... a rally by pro-abortion rights Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton at St. Mary's University in San Antonio; a Georgetown University theologian's questioning whether Jesus offers the only road to salvation ... [and] ... a conference on teen pregnancy held on the campus of the College of the Holy Cross that included speakers from Planned Parenthood and NARAL.
Moreover,
St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke said St. Louis University basketball coach Rick Majerus should be disciplined for his comments in support of abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research; and Catholic bishops moved a theological seminar off Notre Dame's campus to protest an on-campus performance of the play "The Vagina Monologues."
And,
Bishops have criticized Georgetown [University] for hosting Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and allowing the establishment of a pro-abortion rights student club there. Conservative Catholics are complaining about plans to open a gay resource center soon at the school.
All this hubbub in the Catholic Church comes amid my personal quest to understand and deal with the ways in which my own beliefs conflict with the teachings of the Church.
Though I am a Catholic, I believe that abortion is morally permissible and that women need to have the right to choose. I believe that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with gay orientation or gay sex. I believe using artificial means of contraception such as condoms or the Pill violates no God-given precept. I think masturbation is natural and normal. Nor does sex without the benefit of marriage necessarily constitute a sin. I do not care to judge Larry Flynt of Hustler, or Bob Guccione of Penthouse, or Hugh Hefner of Playboy, simply on the basis that they extol sexual pleasure, frankness, and openness.
Though I am Catholic, I do not believe the Church is right to insist on an all-male, celibate priesthood. I do not believe Jesus offers the only road to salvation. And I certainly do not believe that a Catholic institution of higher learning ought to bar events and speeches by politicians whose views on such things as abortion are not in line with Church teachings.
I would like, then, to make the following sort of case. First of all, the traditional views of the Catholic Church about sex and related matters are deserving of the greatest historical respect. Second, they are now outdated.
As far as I can tell, the Church's traditional ideas about sex, etc., are pretty much identical with those of Christianity's august predecessor, Judaism, as described by conservative Jewish commentator Dennis Prager in "Judaism's Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism (and then Christianity) Rejected Homosexuality." If the greatest historical respect were not already due to the teachings concerning sex of the Catholic Church, they would certainly be due to the teachings of the foundational writings of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses which were the cornerstone of Judaism, and then of Christianity.
When Prager's article begins with
When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible. Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.
we are treated to a great kernel of historical truth in a very compact nutshell. Prager shows that Judaism, from its outset several thousand years ago, was the complete antithesis of all the other religions surrounding it in the ancient world. The pagan cultures gave their gods and goddesses sex lives, while sexual actings-out were part and parcel of human devotions to these deities.
Psychiatrist and sexual historian Norman Sussman describes the situation thus: "Male and female prostitutes, serving temporarily or permanently and performing heterosexual, homosexual oral-genital, bestial, and other forms of sexual activities, dispense their favors in behalf of the temple." Throughout the ancient Near East, from very early times, anal intercourse formed a part of goddess worship. In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan, annual ceremonial intercourse took place between the king and a priestess. Women prostitutes had intercourse with male worshippers in the sanctuaries and temples of ancient Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Corinth, Carthage, Sicily, Egypt, Libya, West Africa, and ancient and modern India. In ancient Israel itself, there were repeated attempts to re-introduce temple prostitution, resulting in repeated Jewish wars against cultic sex.
Prager goes on to show how
forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle ... ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.
As a result of Judaism's "placing controls on sexual activity," sex
could no longer dominate religion and social life. It was to be sanctified — which in Hebrew means "separated" — from the world and placed in the home, in the bed of husband and wife. Judaism's restricting of sexual behavior was one of the essential elements that enabled society to progress. Along with ethical monotheism [i.e., the belief that one morality for all humanity emanates from the One God], the revolution begun by the Torah when it declared war on the sexual practices of the world wrought the most far-reaching changes in history.
I personally agree with Prager of the importance of this radical departure in religious history, but disagree with him that the traditional Judeo-Christian outlook on sex is valid for all time.
Rather, I look at the modern attitude to sex as emerging out of and ending the dispute between ancient paganism and Jewish (then Christian, then Islamic) monotheism in the way that philosophers have called dialectical. First there is a thesis, in this case, pagan religious-sexual practices. Then comes an antithesis, the ethical monotheism of the Jews, carried forward in Christianity and then Islam. The thesis and antithesis seem to be wholly opposed, irreconcilable, either-or ideas. But then comes the synthesis, a merging together of the two earlier ideas in wholly unexpected ways.
For example, Prager says the Torah labeled homosexuality an "abomination," thus raising it to the highest level of censure. From the Bible's perspective, gay sex epitomizes any form of sex which, in the words of Martha Nussbaum, professor of philosophy at Brown University, "is understood fundamentally not as interaction, but as a doing of some thing to someone." It is therefore ugly and wrong.
But today we see gay men (and lesbian women) seeking to obtain the right to marry and establish the kind of union in which their sex acts can be fully interactive and mutually giving of, and to, one another. Gay sex no longer has to be a question of merely one person "doing" something to another. It no longer needs to be exploitive.
Prager says the Judaic revolution in religion "began the arduous task of elevating the status of women." He is right, and today's feminists have a lot to thank ethical monotheism for. Yet I don't think traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic sexual morality suffices to finish that arduous task.
The problem with it is that it makes a woman's womb — her reproductive capacity, her fertility, her womanhood — the property of men. As I wrote in this earlier post, the menfolk of the biblical Jewish tribe were required to participate in a sort of communal "anti-defilement covenant," in which:
Together, the men control each and every woman's sexuality from the cradle to the grave.
According to such a covenant, a woman's sexual chastity is a precious possession, to be guarded at all costs by its possessors: the men. The men collaborate to set up the rules of conduct and official ceremony by which this can reliably be done. In the case of the ancient Hebrews, the rules were said to have come to Moses from God.
The underlying notion is, again, that a woman's sexual and reproductive identity belongs to her husband, her father, her brothers (whose job it is to avenge any adultery or rape committed by or against her), and the tribe's menfolk in general (who are adjured, for the sake of domestic tranquility, to rein in their natural tendency to want to "lie with" this woman or that, and with the other as well).
There was even the custom of levirate marriage, in which a man was obliged to marry his brother's widow, lest her womb with its ability to conceive and give birth cease to be possessed lawfully by a man.
This husbanding — in both senses of the word — of a woman's womanhood did elevate the status of women, but at a price. Pagan goddesses had been conspicuously in charge of their own sexuality, their own bodies ... which implied that female wombs were not necessarily male-possessed. Under the new Jewish covenant, that changed.
On those terms, abortion is abominable because it suggests that a woman need not consider the fetus in her womb to be the property of a man — or of a male deity — to dispose of as only he wills.
On those terms, sex for a woman became a duty to her husband, not necessarily a source of pleasure to herself.
On those terms, women's modern "our bodies, ourselves" movement would have made no sense.
My point is not that these ancient ideas, still much with us today, about sex and womanhood were "wrong" in any absolute sense. Indeed they were very right for their time and place — a very long time, in fact, and a very capacious place. For they, as much as anything else, insured the survival and growth of ethical monotheism down through several thousand years of world history, in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim forms.
But now their time is rapidly drawing to a close, and their place is rapidly receding into the hearts and minds of a minority of modern people who are disinclined to relinquish them without a fight. More on this in future posts ...
