5. How sinful is Sex?

From What Happened to Sin, by Seán Fagan. S.M.

The Columba Press, 2008.

One of the reasons for confusion about the notion of sin today is our preoccupation with sexuality. The saddest commentary on the Church’s moral teaching is that when a person is described as immoral, most people think of sexual sin. The individual may be selfish, greedy, spiteful, cruel, jealous, unjust, brutal, violent, unscrupulous, arrogant, but such a person will not be thought immoral unless he or she is involved in sexual sin. Not only did traditional moral teaching seem to pay more attention to the sixth and ninth commandments than to the others, but also its understanding of sex was predominantly negative. There seemed little in the sexual sphere that was not sinful. Any positive treatment of the subject spiritualised it to the extent of almost losing contact with the world of reality. The bulk of the teaching was concerned with the danger of sex, and the textbooks were even hesitant about what was ‘permitted’ to engaged couples and married people. It is not sufficiently realised how much of this attitude is owed to non-Christian influences in the early centuries and failure to benefit from the insights and discoveries of the human sciences. Sin is as much a reality in the sexual area as in any other, but if we are to get a balanced understanding of it we need to look critically at the factors that influenced our tradition and see how we can make the Christian view of sex meaningful in today’s world.

Sexual wilderness

A reaction against the over‑emphasis and negative treatment of the past is the tendency among many priests and teachers to soft‑pedal it now, to take it for granted that the subject has too many grey areas to allow us to speak clearly of sin. There is a real risk in this, insofar as a generation of teenagers are growing up without any norms or guidelines in this most difficult area of their development, and what we are witnessing is not so much a sexual revolution as simply a sexual wilderness. This in turn provokes a reaction from those who complain bitterly about the ‘permissiveness’ of the age and want pastors to preach the old black‑and‑white rules, conveniently forgetting that many of those who swing along with the so‑called permissiveness were themselves brought up on such rules.

It is sad to see such polarisation in the Church. But in reacting against these two extremes and searching for a positive and meaningful view of sex in the context of Christian faith, we need to beware of a certain ‘mystique’ of sex, the kind of glorification of sexual activity embodied in the view that ‘bad sex is better than no sex’. It is no exaggeration to say that our western culture is obsessed with sex, and we need to be reminded that obsession with sexuality is every bit as inhuman as suppression of it. Our concern for a new and more meaningful understanding of it should be seen, not as a last‑minute rush to catch up with the ‘modern world’, but rather in the context of our attempt to understand the sexual dimension of our human nature in the service of love.

That the sexual dimension is no minor matter is recognised in the opening paragraph of the Holy See’s Declaration on Sexual Ethics (1975), which says: ‘The human person, present-day scientists maintain, is so profoundly affected by sexuality that it must be considered one of the principal formative influences on the life of a man or woman. In fact, sex is the source of the biological, psychological and spiritual characteristics which make a person male or female and which thus considerably influence each individual’s progress towards maturity and membership of society.’ This simple statement has implications for Christian morality that were seldom recognised in the older tradition. But the older tradition has so moulded, not only our thinking, but more so our feeling and gut‑level reactions, that it is difficult for many people to adjust to the new insights. As in the previous chapters, it is necessary to take a critical look at the older tradition and explicitly recognise its shortcomings in order to exorcise the ghosts that haunt our imagination. Again it could be objected that it is not fair to criticise the past, and it is so easy to paint a caricature. But the fact remains that much of our thinking is still subconsciously affected by factors seldom explicitly adverted to. To face these explicitly and recognise their influence will help to clarify our thinking.

The positive strand

It would be totally untrue to say that the older tradition had no positive and healthy teaching on sexuality and Christian chastity. One can find the basis for such teaching in the Bible itself, beginning with Genesis. The Bible ‘demythologised’ sex, took it out of the realm of the gods, with its fertility rites and temple prostitution, and made it something basically human, good and beautiful. The creation narrative is quite explicit: ‘God made human beings, male and female … and God was pleased with what he saw. The man and woman were both naked, but they were not embarrassed’ (Gen 1‑2). The Song of Songs describes the physical beauty and erotic love of two young people, a relationship that is sensuous, passionate, and fully human. The prophets, and later St. Paul, were not ashamed to use the marital relationship as a metaphor for God’s love for his people. The gospels make no mention of Jesus ever giving genital expression to his sexuality, but Hebrews tells us that he was like us in all things but sin. He was a sexual being, and the affective dimension of his personality is clear from the picture we have of him as a compassionate, gentle, loving, tender and warm person who touched people physically, psychologically and spiritually. Far from the cerebral, abstract language of Vatican documents, he described the essence of marriage in the words of Genesis, that husband and wife become ‘two-in-one-flesh’.

The positive strand in our tradition was never lost down through the centuries, and in every age there were people whose common sense, emotional balance and secure family background enabled them to appreciate and live it. They were not unduly perturbed by the more negative strands in the tradition, and they are the people who today are best able to understand and appropriate the new insights from the human sciences, because they have already been discovering them implicitly in their own experience. This fact needs not merely to be tacitly admitted, but in the interests of truth and justice to be loudly proclaimed. Any new sexual ethic must be in continuity with the best of the past, although the deeper continuity may sometimes involve a radical discontinuity at certain points. But the best of the past was far from being the whole of the past. Even a slight acquaintance with marriage counselling, confessional practice and the history of moral theology should make it clear that for large numbers of people the positive strand was a remote ideal, only hazily glimpsed through a dark fog of emotional hang‑ups, religious scruples and crippling guilt. Knowledge alone is not virtue, but a sober look at some of the ingredients in that fog may help to clear away the mist from people’s minds and enable them not merely to cope with their sexuality, but to rejoice in it as God’s gift.

A fact that can easily be overlooked is that ‘Church teaching’ on sexuality is to be found in papal encyclicals which are never seen by over 99.9% of Catholics. Those who do read them find them heavy going, with very little of the Joy and Hope that is a feature of the documents of Vatican II. Each one was promulgated by just one man (Pius XI, Pius XII, Paul VI), a male celibate cleric steeped in the clerical culture of the Vatican civil service, possibly with the help of some theologians, but with no indication of input from other bishops or from the experience of happily married intelligent women. The writings of Dr. Jack Dominion (over 30 books), a happily married layman, world-renowned therapist and lecturer, are far more theological, spiritual and inspiring than all of the official documents on the Christian meaning of relationships, sexuality and marriage. Too many fundamentalist Catholics think that Vatican documents are to be accepted in faith and obeyed in blind obedience, and whatever suffering they may cause is to be accepted as a share in the sufferings of Christ. This comes close to blasphemy.

Benedictine Abbot Christopher Butler, one of the most outstanding members of the Second Vatican Council explained that our Christian faith and belief are limited to a few essentials: the existence of one God, of two natures in Christ, of Three Persons in the Blessed Trinity, of Jesus in the Eucharist. Divine faith does not include every statement of every pope. Church teaching about morality is human reason interpreting the eternal law and this human reason is fallible, open to change, development and refinement as we grow in understanding. This is the Church’s teaching function or Magisterium. As human and fallible it can get things right, but also horribly wrong, and when this happens it sadly relies on reform by amnesia, conveniently forgetting the dreadful things it mistakenly taught for centuries. Unfortunately it seldom has the humility to admit its failures.

Moralism

One of the reasons for today’s confusion is moralism, the temptation on the part of pastors, parents and teachers to teach morality by decree. When society was less democratic and there was more unquestioning acceptance of authority, preachment and prescription served well enough. But from their first years in school, children are now taught to question and discover things for themselves, and they cannot understand why religion should be an exception. As young adults they find that their questions about the Christian meaning of sexuality are not getting convincing answers. Some of the answers remind them of the preacher’s sermon notes with the red‑pencilled directive in the margin: ‘argument weak here, shout like hell!’ It is false loyalty to the Church to pretend that our argument was never weak, that we were never ignorant of the facts, that we never overstated the case.

History is there to show how much the Church’s teaching has changed through the centuries. A narrow view of the Church’s teaching role has given the impression that the changes were only minor details, and that on all major points there is an unbroken line of tradition going back to Scripture itself or to the early Christian communities. This is simply not the case. It is too easily forgotten that it was the constant teaching for centuries that intercourse had to be for the purpose of procreation in order to be free of sin, that intercourse during menstruation or pregnancy was a mortal sin, and that any other position apart from the so‑called ‘natural’ one (husband on top) was at least a venial sin. St. Augustine taught that intercourse during pregnancy is gravely sinful, indeed a greater sin than fornication, adultery or even incest, provided that these are done with the intention of producing a baby. He set up flawed standards of sexual behaviour which no-one could possibly live out without crippling emotional damage producing failure, shame and guilt. Ascetic Church men became prurient voyeurs, searching out sexual temptations from even the most innocent of women. This weird nonsense was based on the ignorance of physiology, which at that time believed that the male seed contained the homunculus, or little man which needed the female seed-ground in which to be planted, but no farmer would ever sow twice where seed has already been planted.

Cultural conditioning

These simple facts exemplify what has already been explained in an earlier chapter about the cultural conditioning of moral norms. The Bible is not a code of revealed morality with ready‑made answers to moral questions, so when it came to formulating specific rules of practical morality, the people of God in both Old and New Testaments and the Church ever since had to fall back on the wisdom of the time, which, in the very nature of things also reflected the ignorance and superstitions of the particular stage of civilisation. The negative elements of various stages may have been dropped intellectually by later generations, but in many instances their influence continued in the form of basic attitudes that still distort people’s understanding of sexuality.

