This 1995 book's author, Thomas C. Fox, was a reporter and editorialist who served at The National Catholic Reporter as its editor and has also written for and/or worked for The New York Times, Time, The Detroit Free Press, and The Washington Star.
The premise of Fox's book is that the Catholic Church is suffering badly from its refusal, since the late 1960s, to modify its traditional teachings about birth control and about sexual morality in general, teachings that many Catholic theologians, clergy, and lay people think make no sense today.
The Church on Sex and Artificial Contraception
In the book's early going, Fox emphasizes how out of step the church's refusal in the 1960s to sanction artificial means of contraception has been judged by many Catholics. Use of birth control pills, condoms, and other devices and methods — other than the rhythm method — that reduce the likelihood of pregnancy are, in official church teaching, sinful.
In explaining this issue, Fox details the long history of the church's attitudes about sex, inasmuch as that history wound up seemingly tying the hands of Pope Paul VI in 1968 when he issued a papal encyclical that (contrary to the expectations of many Catholics) refused to sanction artificial birth control.
The history of Christian/Catholic thought on sex begins in ancient Jewish society before the time of Jesus, when the earliest worshippers of Yahweh codified rules about marriage and sexuality that had the overall effect of rendering the status of women inferior to that of men.
Jesus, though a Jew, did not treat women as of lesser worth than men. The few pronouncements Jesus made concerning sex, gender, and marriage had a pro-woman thrust. When he said that "... everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-28), he meant, in today's lexicon, that it is sinful for men to treat women as sex objects.
Early Christian Teaching on Sex
Through 2,000 years of Christian history, the church has taught that the main purpose of marriage is the bearing and rearing of children; so, sex must take place only within the context of a stable, monogamous marriage-for-life that has been contracted between a man and a woman.
Fox shows how this idea developed historically. The early Christians were fighting for survival in the eastern reaches of the (then-hostile) Roman Empire. Many lived in portions of the Middle East whose culture was Hellenic, and so the philosophies of the ancient Greeks were widespread. Christian theology was influenced by various Greek philosophies, among them that of the Stoics.
The Stoics were in extreme reaction against earlier Greek schools of thought that held that the pursuit of bodily pleasure was the principal goal of life. The Stoics said, contrariwise, that willpower and self-discipline were the royal road to inner peace. Desire, fear, anger — all such irrational attitudes must be sternly uprooted.
The early Christians adopted a middle road between the pleasure-loving Hedonists of Hellenic yore and the Stoics, holding that procreative sex within marriage was morally defensible — not because it is pleasurable, but because it engenders children.
But that was only part of the story. Not long after the Christian era began, thinkers in the early church decided that celibacy, virginity, and sexual abstinence were morally superior to marriage, sex, and procreation!
St. Paul
Fox points out that the apostle Paul, whose letters would one day form much of the New Testament, beseeched the Christians of Corinth to avoid marriage if at all possible (1 Corinthians 7:26-27). Paul believed that Christ's Second Coming was imminent. For those who wished to prepare for the return of the Savior, the passions of sex would be a positive distraction.
Paul had to some degree absorbed the Stoics' attitude that sexual desires were impure, and so he strongly advocated celibacy over marriage.
St. Augustine
As the fourth Christian century began, St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions that all of us need to (in Fox's words) "escape from the prison of bodily limitations" in order that we might "reach pure spirit."
Augustine did affirm, though, that marriage and procreation were generally good things. He thereby opposed the Manichaean theologians of his day. Asserting themselves to be true Christians, Manichaeans held that "dark substances" dwelt within the human soul right alongside "light" ones. Sexual passions, they said, interfered with the ability of the Redeemed Christ to enable "imprisoned particles of light to escape from the darkness." Hence, not even sex within marriage for purposes of procreation was acceptable to the Manichaeans — whose extremism was quickly declared heresy by established church authority.
So Augustine, like Paul and the very earliest Christians, took what appeared at the time to be a middle road: it's wrong to engage in a life of lust, but it's equally wrong to insist on total celibacy and asceticism as an absolute which all Christians must observe.
