This paper was presented 
at the 
Commonweal Fall 2001 Colloquium

Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY, 
October 26 - 28, 2001 October 26 - 28, 2001

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Looking only at official statements concerning Catholic sexual morality, the past six decades appear serenely unchanging. When I was a child, the church forbade divorce, adultery, fornication, abortion, and artificial birth control. Religious men and women took vows of chastity and ordained priests were obligated to celibacy. Now almost sixty, I can state that none of these positions has been substantially modified during my lifetime. If communication consisted only in transmission, this essay could end here. The official church beams out the same message as always.

That message, moreover, can correctly be perceived as counter-cultural within an American society that, over the same sixty-year period, became ever more profoundly individualistic and pervasively sexualized. To use the language of faith rather than of sociology, the church’s teaching on sexuality is, in important ways, prophetic. It stands for a vision of the world defined by God over against practices that distort creation. The demand for fidelity in marriage challenges an American ethos in which rampant divorce testifies to the erosion of a sense of covenant. The insistence on celibacy for religious and clergy witnesses to the power of the resurrection over against a culture whose lust for pleasure and acquisition is based on the premise that this is the only life to be had. Restricting licit sexual activity to marriage declares that sexuality is meant to be covenantal and mutually responsible, against the cultural forces that define sexuality simply in terms of pleasure and individual fulfillment. Most impressively, the church’s firm and unwavering stance against abortion stands in the classic prophetic tradition of the protection of the powerless against oppressors, asserting the worth of all human life as God’s creation against the death-dealing idolatries of comfort and efficiency. The church’s sexual teaching can be, and has been, a prophetic voice within American culture.

The church’s teaching on sex is, however, inevitably more than words from a pulpit or even statements in the press. Teaching on any moral issue is real and convincing only to the extent that it is embraced by believers, embodied in their practices, coherently and consistently expressed by the community of faith. In this sense, the “reception” of Catholic sexual teaching by Catholics themselves --- both clergy and lay --- is an essential ingredient of that teaching. Only to the degree that moral teaching is expressed by patterns of moral attitudes and actions among Catholics themselves can it be perceived and perhaps received by those outside the Catholic community. A prophet can be taken seriously if the prophet’s message is clear, consistent, internally coherent, and corresponds to the prophet’s own manner of life. Precisely here, I argue, there has been a profound change over the fifty-some years of my life, a change that has compromised the prophetic voice of the church in matters of sexual morality. 

THAT WAS THEN

From the 1940's through the mid-1960's, Catholic teaching on sexuality was remarkably consistent. More impressive, it was embodied by a clergy and laity who wore their rigorous sexual code as a badge of honor distinguishing Catholics from their less impressive Protestant rivals. The prohibition of artificial birth control, of divorce, of pre-marital sex, and of mixed marriages marked them, they thought, as the serious Christians in this country, although not even the Protestants who had accommodated to Freud and Kinsey and Americanism in general, yet approved of abortion. There was, furthermore, a real distinction between nominal and practicing Catholics. Practicing Catholics lived by the strict teaching of the church, and extended that teaching through sets of attitudes and actions that comprehended the most minute htmlects of everyday life. Humorous and bitter memoirs alike have related how the prohibition of fornication led logically to modesty in dress and how modesty in dress was spelled out in highly specific norms, from loose blouses to non-reflecting shoes. The Legion of Decency’s ranking of films was more than a list tacked to the bulletin board. It provided a guide to moral discernment in the home. I vividly remember an argument between my mother and my teen-age sisters when I was about 8 years old about going to see “Joan of Arc.” My sisters argued that it was about a saint, after all. My mother countered that it starred Ingrid Bergman, who had abandoned her husband; to attend this film would be to countenance adultery and divorce. 