Paul and the early Christians accepted the Stoic philosophy of the time, which exalted nature, reason and decorum, and downgraded the emotions and feelings. This tradition was continued and intensified by Christian writers all through the history of the Church, until it reached a kind of rationalism in the neo-scholastic period up to the Second Vatican Council. A consequence of this was the almost morbid distrust of venereal pleasure that is so marked a feature of theological writing on sexuality down to recent times. Another element that entered in was the Manichean downgrading of matter as evil. This came particularly through St. Augustine, one of the most distinguished theologians in the history of the Church. His writings are six times as voluminous as the whole corpus of Cicero and his theological views were at the heart of the subject for over a thousand years and are still quoted. At the age of eighteen when he took an African concubine he joined the Manichees, a sect which renounced most of the ordinary pleasures of life associated with eating, drinking and sexual expression. When his companion left him after fifteen years to return to Africa, he took another concubine, and then was converted and baptised at the age of thirty three. In spite of the grace of conversion he carried much of the Manichean influence in his thinking for the rest of his life. He had no real understanding of marriage but only his own guilt-ridden experience of long years of sinful fornication. John Noonan describes him as holding that there was nothing rational, spiritual or sacramental in the act of intercourse. He saw it as intimately linked to original sin, a distortion that has blighted Catholic theology until the present day, believing that innocent babies are born with original sin needing exorcism in baptism and their mothers needing to be ‘churched’ to purify them after childbirth. This teaching crucified millions of devout Catholic mothers who suffered up to ten or more still-births and still worry today about the fate of their unborn children. Until very recent times the Church’s guess-work in theology has given them no consolation.

The essence of marriage

Augustine’s theology of original sin which was bequeathed to the whole Catholic Church of the West was unknown in the East. Genesis and Jesus describe the essence of marriage as the ‘two becoming one flesh’, whereas Augustine blasphemously changed those words of Jesus into: ‘in intercourse a man becomes all flesh’ (Sermons, 62,2). One tragic result of this is that those beautiful words of Jesus describing the essence of marriage as ‘two-in-one-flesh’, the intimacy which is the very heart of their relationship, have never been used in official Church teaching down to the present time. That sexuality in marriage was marred forever by original sin is clearly stated in the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church: ‘As a break with God, the first sin had for its consequence the rupture of the original communion between man and woman. Their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations, their mutual attraction, the Creator’s own gift, changed into a relationship of domination and lust, and the beautiful vocation of man and woman to be fruitful, multiply and subdue the earth was burdened by the pain of childbirth and the toil of work.’ (n. 1607). Is this in fact what people feel as they make their marriage vows to each other in the presence of God and of the Christian community?

This may well have described Augustine’s relationship to his slave woman, but it is an affront to the millions of happy holy marriages down through human history. In fact, it is individual actual sin which causes damage to individual marriages. What is perhaps yet more shocking is that Genesis 3:16 is used as a quotation to support that assertion of the presence of domination and lust. God said to the woman: ‘Your desire shall be for your husband and he will have dominion over you.’ Firstly, would God, the most loving of fathers, make the relationship at the centre of human life a hideous sin-trap fraught with instincts against which the couple must fight throughout their whole lives together? Sadly this seems to be an idea still present in some clerical thinking and writing. Could we transpose those words to another plane saying ‘My desire is for the Lord and He has dominion over me’ and that the love of wife for husband and his gentle authority should be a mirror image of this divine love?

Augustine went even further in his declaration: ‘I feel nothing more turns the mind of man from the heights than female blandishments and that contact of bodies without which a wife may not be had’ (Soliloquies 1,10). Augustine legitimised the split between love and sex so that sexual intercourse is depersonalised. He wrote that carnal concupiscence, namely sexual desire that is not motivated by the desire for children, is never acceptable even in marriage, because it is an evil which is the accident of original sin. For him, sex is always corrupting if it is enjoyed, so that a man who loves his wife with passion is an adulterer with his own wife.

Over sixteen centuries later we find that negative thinking repeated by John Paul II in his Theology of the Body: ‘This shame induces man and woman to hide from each other their bodies and especially their sexual differentiation. Their shame confirms that the original capacity of communicating themselves to each other had been shattered’ (p. 117). It is sad that Augustine is still being quoted on sexuality and marriage as though he were part of divine revelation. In fact the official writings of Pius XI, Pius XII, Paul VI and John Paul II bear the mark of his negative influence and his Manichean background. The Second Vatican Council has made amends by defining marriage as a covenant rather than a contract and making it clear that its primary purpose is the ongoing personal and loving union of the couple which in God’s plan is only occasionally procreative. As a sincere and gifted theologian, Augustine, if he were alive today, might well be the first to acknowledge the new knowledge we now have from physiology and the human sciences, and admit the regrettable errors of the past.

Anti-feminism

All through the centuries of tradition, reaching back into the Old Testament and beyond, there is a negative attitude to women and all things feminine. In spite of the Genesis account of the complementarity of the sexes, and the personal roles played by many women in the Old Testament, women were considered the property of men, with a utilitarian value. In its original context, the sixth commandment of the Decalogue was not concerned about sexual morality as much as with the injustice done to husband or father by the man who has unlawful relations with a girl. Jewish rabbis feared women as a distraction and temptation. In the Jewish tradition, women were generally considered greedy, curious, lazy, and jealous. Christian writers took over Aristotle’s notion of the female as a half-baked man, a male manqué. Over a thousand years later, St. Thomas Aquinas found no reason to differ from this view or even question it; he accepted it as a fact of nature. With all the arrogance and simplicity of the male, he discussed whether women should have been created at all, and with colossal ignorance (natural enough for the time) he proclaimed that the female is something defective and manqué. He explained that the active power in the seed of the male tends to produce something like itself, perfect in masculinity; but the procreation of a female is the result either of a weakness in the seed, of some unsuitability of the material, or of some change brought about by external influences such as the south wind. Often quoted by Church authorities as an oracle on natural law, he maintained that even before original sin, women by nature would have been governed by men for their own good, because the power of rational discernment is by nature stronger in men.

Pessimistic bias

St. Paul could compare marriage to the union between Christ and the Church and vice versa. But no matter how well the glories of Christian marriage were later sung by the great doctors of the Church, their pessimism came through. According to Augustine, only procreation could justify marriage, sex, or even women. Pope St. Gregory the Great affirmed that it was as impossible to have intercourse without sin as it was to fall into a fire and not burn. Clement of Alexandria compared marital intercourse to ‘an incurable disease, a minor epilepsy’. The great St. Jerome held that virginity was the norm in paradise, that marriage came about as a result of sin, and that the only good in marriage is that it can give birth to virgins. In the fifteenth century St. Bernardine of Siena claimed that of 1000 marriages, 999 are of the devil’s making. One wonders how he did the survey. This was in the ‘age of faith’, when most of the known world was Christian. The same saint, the greatest preacher in Europe in his day, maintained that it was a piggish irreverence and a mortal sin if husband and wife do not abstain from intercourse for several days before receiving Holy Communion. During the Middle Ages, a woman who died in childbirth was often buried in a special corner of the cemetery and without the usual honours, though some theologians permitted such a woman’s burial in consecrated ground if the baby had first been cut out of the womb.

St. Augustine of Canterbury felt it necessary to write to Pope Gregory the Great to ask if it were permissible to baptise women when pregnant or during their monthly periods, and whether they could enter churches and receive Communion at such times. The pope told him it was no sin, but in spite of this, Archbishop Theodore shortly afterwards forbade nuns and lay women to enter a church or take Communion during their periods. The penalty for breaking the law was three days fasting on bread and water. The prohibition remained part of the general law of the Church until the sixteenth century. This notion of ritual impurity infiltrated Christian thinking from pagan superstition, according to which terrible things were believed to happen when women touched anything during their periods: crops would dry up, fruit rot on the trees and iron would turn rusty. No one would claim that this kind of thinking is still at work in the Church, but it is hard to avoid the impression that something of the basic negative attitude lurks behind even the idealistic language of modern Church documents on the role of women, especially since it is taking us so long to give practical recognition to the equality of the sexes. It is said that when Pope Paul VI wrote an encyclical on women, holding up the Blessed Virgin as their model, the Vatican refused to accept a third secretary of the German embassy to the Holy See simply because she was a woman.

This negative attitude to women was reflected in the constitutions of many religious congregations of men. On the subject of chastity, monks were told that little need be said of this ‘angelic’ virtue, but they were advised to flee the company of women. If it was necessary or really useful to speak to them, conversation should be as brief as possible. They were told that since the Blessed Virgin was troubled and afraid at the approach of the angel, how much more they themselves, weak and shaking reeds, had reason to fear. However much they may have outgrown it, this was the kind of writing that the majority of the world’s male religious were brought up on.

Literal repetition

The more recent documents of the Church show some advance on previous teaching insofar as, since Paul VI, they go beyond the harsh dichotomy between sex primarily for procreation and sex merely for pleasure. The fundamental importance of the sexual dimension of human personality is explicitly recognised, but once the realm of general principles is left behind, confusion returns. Official statements often repeat the old black-and-white prescriptions of sexual morality, with little reference not only to the discoveries of the human sciences of physiology and psychology, but even to developments in Scripture studies, dogmatic and moral theology. It is taken for granted that Augustine, Aquinas and other theologians were justified in laying down norms for Christian life on the basis of the contemporary outlook on sexuality, seriously defective though it was, but today’s theologians seem to be denied this right and duty.

