Sexing the Church: Gender, Power, and Ethics in Contemporary Catholicism
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Sexing the Church: Gender, Power, and Ethics in Contemporary Catholicism
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253111388 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 459 KB |
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Sexing the Church
Gender, Power, and Ethics in Contemporary Catholicism
By Aline H. Kalbian
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 Aline H. KalbianAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34530-1
CHAPTER 1
ORDER AND SEXUAL ETHICS
Sex is a contentious topic in Catholicism. Mark Jordan notes that in the contemporary American imagination, Christianity is often thought to be nothing more than a "code of sexual conduct" (Jordan 2002, 5). In other words, most Americans know little about the details of doctrines such as the trinity, the resurrection, or the incarnation, but they can recite lists of prohibitions against particular sexual acts. Jordan is clearly exaggerating for effect, yet he draws attention to an important point — that the regulation of human sexuality is central to most perceptions of Christianity. In the case of Roman Catholic Christianity, the association of religion and sexuality is even more pronounced — a perception reinforced by recent attention to sexual misconduct by Catholic clergy.
The link between Christianity and sex is not limited to the public imagination. Indeed, an internal discussion among Catholic theologians is also suggestive of the central connection between modes and sources of moral reasoning in religious ethics and the regulation of human sexuality. For example, critics of Pope John Paul II's 1993 encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor proclaimed that "human sexuality governs this text" (Patrick 1993, 18). Supporters of the encyclical responded that "[f]aith, not sex, is the theme" of the document (Finnis 1994, 69). The apparent goal of the encyclical is to challenge theories of morality held by some Catholic theologians. More specifically, the pope attacks secular trends such as relativism and utilitarianism by explaining and defending more fully the basic principles of Catholic moral theology. He mentions sexuality only a few times, and that in passing. That many understand the real motivation to be uneasiness about sexuality strongly suggests that Catholic discourse about modes of moral reasoning is intricately connected to Catholic sexual teachings; indeed, the responses to Veritatis Splendor indicate that the authority of the Church is at stake.
The link between sexual morality and church authority is strong, and it is fortified by Catholic attitudes about order and gender. This book explores those attitudes through a careful study of recent official Catholic documents on sex, marriage, and reproduction. I chose the provocative title Sexing the Church because it captures the way Catholicism's attitudes about gender (what it means to be male or female) permeate its teachings about sexuality, reproduction, and church authority. "Sexing" the Catholic Church means revealing the profound interconnection between gender, power, and sexual ethics in the teaching documents of the Church. In recent decades, especially since the Second Vatican Council, sex, gender, and church authority have been among the most controversial issues in Catholicism. Disagreements about contraception, abortion, women in the priesthood, assisted reproductive technologies, and homosexuality all reveal the centrality of Catholicism's understanding of the natural order and its view of authority and obedience. Can the Church change its teachings about morality? Can it abandon traditional ideas about gender roles and sex without severely compromising Catholic beliefs? Catholics believe that the Church's role is to interpret and maintain the natural order of God's creation, an order that relies on the correct interpretation of the meanings of human sexuality and gender. In what follows, I will utilize the concept of order as the organizing metaphor for clarifying Catholic sexual ethics.
In brief, this book explores the notion of order through a significant body of religious writing on morality. The chapters are structured around three concerns: 1) order as reflected in the theology of marriage; 2) the challenge to that order in the second half of the twentieth century through the debates on contraception and assisted reproduction; and 3) the way attitudes about gender in Catholicism connect theological and moral order with ecclesiastical order.
Catholic theology has long exhibited a concern with human sexuality and its relationship to theology and church authority. St. Augustine, for one, made sexuality central to his theology by linking original sin to concupiscence (immoderate desires). In his view, original sin, disobedience, sexual intercourse, and the need for authority were all connected. Augustine claimed that Adam and Eve's original sin was disobedience resulting from pride. They turned away from God, who is the telos of the human striving for the good. Augustine described the disobedience as "this wicked desire which prompts man [sic] to please himself as if he were himself light, and which thus turns him away from that light by which, had he followed it, he would have himself become light" (St. Augustine bk. 14, ch. 13). Concupiscence was both evidence of and punishment for original sin: "What but disobedience was the punishment of disobedience in that sin?" (bk. 14, ch. 15). While the term "concupiscence" refers to all immoderate or uncontrolled desires, for Augustine, sexual desires were the most significant because the first effect of Adam and Eve's disobedient act was the awakening of the sexual organs. After the Fall, Adam and Eve "experience a new motion of their flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God," writes Augustine (bk. 13, ch. 13).
