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CHAPTER 1
Clashing Symbols
Sex, Conscience, and Authority
Before examining biblical and historical sources that can be used to shape a contemporary sexual ethic, some attention must be given to the actual cultural situation to which such an ethic is addressed. This is necessary for a number of reasons.
First, it is important to attend to the context in which biblical teaching can be received and heard. While it is reductionist to totally identify the teaching of Scripture with one's own cultural horizon and experience, modern hermeneutical theory has made it clear that one's cultural horizon and experience does impact the reading of the biblical text. Therefore some awareness of this horizon, along with appropriate use of critical methods, can serve to guard against various forms of eisegesis, reading one's own ideas and presuppositions into the text. In this way some awareness of the cultural matrix in which it is received can aid in the hearing and reception of God's word in Scripture.
Second, unlike other more abstract forms of moral theory, a virtue-based approach is ordered to actual praxis in specific historical situations. This means that one must attend to the actual cultural setting, symbols, and social attitudes that might impact the development of specific kinds of excellence that are integral to human flourishing. In this case, it means paying attention to the intellectual and cultural forces that have shaped contemporary attitudes toward sexuality.
Third, a certain historical perspective can shed some light not simply on the complex confluence of current cultural ideas that shape a perception of sexuality, but also on the equally complicated and often contentious debates about ethics to which they have given rise. Arguments about sexual morality may not be new, but the last thirty years have witnessed debates of unprecedented scope and intensity. These have taken place not simply within the Catholic Church, but in many Christian churches and in other religious traditions as well.
This chapter will examine current cultural attitudes about sexuality and their impact particularly on Catholic Christians. The focus of this examination will be on the experience of Catholics in Western industrialized nations, using the United States as a case in point. It will be argued that many such Catholics experience a kind of "disconnect" between their faith and the experience of sexuality, shaped as it is by cultural symbols and attitudes. The roots of this alienation can be traced to a number of sources: the powerful and diverse influences that have shaped Western and U.S attitudes toward sexuality; the controversy surrounding Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae vitae; and the entrenched legalism of the Catholic moral tradition in the modern period which this controversy exposed.
I. The Experience of Alienation
Numerous studies, polls, and surveys highlight the fact that there is a disturbing gap between official Catholic teaching regarding sexuality and the actual beliefs and practice of large numbers of the baptized. This is not simply true of the contentious issue of birth regulation, but also of other issues such as extramarital sex, homogenital activity, the use of reproductive technologies such as artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization, and even abortion. These findings are true not only in the United States: they have correlates in European countries increasingly impacted by secularism. This divergence has led some observers to speak of a kind of "moral schism" in which increasing numbers of disenchanted laity and even pastors, while not publically rejecting Church teaching, consign it to irrelevance by ignoring it.
There are a number of observations that should be made about this data. First, it should be noted that some of these surveys are not careful in distinguishing practicing from nonpracticing Catholics. Hence the voices of those who have not prayed or been near a church in years are given equal weight with those who seek to live their faith on a daily basis. Second, it is undoubtedly true that such results can be distorted by bias in the way in which the questions are asked or the way in which the data is compiled. Third, often buried in the analysis of such results are genuinely positive signs that are not given equal attention.
Nevertheless, such cautions aside, the basic point remains: there is a large and perhaps growing disjunct between magisterial teaching and the belief and practice of many Catholics in the area of sexuality. Even many committed members of the faithful find themselves wrestling with little success in trying to reconcile their own experience and convictions regarding sexuality with what they know of official Church teaching. The result is a kind of alienation in that these Christians cannot relate the very fundamental experience of their sexuality with statements concerning it by the Church with which they may otherwise profoundly identify.
Before considering how to address such a troubling phenomenon, it is important to understand it more fully. In particular, consideration must be given to the historical forces that have given rise to current attitudes. What are the roots of this alienation among contemporary Catholics?
II. Sex: The American Ethos
In a recent book Peter Gardella traces some of the key social and intellectual forces that have shaped the American understanding of sexuality through the early 1980s. The modern American ethos of sexuality, according to Gardella, has been shaped by influences as diverse as Roman Catholic moral theology, evangelical Protestantism, medical science, Romanticism, the Virgin Mary, the ideology of the birth control movement, and modern psychology.