Catholics of my age well remember the totalizing character of the Catholic ethos of the fifties. Devotion to Pius XII, the Blessed Mother, fasting on Friday, keeping the eucharistic fast, avoiding blhtmlhemy (any use of “Jesus” without bowing the head), masturbation, and impure thoughts were all pretty much at the same level of obligation, woven together in a single, unquestioning and unquestionable fabric of belief and practice, of fear and love, of resentment and pride. Weekly confession on Saturday afternoons marked the practicing Catholic. Yes, it was terrifying to acknowledge every impure thought and act. But it all made sense. Catholics, we told each other, were unlike Protestants also in this respect: they had psychotherapy, we had the confessional.

Catholic sexual mores marked the church as an immigrant religion out of step with an America whose post-war affluence and freedom saw Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe give way to more spectacular and more sinister entrepreneurs of sex. But Americans also paid a certain respect to the Catholic insistence on remaining aloof from the sexual mainstream, a respect suggested by Hollywood’s cautious and usually positive portrayal of Catholic priests, nuns, and morals. The priests portrayed by Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy in the 1940's were virile, musical, and unequivocally committed to the good of humanity. The depiction of nuns like Deborah Kerr (in “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison”) and Audrey Hepburn (in “The Nun’s Story”) were notable for the seriousness with which they took religious vows and the desire of religious women to seek God’s will. Hollywood producers were neither Catholic nor particularly moral, but they knew that Catholics voted at the ticket office. 

THIS IS NOW

One way of indicating a seismic shift in the reception of Catholic sexual teaching is viewing more recent Hollywood portrayals of Catholics. When not simply silly (Whoopi Goldberg in “Sister Act”) or horrifying (Meg Tilley in “Agnes of God”) the depictions of Catholics tend toward the puerile (“Keeping the Faith,” “Dogma”). It’s not just films. In live and televised drama, characters are presented positively when they struggle against catholic teaching and are presented negatively when they straightforwardly act according to it. Stand-up comics, many of whom claim to be “recovering Catholics,” treat traditional sexual teaching as self-evidently ludicrous. In a world of political correctness, practicing Catholics are among the very few remaining safe targets for easy mockery.

Attacking Catholic sexual mores seems increasingly arbitrary and even dated, however, as the formerly monolithic Catholic sexual ethos has all but disappeared. Today, as many American Catholics divorce as do non-Catholics. Catholics are not notably better at avoiding adultery and fornication than non-Catholics. Young Catholics sleep together before marriage with little sense of “living in sin.” As for masturbation, it is practiced as regularly as before, except that few now confess it as a mortal sin. With clear conscience or not, married Catholics practice artificial birth control. Fewer, to be sure, but still some Catholic women have abortions. Vocations to religious orders that demand chastity are scarce. As for a celibate priesthood, more later, but the lack of vocations has once again made America a missionary country. If Catholic sexual teaching includes the willing reception, glad enactment, and unquestioning proclamation of that teaching by Catholics themselves, then that teaching is, in the year 2001, far less coherent, consistent, and clear than it was in 1950, simply because many Catholics today themselves either don’t believe it or consistently practice it. 

Before proceeding further, two disclosures by the writer. First, I write as a Roman Catholic male who has five older siblings with 24 children, was a seminarian at 13, a benedictine monk for nine years, an ordained priest for three years, a married layman for twenty-eight years with six children inherited with my marriage to Joy, another child we share, and ten grandchildren. My report is that of a participant-observer. Second, I am well aware of the tendencies in American Catholicism counter to the transition I am here depicting, and that seeks a return to the ethos of the pre-conciliar church. But even these tendencies are defined by the context that I am describing. 

A TIME OF TURNING

How did American Catholicism reach this state of compromised prophecy_ A full answer would require more space and better analytic skills than are available to this essayist. For purposes of discussion, I suggest that the shift is due both to factors external to Catholicism in American culture, and to factors internal to Catholicism, and that the link between the two — indeed perhaps the best explanation — is the way the external became internal, or the way in which American Catholics truly became American at a moment when America itself was undergoing a cultural revolution. It has become a cliche to “blame it on the 60's,” but the cultural changes occurring in America from the middle of that decade to the present are far from a cliche. Doubtless, a more adequate analysis would show complexities and ambiguities before and after the transition, but would also show that the transition itself was nevertheless real and profound. 