The Church's Two-Tiered Approach to Christian Life
The upshot of all this was to establish a two-tiered approach to Christian life. Those who were considered "better" Christians — a notion that crystallized later in church history in the form of a celibate, all-male priesthood — were unmarried and ostensibly had no sexual passions or relations whatsoever. Those Christians who married and had children — and presumably underwent sexual passions/pleasures of various sorts — were taken to be inferior, in some spiritual sense, to the higher-in-God's-eyes celibates.
Medieval Penitentials
In the early Middle Ages, the church codified their grudging support of sex-for-procreation-only in the form of "penitentials": books for priests to use in hearing confessions, doling out penances for sins, and granting absolution. Various sins, including sexual ones, were catalogued in exquisite detail in the penitentials. The penances for "unnatural" acts such as "anal sex, oral sex, and even certain positions of sexual intercourse," Fox writes, "might extend from seven to fifteen years, in some cases." The penitent might be required to (for example) fast on bread and water for the duration of his penance.
St. Thomas Aquinas
In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas and other medieval Scholastic philosophers put "natural law" — "human reason reflecting on human nature" — as the basis for all church teaching thenceforth. Reasoning in accordance with "natural law" took primacy over both faith and Scripture in the Aquinan view, which became the official view of the Catholic Church.
Reason, said Aquinas, tells us that our human "nature" is like that of other animals insofar as sexual reproduction is concerned, so (per Fox) "sexuality becomes understood in light of those acts common to human beings and to other animals."
My interpretation: other animals engage in sex in order to procreate. Hence that is the one reason that, according to natural law, sex is permissible to humans.
Fox continues, "Thus, the human can never morally interfere with the physical act of sexual intercourse. It is unnatural, wrong, and sinful to do so. It follows that any form of artificial contraception is always wrong."
The Counter-Reformation
In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation triggered in the Catholic Church a Counter-Reformation, during which period the church first began grappling with the bare possibility that, per Fox, "sexual intercourse in marriage could be justified for its own sake."
If so, the erstwhile insistence on procreating (along with the educating of) children as the primary function of marriage might conceivably give way, if only slightly.
Jansenism
It didn't give way, though. Instead, a movement grew within the church to make the rules about sex and marriage even more strict than before. This movement, Jansenism, was officially disavowed by the church, but it was far from stamped out. In particular, Irish clergy who followed their countrymen to America in the 19th century were heirs to Jansenist thought.
Neo-Jansenists
Even as late as the 20th century, such neo-Jansenists as Henry Davis could, in 1936, write:
It is grievously sinful in the unmarried [person] deliberately to procure or to accept even the smallest degree of true venereal [i.e., sexual or carnal] pleasure; secondly, that it is equally sinful to think, say or do anything with the intention of arousing even the smallest degree of this pleasure. ... [T]he smallest amount of this pleasure is an inducement to indulgence in the fullest amount of it.
Pope Pius XI's Encyclical Casti Connubii ("On Christian Marriage")
The less extreme degree of sexual stricture in the church's official doctrine, which was already more liberal than Jansenists would have liked, had already begun to get more liberal in 1930, when Pope Pius XI wrote in his encyclical "On Christian Marriage" — in Latin, Casti Connubii — that "the cultivating of mutual love" and a "mutual inward molding" between husband and wife were "the chief reason and purpose of matrimony."
A "determined effort to perfect each other," Pius XI wrote, was sufficient reason why marriage partners might be justified in intentionally engaging in non-reproductive sex: for instance, having sex during that part of the woman's menstrual cycle in which she is infertile.
Thus was born the Catholic Church's support for the "rhythm method" of birth control, known today as "natural family planning."
Even so, Pius XI resolutely refused to permit the use of "artificial" birth control methods, which in those days before the arrival of "the pill" in 1960 were oriented toward the use of as yet crude condoms or, more frequently, coitus interruptus, the practice of withdrawing the penis from the vagina just prior to ejaculation.
Vatican II
Four times between 1962 and 1965 the world's Catholic bishops convened in Rome under the auspices of the Second Vatican Council to consider how to make the Catholic Church more relevant to the modern world. As a result, many reforms in church practice were instituted, and Vatican II was hailed a tremendous success.
But Pope Paul VI — who had succeeded Pope John XXIII, the pontiff who had initiated Vatican II but had soon died of cancer — would not let the council update the church's stance on sex in general or on artificial birth control in particular.