Much of official teaching simply repeats statements from the past as though they could be valid for all time, independently of historical and cultural developments and differences. It is frequently asserted quite simply that the ‘constant teaching of the Church’ has condemned contraception, with no reference to the fact that the problem could not possibly have been understood in today’s terms until the facts of human reproduction had been discovered, within the last century. The so-called ‘safe period’ was ‘permitted’ only with the greatest reluctance by Pius XII in his Address to Midwives (1951), whereas now some preachers present it almost as one of the glories of natural law, God’s gift to women. St. Jerome justified the prohibition of intercourse during menstruation for the good of the foetus. He argued that ‘if a man copulates with a woman at that time, the foetuses conceived are said to carry the vice of the seed, so that lepers and giants are born from this conception, and the corrupted menses make the foul bodies of either sex too small or too big.’ This is a fair example of the guesswork that took the place of knowledge, but it was often on the basis of such defective knowledge of the facts of nature that moral norms were formulated in the Church. Perhaps the ignorance seldom went to the extreme of the Roman emperor who claimed that homosexuality was the cause of earthquakes, but there are enough bizarre examples in the history of the Church to alert us to the need for critical reflection.

Physicalism

Following the method of Aristotle, the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages used philosophical principles to reach truths that we now know can be reached only through empirical observation. They maintained that the stars must be perfect spheres, whereas our telescopes reveal that they are not. They believed that the male seed was a human being in miniature and they knew nothing of the contribution of the female apart from her function as receptacle; modern physiology tells us a different story. Reverence for the ‘little man’ contained in the semen meant that any form of contraception was thought of in terms of murder rather than an exercise in responsible parenthood. That same reverence for the seed as bearer of life led to a continual concern about ‘loss of seed’ or ‘waste of seed’ which created endless scruples and dominated so much confessional practice in this area, whereas modern science shows that nature’s own ‘wastage’ has truly astronomical proportions. For fifty-five years I have heard the confessions of bishops, priests, male and female religious and thousands of laity, married and single in twelve different countries. The most frequently confessed ‘sin’ was ‘impurity’ meaning ‘self-abuse’. Husbands would accuse themselves of having ‘lost seed’ and their wives would confess to making their husbands lose seed. If this wastage is a sin, then God himself is the greatest waster of all, since we now know as scientific fact that more than 250 million sperm are produced every day by men, which in fact are wasted through urination and wet dreams. Of the millions released into a woman’s body during intercourse, only a few hundred survive the journey to find an egg. How many trillions are lost to produce the average family of two or three children in a lifetime?

The contrast between the massive sperm loss of the male with that of the female could not be more dramatic: she produces a single ovum a month, or possibly two, or very rarely three. It is to this tiny pin-point object that all sperms race. Yet women usually have as strong and continuous a sexual urge as men on a more emotional level, for comfort, affirmation, fulfilment. To realise that this is a life-long urge independent of ovulation is to see that the unitive, emotional side of intercourse needs moral assessment independently of fertility, and this raises the question: how is anything like justice to be achieved in discussions of marital morality? Are we not embarrassed that all through Church history the rules of sexual morality were all thought up by men?

We face the specific problem in later marriage of impotence in the male, or medical indications in the female which rule out intercourse. Is self-relief or mutual masturbation acceptable and excusable in these circumstances? ‘Traditional’ morality would condemn such activity as mortal sin because it is not procreative in form. To fight it, however, is simply to increase the tension until it becomes unbearable and sleep becomes impossible. For the wife to satisfy herself can in fact increase her sense of well-being, enabling her to love and care all the more for her husband and family. Why should God condemn her for doing what is natural, using his gifts for her comfort and well-being? In fact, it can be said in general that where there are medical or other marital problems which make intercourse inadvisable or impossible, ‘self-service’ can be a natural release for sexual tension for both partners. Might the same not be said for those who have no spouse?

Not much of the Church’s outmoded ‘science’ is preserved in its more recent pronouncements, but the physicalism of their approach seems to indicate that they have not progressed far beyond it. Much of current teaching deals exclusively with the finality of the physical act of intercourse itself, in spite of the fact that the Vatican Council insisted that sexual morality is based on the nature of the person. The sexual act is discussed in isolation, with little or no reference to the psychological, personal, relational and spiritual aspects of it, or to sexual maturity as a goal to be striven for over a period of time. It is said, for example, that both the Magisterium of the Church and the moral sense of the faithful have declared that masturbation is an intrinsically and seriously disordered act. The Magisterium in this case is a letter of Pope Leo IX in 1054, a decree of the Holy Office in 1679, and speeches of Pope Pius XII in 1953 and 1956, none of which have an in‑depth study of the problem or could take any account of today’s insights into the nature and meaning of sexuality. Nowhere is it made clear how the ‘moral sense of the faithful’ is measured, since it is never consulted, in spite of the fact that God’s holy people are the Church. Good-living people are shocked today to hear sexual self-gratification decreed to be intrinsically disordered without any convincing explanation and to be labelled as ‘mortal sin’ meriting eternal damnation. Many feel that this ‘teaching’ cannot be substantiated. If the Holy Spirit is invoked it should be explained why that same Holy Spirit cannot enlighten the minds of the faithful who are God’s holy people, or enable the ‘teachers’ to provide reasons that convince. The experience of vast numbers of the faithful is that the traditional teaching made their lives miserable for years on end and often made confession a torture instead of a sacrament of healing and peace.

If a text of the Magisterium is to have such binding force, how are we to react to a decree of the Holy Office in 1666 (never revoked) which condemned a proposition saying that a kiss given for the pleasure of it is probably not a mortal sin but only a venial sin? Is it necessary to wait for another decree to tell us what most sensible Christians already know, namely that it is no sin at all, or at least that one cannot discuss the morality of it until the actual meaning of the particular kiss is known? There is no need to get upset about decrees like this, but they need to be seen in their cultural and theological context and interpreted accordingly. This does not mean that everything is relative, but only that we need to relativise some of our mistaken absolutes. The moral law is discovered and explained by human reason, which is fallible and can make mistakes.

No consultation

A major weakness in the Church’s moral teaching, particularly in the area of sexuality, is that it is abstract and deductive, logically drawn from a theory of nature now seriously questioned and in many cases simply abandoned. It seems to take little account of what ought to be a central element in the discussion, namely how the faithful actually experience their sexuality. Celibate male theologians are in no position to dictate to them what they experience or how they should feel. People are now trusting their own experience and discovering that the new insights on the meaning of sexuality in terms of relationship, love and growth can give their Christian living a new depth. They are disturbed that theologians and Church authorities can go on analysing concepts and dogmatising about sex with all the arrogance of ignorance without consulting Christian married people.

Barely two hundred years ago, the influential theologian Billuart insisted that only procreative purpose could make intercourse lawful, that married people had to want children each time unless the act of intercourse was to be a sin. To the objection that the Church allowed the old and sterile to marry, he replied that they could marry provided ‘they intend to live chastely or use marriage by only returning but not demanding the debt’. Since these persons might commit greater sins if they were not married, he taught that it was better to ‘dissimulate’ the truth that they will probably commit sin in marriage anyway. He went on to say that ‘even their confessors’ must practice this dissimulation. To the objection that his position made marriage for anyone a continual occasion of sin, which seemed ‘hard, odious, and in some fashion absurd’, Billuart replied, ‘I know this is true, not indeed precisely by reason of the state of matrimony, but from the corruption of men.’ This is simply arrogant nonsense, but it was accepted in pastoral practice for far too long.

The ivory tower mentality of some moral theologians is not restricted to those who have been dead for centuries. A random selection from manuals still on the shelves of the clergy would frighten the laity. A volume dealing with the sixth and ninth commandments has three pages on the virtue of chastity, one of which is taken up with describing how virginity is lost, and almost fifty pages listing in detail all the possibilities of sexual sin, with their degrees of mortal and venial. Without a blush of hesitation it says that ‘company keeping with the intention of early marriage may be looked upon as a necessary occasion of sin, and as far as sexual liberties are concerned, engaged persons are forbidden to do anything which is not permitted to other single people.’ Is this how good Christian couples view their relationship? Should they feel guilty if they fail to share this attitude? Today’s Catholics feel ashamed of such ‘teaching’.

Humanae vitae

The publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968 brought world attention to Catholic sexual morality, although forty years later it is generally recognised that 80% of Catholics, including bishops and cardinals, are not convinced by it. A recent survey shows that 47% of Catholics in Britain never heard of it. Thirty years ago it was the most frequently confessed ‘sin’, whereas nowadays it is hardly ever mentioned in confession. For the average Catholic, the encyclical condemns artificial contraception, and Church leaders have been repeating the condemnation ever since, often in the same breath as abortion and divorce. Any debate on the subject quickly moves on to the question of authority and obedience. Acceptance of the teaching is often seen as a test of loyalty to the Church, a necessary condition for promotion. Sadly, responsible parenthood itself gets lost in the process. Conscience, moral discernment and responsibility often seem to be bypassed, even in official statements by Church leaders. Humanae Vitae was certainly a watershed for the Church. Some would see the fall-out from the encyclical as a disaster, while others maintain that in spite of the deep suffering it has caused to so many devout Catholics, the overall effect has been positive in helping people towards a more mature understanding of conscience. It follows the Second Vatican Council in stressing the importance of the unitive purpose of marriage. This contradicts the teaching of both Pius XI and Pius XII, who saw it strictly in terms of the primacy of procreation. As will be quoted later, Pius XII actually denies that intercourse has a unitive meaning.