At least six elements pertinent to the present subject made up the cultural upheaval in the United States during the 1960's. The first was a sustained prosperity unparalleled in human history, enabled by the same technological breakthroughs that made possible both the microchip and a reliable birth-control pill, that appeared to make possible a simultaneous war against foreign communism and domestic poverty, that enabled — and then demanded — the full participation of both men and women in the economic sphere. The second was the sexual revolution sweeping first across college campuses and then into homes and elementary schools. Masters and Johnson brought the orgasm into polite company, and Alex Comfort brought the Joy of Sex to the local bookstore, with drawings that a decade earlier would have required a brown wrapper. Post-pill and pre-Aids, sexual activity was preached and practiced as a matter of fun and freedom, with sex and procreation increasingly regarded as quite separate realities. 

The third element is the merging of the sexual revolution and commerce in the media, above all in advertising. As movies and rock and roll tested the boundaries of sexual expression, each risky extension was domesticated with breathtaking speed by television. By the beginning of the 21^st century, no form of sexual exploitation including soft-core child pornography, has gone unexploited by advertisers. As for hard-core pornography, it has become the most lucrative branch of film-making, and parents must make a special request in motel rooms to keep such films from being offered to their children. Pornography and prostitution are available for sale on the internet to every child. The distinction between sex selling and selling sex has virtually disappeared. 

The fourth element is the impact of the political scandals of the 1960's on the American consciousness, above all on the so-called Boomer generation, whose path through life has had such a disproportionate cultural effect simply because of its size. The late fifties and early sixties encouraged a sense of political optimism in the civil rights struggle, and the peace corps, and the war against poverty. Social involvement could make a difference. But the assassination of the Kennedys and King, the secret war in Asia uncovered by the Pentagon papers, the Watergate scandal and coverup, all these had two profound effects. One was the emergence of the hermeneutics of suspicion. America finally emerged from its cocoon of political naivete, as more and more saw that politics was about power and power was most often self-interested, and that politicians lied out of both habit and choice. The other was a shift in the sense of what was morally more important, from the private to the public. The Eisenhower generation cultivated sexual propriety but winked at racial, class, and gender inequities. The Boomers (before AIDS) saw nothing wrong with sexual promiscuity, so long as the right social issues were engaged. These are genuine shifts in consciousness. 

The fifth element in the 1960's American cultural revolution was the women’s movement, which drew upon and extended each of the other elements. It was an economic prosperity grounded in labor-saving technology that freed women from biological determinism and domestic servitude. The pill liberated them from the constant threat of pregnancy and child-rearing, enabling them to think seriously about careers. The sexual revolution made women full partners of men in seeking sexual adventure separated from commitment. The media’s marriage of sex and commerce, in turn, revealed how commodification simultaneously glorified and degraded women’s bodies. It was women who concluded that if all politics is personal so everything personal is also political. Women above all seized on the hermeneutics of suspicion: the validation of their own voices required the demystification of patriarchal structures constructed for the benefit of men and the suppression of women. Women translated the split between private and public morality into an advocacy of the legality of abortion, so that the killing of a fetus was interpreted in terms of “women’s rights over their own bodies.” In short, the women’s movement, the most controversial and threatening element in the cultural revolution, forced all Americans to recognize that sex is also always about gender, and that gender always involves social construction, and that social construction always involves somebody’s interest.

Finally, the 60's saw the birth of the Gay and Lesbian Rights movements in the cities of America. That relatively small portion of humanity whose identity was defined by others in terms of deviance also discovered through solidarity its name and its right to speak for itself and to define itself. As a result, more and more American Catholics discovered that they or their children or their spouses were homosexual. And what should they think or do about that_

These six elements of cultural revolution are morally a mixed bag. America’s prosperity brings blessings but it has also shaped an entitled population. The pill gave women freedom but its long-term health effects remain unsure. The sexual revolution, however inevitable, has had disastrous consequences on a number of fronts. The sexualization of identity in the media has coarsened the American soul. The hermeneutics of suspicion has disabled many from civic participation. Yet it was past time for Americans to mature politically, past time for moral consciousness to embrace the social as well as the domestic sphere, past time for women and homosexuals to receive full recognition of their humanity and place in the world. However we might evaluate the morality of these elements, the essential point is that they all occurred simultaneously over a short period of time and, in combination, profoundly altered American culture.