While it is undoubtedly true that the "puritanism" of the early Puritans has been exaggerated, it is equally true that early American preachers and theologians said little about sex, even that between husband and wife. This reticence created something of a vacuum regarding reliable public information about sex — a vacuum filled by the persons and writings of a primarily Protestant medical profession. This silence also explains some of the shock of a primarily Protestant United States to the influx of Catholic immigrants and ideas in the mid-nineteenth century. For the moral manuals used in Catholic seminaries to train priests contained very detailed treatments of the place of sex and love within marriage. In time, this linking of sex and love within marriage would help to form a more personal concept of marriage different from its European predecessors. More immediately, however, it fed into the powerful anti-Catholic reaction that characterized the nineteenth-century United States and the lasting cultural association of Catholics and sexual immorality.
If early medical treatments and Catholic moral theology presented sex in fairly straightforward and positive terms, this warm assessment cooled considerably in the Victorian period. Theological, scientific, and social views coalesced to produce a "medical Christianity" that closely identified sex with original sin. The essence of this sin was seen as disordered passion, which produced the physical lust that in turn was at the root of a whole host of personal and social evils. This perception caused both doctors and theologians to prescribe a kind of medical salvation in which passion could be restrained (and hence the ills of society cured) through a resolutely bland diet, strictly moderated sexual practice, proper sleep and exercise, and, in some cases, surgery. Such medically inspired fears created a kind of consensus of sexual repression between Protestants and Catholics and a perfectionist optimism that society could indeed be transformed. It also conferred a new authority over the whole of human life on the medical profession, thereby contributing to the continuing medicalization of sexuality.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the attitudes of some doctors began to change, resulting in a new emphasis on the acceptance of sex and its concomitant pleasure as integral to physical and spiritual health. Such doctors counseled a more frank and open discussion of sex to banish its associations with sin and urged couples toward a "total yielding" to their sexual impulses in marriage. This notion resonated deeply in a culture influenced by the revivalist ideal of "total yielding" to Christ forged in the Great Awakenings and carried forward by various evangelical groups. In this climate women came to be regarded as uniquely capable of the ecstasy that accompanied this self-abandonment. This development too was aided by religious perceptions such as accounts of sanctification by Methodist women, descriptions of receiving the Holy Spirit by female Pentecostal leaders, and Catholic appreciation for female visionaries such as Bernadette. Such an impression was reinforced by the Romantic appreciation of Mary (by Protestants as well as Catholics) as the ideal woman, depicted as youthful, innocent, beautiful, and ecstatic.
But as the twentieth century progressed, two other forces emerged to purge this vision of salvific sexuality, "total yielding," and female ecstasy of their religious trappings. These forces were the ideology of the birth control movement and the rise of modern psychology.
Margaret Sanger, the U.S. apostle of contraception, effectively drew on all of these elements in her campaign to change legal prescriptions and social attitudes. Sanger depicted sex as quasi-sacramental, that is, as a kind of communion in mutual ecstasy. However, she carefully gendered her account of sexual roles, highlighting the activity of the male (who becomes almost godlike in sexual foreplay) and the active passivity of the woman who abandons herself to passion. But ideally, for Sanger, the couple would achieve the ecstasy of mutual orgasm together. Such sexual skill, she argued, would require practice and hence contraception — so that women could develop their "love nature" apart from their "maternal nature." This in turn would redeem motherhood and indeed all humanity, eliminating abortion, infanticide, child neglect, and abandonment. The utopia created by only "wanted" pregnancies would transform the world. Thus Sanger offered the nation her own form of secular perfectionism.
Another secularizing influence on twentieth-century American views of sexuality was provided by modern psychology, particularly the thought of Sigmund Freud. As influential as it was in Europe, Freud's thought had an even greater impact on U.S. culture. While some of his darker ideas concerning the death instinct and religion as an illusion were not widely received on American shores, his pansexualism proved enormously popular. In the hands of his popularizers, this view was wedded to the emerging views of sex as the highest of human experiences, orgasm as a form of spiritual ecstasy, and redemption as an aspect of sexual experience — apart from any connection to Christianity.