Notably, "the pill" had been introduced in 1960, just two years before the council first convened, but it was as yet unclear what effect it might have on the sexual mores of the church or the world at large.
A Personalist View of Marriage
Liberal bishops of the time wanted their brethren at Vatican II to affirm a new, "personalist" view of marriage. In it, the old "juridical" norms would be deprecated in favor of a more up-to-date stance. This imagined stance would be one that allowed marriage partners to decide more freely for themselves how to handle questions of sex and procreation. Instead of a depersonalized, prepackaged hierarchy of rights and wrongs which put celibacy, virginity, and abstinence above even marital sex and procreation — and which went on to constrain the freedom of marriage partners to decide when and how to procreate — the liberals wanted to replace absolutist taboos and norms a doctrine that said (borrowing the words of Pius XI) "the cultivating of mutual love" is "the chief reason and purpose of matrimony."
Further, they wished to emphasize that this "chief reason and purpose" was in no way inferior to the call to celibacy, virginity, and sexual abstinence felt by some but by no means all Catholics.
This meant to Catholic liberals that "artificial" means of birth control ought legitimately to be within the purview of a loving married couple to decide to use ... or not.
Post-Vatican II Teaching on Birth Control
The bishops at Vatican II, as it turned out, would have little to say about sex, marriage, and birth control. Pope Paul VI, moreover, would not accede to liberals' wishes for him to act on his own to codify the radical changes in Catholic teaching that they desired.
The pope's recalcitrance came even in the face of the liberals' claim that to continue to oppose "the pill" and the use of condoms was condemning the world to an impending "population explosion" that would lead to hunger and deprivation, armed violence, and other affronts to traditional Catholic values of social justice and peace.
Pope Paul VI's Encyclical Humanae Vitae ("On Human Life")
The work of Vatican II was completed in 1965. It wasn't until 1968 that Paul VI promulgated his encyclical Humanae Vitae ("On Human Life") reaffirming traditional Catholic teaching that "artificial" contraception is wrong. In so doing, the pope (said his critics) was continuing to view issues of sexual morality, within marriage and outside it, as "act-centered"— i.e., each and every act of using artificial means of birth control was in and of itself absolutely wrong — rather than taking cognizance of a married couple's intentions, context, and life history before pronouncing upon the act.
The very act of using the pill — or a condom or coitus interruptus — to forestall pregnancy was in and of itself against God's will, the encyclical held. Only "natural family planning," as the rhythm method had come to be called, was acceptable.
The Papal Commission on Birth Control
Pope Paul VI's 1968 pronouncement came after an expert commission launched by the previous pontiff, John XXIII, and enlarged more than once by Paul VI himself had sent to Paul a "majority report" suggesting a new view of birth control. The report held that modern times had made the use of artificial contraception no longer the enemy of the main purpose of marriage — which continued to be viewed by the commission's majority as procreation and the education of children.
Thanks to antibiotics and to better hygiene, diet, and health care, the report said, a "demographic transition" had occurred such that no longer were the births of seven children necessary to ensure that two made it to adulthood, thus to replace their parents in the population.
Moreover, masses of humanity in poorer nations were abandoning agricultural villages and moving to cities, meaning that it was becoming increasingly harder to pull lesser-developed countries out of poverty, if population growth were not curbed. Not allowing families to avoid unwanted pregnancies by means of artificial contraception, said Catholic liberals, severely aggravated those dangerous demographic trends. That alone was justification enough, in the liberals' view, for the church to revise its stance on birth control.
The Commission's "Minority Report"
Along with the commission's "majority report," a countervailing "minority report" that argued for continuing the traditional Catholic proscription against artificial contraception was leaked to the press not long before Paul VI published his encyclical Humanae Vitae. As a result, large numbers of Catholics had already become exercised over the issue by the time Humanae Vitae came out, so, when that occurred, great numbers of bishops, theologians, priests and religious, and lay Catholics were extremely disappointed in the anti-modernist stance the pope took.
Why Paul VI's Anti-Birth Control Stance?
Fox asks why Paul VI took the stance he did and suggests that at the end of the day he may have had four motives.
- One was the possibility that the traditional church had grown "increasingly defensive and even ghettoized" in the face of modernity's attendant "evils," and the pontiff wanted to draw a clear line in the sand against said "evils."