Now the pertinence of all this to the present discussion is twofold. First, all this cultural upheaval was in process at the very moment when American Catholics finally became fully American. Second, they coincided with the greatest cultural upheaval within the Catholic church itself since the 16^th century, generated and symbolized by the Second Vatican Council (1963-1965).

INCONSISTENCY AND CONFUSION

John F. Kennedy’s election as president signalled American Catholicism’s turn from immigrant and second-class status to full participant in American culture. In the early sixties, the American church was prosperous, was growing together with the suburbs, was becoming American in its hierarchy, and was attracting so many young men and women vocations that huge new seminaries and convents were being built to accommodate them all. As much as the Kennedy presidency, the council seemed to symbolize the coming of age of the American church. The American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray spearheaded the passage of the council’s decree on Religious Freedom (imagine: the supremacy of the individual conscience before God!), and the Council appeared to call for the reform of the church in the direction of distinctively American values, advocating strong lay leadership, consultation, and decision-making by national organizations of bishops.

The council notably did not address the sexual revolution. It said nothing about the role of women. It did not acknowledge homosexuals. It emphatically changed nothing in the rule of priestly celibacy. But it raised expectations, especially concerning the existentially most pressing issue for American men and women Catholics, birth control. Among these expectations was that the promised decision on this difficult issue would be reached on the basis of the values inculcated by the council itself.

By the late 1960's, American Catholics were caught up in a cultural revolution with little to guide them. The council explicitly called for the church to engage modernity. But in moral matters, the council offered little to help Americans through an overwhelming flood of change. Catholics did not suddenly became sexual adventurers. But they were ill-prepared to sort through issues that few people were then even in a position to assess accurately. In the 60's, the most respected moral theologians had shifted from a language of rules and law, to a language of relationship and discernment, especially in sexual matters. They spoke of sex in marriage as serving relational values as well as procreation. And the most significant theological movement within the church, liberation theology, emphasized how Scripture is more concerned with social oppression through economic and political systems than with how people arrange themselves sexually. But these were not the only views among teachers: other moral theologians vigorously opposed the new vision of morality, and continued to emphasize a rule-based sexual ethics.

In hindsight, it is scarcely surprising that American Catholics — now themselves more than ever American in their individualism and consumerism — began to choose teachers and tenets for themselves. Small wonder also that priests in the pulpit and in the confessional exhibited considerable variety of opinion on issues like birth control. And everyone waited Paul VI’s clarification on this matter with mixed moods, for the media had made widely known that the process of consultation had pointed to the need to change the rules on contraception. It is even no shock that some American Catholics, raised in a context of severe repression, went overboard in an atmosphere of greater openness. Shaped by a code morality that put a person chewing the host and eating meat on Friday and committing masturbation earning a place in Hell on each count, and then being informed that none of them in fact did, and now being instructed that “moral discernment” rather than rules should guide the conscience, some people inevitably confused freedom and license. 

By the end of the 20^th century, overwhelmed by cultural changes outside and within the church, American Catholics had completely lost their former self-confident and uniform sense of what it meant to be Catholic in terms of sexual morality. Confusion and contention had replaced clarity and confession. If Catholics had a prophetic voice on sexuality, they themselves seemed unsure what it was. 

INCOHERENCE AND CORRUPTION

Another and far sadder dimension of the American Catholic scene must be addressed, however reluctantly and inadequately. American Catholics have also grown increasingly suspicious of and hostile towards a hierarchy that appears, in the harsh light of publicity, as no longer credible because of incoherence and even corruption.