Most of the encyclical is a positive treatment of married love as human, total, faithful, exclusive and fruitful, But it completely fails to prove its central point that artificial contraception is immoral, while so-calld natural family planning is permitted as God’s will. The distinction between artificial and natural has no probative value, since when the Pope is seriously ill and needs an anaesthetic he will not ask for a ‘natural’ one, but he will insist on the most efficient method available, which, like most of what we use in our daily lives, is artificial.

Likewise when a married couple find themselves morally bound to avoid conception they will naturally want the most effective contraceptive available. But Church teaching allows only so-called natural family planning (NFP), which means restricting intercourse to the infertile times of a wife’s monthly rhythm. This can mean that the couple may behave as honeymooners for the few safe days, but must live as single people or brother and sister for most of the month. For enthusiasts of this method to say that the long periods of abstinence can unite them with the sufferings of Jesus on the Cross is not a healthy spirituality. Elizabeth Price once remarked that timing intercourse round menstruation is as idiotic as trying to time one’s mealtimes round our bowel movements. Intercourse in its unitive sense is above all a form of communication between the couple, a bodily expression of their love, to be used in the context of when such communication is appropriate. Another simile for NFP might be a certain Cistercian monk suggesting that because Silence is at the core of his spirituality, everone else’s inner life would improve by forced silence at certain fixed hours (the fertile period). Members of religious teaching orders would rightly complain that they need freedom to use their faculty of speech at all appropriate times to fulfill their vocation. Celibate clerics seem to force abstinence at times of ovulation upon the married as a means of spiritual betterment, not realising that in fact they are removing a faculty God himself has given them to be ‘no longer two but one flesh’, which is the very essence of marriage, whereas contraception makes this faculty freely available to those who should not conceive at that time.

Most people find the onerous routine of calendars, thermometers, mucus testing, etc. totally unnatural and artificial, not to mention trying to do the testing while looking after a family, and coping with colds and various health problems, plus worries about mortgages and job security. But the biggest objection of all is the prolonged, unnatural, imposed celibacy that destroys the very essence of the marriage itself, namely the beautiful mystery of ‘two-in-one-flesh,’ especially when the couple most need the intimacy, togetherness, affirmation and consolation that enable them to cope with the problems of life.

The encyclical offers no Scriptural argument for its teaching, and its use of natural law is limited to biological factors with little awareness of the theological richness of this concept and its modern development. The core of the official teaching is the inseparable bond between the procreative and unitive aspects of intercourse. It is claimed that, as natural law, this is God’s will. But in fact these two purposes are inseparable only in the male. The female is quite different. She ovulates once a month and for the rest of the time is sterile. She is also sterile during lactation, when nature produces prolactin to avoid fertilisation, and she becomes totally sterile after the menopause when she is too old for safe child-bearing. Nature itself, therefore God, has arranged that for most of her life the unitive and procreative purposes of intercourse are totally separated. Not only did Pope Paul VI declare that the bond between the two is inseparable, but he was also the first pope to admit that intercourse has a unitive meaning, as declared by Vatican II. Pope Pius XII in his Address to Midwives (43) actually denied that intercourse had a unitive meaning, as did Pius XI before him.

God’s plan for marriage

The beautiful mythological story of the first humans in the garden of paradise should be the starting point of any discussion on sexuality and marriage. The Genesis text is very clear: it tells us that God created humankind in his own image, male and female and they were naked and were not ashamed. God said: ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they became one flesh.’ Jesus refers to this same beautiful teaching on marriage when he says ‘They are no longer two, therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide’ (Mt 19:6). In other words, what Jesus is teaching is that intercourse and marriage are inseparable. The consummation of the marriage changes the relationshmip of the couple so that they are no longer two separate people, but one flesh. This is what marriage is all about. If they are lucky they may also be blessed with children. The fact that for some couples frequency of intercourse becomes less important with time in no way diminishes its central importance in the relationship, as most married couples readily admit.

Theologians explain that the Christian sacraments are rooted in primordial human experiences that arise at crucial moments in life, namely fertility, birth, the transition to adulthood, to marriage, the assumption of leadership, and finally death. But Elizabeth Price would vehemently object to this sequence with the statement: ‘No, the human life cycle starts with marriage (as in Genesis 2:24 and Matthew 19:5) and it is the fusion of the two-in-one which is the initial stage of life. Marriage (two-in-one-flesh) is the primnordial sacrament. Without that protection we have the awfulness of bastardy. The Church has sacralised fertility, but unfortunately not the essential fusion of man and wife which ought to lead up to it, protect it and enhance it. Augustine, John Paul II and the Catechism refer too easily to the influence of lust (from original sin) for what is the natural and essential servicing of their ‘oneness’ and togetherness, the security which protects the life, health and growth of their relationship and the welfare of their children.’

Imposing so-called Natural Family Planning (NFP) as God’s way of spacing or avoiding conception when this is a moral obligation can hardly be God’s will when it is a denial of the very essence of marriage itself. It is precisely when a couple are morally forced in conscience to avoid conception that they most need the consolation of marital intimacy, making them no longer two but one flesh. This intimacy, togetherness and union is what marriage is all about, bringing them an incarnation of God’s love. The awful demand that they restrict intercourse to the infertile periods removes the possibility of their being one when they may most need it and lengthens the period of enforced abstinence when the husband’s job involves absence.

There is no convincing proof that periodic abstinence is God’s law for married couples. NFP enthusiasts cannot answer the simple question: if human beings as we know them have been on this earth for about 40,000 years, why did Almighty God wait until the 1930s to reveal it to us, and then wait for Pius XII to give permission to use it in the 1950s? We often have recourse to ‘authority’ in moral argument: the authority of God, of the Bible, of the Church, but too often we ignore the most basic authority of all: the authority of the facts. There can be no worthwhile discussion of contraception without serious knowledge of the facts. The facts about the subject are to be found in the magisterial study of Professor John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception.(1) Few Catholics are aware of the absolutely weird things that were accepted as ‘Church teaching’ for centuries. Professor Noonan was special advisor to the papal birth control commission of experts in Rome before the publication of Humanae vitae.

The contrast between NFP and contraception is quite radical. When a couple decide in conscience that it would be immoral for them to risk a pregnancy, they have two possibilities: either by changing the act of intercourse to render it infertile (contraception) or by changing the marital relationship itself by removing the sexual intimacy which is its very essence. Responsible married women faced with this choice who know what marriage means in God’s mind, in the words of Jesus and in their own personal Christian experience, believe that no authority on earth has the right to demand that they sacrifice the intimacy which is the very essence of their marriage for an abstract rule for which there is no convincing foundation. The beautiful words of Genesis, repeated by Jesus, to describe the essential meaning of marriage is what they see as God’s will, much clearer and more beautiful than man-made rules.

The voice of experience

If the Church is first and foremost the People of God, before there is any reference to how it is organised and governed, the lived experience of God’s holy people must be a central source of inspiration and enlightenment for any ‘teaching’ proclaimed by a pope. Humanae vitae seems to leave little room for conscience. Paul VI chose to ignore the witness of thousands of devout married people who had to decide on how best to regulate their fertility for the good of their marriage and the welfare of their family. These people of faith had received the sacramental grace of matrimony and were Eucharistic people of prayer. The Holy Father found himself in an agonising situation, concerned that a change in teaching might cause a schism in the Church, so he accepted the view of the four clerics who disagreed with the Commission’s report. These clerics had no experience of the actual God-given graces available from the sacrament of Christian marriage, because they never had need of them. Succeeding popes have been repeating that worn-out misguided theory of Augustine that married men are driven to exploit their wives rather than ‘observe their rhythms’ as though the ovulation cycle only discovered in 1933 is the most important thing about women, whereas it is in fact their need to sustain the ‘two-in-one-flesh’ ideal, which is the very essence of marriage. This instinctive and God-given grace of insight is part of their lived experience, which is prior to and more important than any academic training in ‘theology’. Celibate clerics have never been given this grace (since they never had to make personal decisions in this area of life). Instead of dictating Augustine’s flawed theology to laity, they should have had the humility to listen to and learn from God’s holy people who have daily experience of the presence of God in their sacrament of matrimony.

A final argument against so-called NFP is from natural law itself. When women are breast-feeding, nature renders them sterile by the production of the hormone prolactin, so that they can have intercourse with their husbands whenever they like without the risk of an imprudent pregnancy. Their sexual intimacy brings them closer together so that they fulfill the purpose of marriage by becoming two-in-one-flesh, creating the warm, healthy community of love their children need so that they in turn will experience God’s love incarnate in their home. When scientists use their God-given creative intelligence and follow the God-given laws of chemistry to create a pill which produces the same sterility for the good of responsible parenthood, are they not obeying the natural law, God’s law of nature? Where is the sin in this?

Scientifically, lactation is by far the most reliable contraceptive, but to be fully successful the natural rhythms must be respected. If the mother can breast-feed her baby for at least ten minutes six times in every 24 hours she is totally infertile all through the lactation time. A mother, now a grand-mother, who had five children while following this regime had only three periods in ten years, and the one ‘surprise’ or unplanned baby came because she missed a few feeds! For mothers who cannot be as disciplined or organised as this, why should God condemn them for getting help from chemicals which provide the same infertile periods, just as their health is protected and enhanced by the thousands of other chemicals produced in the laboratory according to God’s laws of nature?