- Another possibility was the danger seemingly imposed to the longstanding "systematic theory" the church had promulgated concerning matters of sexuality, a theory which linked moral beliefs about contraception with those proscribing extramarital intercourse, homosexuality, and masturbation.
If childbearing within marriage alone justified sexual expression, and if the church changed that teaching to allow sex for purposes of other than creating new life (such as cementing the loving relationship between husband and wife), might not changes concerning other matters of sexual morality be unavoidable?
- A third possibility was that the pope might simply have wanted to reaffirm the church's "great emphasis on tradition."
- And fourth, there was the question of the church's authority, never mind the details of the particular moral issue involved. If the pope changed the church's signals on birth control, would he not be admitting the church might have been wrong in other of its previous stances.
As Fox puts it, "How could the Holy Spirit allow the church to have been wrong?" If wrong on one important matter, then possibly wrong on others ... and the whole edifice of church authority might come tumbling down.
Patriarchy and Church Authority
It isn't until Fox, in three separate chapters, deals with abortion, homosexuality, and celibacy that, in his chapter on "Women and the Church," he expands on the topic of patriarchal church authority.
In the Catholic Church, as most people know, women have never been priests ... much less bishops. For women to be priests, they would have to be ordained: to undergo the sacrament of Holy Orders. Today, numerous Catholic women in the U.S. would like to see other women — or themselves — made eligible for ordination to Holy Orders. The church hierarchy, though, opposes this.
Why shouldn't women be ordained? The official church teaching is that Jesus chose only men to be his apostles. Bishops in the Catholic Church are successors to the original apostles. If a woman could be made a priest, she might licitly be made a bishop ... and that would be unthinkable! All heirs to the first apostles must be men!
Another rationale is that the priest as the celebrant at a Catholic Mass is considered to be an icon of Christ himself. Through the person of the priest, the person of Christ himself is rendered visible. This putatively requires that the priest be of the same sex as Jesus was.
Catholic Church clerical power structures and the priesthood have accordingly always been male-only.
Feminist Theology
There is today much "feminist theology" within the Catholic Church and in the wider Christian community that disputes the assumption that the exclusive maleness of the Christ-called apostles or the gender of the Savior himself is binding on us today. In view of the fact that having only male apostles was mandated on Jesus by the male-dominated culture he lived in 2,000 years ago, we can change the tradition without giving offense to God. Also, women today can serve as icons of the Savior just as well as men can.
In so admitting, though, the church would be opening up the ranks of vested church authority to people with different agendas and worldviews: women. Feminist Christians looking to promote their agenda and worldview have sought accordingly to expose the roots of traditional church teaching about women, to show that this teaching makes no sense today.
Church Belittlement of Women
Why have women been so belittled by the church that even today the priesthood and the episcopacy (the bishops) remain all-male? In answer, feminists start by citing (says Fox, pp. 218-219)
... Old Testament passages that associate women and evil, especially those that depict women as temptresses, as in the Adam and Eve story. Of course, the subjugation of women preceded Hebrew and Christian biblical writings, dating back to antiquity where it was common to view women as a source of disease and bad spirits, especially during menstruation when intercourse was often prohibited. Both pagans and Jews looked upon menstrual blood as infectious and poisonous. For example, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus (15:19-24) God defines a menstruating woman as unclean for seven days, and anyone who touches her or anything she has touched, or anything touched by someone she has touched, as unclean. Such attitudes were common at the time and were widely shared by the early Christians. The subjugation of women by men was reflected in New Testament injunctions as well. For example, Christian women were told to be silent in the Christian assemblies and were to subordinate themselves to male "headship." Early Christian writers, again reflecting broader cultural currents, had little understanding or sympathy for women's bodily functions, which they commonly feared. Around the year 200, the church father Clement of Alexandria ... warned men not to have intercourse with menstruating women, claiming that children conceived during menstruation would be born impaired. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, menstruation had the added disadvantage of being tied to sin, commonly seen as the result of God's punishment after Eve tempted Adam to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Clement was only one of early church writers to express virtual contempt for women. He once observed that a woman should properly be shamed when she thinks "of what nature she is."