Hence, to understand the human relationship to God, one needs to grasp the connection between human sexuality and disobedience. Yet sex is necessary to propagate the species and to create families. For Augustine, families are necessary to teach and enforce morality. The husband, on behalf of his wife and children, tries to follow the precepts of morality: to injure no one and to do good to every one he can reach (bk. 19, ch. 14). He is entrusted with the care of his family, and in return the family is duty bound to obey him. For Augustine, family harmony or domestic peace was based on obedience to authority It flowed from his well-known phrase "The peace of all things is the tranquility of order" (St. Augustine bk. 19, ch. 13). Each thing has its own place. The hierarchy of the family is a check on the human propensity for disobedience; it is the foundational unit of order.
Augustine and the tradition that followed him stressed this inextricable link between theological beliefs, sexual morality, and "the tranquility of order." In this tradition, original sin always mars the human response to God as well as human responses to fellow humans. As a result, the Church guides and directs Catholics in the life of virtue. The Catholic Church understands its role both as interpreting right order (describing the relationship of order to purpose) and as giving orders (regulating and enforcing). This twofold sense of order as created and enforced captures interesting patterns of thought in Catholic sexual ethics, especially in recent documents on sex, marriage, and reproduction. These documents interpret what God intends for the human sexual act and they also prescribe specific action guides (norms of behavior).
These two senses of order are not merely a matter of individual behavior, they are also a communal matter. And it is at that communal level that religions promulgate and enforce the moral order. This is similar to what David Little describes as society's "process of arranging itself in such a way that its institutional structures and its patterns of authority fit into an ultimate frame of meaning that commands the loyalty of its members" (Little 1969, 7). Marriage is an important example of that societal self-arrangement, and for Catholic teaching, marriage is coherent only when it exists according to an "ultimate frame of meaning" — God. Through marriage, sexual acts are oriented to their proper end, which is the propagation and education of offspring. The Church exercises its authority by teaching the faithful about the proper use and order of sexual faculties. The theology of marriage, the ethics of reproduction, Catholic ecclesiology, and attitudes about gender are all part of the process of arrangement and order characteristic of religion. This process is simply a way to define appropriate relationships, such as the right relationship of humans to God and to each other.
While I want to suggest that viewing this set of Catholic documents through the category of order is helpful, a further purpose of this project is to explore how gender roles permeate these senses of order. Before the Second Vatican Council, Catholic theology claimed that women were subordinate to men. As Pius XI stated, "For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love" (Pius XI 1930, 15). In the post–Vatican II period, the Church has downplayed the emphasis on subordination of women, as seen in this passage from John Paul II: "[B]oth man and woman are human beings to an equal degree, both are created in God's image" (John Paul II 1988, 6). Hence, while the magisterium continues to emphasize gender difference, they embrace a rhetoric of equality between male and female. Male and female are equal in dignity and equal in God's eyes, but he ordered them to be in relation to each other — a relation that requires difference.
In the arena of sexual relations, equality and difference take on even greater significance, as seen in the renewed emphasis on difference in John Paul II's theology of the body. A human being's gendered identity (understood either in its biological or psychosocial manifestations), while not relevant to God's relationship to the person, is important to sexual identity and practice. There is evidence, then, of both an egalitarian trend (men and women are equal in their dignity) and a subordinating one (men and women each have distinct roles).
Similarly, Catholic attitudes about women in the priesthood also display this contradiction between egalitarian and subordinationist views. As the feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether describes it, "[W]omen are said to be equal in the created order and hence in secular society but subordinate in the redemptive 'mystery' that connects Christ with the eucharistic priesthood" (Ruether 1991, 98). The nature of the equality in the created order is clearly anthropological, but Ruether's point is that the grounds for excluding women from the priesthood suggest an inequality in the redemptive order. Male and female as sexual beings are part of the created order, different yet equal before God. Women are denied access to the "eucharistic" priesthood because allowing them in would upset the redemptive order. Why is it, then, that imagery from the created order (women as mothers, brides, virgins) is often used to describe the redemptive "mystery" that connects Christ with the Church? Why is the Church "sexed" female?
This practice of "sexing" the Church is another way that gendered roles enforce order. Most notably, the Church is sexed female in the common practice of referring to the Church as mother, bride, and virgin. This association of female sexual roles with an institutional entity such as the Church sheds light in two directions. First, it tells us more about how Catholicism understands "the Church." Second, we learn more about how Catholics view the roles of mother, bride, and virgin. This sexing of the Church is more than just an example of how gender and order work in Catholic morality; it also reveals tensions in the complex patterns of Catholic reasoning about marriage, reproduction, and church authority. In a surprising way, it challenges the order enforced by the Catholic ethics of marriage and reproduction.