Loss of credibility

It is no exaggeration to say that during the past forty years Humanae vitae has done enormous damage to the credibility of the Catholic Church. The painful experience of thousands of married couples is reflected in the words of Angela Hanley: ‘As a woman and a mother I always found the music of Humanae vitae to be distinctly off key. I thank God that I had an instinctive understanding of the sanctuary of conscience, and therefore was spared the agonies of scruples trying to live an unworkable, and in many cases emotionally damaging, directive. As a woman and mother who, in recent times, has delved more deeply into the background of the same encyclical, I can truly say that it has become a ‘hideous cacophany.’ To read about what amounts to the subversion of the truth certainly does not add lustre to the teaching authority of the Church. We need now, as never before, the ‘loyal dissent’ of able theologians to keep the Church on track and keep it true to its mission of being a sign of God in the world. In the words of Bernard Häring, one of the greatest moral theologians of recent history, ‘It is part of our task and our service to the Church as moral theologians to take the variety of moral norms that have been or are taught and submit them to scholarly (not necessarily existential) doubt. We must ask whether they were once appropriate and whether they still are appropriate today. This is not challenging for the sake of challenging, but a reverential testing in absolute love for truth and goodness.’(2) Häring further warns that the Church is now learning what not being listened to means – People who themselves do not listen are ultimately not listened to. Obedience and responsibility, if they are authentic, are designed for reciprocity. Häring, who knew what it meant to love the Church and suffer for it, also said ‘I am convinced that the desire of the laity for free and frank exchange of opinion in the Church and the world is a prominent sign of the changeover to a new Church. If the Church’s leadership were to close itself to this ‘sign of the time’, it would lose a good deal of authority, credibility and attractiveness.’(3)

When it comes to the experience of marriage a truly prophetic voice is that of Dr. Jack Dominian, probably the most qualified and experienced writer and counsellor in the English-speaking world. In his autobiography he writes: ‘What has gradually emerged in my life is a shift of understanding of sexuality from biology to love − an evolution of the theology of marriage from its legalistic and canonical roots seen primarily as a contract to understanding it as a relationship of love, first described in my book Christian Marriage in 1967, and the Vatican Council confirmed this interpretation. Second, I came to see sexual intercourse as a recurrent act of prayer, giving life to the couple every time, and occasionally new life; and importantly I came to see marriage expressed as a community of love whose inner life is the daily liturgical living prayer of the overwhelming majority of Christians which together with the Eucharist provides their sanctification in this world, preparing them for their union with the love of the Trinity in the next. (4)

Church teaching

The above arguments treat of the nature of contraception itself. But an equally strong argument against the encyclical is its claim that it is ‘Church teaching’ when in fact it is the personal view of one pope, Paul VI. It is sad that although he will certainly go down in history as one of the truly great popes of modern times, he seriously misjudged two burning issues in the Church: contraception and priestly celibacy. He did not allow the bishops gathered in the Second Vatican Council to discuss them, but reserved them to himself and wrote an encyclical on each. If it is true that, as the Second Vatican Council solemnly declared, the Church is the People of God, how can God’s holy people accept as God’s will the statement of a celibate pope which has no scientific basis and flies in the face of their own life-long experience of Christian sacramental marriage? Many of them feel that Humanae vitae can be compared to a decision made by a human brain cut off from its blood supply and the myriads of nerves continually sending their messages to inform and guide it. It is well known that the world’s bishops gathered in the Second Vatican Council were not allowed to discuss the question, because a papal commission had been established to study the matter. This commission, enlarged to 72 members, voted that there could be no objection to artificial contraception, that it could not be proved to be ‘intrinsically evil’. Even the four clerics who voted against this conclusion admitted that they could find no proof for their contrary position except to warn that changing the teaching would imply that Pius XI, Pius XII and a great part of the Catholic hierarchy ‘had condemned most imprudently, under pain of eternal punishment, thousands upon thousands of human acts which are now approved.’ Seemingly it was this fear of having to admit that past teaching was so terribly wrong, that drove Paul VI to compose his text. He paid no attention to the thousands of written testimonies submitted from committed Catholic couples around the world that have still not been published. He failed to see the injustice of continuing to condemn people for sin where no sin can be proved.

In concluding his encyclical, Pope Paul invited bishops to uphold this teaching of the Church, exhorted priests to give an example of obedience by preaching it, assured married couples that the grace of the sacrament would help them to follow it in spite of its difficulty, and he appealed to doctors and scientists to show that there can be no contradiction between God’s law concerning human reproduction and the fostering of married love. The factual position in today’s Church makes one wonder if all of these appeals fell on deaf ears. Many episcopal conferences (surely a recognised part of the teaching Church) issued pastoral statements to help people understand the encyclical and they considerably softened the declaration of paragraph 14 condemning all artificial means of contraception. It is an open secret that many cardinals and bishops today (like most of those on the papal commission) are not convinced of the teaching on this point, but out of loyalty to the Church or fear of offending the Holy Father will not admit this publicly. Cardinal König, the recently deceased archbishop of Vienna, is an exception. In a debate with Cardinal Ratzinger in 1992 he dismissed the ‘irritating distinction between artificial and natural contraception,’ and declared that on the question of birth control we have ended up with a bottleneck mostly because of this distinction, almost as if the morally important thing is the ‘trick’ of cheating nature.

Retired Jesuit Cardinal Martini, a favoured candidate for the papacy had it not been for his failing health, is very strongly of the same view. In his recently published Jerusalem Nightly Conversations (5) (not yet translated) he calls on Vatican authorities to have courage in facing up to the need for reform, especially in the whole area of sexuality, where they have lost so much credibility. He says ‘unfortunately the encyclical Humanae vitae had negative results. Paul VI deliberately avoided consulting the Council in session, and took sole personal responsibility for condemning contraceptives, and this purely personal stance was not a positive premise on which to discuss matters of sexuality and family life.’ The sad truth is that after forty years science has not produced a single fact to support NFP and the encyclical. Statistics suggest that 80% of Catholics agree with the majority finding of the Pontifical Commission that there is no convincing argument that contraception is sinful, so they continue to use it without scruple. Some also believe that the Church’s ban on contraception undermines its credibility among other Christian groups as well as in the secular world, which lessens the power of its voice against abortion or other moral questions.

Comparison with judicial procedure in the secular world can be embarrassing for Pope Paul’s encyclical. If the Pontifical Commission established to advise the pope were a jury in a court case where no one, not even the four dissenting clerics, could state wherein the guilt of contraception lay, the Pope in continuing to maintain that contraception was a sin would be overlooking the most fundamental tenet of justice, namely ‘innocent until proven guilty’ by accusing couples of sin when no guilt for their action can be proved. If an appeal judge who refused to accept fresh evidence refused the appeal on the grounds that changing the previous judgment would undermine the credibility of the judiciary and people would no longer trust the legal system, he would be struck off for malpractice.

A very balanced judgment of Humanae vitae is that of Fr. Raphael Gallagher, C.Ss.R., a highly respected Roman professor of moral theology: ‘Humanae vitae presumed a world-view and type of Church which no longer exist. Its failure is a precise but important one: it formally promulgated a law on contraception which has not been received in practice by the faithful of the Church. Forty years is a decent span of time to judge whether a law has been effective. On other points Humanae vitae is still valid, though we need courage to face today’s new sexual challenges with a different philosophical analysis and a more collegially responsible Church than was the case when Pope Paul, after two years of personal anguish, finally published Humanae vitae 40 years ago.’(6)

Baggage from the past

The lesson to be learned from this sad experience is that Church teaching needs to free itself from unnecessary baggage from the past. Church documents too often repeat the phrase ‘as the Church has constantly taught’ with the implication that repeating something ten or a hundred times makes it more true, when in fact developments in human knowledge and experience can alert us to the appalling views repeated for centuries by some of the greatest Christian minds, including popes (see chapter 3 above). We can now see that the source of all the problems in the theology of sexuality and marriage is the warped view of Augustine, one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church. Influenced by his experience in the Manichean sect and his guilt-ridden years of fornication, plus the culture of Roman society with regard to the place of wives, he had no experience of the beautiful ideal of married couples delighting in their union of mind, soul and body, living out the biblical picture of being naked and not ashamed, of ‘two-becoming-one-flesh’ in their marital relationship. In his classical book On Marriage and Concupiscence, chapter 7, he claims that it was because original sin struck us in our genital organs that Adam and Eve covered their genitals with fig leaves, and that people do not copulate in public. He writes that the members which were created for the procreation of children ‘will not obey the direction of the will, but lust has to be waited for to set these members in motion, as if it had a legal right over them, and sometimes it refuses to act when the mind wills, while often it acts against its will! Must this not bring a blush of shame over the freedom of the human will, that by its contempt of God, its own Commander, it has lost all proper command for itself over its own members?’

All of Augustine’s theology of sex and marriage is saturated and dominated by this view of the unruly phallus, and warped by his conviction that original sin (by Adam and Eve in the garden) is intrinsically bound up with intercourse. Nowhere in his writings is he aware of the centrality of the genitals in the emotional and spiritual effects of the marital relationship, making the couple ‘two-in-one-flesh’. For Augustine, intercourse occurs in marriage simply because the couple are overcome by lust resulting from original sin in the Fall. To avoid moral blame they must have the explicit intention of procreation. His theology could never describe intercourse as ‘making love’.