In such writings are found examples of long-held male prejudices as well as the early beginnings of church structures built to help keep men pure and women at a distance. It was not long before these notions worked their way into church theology and traditions, becoming integral to Christian reflections, especially those dealing with sexual morality. Augustine, writing in the fourth century, for example, noted that "the good Christian likes what is human, loathes what is feminine." Eight centuries later, Thomas Aquinas wrote that "woman is defective and misbegotten" and that "it is not possible in the female sex that any eminence of degree can be signified."
Unbroken Church Tradition
The Catholic Church's unbroken tradition, then, has been both anti-woman and anti-sex. It has been considered "better" for a man to be unmarried and celibate than to marry and accordingly have sex with a wife. The men who answer the call to the celibate priesthood have always been the ones in power positions in the church, from the pope and the prelates in the Vatican on down through the local archbishops and bishops to the male priesthood. The church has always been patriarchal.
If a man eschews being a priest and marries, furthermore, sex with his wife must always remain "open" to procreation. If pregnancy is not desired, the only sanctioned method of avoiding it is to abstain from sex during the wife's fertile time of the month.
Forms of sexual expression that by their nature can never be "open" to procreation are accordingly prohibited: homosexual acts, masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, coitus interruptus, etc.
As for women, according to church tradition they can best serve the Lord if humble and virginal. If they marry, they must grant "headship" to their husband. They may not become priests.
Fox writes that the church has recently, during the pontificate of John Paul II, defended this arrangement by appealing to the "complementarity" of men and women. In this view, men and women are said to be made equally in God's image, but their basic natures are "complementary," not identical. This, indeed, is why traditionalists insist a woman cannot serve as an iconic representative of Christ in saying the Mass.
In today's culture, such a view of women has been called into question by feminists and the women's liberation movement. Likewise, feminists in the church have dissented from this traditional view.
An Alternative Theology: Creation-Centered Spirituality
If traditional church teaching is out of step with today's world, Fox asks, is there an alternative?
Some Catholic theologians, writes Fox in his chapter on "Carnal Love," have proposed a "creation-centered" spirituality. The Creator, the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit — the three persons of the one Trinitarian God — have alternated insofar as which has stood out in Christian history and culture. In the Orthodox Christianity of Eastern Europe, the Holy Spirit has traditionally commanded attention. In the West, it has been the Redeemer, Jesus Christ, who has been the focus of attention. Now the proponents of a creation-centered spirituality say we need to throw the spotlight on the Creator, traditionally known as God the Father.
The Cosmic Story
A creation-centered spirituality, says Fox, would depart from "the anthropocentric Adam and Eve story" to instead "stress the cosmic story, the creation of galaxies, of the solar system, of the planet, and the evolution of species, including humanity."
There are, according to this alternate approach, "complex webs of ecological support systems" that exist at various levels of complexity in the world, with God being seen as "part of all that is." Creation-centered spirituality is all about "finding God in nature" ... a challenge which, Fox writes, comports easily with the traditional Catholic emphasis on the sacraments: "ordinary substances and actions that point believers toward the mystery of the divine." Creation-centered spirituality is quintessentially sacramental.
The "Original Blessing" of the Cosmos
Fox says the "foundation truth" of such a newly understood cosmic story would not be Original Sin, as in the Adam and Eve story, but "original blessing." All creation itself is placed front-and-center here. The big bang happened 15 billion years ago. Compress all of cosmic history into a 100-year time scale, and our species appeared on the very last day of the ninety-ninth year. On the last day of the final year our classical religious culture, the one we today know so well, emerged ... at 11:40 PM!
We are cosmic newcomers who are still developing our understanding of who and what we are.
A New "Ecological" Period of Religious Culture
Now perhaps it's time for us to transition from "classical" religious culture into a new "ecological" period, says Fox. He tells of how Passionist priest-theologian Thomas Berry has written, in his 1988 book The Dream of the Earth, that in this new ecological period we ought no longer to focus on our "redemption out of this world through a personal Savior relationship that eclipses all concerns with cosmic order and process." Instead, we need to think of ourselves primarily as God-created beings in our universe.
The universe, says Thomas Berry, is at all levels of organization "a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects." On this planet, we humans especially compose a "communion of subjects." We humans are conscious and reflective. We uniquely have our own interior, subjective experiences. We must therefore not treat one another — or anything else in our universe that likewise reflects its Creator — simply as "things," as mere objects.
