Traina: Media sex-obsessed? So is Catholic Church

Modern magazines, movies, television and advertising seem to be obsessed with sexual orgasm, said Cristina Traina in her workshop "Reenvisioning Sexuality." Unfortunately, she noted, so is the Catholic Church. Through much of its history, the Church has understood sexuality almost exclusively in terms of intercourse, said Traina, who teaches religion and ethics at Northwestern University. Therefore, she said, the very mention of sex arouses concern and alarm.

To illustrate her point, she asked the overflow audience at her presentation to call out words that immediately come to mind when the expression, "Roman Catholic Church and sex," is mentioned. The response was depressingly hilarious. Shouted out were exclamations like "sin," "don't," "no," "shame," "guilt," "impure thought," "no small sins," "abstinence," "Humanae Vitae," and "five kids."

In reality, said Traina, genital intimacy is but one piece of a much larger landscape called sexuality. She asked the audience to think of all the persons with whom they share some physical manifestations of affection, including parents, children, spouse, friends, neighbors, even co-parishioners. Yet with only one such person, presumably, is sexual intercourse regularly practiced.
Furthermore, noted Traina, by presenting marital intercourse as the "only morally significant act" in marriage, the Church puts exaggerated weight and emphasis on this one activity, thereby leading couples to expect too much from the fragile sexual union. This, ironically, is precisely what modern secular culture does through the entertainment and media industries. The remedy in Traina's view is a more comprehensive, inclusive view of sexuality which neither fears nor idolizes the flesh. She proposed Jesus as a model of the fully human person - touching and embracing others, eating, drinking, laughing, spitting, weeping - experiencing his existence as a sensuous bundle of flesh.