Augustine’s legacy

With our 21^st century understanding of human nature and the human sciences, it is easy to smile at this other-worldly negative nonsense, but this basic attitude is at the root of papal statements on the subject right up to our own times. John Paul II does not quote Augustine explicitly in his homilies published as Theology of the Body, but parts of Augustine’s teaching are faithfully reproduced therein. He sees the unsolicited erection not as an autonomic nervous system reaction to sexual stimuli preparing the body for action, as does adrenalin in the ‘fight or flight’ situation, but as the effect of original sin, making men lustfully seek sex far in excess of procreative need. Instead of seeing the important words of Jesus in Mt 19:4-5 as revelation about the emotional and spiritual aspect of intercourse making the couple one, he stresses that the words ‘In the beginning’ are Christ calling the married couple to go back to Augustine’s pre-Fall notion of marriage where, although there was physical pleasure in intercourse, this would be experienced only in a completely disciplined manner, namely when procreation was intended. Furthermore he uses the Sermon on the Mount stricture on ‘adultery in the heart’ to suggest that a man who looks at his wife with sexual desire is committing adultery with her within marriage. This accords with Augustine’s idea found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church quoted above. Furthermore, in his book Love and Responsibility, he echoes the teaching of Augustine that ‘What food is to the health of the individual, intercourse is to the good of the race’ (The Good of Marriage, 18, CSEL 41:210), implying that the physical pleasure in each is given to ensure the survival of individuals and of the race. In that same book John Paul II compares the attitude of the Creator with regard to contraception with that of a father who gives his child a piece of bread and jam, and sees him eating the jam and throwing away the bread. Elizabeth Price is much closer to the truth when she says that the relationship itself is in fact the bread of marriage, while the children are the occasional jam, if the parents are lucky.(7)

The four clerics who disagreed with the recommendation for change presented by the Pontifical Commission questioned the integrity of the married people who were members of it. Their view is as unreal as anything from Augustine. They wrote: ‘Conjugal love is above all spiritual (if the love is genuine) and it requires no specific carnal gesture, much less its repetition in some determined frequency. Consequently the affirmed sense of generosity and the absence of hedonism are suspect when we find the intimate love of the whole person between a father and a daughter, a brother and a sister without the need of carnal gestures.’ One wonders if these male celibate clerics ever had a meaningful discussion with their parents. Sadly there is no official Church statement to point out that this unnatural and unchristian nonsense has no foundation in our Catholic faith or in human experience. Their public statement brings shame on our Church.

One can sympathise with the agony of Paul VI struggling with his burden of responsibility for the good of the Church and concerned about the danger of schism. But it is hard to understand how he could ignore the verdict of the special Papal Commission, reporting after five sessions of meetings between 1963 and 1966 that contraception was not intrinsically evil and pay more attention to the four clerics opposing that decision. Their attachment to a theory of sexuality untested in real life is absolutely incredible. It is sad that Pope Paul seemed not to notice their outlandish view that married love is above all ‘spiritual,’ needing no carnal expression, much less at specific intervals. Their suggestion that married couples during their imposed celibacy times should be inspired by parental/sibling love may be the result of their own experience of imposed celibacy as male celibate clerics. They seem to have had no understanding of the unitive function of marriage, which is its very essence. They could not see that it is in the marriage act of bodily love that the union of heart and soul of the couple finds fullest expression. Nor could they recognise the healing value of marital intimacy when the relationship is under strain for one reason or another. These celibate clerics seem to have had little understanding of the theology of marriage as a sacrament and covenant rather than a mere canonical contract. The new Catechism explains sacraments as ‘perceptible signs (words and actions) accessible to our human nature, which by the action of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit make present efficaciously the grace that they signify’ (1084). Sexual intercourse is intrinsic to the relationship of marriage. The words of Genesis and of Jesus (Mt 19:4-6) suggest that it is the outward sign of the inward grace of being ‘no longer two but one’, that is, forming the strong, stable and permanent background in which God intended humans to rear their children. As the duty to sustain that union is continuous, so also access to sexual intercourse as needed to be ‘two-in-one-flesh’ should be continuous, whereas the duty to procreate is intermittent (and spaced by God in lactation). The imposition of abstinence preached by NFP requires that the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is blocked by an external interference of the Magisterium denying to the couple the possibility of giving themselves to each other which is the very essence of marriage. Both those who use NFP and those who use contraception withhold their fertility from each other, but in NFP they have to withhold themselves from each other as husband and wife, whereas contraception allows the others the freedom to give themselves to each other in love at times when conception should not occur.

John Noonan has a beautiful quotation from Professor Herbert Doms OSB on the sacramental meaning of intercourse in marriage. Whereas Augustine and much papal teaching presented sexual pleasure like bait and the spouse seeking intercourse like an animal lured by the bait to procreate, Doms stressed that sexuality involves the whole human person and not simply the genital organs. He developed the parallel with the Eucharist. The physical union in marriage completes the moral participation in the life of the other spouse just as physical union with Christ in the Eucharist completes the believer’s moral union with Christ.(8) To impose intermittent abstinence on a couple with the suggestion that this will improve their marriage is as crazy as saying that abstaining from the Eucharist will improve one’s closeness to Christ. The discussion is not about abstinence or frequency of intercourse, but rather the very essence of marriage itself as ‘two in one flesh’ so beautifully expressed in Genesis and repeated by Jesus, where intercourse is the fervent expression of love, a peak moment in the sacramental sign of marriage. If intercourse is not this in marriage, then it is a travesty of what God intended it to be. Children ought to be the fruit of such love, so that a child born of rape is the ultimate insult to what God willed parenthood to be.

The Second Vatican Council resolutely dropped the traditional teaching that the primary purpose of marriage is procreation, and stressed that the procreative and unitive purposes are on the same level, of equal importance. Pope Paul was the first pope in history to state that explicitly. Pope Pius XII in his Address to Midwives (1951) summarily dismissed the view that the bodily union of intercourse is the expression and actuation of the personal and affective union. He said: ‘The truth is that marriage as a natural institution is not ordered by the will of the Creator towards the personal perfection of the husband and wife as its primary end, but to the procreation and education of new life. The other ends of marriage, although part of nature’s plan, are not of the same importance as the first, still less are they superior’ (47). Reflecting Augustine’s outlook, he castigates contraception users for the selfish use of pleasure given for the good of the human race, and happily teaches total abstinence to married couples, saying that God will provide for such heroism (41, 42). Before him, Pius XI held the same view, and criticised the Anglican bishops at their Lambeth meeting with a tirade in which he quoted Augustine 13 times and declared ‘This criminal abuse (contraception) is claimed as a right by some on the ground that they cannot endure children but want to satisfy their carnal desire without incurring any responsibility’ (Casti Connubii (53).

Older women have sad memories of the prurient, third-degree interrogation they were subjected to for years in the confessional by male, celibate, clerical confessors who had no experience of intimate love. They were advised not to lose hope, but to have recourse to the sacrament of penance for God’s forgiveness. Since the circumstances of their marriage required contraception they could not make a ‘purpose of amendment’ not to sin again, so they felt that the sacrament was reduced to a mere guilt-shedding process that did nothing for their spiritual lives, instead of the sacrament of reconciliation and peace which it is meant to be.

Married Catholics during the past forty years have felt a deep sense of injustice that the official Church should accuse them of sinful behaviour in using contraceptives when in fact it cannot convincingly be shown that they are ‘in sin’. Male celibate clerics can have interesting intellectual discussions about the morality of artificial contraception, but it is not really a matter of conscience for them. None of them ever stand at the crossroad of decision faced by married couples who have to decide how to be responsible parents in the regulation of their family. Such couples will be guided by Church teaching and helped by competent advice, but the final decision is theirs alone before God. Intellectual discussion is a matter of reasonable debate searching for truth, but conscience as a decision is a very personal matter. For the married couple conscience is central and they are only too well aware of their responsibilities in forming, informing and following it. The ‘official teaching’ in this area totally ignored the world’s bishops assembled in Council, the overwhelming decision of the Papal Commision established to study the matter, and the thousands of written testimonies from committed Catholics around the world.

In brief

The past forty years have been a crucifying experience for conscientious married Catholics throughout the world and they have caused a huge loss of credibility to our beloved Church. It serves no purpose to insist on the ‘constant teaching of the Church’ when in fact it was far from constant. Pius XI and Pius XII (within living memory) ignored, indeed vehemently denied, the unitive purpose of marital intercourse, whereas the Second Vatican Council (the highest, latest and most official organ of ‘Church teaching’) solemnly proclaimed it on a par with the procreative purpose, an integral part of the very essence of marriage. Instead of trying to guess God’s will from biology and natural law in the animal kingdom, should we not begin with God’s beautiful words in Genesis 2:24-25, repeated by Jesus himself who is the incarnation of God’s love (Mt 19:4-6)? These words make quite clear that the sexual instinct in humans is not merely about procreation, but is an essential element in creating and nourishing the ongoing environment needed for new life to grow and develop. This instinct guides young people to leave the parental home, find a spouse with whom they set up a lifelong loving relationship, so that their intercourse changes them from two separate people into a ‘two-in-one-flesh’ couple, transforming them into a God-made duality ‘which no man should put asunder’. The emotional welfare of the couple, of their children and of the whole of society rests on the constancy of that union.