Accordingly, the larger world of Planet Earth is fundamentally not a "thing," a dumb object for us humans to "subdue," as the traditional injunction in Genesis goes. It too is a "communion" of non-"things" — for example, of populations of species interacting within their environments to form ecosystems.
Catholic Novelist Demetria Martinez & Sociologist/Novelist Father Andrew Greeley
How is ecological, creation-centered spirituality related to Catholic attitudes about sex? Catholic novelist Demetria Martinez provides Fox with one answer. She has written that "being grounded in the physical" — including the sexual — is "a way of experiencing the divine."
Father Andrew M. Greeley is a sociologist who since the early 1970s has researched the question of why Catholics, though turned off by the anti-birth control stance of Humanae Vitae, stay Catholic. He likewise endorses the notion, Fox writes, that what we experience is how, first and foremost, we each come to know the divine.
"Popular Tradition" vs. "High Tradition"
Catholics stay Catholic, Fr. Greeley's research shows, because for them it is the "popular tradition" of Catholicism, as they experience it, that counts — not the "high tradition" of official teachings about sex and other matters.
In the Catholic "popular tradition," writes Fox, "religion is more about imagination than it is about doctrine. ... Greeley says Catholics are remarkably faithful to their religious beliefs no matter how negative their experiences have been with the Catholic institution. Those beliefs, [Greeley] says, work out of a deeper realm within the believer. Simply stated, [Greeley] says, Catholics like being Catholic."
Why so? "They especially like the 'sacramentality' of the church ... the imaginative outlook that views creatures as metaphors for God, as hints of what God is like."
The "Theology of Story"
For Greeley, who is a novelist as well as a priest and a sociologist, there is a "theology of story" that counts for more, to faithful believers, than does the official theology of the church:
[Greeley] speaks of the theology of story, saying that believers tell religious stories of themselves and others to help give meaning to their lives. He says these stories help predict the way people live out their lives. "The idea is that religion is, first of all, an experience of the holy, the sacred, the good, and then it's the image and memory which recalls that experience, what we would call a symbol, and then it's the story we tell to others to explain the symbol and to recount our experience. That's religion," Greeley has said.Personal experiences of the sacred. Stories. Images. Symbols. They all fit together, Greeley has found ... including in the ways that Catholics experience sex.
A New "Body Theology"
Greeley's research shows that Catholics have sex more often than non-Catholics, even into their later years. Catholic spouses stay romantic, says Greeley, manifesting what he calls "a series of religious and erotic behaviors that do not substitute for one another."
That means (in my interpretation) that the "religious" and the "erotic" are for Catholics not polar opposites. They intermesh. To them, as Fox puts it, "good sex is good for religion and good religion leads to healthy sex."
Moreover, according to Greeley, "Catholics — especially Catholic women — score significantly higher on the sexual playfulness scale. For example, Catholics are half again as likely (three out of ten as opposed to two out of ten) to say they have purchased erotic undergarments either often or sometimes. They are also significantly more likely to report showers or baths with their spouse."
So, Catholics "bring a playfulness to their sex ... because of the gracious images of God they carry within them, images fostered by their religion, images of benign human relationships — mother, spouse, friend, and lover — as metaphors for God.
Accordingly, in our Catholic "popular tradition" our "story theology" is also a "body theology," in which "we take our body experiences seriously as occasions of revelation."
Sexuality and Church Authority
After discussing such new attitudinal approaches to theology and sexuality, Fox goes on to a chapter about how the church's stands on birth control and sexuality in general affect ongoing worries about the world's population growth, especially in poorer nations. Then he wraps up with a long chapter and finally a shorter one on how issues of sexuality relate to church authority and the Catholic future.
Pope John Paul II, who was pontiff when Fox's book was written, issued encyclicals such as Veritatis Splendor ("The Splendor of Truth") asserting that the church could not and would not "discuss" changes of its teaching vis-à-vis artificial contraception.
Fox casts this as obdurateness in service to shoring up the authority vested in the Vatican hierarchy, with the pope himself expressly at the top of the pyramid. If the church reverses itself on contraception, the thinking seems to have been, it undermines its whole magisterium — the Catholic Church's body of traditional teachings, down through the ages.