The decisive moment was the 1969 publication of Humanae Vitae. It reaffirmed a prohibition of all forms of artificial birth control on the basis of patently poor logic and as an act of papal authoritarianism in the face of a process of discernment that the Pope himself had initiated. Contrary to the Pope’s expectations, the encyclical’s equation between artificial birth control and abortion did not serve to strengthen the moral argument against birth control, but served instead to weaken the church’s prophetic stand against abortion. The subsequent efforts by John Paul II to shore up Humanae Vitae through a “theology of the body” have only sharpened the perception that, lacking a convincing theological basis, the magisterium’s intractability on this point is really about keeping women in their place and maintaining the aura of papal authority. The birth control issue finally initiated many American Catholics into the hermeneutics of suspicion, enabling them at last to see and name many other forms of inconsistency and corruption that they had formerly allowed to pass in the name of loyalty and obedience.

The church’s way of dealing with divorce and remarriage, for example, lacks any coherence. Everyone knows that some Catholics are allowed to divorce and remarry with the approval of the church, so long as they (or their ecclesiastical lawyer) can make a case for annulment even after years of cohabitation, and if they are rich or prominent enough to demand such special attention. The poor and the legally unrepresented who find themselves in disastrous or abusive marriages cannot divorce and remarry in the church. The exception is if a first marriage was not really “in the church.” There is no problem about folks with serial unsacramental marriages behind them now to divorce and enjoy the benefits of full communion. Only if a sacramental marriage fails are faithful Catholics unable to seek another sanctified partnership.

Equally inconsistent and incoherent is the fiction of a totally celibate priesthood. I leave aside the anecdotal evidence that reminds us that theoretical celibacy need not be translated into actual chastity. But how can Rome insist that a male celibate clergy is necessary in the face of the contrary evidence from Scripture and Tradition, in the face of the experience of Protestant and Orthodox communions, and while accepting into the Roman priesthood men who are married but who have converted from Anglicanism_ The Roman church’s willingness to lose an ordained priesthood altogether rather than ordain married men or (horrors) women may appear noble to some, but to more and more American Catholics, it appears as suicidal self-delusion. Its eagerness to ordain old men who are widowers and married men into the diaconate appear as desperate avoidance mechanisms and an expression of fear and loathing toward normal sexual behavior and above all toward women’s bodies. It is now no longer even possible for theologians under the mandatum to speak in favor of women’s ordination, despite the fact that every argument advanced for an all-male clergy is laughable (at best) and blhtmlhemous (at worst). No wonder the suspicion grows — and has been given explicit voice by at least one brave moral theologian — that the obsessive protection of this male privilege owes something to its capacity to provide cover for homosexual men using their priesthood (and perhaps their bishopric) as a closet. I mean nothing slanderous by repeating this statement. An argument can be made for homosexual as well as heterosexual priests. But if homosexuality among its clergy were to be honestly faced by the church, then other things would need honestly to be addressed as well. 

The magisterium might then need to take account of the Archbishops who have had long-term affairs with female staff members, or Bishops who decide they want to get married and stay bishops, or African priests who carry out a campaign of rape against African nuns. The magisterium might need to ask whether the cumulative effect of such behaviors might indicate something more than human weakness, might in fact point to a deeply distorted understanding of sexuality, might in fact indict an ecclesiastical practice that virtually guarantees a sexually immature clergy. Publicly most scandalous to Catholic laity, and deeply injurious to their already diminished sense of confidence in the hierarchy’s moral guidance in matters of sexuality, is the decades-long practice of enabling and covering up crimes of child-abuse by pedophile priests who continued to be moved from one parish to another to perpetuate their infantile and predatory sexual practices at the expense of innocent children. The sheer numbers of priests involved and of their victims is shocking enough, but even more disgusting are the self-serving gestures of a hierarchy that has had to pay possibly hundreds of millions in lawsuits (presumably drawn from the collection plate) and has, to this day, only reluctantly supported laws to forestall such crimes against the helpless. 

Finally, the magisterium does not seem to grhtml that its profound, deliberate, and systemic sexism compromises its prophetic voice. Everyone knows that most Catholic parishes in this country would have to close up tomorrow if it weren’t for women. I don’t mean this in the sense that women have always been more loyal and religious than men, attending Mass while their husbands waited outside smoking. I mean this in the very specific sense that women are carrying out most of the work of ministry in many if not most parishes in this country. But the same abuse of power by which the male clergy exploited but never fully honored the ministerial labors of religious women in parishes, hospitals, and schools, is now being perpetuated in the exploitation of single and married women in local parishes. And this, while they are kept from ordination by the argument that only males can really represent Christ!