The resulting cultural view of sex Gardella terms "innocent ecstasy," sex understood as bearing the promise of ecstatic release, personal fulfillment, and salvific power, yet completely freed from a religious framework or any association with original sin. This ethos is not without certain advantages — Gardella points to increased sexual skills and sensitivity, and perhaps greater sexual pleasure. However, these advantages are bought at a high price. Gardella opines that the new focus on the "quality" of sex has led to increased divorce due to unrealistic expectations and has created added pressure to engage in sex before marriage in order to gauge one's own level of "performance." It has also created new burdens resented by both sexes: women must simultaneously embody innocence and certify sexual success, while men must satisfy women through their performance. Finally, Gardella notes that the "pursuit of orgasm as the equivalent of religious ecstasy quickly became an ascetic practice best performed by those who have disciplined their bodies to be clean, thin, and odorless." Sex thus perceived becomes a utopian illusion that cannot deliver what it promises.
While Gardella's sketch covers a good deal of ground and brings into focus many of the diverse forces that have shaped current U.S. attitudes toward sex, there are a few factors that should be added to this portrait. First, one should not underestimate the importance of contraceptives, particularly the birth control pill, in launching the massive shift of cultural attitudes and practices known as the "sexual revolution." Both modern contraceptives and the new sexual behaviors that they enabled can be correlated with some of the phenomena Gardella mentions, such as the growing incidence of extramarital sex and divorce.
Second, another factor that made possible the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was the burgeoning consumer culture created by postwar prosperity. It is not surprising that this same culture managed to repackage sex itself into a product in the enormous success of glossy magazines such as Playboy and its more explicit imitators, which transformed pornography from an underground traffic to a very public, multibillion-dollar industry. The crude debasement of sex into a commodity for pleasure and profit became the dark underside of the modern pursuit of fulfillment in sexual release. Darker still is the widespread recourse to abortion in the name of sexual freedom which is itself enabled by a lucrative industry.
Third, integral to the growth of consumerism has been the expansion of technology in an industrial and now increasingly informational society. One of the effects of this growing technology is the disconnection of people from one another. Traditionally, it was human contact in the home, workplace, and public life that fostered friendships and social relations. Technology has served to undercut much of this contact — whether solitary factory workers who put in long shifts tending massive machines, office workers huddled in cubicles whose only human contact in a workday is an e-mail, or the family whose meals are spent in silence huddled around a television. The result is a new search for intimacy to fill the void created by technology — a search that often gravitates toward sex. This too has behavioral results as it drives some to seek intimacy in casual sex outside of marriage. It also heightens the strain on marriages as a couple's sexual relationship is expected to meet a host of interpersonal needs for which it is not equipped.
Fourth, Gardella's portrait is somewhat dated in light of many of the fears created by new public awareness of sexually transmitted diseases, particularly the HIV/AIDS epidemic. There are indications that these concerns have somewhat dampened the fires lit by the sexual revolution, modifying indiscriminate sexual behavior by both homosexual and heterosexual persons. While many may still hold to some variant of a secularized concept of sex as integral to personal fulfillment, new fears of disease have reawakened an awareness of its dangers which its association with original sin supplied in previous generations.
Finally, while Gardella hints at the importance of the issue of contraception, particularly for Catholics, more should be said about the importance of this issue for shaping present attitudes and framing current debates in moral theology. It is to this issue that this study now turns.
III. Humanae vitae: Flashpoint of Controversy
The uneasy consensus between Catholics and Protestants forged by Victorian repression was split apart by the birth control movement. For not only did its proponents, such as Margaret Sanger, effectively play on religious antagonisms between these traditions, but also, for a variety of reasons, Protestant churches proved to be far more receptive to the message of the movement. In 1930 the Anglican bishops gathered at the Lambeth Conference reversed the condemnations of two previous conferences (1908 and 1920) and gave approval to the use of contraceptives. Even though the Catholic Church strongly reiterated the condemnation of contraception in Pius XI's encyclical Casti connubii, other Protestant churches were swift to follow the Anglican lead. Catholics thus found themselves estranged from other Christians on a key issue of sexual behavior and ethics.
In addition to such religious factors, there were numerous other social and intellectual currents that coalesced to force further scrutiny of the issue of birth regulation within Catholicism. Some of these came from within the tradition itself, such as the increasing attention given within theology to the place of love within marriage and sexuality. This emphasis especially flowered in the treatments of personalist authors such as Dietrich von Hildebrand and Herbert Doms. Other currents caused by changing social factors were effectively harnessed by the proponents of birth control: the new roles of women in postwar society, rising educational costs, and growing concerns about world population.
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Excerpted from "Sex and Virtue"
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Copyright © 2003 The Catholic University of America Press.
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