The concern for alignment and order evident in official Catholic teachings on marriage, reproduction, and gender is structurally similar to attitudes about church authority. In the documents I study, marriage mirrors the properly ordered relationship of God to humans. It also sacralizes the natural teleological order that connects human sexual acts to creation. Moreover, Catholicism's insistence on "chaste marriage" emphasizes the necessary order of a person's passions to her will. These three dimensions — the vertical, horizontal, and internal — are present in various ways through all the texts I consulted for this project. Beginning with Leo XIII's encyclical on marriage in 1880, the magisterium has continuously revisited the matter of how marriage structures, legitimizes, and maintains order. It has been concerned with how to restore order to the temporal realm — an order that, according to Pius XI, is "frustrated and trampled upon by the passions, errors and vices of man [sic]" (Pius XI 1930, 49). In Catholicism, the rightly ordered marriage, as we shall see in the next chapter, has profound implications for all created order, especially the alignment of the individual to God, the individual to the neighbor in society, and the components of the individual's soul.
Order, Religion, and Morality
Before proceeding, however, we must be clear about how and why the category of order is used in this study. The two senses of order, as descriptive of an organized or structured pattern and as a command, help organize and explain Catholic sexual ethics. The first sense captures the Catholic belief about the inherent purposiveness of God's creation, which informs the human understanding of moral action. By contrast, order in the sense of command reflects the emphasis on governance and regulation. Put more succinctly, God has created an order, humans strive to respect and fulfill it, and the Church assists humans by enforcing the appropriate moral norms.
The concept of order is used in theological and philosophical discourse in a variety of ways. The term, understood in its broadest sense, refers to "a structured state of affairs" (Childress 1986, 439). The notion of structure implies a pattern made up of different elements that all relate to each other in some fashion. Order describes the state of that relationship. Thus, a set of elements whose relationship to each other is coherent is said to be in order. Various elements whose relationship is unclear or even antagonistic are often thought to be in disorder. For instance, we use the phrase "out of order" to mean broken or not functioning — not able to achieve its intended purpose.
We might ask, then, what constitutes an ordered state? Often what appears to be utterly disordered (e.g., a messy desk, an abstract painting) may in fact be very much in order. The relationship of the various parts may be systematic, at least in one individual's view. This sort of reflection about the concept of order is relevant to many areas of life; politics, law, art, music, landscape design, physics, and so forth. In the area of theology, the concept of order is important because it describes what believers perceive as the proper state of relationship in the created universe. Indeed, for Christians it illuminates the nature of God's relationship to humans, relationships among humans, and the relationship of the parts of the individual to each other. Catholic sexual ethics invokes all three of these types of order, and they all adhere to a teleological logic, which views order as inseparable from purpose.
John Mahoney's Augustinian description of order captures these three dimensions — vertical, horizontal, and interior. He writes,
All the things which God has created are good, and so the rational soul acts well with reference to them if it maintains order, and if by distinguishing, choosing, and assessing, it subordinates the lesser things to the greater, the bodily to the spiritual, the lower to the higher, and the temporal to the eternal. (Mahoney 1987, 75)
The moral life, then, is about maintaining the order of God's creation as it is manifested in various dimensions. Mahoney summarizes Augustine's ethics in the phrase "a place for everything and everything in its place" (75). Seen through the feminine metaphors for the Church, the Catholic construction of gender reinforces all three of these orders — the feminine has historically been associated with the lesser, the bodily, the lower, and the temporal. Nevertheless, the activity of sexing the Church as feminine undermines that order by presenting a vision that is discontinuous with the reality of church authority as male. In other words, what is the right relationship of the feminine to church authority and rule? Thus, even as the Church sees gender roles as embodiments of God's order, the sexing of the Church as female might suggest some ambiguity in that order.
Charles Curran clarifies contemporary discussions of the Church by noting two distinguishing characteristics of Catholic ecclesiology: its emphasis on mediation and its hierarchical structure. Mediation, which Curran refers to as "sacramentality" or "analogical imagination," captures the Catholic view that "the divine is mediated in and through the human and the natural." Catholics are confident that the order of nature (God's creation) reveals the divine. The Church is the visible sign of the divine working through the human. The Church is neither fully human nor fully divine, according to this view. Rather, it is a unity; a marriage. In a certain sense, the fruits of that union are the sacraments. They "illustrate the reality of mediation" (Curran 1999, 10). While Curran presents mediation as characteristic of Catholic ecclesiology, he is also critical of historical moments when mediation has led to the claim that the Church is divine, and therefore perfect and sinless.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sexing the Church by Aline H. Kalbian. Copyright © 2005 Aline H. Kalbian. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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