Not all parishioners have yet awakened to this pattern of sexism. Even while they worry over the fact that their parish now has one priest when it formerly had three, they are still better off than some parishes that can celebrate the Eucharist only when a priest can visit. So pleased to see (and to be) women acolytes and lectors and eucharistic ministers and catechists, they do not yet appreciate that such accommodation simply continues with slight variations the traditional exploitation of women by male leadership. But an increasing number of women do see the pattern, and they are angry. They correctly see that the rejection of women lies at the heart of a great deal of the church’s twisted and confusing sexual practice. And while they fervently support the church’s opposition to abortion, even they find it increasingly difficult, in the shadow of this pattern, to cogently respond to the non-Catholic feminists’ charge that the church’s objection to abortion is only the most radical form of its desire for women above all to be controlled. The church’s teaching cannot be prophetic if it is or seems to be in service of corrupt power.

I argue in this essay that although the words have stayed the same, the reception of Catholic moral teaching in America has not. A combination of cultural upheaval, inconsistent teaching and practice, and the corruption and abuse of authority, has led to uncertainty and inconsistency among Catholics themselves at the start of the 21^st century. Unless the leaders of the church begin a serious examination of conscience with regard to their practice and a serious process of discernment with regard to their teaching, little better can be expected. At a time when a seriously disordered world most needs a prophetic word concerning humans as sexual creatures before God, the church’s ability to speak and embody that prophetic word will be hopelessly compromised.

CONSEQUENCES FOR PUBLIC DEBATE

As the largest and (at the moment) still most cohesive version of Christianity in America, Roman Catholics should have a significant voice in the many difficult public issues facing the United States that, in one way or another, touch on human sexuality. Some of these derive from the astounding advances in the biological sciences, above all in the area of genetic engineering, that threaten all systems of morality by raising possibilities that had never before been imagined. The debate over stem-cell research has obvious implications for public policy concerning abortion: the opportunity to commercially produce and then harvest “fetal tissue” for medical research and pharmaceutical product will be irresistible to many. The AIDS pandemic in Asia and Africa makes the distribution and use of condoms a public health issue. Other challenges arise from the continuing cultural changes I have described. The number of two-career couples puts great strain on marriage and on child-rearing. Same-sex unions and the desire of same-sex couples to create their own families put pressure on existing marriage and inheritance law. The international systems of slave-prostitution and child-pornography are among the obvious human-rights issues our nation needs to address in its diplomacy, as are economic or social practices leading to the enslavement of women and children. How Catholics view all these matters ought to figure significantly in national debates.

But the failure of Catholics to speak coherently on sexuality means that it is difficult for others to reckon with “the Catholic position.” If American Catholics in their actual convictions and practice are deeply divided, then what does it mean to speak of a “Catholic Voice_” It certainly means nothing to legislators and diplomats, who pay attention to voices as votes. If Catholics in their diverse range of convictions and practices are indistinguishable from the varieties of Protestant Christians, then they cannot be heard as a single voice and thereby have no significant social and political presence as Catholics. The division between Catholic laity and hierarchy in matters of sexual morality, moreover, means that political leaders lobbied by the clergy in the name of the church will also ask what votes are actually represented by these official spokespersons. When neither unanimity in practice nor logical coherence characterize Catholic sexual teaching, it becomes more and more difficult for those either within or outside the church to take it seriously.

In his first letter to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul noted the affect that the raucous Corinthian worship services had on outsiders and unbelievers:

If then the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind_ But if all prophesy, an unbeliever or outsider who enters is reproved by all and called to account by all. After the secrets of the unbeliever’s heart are disclosed, that person will bow down before God and worship him, declaring, “God is really among you” (1 Cor 14:23-25, NRSV).

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