John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI — who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of the Vatican's archconservative Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under John Paul II — have seemed to view the modern world as infected by a deep malaise. In the mind of John Paul II, the malaise was a problem with more than just sexual morality. Sexual matters aside, it seems to have included such things as rapacious capitalists ... of exactly the sort that brought America's financial industry down in 2008. It also included many of us baby boomers who have formed the self-centered "Me Generation." And so on.
Veritatis Splendor
In 1993 Pope John Paul II promulgated his encyclical Veritatis Splendor ("The Splendor of Truth"), which Fox describes as "calling for a restoration of rules of behavior in moral theology."
In it, the pope decried "modern tendencies" and "certain currents of thought," blaming liberal bishops and theologians for defecting from church orthodoxy and creating a crisis in the church. John Paul II had previously gone so far as to deprecate "the Second Vatican Council's statements about the omnipresence of grace in the world" as "wildly optimistic," and Veritatis Splendor was, in his mind, apparently, a corrective to that.
But according to polling research done by Father Andrew M. Greeley in the 1970s, what had created the crisis, in the American church specifically, was not Vatican II but the 1968 encyclical that blocked Catholics from using artificial contraception, Humanae Vitae:
"The encyclical and not the council is responsible for the deterioration of American Catholicism in the last decade," [Greeley] wrote, "Had it not been for the council, the deterioration would have been worse."Yet John Paul II saw things otherwise. In reaffirming Humanae Vitae in no uncertain terms, he (per Fox) "said that contraception under any circumstances is 'intrinsically evil' and therefore can never be justified."
Implications for Catholic Moral Theology
Post-Vatican II, during and after the 1960s, Catholic priests and moral theologians had transitioned to judging the gravity of putative sins, confessed by penitents to priest-confessors, as determined "in the light of the gospel and of human experience." This was new. It added "human experience" to "the usual Catholic triad of Scripture, tradition, and natural law" as determinative of what is or is not sinful and how serious the sin might be.
True, the new approach harkened back to traditional ways in which confessors had long adjudged sins only after inquiring into the "intention" or aim of the act being confessed, into the circumstances of the act, and into its results. At least in the modern era, there was never a time in which the personal context of a penitent's act counted for nothing in the confessional.
But John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor undermined that. Acts such as the use of artificial birth control, since they were deemed "intrinsically evil," could not be exonerated by human experience and personal context. Here was instead a papal declaration of moral absolutes, done on the authority of the pope alone.
Evangelium Vitae
In 1995, John Paul II followed Veritatis Splendor with a new encyclical, Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life"). In it, he posited the need to overcome a modern "culture of death" that had taken root in the church and in the world. He asserted a "consistent ethic of life" as its antidote. In such a way did he take a clear stand against abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, capital punishment ... and also against contraception, sterilization, scientific experiments on surplus embryos, artificial insemination, and other such modern reproductive technologies.
With Evangelium Vitae the list of "intrinsically evil" sins concerning matters sexual and reproductive grew, meaning that confessors who wanted to toe the official Vatican line could not consider personal experience or other potentially mitigating factors of context and life history in assessing sin.
A Single Theological Pathway ...
As Fox puts it, "Both Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae vigorously affirm a single theological pathway as true for all time for the doing of Catholic moral theology." And that inerrant pathway comes to the church only through "the papacy itself." The world at large may, in terms of its broad human experience, find such things as artificial contraception to be, if sinful at all, the lesser of possible evils. But that counts for nothing, John Paul II asserted, if the pope takes a different view.
... Versus Two Opposing Models of Church
What is really going on, Fox shows, is that two distinct models of church are contending with one another.
In the conservative model put forth by popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the Holy Father can infallibly declare certain things to be "intrinsically evil." End of discussion. Even when the declarations technically stop short of invoking papal infallibility, for all practical purposes the result is — or is intended to be — the same. No bishops or moral theologians are permitted to dissent. No lay persons or priests hearing confessions can make up their own rules based on human experience and personal witness.
But some bishops, theologians, feminists, etc., in the U.S. and elsewhere have posited a new model of church. In the new model the rightness or wrongness of sexual, marital, and reproductive acts is not to be left entirely to the dictates of a celibate male priesthood and church hierarchy. The personal experience of such a priesthood does not match up with, say, that of a woman who desperately wants to have no more children but for whom the rhythm method of birth control does not work.