It may help to clarify this truth if we replace the words ‘unitive and procreative’ with the more exact and meaningful words ‘marital and parental’ to describe the experience of intercourse in marriage. Marital intercourse refers to the physical expression, augmentation and celebration of a lifelong continuous commitment of the spouses to each other in love, whereas parental intercourse describes the occasional isolated act resulting in the conception of a child. This distinction gives the couple the freedom of continuous access to the marital function of intercourse at times appropriate to the well-being of marital unity, whereas if they obey the Church’s prohibition of contraceptives they must either go without the marital function of intercourse or risk the very conception that responsible parenthood demands that they must avoid. ‘Church teaching’ in this case forbids them to become ‘two-in-one-flesh’, which amounts to ‘putting asunder what God has joined together’. If so-called Natural Family Planning is used, then intercourse is limited to that time in the ovulation cycle when the marital and parental functions can be separated and intercourse happen without conception resulting. But this means that calling NFP ‘being open to life’ is semantic nonsense. As mentioned above, if NFP enthusiasts accuse contraception of being artificial, surely tying marital intercourse to the reading on a thermometer and/or chart, and/or the results of a somewhat squalid mucus examination or urine test, is far more artificial?

Homosexuality

The Second Vatican Council had no hesitation in reminding us that, to be faithful to the gospel, the Church itself is always in need of purification. It is a real disloyalty to the Church, to Truth and to God to pretend otherwise. An area crying out for attention with regard to the sacredness and truth of language is the Church’s current attitude to God’s holy people who happen to be homosexual. In its concern for justice and respect for human dignity, the Church has recently warned against the harassment and persecution of homosexuals, but fails to see the contradiction between this and its continued ‘teaching’ that our sisters and brothers who happen to be homosexually orientated have a condition that is ‘intrinsically disordered,’ naturally inclined towards immoral acts that are selfish and depraved. This is not divine revelation or a message from the gospel, but a ‘teaching’ that was culturally conditioned and repeated mechanically for centuries, without any input from the lived experience of homosexuals themselves, who are temples of the Holy Spirit and as close to God as the writers of Church documents.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2357) refers to homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, condemned by Sacred Scripture (Gen 19:1-29, Rom 1 26-27, I Cor 6:9, I Tim l:10). But the Church has never convincingly shown why these few texts have to be interpreted literally, whereas other clear commands of Scripture are not binding in conscience, e.g. the death penalty for a disobedient son (Deut 21:18-21), or the stoning to death of a wife found not to be a virgin (Deut 22:30-21). The Bible condemns intercourse during menstruation, and marriage with non-Israelites, but permits behaviours that today we condemn as immoral: prostitution, polygamy, concubinage, sex with slaves, and treating women as property. Old Testament writers and even St. Paul saw homosexuals simply as perverts (as indeed some of them were, just like many heterosexuals in their abuse of God’s gift of sexuality), but they were totally ignorant of the fact that the homosexual condition is no more personally chosen by individuals than heterosexuality. Both are facts of nature, and in Christian theology God is the author of nature. The question is: what is God’s will in this area? Does the Church have a convincing answer? If it is so clear and convinced in its ‘teaching’, why not answer the simple question so often asked by Dr. Jack Dominian: Why did God create so many millions of homosexual people? Nobody chooses to be homosexual.

The Church has never even tried to explain, but it could be a little more humble in looking at the facts. It is a fact that at least 5% and possibly 10% of men throughout the world are homosexual, with a lower percentage for women. It is now recognised that it is genetic in origin and recent post-mortem studies have shown a significant brain-difference between homo- and heterosexuals. It is also a fact that for some people their sexual identity is not clear until teenage or even later. Another mystery is that a person may have all the physical characteristic of one sex (even to being married and having children) and later discover that psychologically and emotionally they belong to the other sex. Another fact of nature is that some people are bi-sexual. One has to beware of sweeping generalisations. Also a distinction needs to be made between homosexual people and the homosexual culture. One can drift into and out of the latter, but one’s sexual orientation is a matter of nature, of human make-up.

New knowledge

Truth cannot simply be decreed from on high and imposed by sanctions. Truth can only be discovered and shared, by God’s holy people listening to each other and learning from each other, and nobody has a monopoly of truth. There is a vast amount of knowledge now available on this subject from anthropology, sociology, psychology and sexuality, and we should remember the wise words of the Second Vatican Council: ‘By the very circumstances of their being created, all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order. We need to respect these… for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God.’ (Church in the Modern World, n. 36).

Another fact is that human beings have a basic need to love and be loved. Nobody grows alone. People need people. We are what our relationships enable us to be. This is true of both homo- and hetero-sexual people. These orientations are simply different ways of being human sexual persons, not two separate sexes. Both were created by God. The moral obligation for all of us is responsiblility, to be responsible in our loving and in our relationships, respecting each other in our human dignity, in our commitments (vows of marriage or religious life), in all the circumstances of our lives. Many gay and lesbian couples have 30-40 years experience of committed love relationships which compare with the best of marriages, but this in no way threatens or lessens the special dignity of marriage. Over thirty years ago, Dr. Jack Dominian wrote: ‘The Christian community needs to summon every ounce of care and compassion towards one of the largest minorities that is still considered deviant without any reason, for exclusive homosexuals are no more responsible for their state than heterosexuals.’ What a pity the Church continues to pay so little attention to that call.

Signs of the times

It may seem that we have delayed too long with the negative elements in our tradition, but it is necessary to bring them into the open and recognise them publicly. The confusing details may have been familiar to historians, but the faithful can be helped by recognising them. The confusion would be unsettling enough if it were merely an intellectual muddle, but it is much more serious when it involves an agony of conscience compounded by emotional hang-ups and guilt-complexes. To realise how much of the traditional teaching in the area of sexuality is coloured by influences that have nothing to do with the gospel, and so need to be re‑evaluated today, is already a liberating experience. While learning from the valid insights and experience of history, we should never become imprisoned by the past. Neither the Bible, Church pronouncements or natural law provide a code of morality to be read to the faithful by experts who alone know how to read them. Jesus promised his followers that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth, so the whole Church is a learning and pilgrim Church. It is the whole Christian community, God’s holy people, men and women, together in dialogue and prayer, who have to discover the meaning of sexuality today and formulate the principles that will guide them in its responsible use. An extremely valuable contribution to that enterprise is retired Australian Bishop Geoffrey Robinson’s book Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: reclaiming the spirit of Jesus. It has been well described as ‘a local encyclical addressed to the world’. It has no Vatican stamp, but it is a prophetic voice with the ring of truth and deserves the widest possible readership, particularly by Church leaders.(9)

Sex is not the whole of life, but the sexual dimension of our human nature touches the deepest levels of our being, so it is understandable that it be a moral concern, not only for the teaching authorities in the Church, but for Christians who want to love God and grow in his love as whole persons, as men and women. If they are to be helped, we need to explicitly disown the negative and pessimistic elements in our tradition, honestly admit the weakness of many of our positions in the past, and face up to the challenge of making the Christian view of sexuality meaningful in today’s world. From what has been said in previous chapters about the Bible and the various types of law in our understanding of morality, it should be clear that a literal quotation of the past will not do. The problems of human life cannot simply be brushed aside by triumphantly brandishing a text from Scripture or an ecclesiastical decree.

The Second Vatican Council speaks of reading the signs of the times in the light of the gospel as a continuing sign of God’s will. We are not doing this if we dogmatise about sexual morality without any reference to our contemporary understanding and experience of sex. Quite radical developments have taken place in the last few decades. The equality and complementarity of the sexes, the personal dimensions of the sexual relationship, our growing control over fertilisation, the changing patterns of family life, and the greater awareness of what marriage can do in terms of deep personal fulfilment, are all factors that must be taken into account before we can even begin to talk about sexual morality. Our starting point should be the central truth of our Christian faith, namely the incarnation of God’s love in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. God’s love took flesh in Jesus who became one of ourselves, but that same Love becomes incarnate, takes flesh in people who touch our lives with love. The ability to love is one of God’s greatest gifts to us, and it is differently experienced and expressed by different people and different cultures. The challenge is to accept and live the great gift of intimate loving, to recognise and reverence it wherever we find it.

New Challenges

The new focus on person-centred morality and the interpersonal relationship symbolised by the two-in-one-flesh as the heart of marriage is a healthy development. But there is no ‘happy ever after’ ideal marriage to solve all the problems. Our world has changed dramatically in just one generation and most developed countries have similar experiences. The ideal of marriage for life has diminished. Civil marriages, cohabitation, divorce and serial marriage are now commonplace. Extended families are a thing of the past. The new focus on the personal relationship as the prime value can lessen appreciation of its social dimensions. Pre-nuptial agreements imply that the marriage is expected to fail, whereas the social aspects of the traditional contract can give stability and security. The alarming increase of suicide among young males is not unrelated to confusion about sexual identity and roles. A narrow focus on the ideal Christian marriage may prevent us from coping with new and unusual relationships. A striking example was a 2004 BBC television documentary showing a gay Anglican priest who described his ‘family’: he lived with his partner of twenty-five years, his elderly and disabled mother and a foster child with learning difficulties. Explaining his situation, he made clear that his Christian orientation was of more importance to him than his sexual orientation, recalling the words of Paul to the Galatians (3:27): ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’. He saw his situation as a model extended family. I believe Jesus would understand and accept him. But I feel that the same infinite love of Jesus would not be happy with the way our Catholic Church harshly treats its members whose marriage has broken down irretrievably and find themselves in a new relationship where they experience God’s love to the full, but are refused a place at the table of the Lord which is the heart of every Christian community. Current practice and canon law has changed the Eucharist which theologically is for the forgiveness of sins into a reward for good behaviour. There is very little of the Joy and Hope of Vatican II in today’s Church. But it is interesting to recall that our present Pope, writing as Professor Ratzinger in 1972 with regard to divorced and remarried Catholics who thought that they should be allowed to receive Holy Communion, said that ‘Communion can be given to someone living in a second marriage, without the suspension of the second marriage (in other words, without having to live as brother and sister); this in confidence in God’s mercy… It seems that the granting of full communion… is nothing less than just, and is fully in harmony with our ecclesiastical traditions.’

