue not only within the community in question but in the force
field of world opinion, universal rights, global ethics and just plain common
sense.
Reproductive rights are a new category in human thought. Reproduction was once
seen preeminently as a duty or community dictate. Today people are aware that
the survival of the human family is not at issue in our sexuality the way it
was. Indeed it is not reproduction but responsible sexuality which defines people
more readily today in their social roles.
Until the modern age, sexual power and force over the other was more acceptable.
Men functioned with a double standard (polygamy and serial divorce were permitted
in the Hebrew Bible). In marriage, men set the sexual norms. A man might take
a concubine if his wife could not conceive; a married man did not commit adultery
if he had sex with a single woman; a widow had to have sex with her brother-in-law
if her husband died childless. In some parts of the world, a woman killed herself
when her husband pre-deceased her. Even today, female circumcision and the social
confinement of women victimize women.
Our problems with sexuality today are not trivial but they may be less dreadful
than those of the past we have cited. Reproductive rights are asserted but they
are balanced by a mutuality and equity which are new in human affairs and are
welcome.
Abortion and contraception have been more readily utilized in our day but it
is important to evaluate these choices in proper historical context.
Throughout the pagan world and all through the centuries of Christian European
culture, unwanted children were abandoned in great numbers. Indeed, there were
places assigned in the Roman Forum and, later, designated monasteries where
children were forsaken, anonymously, by distressed mothers. Often these children
were taken up by those, even monks, who sexually abused them or exploited them
for profit.
In 1198, Pope Innocent III opened the first foundling home when fishermen informed
him that their nets regularly retrieved from the Tiber River the bodies of drowned
infants. Without the resources to care for their children and without reproductive
choices or remedies, many parents left their children to die.
Without effective contraception, people had more children than their resources
allowed.
In any case, reproductive rights for the individual and mutuality in sexual
experience are positive developments and represent ethical progress.
Conclusion
Religion is more effective with sexual ethics when it is less specific (as Jesus
was in the Gospel). Pastoral care brings sexual crises to resolution less violently
and harshly than institutional mandates which preempt this care and force it
into unhelpful categories.
There are times when divorce is a moral imperative and times when it is simply
destructive. There are times when contraception is essential to responsible
parenting and times when it is intrinsically selfish. The list can be expanded
but the point is obvious.
Pastoral care needs to function under broad guidelines, with fewer specifics
and warnings. Sexual norms, formulated by institutions, are frequently self-serving,
politically charged, monarchically promulgated, and too restricted to evaluate
human behavior.
Allow me to conclude with a note about religion and Church.
People do not join Churches today to be defined by them. They enlist because
they sense the transcendent in their lives and need relief from an exclusively
utilitarian world. They do not seek sexual guidance but social contact and community.
They are not moved by the specificity of creeds or ethical systems. Indeed conservative
Christians are frequently no different from liberal Christians in their sexual
behavior and in the number of official Church policies they selectively ignore.
Fulminations against abortion and contraception have not kept Catholics, in
large numbers, from resorting to both in the same percentages that hold for
the general population. And Catholics who choose these options continue to see
themselves as Catholics and to take communion.
Today, people turn to the Churches to address the mystery in their lives, to cope with suffering and death, to find a hope the world at large does not always give.
Religion and the Church ought not to be total monarchical systems in which all
is determined in advance and unilaterally. Democracies, on the contrary, are
elective systems to the extent this is compatible with social order and human
rights. People now seek the Churches as elective and, as it were, democratic
systems.
This does not make the Church less dear. Do people in democracies love their
nation less? Does the Church one chooses with all one’s heart not become
an object of love nonetheless, perhaps even more ardently than the Church one
is compelled to serve? Does choosing one’s wife or husband make that person
less valuable than when others make the choice?
It is time for us to see power and sex in a new light for the sake of the Church
and for the sake of the Gospel which proclaims a Christ who rejects power far
more rigorously than sexual misdeeds.
Anthony T. Padovano