Nor does it match up with the experience of gays and lesbians who do not want to go through life with no sexual intimacies or marital unions whatsoever on grounds that their orientation is deemed "intrinsically disordered."
Nor with the experience of Catholics in second marriages whose first marriages ended in civil divorce, but who for one reason or another cannot obtain from the church the necessary "annulment" of their first marriage that would allow them to receive the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist without Vatican opprobrium.
The New Church Model
Instead of a "vertical" model in which "a God 'up in heaven' ... sends down graces through a series of chosen mediators" — to wit, the pope, the Vatican hierarchy, the bishops, and the priests — a new "horizontal" model has it that God is preeminently "among the people and shares their experiences."
"In this model," writes Fox, "God is not 'above'; God is within the church, present to it in Word and Spirit. Jesus did not leave the world in his Resurrection; Jesus in Resurrection became the Christ dwelling 'until the end of the world' with those who in faith and hope accept the redeeming truth that unending life comes from the Cross."
In this new model of church, God's law is written in all of our hearts and calls for our reasoned response in terms of personal experience and conscience. On this view, we were created basically good and can be trusted to use our consciences appropriately as guides to reason.
This is the model of church Vatican II promulgated, Fox tells us. But John Paul II in effect rescinded it, along with much of the spirit of Vatican II itself, by declaring a list of acts that, in and of themselves, he called intrinsically and absolutely wrong.
In so doing, he likewise moved to rescind the new model of church that many non-conservative post-Vatican II Catholics have shown themselves eager to embrace.
Fox's Final Chapter: Moral Theology and the Catholic Future
Fox finishes his book with a chapter discussing what the future may hold, in terms of Catholic views on moral theology. Many theologians, he says, are attempting to integrate the two opposing views of church and of moral theology.
The two views can be characterized as a "classicist" view and one that brings "historical consciousness" into the picture.
In the classicist view, reality is understood "in terms of the eternal, the immutable, and the unchanging." Meanwhile, historical consciousness promotes the importance of "the particular, the contingent, the historical, and the individual" in assessing the propriety of our relationship to God.
Only when the church's teachings can develop and evolve, the historicist view goes, can Scripture be properly interpreted (an reinterpreted) from one age to another.
Theological Forces in Tension
Fox accordingly writes (p. 337):
The conflicting forces of Catholic moral theology involve the drive toward totality on one hand and the recognition of diversity on the other. Catholic moral theology since Thomas Aquinas has proclaimed a living, unified, intelligible vision in which moral evaluation occurs. In this scheme the morality of sexual acts is seen in the light of a preexisting law called natural law. It governs all, is intelligible to all, but is proclaimed by the church.Counterposed to that, Fox says, is this:
During this century and especially in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Catholic theologians began also to consider history, sociology, and anthropology, having acquired the theoretical ability to stand outside history and see it as history, rather than being immersed in it. These capabilities allowed greater awareness of circumstances and, if not allowing complete objectivity, moved the analysis to particulars demanding their own analysis. Circumstance entered theological discourse as did the need to understand the persons as well as the acts before coming to moral judgment.The post-Vatican II stances of John Paul II (and now Benedict XVI) have undercut that second trend in Catholic moral theology by undercutting its emphasis on human diversity and the personal circumstances within which various acts take place.
Resolving the Tension
Fox comes to no firm conclusion as to how the tension between the two theological and ecclesial models can be resolved.
He does say that few Catholics, no matter how opposed to recent papal pronouncements concerning birth control and other sexual, marital, and reproductive issues, would embrace a church in which the pope and the Vatican had no authority whatsoever in matters of faith and morals. His implication, then, is that there clearly needs to be a top-down/bottom-up dialogue.
Unfortunately the Vatican, as of the time Fox's book was being written — it was published in 1995 — had actively moved to forestall such dialogue by going so far as to remove at least one (French) bishop who vocally dissented from official doctrine and to clamp down on academic theologians who likewise dissented. This, says Fox, created a "chill factor" which has prevented bishops from frankly representing to the Vatican the attitudes of their flocks.
For the moment, it seemed to Fox, no creative top-down/bottom-up dialogue was in the offing. His belief clearly was that the future would surely bring a just resolution to the tension.
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