C for Chastity

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In my previous post, F for Freedom, I talked about one of the themes of Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures: freedom. Specifically, is the modern understanding of freedom as a matter of individual, radically unfettered self-expression compatible with the traditional Christian view of the inviolability of human life and dignity?

That comes down to, I suggested, a question of chastity. Although the pope doesn't say so outright in his book, it's clear he feels our dignity is best served by self-imposed chastity and not by radically free self-expression.

Of course, the word "chastity" conjures up images of sexual self-restraint, primarily. In the Catholic lexicon — and I say this as a Catholic — chastity is actually more than that.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser's The Shattered Lantern

"To be chaste means to experience things, all things, respectfully and to drink them in only when we are ready for them. ... Unbridled restlessness makes us unhealthily impatient for experience ... Greed and impatience push us toward irresponsible experience," writes Ronald Rolheiser, a Catholic priest, in The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God.

As I intimated in my prior post, when you combine the exigencies of "want to" and "now," you have a recipe for what Rolheiser calls "unbridled restlessness," the enemy of chastity. It doesn't really matter whether the urge for immediate gratification involves sex or not.

Still, self-indulgent sex is a biggie in our culture; we call it "hooking up." That's why it comes as no surprise that the Catholic Church opposes sex outside the confines of heterosexual marriage. It even opposes sex within marriage if one partner is using the other merely for personal gratification ... or even if both partners are treating each other as objects.


I ask myself all sorts of questions about the topic of sexual chastity as it is viewed within Christianity, and I find I can't answer a lot of them.

I don't really understand, for example, why homosexual relations are considered "objectively disordered" by the Church. Clearly, the pope's rhetoric in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures and elsewhere, combined with other things I have heard and read, implies that homosexual behavior is wrong because it is unchaste, which means he thinks it the handmaid of gratification and not of love. But is that true, always and everywhere? Is homosexual sex necessarily any more unchaste than married, heterosexual sex?

Also, I don't really understand why the Church finds fault with "artificial" means of birth control. The so-called "rhythm method" is permitted as "natural," but condoms and pills are prohibited as "unnatural." With the former, sex has to be avoided on certain days of the month, which may, I suppose, strengthen a couple's ability to postpone gratification in the name of chastity. Is that the not-so-hidden agenda here?


I also ask myself a lot of hard-to-answer questions about chastity in general, in the context of our popular culture today. The culture is not known for promoting abnegation and self-mastery, to say the least.

It seems rather to push us right up to the edge of truly "bad" behavior. Occasionally, some of us go way beyond the edge. When that happens publicly to a star of Hollywood or sports or the mass media, we talk about it for months.

Then there's the fictional "bad" behavior we see all the time on TV or movie screens. It used to be only the villain of the piece who misbehaved. Now the hero can too.

In fact, the popular culture seems to have turned into a giant sociological laboratory in which we're continually asking ourselves, "How far can we go?"

My question is, "Is this so bad?"


Let me put that question another way: "Is there any way we can be good Christians without a return to chastity as the Church traditionally defines it?"

(I'll sidestep the question as it applies to Jews, Muslims, and members of other religions. I have a hard enough time dealing with it in the Christian context.)

One might think that the answer to the question in that form is simple: if an individual freely opts to be a practicing Christian and accordingly chaste, there is no conflict. But, clearly, the pope urges a culture that promotes chastity not individually but communally ... chastity being the antithesis to the mandate of radically free self-expression which he finds at the core of secular values today.

In other words, if self-expression is to be reined in, in the name of what will it be done? Life and dignity. How would it be done? Manifestly, by opting not to express our freedom in certain ways. But if that is not going to turn back into just another way of expressing our radical freedom of choice as individuals, we would have to act in concert and be publicly and overtly chaste together ... which would change the culture drastically.

(To be continued in "M for Maturity" ... )