Person-centred morality

To drop the negative and pessimistic ‘do’s and don’ts’ of the older approach is not to cut loose from all norms and principles. It means to get away from the old physicalism and the fragmented approach to human actions, and to begin with the more basic question of what sexuality is all about, what it means to be a man or a woman, indeed what it means to be human. The Second Vatican Council reminds us that sexual morality is based on the nature of the human person, so it can only be understood in human and personal terms. It is true that we do have a certain nature that sets limits on us and defines our possibilities. But it is not a ready‑made nature, already fully defined, but one of beings who must fashion their own potentialities into a harmonious whole. We must freely become what we are potentially, so human sexuality involves freedom and development.

It is men and women themselves who give meaning and shape to their sexual drive. Norms of sexual behaviour cannot, therefore, be established simply on the basis of biological facts, but will be shaped in accordance with our growing understanding of ourselves and in the light of our human experience. Once again, the historical dimension of morality enters in, because our self-understanding is growing, and our experience is changing. Vatican II quietly dropped the time‑worn and misleading distinction between primary and secondary ends of marriage in its document on the Church in the Modern World, and produced a chapter on responsible parenthood and the relational aspect of sexuality that would have been condemned by the Holy Office less than forty years earlier. For Aquinas, ‘primary’ originally meant generic, what was common to both animal and human reproduction, while ‘secondary’ meant what was specific to humans, but the later tradition turned this upside down and took primary to mean more important, and secondary less important. The new approach will not be trapped into making long lists of laws covering every conceivable situation and describing the precise boundaries of the different degrees of sin. More searching questions will need to be asked about the human meaning of particular kinds of behaviour, rather than simply the biological function of certain acts.

Sex as language

Morality is about becoming a person, and nobody grows alone. People need people. It is only through relating to others that we grow in maturity and develop as persons. Our relationship is expressed and grows through communication: by speech, gesture, touch, and working with and for others. Sexuality is part of this language of communication, a very deep and powerful part. Through it we can enter into varying degrees of intimate relationship with, and commitment to, other people. The personalist approach to sexual morality advocated by Vatican II means understanding sexuality as language, a form of communication. Thus, the moral evaluation of any sexual expression will depend on its truthfulness, whether or not it faithfully expresses the truth of the person and the particular relationship in a given situation. Since relationship is a growing, developing thing, from the casual acquaintance to the total commitment of marriage, with its openness to, and responsibility for, new life, there is a whole sliding scale of what is appropriate or inappropriate, truthful or deceitful, in the expressions of that relationship, both sexual and other.

The moral challenge in our use of sex is to keep it meaningful, not to falsify or trivialise it. It is said to be the easiest language to speak, but the most difficult to make meaningful and to keep meaningful. The full human meaning of intercourse is the whole person saying with all their being, body, soul, mind and heart, ‘I love you, you only, and you always’. Someone who says this without being in a position to follow through in commitment is saying more than he or she means. This impoverishes the sexual language to the point where people can no longer say all that they mean when they really want to and are in a position to. On a deeper level, such people will have so scattered their personal being in isolated acts without meaning, that they will no longer be capable of the total self‑giving that is the essence of sexual relations at their highest point of intensity and fulfilment. It might be feared that this new approach leads to individualism, that individuals can give any meaning they wish to their actions. This can in fact happen. Sex can be for breeding, for fun, for revenge, for exploration or exploitation, for escape or for a variety of other purposes. But just as we are not free to create our own language (unless we wish to talk only to ourselves) but we learn the language of our community, so the community will already have established the essential meaning of sexual activity on the basis of its experience of human nature and its needs. It will have discovered that certain forms of sexual activity do not lead to growth in maturity and fulfilment, and so are considered cul‑de‑sacs, dead‑ends. Others are part of the groping, experimental growing‑up process, to be overcome and integrated into the mature personality. It will have discovered the emptiness and meaninglessness of sex isolated from its human context, the sadness of pornography, and the banalisation of sex that comes from a sex-obsessed culture.

Many of today’s young people see sexual activity as an experience in closeness and intimacy, a protection and refuge against the loneliness of much of modern living. But deeper reflection will show that this is simply one more ‘use’ of sex. It can only banish the loneliness and isolation of the moment. It cannot of itself link past, present and future into the harmonious whole that is human life. The universal experience of people is that sex does not create friendship and intimacy, but that it needs the constancy, stability and commitment of real friendship in order to retain its power of true expression, to be the language of closeness, intimacy and love. Experience has also shown that in general the institution of marriage provides the best possibility for the protection and growth of such a relationship. This is not a popular truth in today’s world of casual encounter, experimental sex, throwaway friends and disposable relationships, but it is one that the Christian community needs to proclaim from the housetops, not merely in words, but in the living sermon and quiet example of its married couples and other really committed relationships.

Wholeness and growth

It will be found that the ‘new sexual ethic’ already taking shape in the Church, though not fully developed in official teaching, largely agrees with the traditional view on the essentials of sexual morality. It condemns pre‑marital and extra‑marital sex, and warns of the dangers of exploitation of persons in the use of sex, both within and outside of marriage. But it avoids the listing of physical actions as mortal or venial sins. While not ignoring the physical facts of nature and the laws of biology, it assesses the morality of sexual behaviour in the context of its appropriateness to persons in their wholeness and in their relationships. But this newer approach in no way ignores the basic values of Christian morality. It is very much aware of the tragic consequences for society of the sexual promiscuity of today’s world, where so many children have no idea who their father is, and where sexually transmitted diseases have increased fivefold in a few years.

The concepts of wholeness and growth are central to the new approach. The moral call is to grow into the fullness of the maturity of Christ by responding to those around us. Not all will be able to respond to the same degree, and we must beware of equating holiness with psychological wholeness. God’s grace and love are available to all who open to him, though not all may be able to show it in their lives because of obstacles beyond their control. But within the limits of our ability we are expected to strive for whatever degree of wholeness is possible, and help others do the same by our response to them. This is what it means to love God ‘with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind’ and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Wholeness refers to the totality of the human person, including the spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical dimensions, in oneself and in others. To grow as a person is to develop all these harmoniously. To concentrate on any one of them (physical, intellectual or sexual), at the expense of the others, is dehumanising, depersonalising, and this is sinful. It could even be said that some of the arguments of traditional moralists are seriously at fault here, since they allow biological processes to take precedence over personal and spiritual values.

The notion of growth is important because the individual is a developing being, and sexuality shares in this development. People move through various sexual stages, not only physically, but emotionally, psychologically, socially and spiritually. We are all called to use our sexuality in the service of love. Love makes people whole. The precise nature of that love is immaterial, but the complete acceptance of oneself with all that is good and admirable and equally all that is weak and less than admirable, by another person is necessary for our completion as human beings. When we can love in that way in return, we are complete. What characterises this relationship and contributes most to its stability is friendship, so that lovers are each other’s best friend.

It is beyond our purpose here to give a complete theology of sexuality, but it should be clear that if people are to be helped to integrate their sexuality into their growth as Christians, much of the older theology needs to be discarded. It is sad, though understandable, that so much of the Church’s energy in the past forty years has been wasted on the question of contraception, and sadder still that so much of the controversy centred more on ‘authority’ than on the moral issue itself. Though it was agonising for large numbers of married couples, it is not the most important question in Christian morality, or even in sexual morality. The same may be said of pre‑marital sex. We need to re‑focus our moral vision so that we are not hypnotised by sex. We must realise that in spite of all the talk about the permissive society and the sexual revolution, for most people their sexual sins constitute only a very small proportion of their general burden of sinfulness. There are no easy answers.

We have already seen that if we could take the emphasis off law and precise measurement, people might have a more balanced and responsible approach to morality. This is particularly the case in the area of sexuality. There would be less confusion, fear and scruple about sin. Some would need to learn to live with a degree of uncertainty, but the experience of some spiritual tension would bring a touch of realism and seriousness to their moral striving. It would be a disservice to them to introduce a new legalism by listing specific acts as mortal and venial sins, and outlining what is now ‘permitted’ in the various zones of the body. Instead, we have the far more difficult task of explaining the Christian meaning of sex, providing them with the know-how of the decision-making process, and trusting them to use their conscience as they make their personal choices. We can invite them to reflect, and give them pointers for their reflection.

There may still be simple people who prefer just to be ‘told’ what is right and wrong, but it is an abdication of authority and spiritual leadership to look on them as the ideal and to wish that all were like them. The Church is a community in which people should grow and be helped to grow. Part of that helping is to provide them with the facts about the meaning of Scripture, the nature, extent and limits of the Church’s teaching authority, the purpose and limitations of law, the historical development of moral norms, and the discoveries of the human sciences. Knowledge like this may free them from pseudo-sins (like sexual thoughts being automatically bad thoughts), and alert them to the more serious questions they should be asking themselves, questions to which there may be no easy, black-and-white answers.

(1) John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception , how the Catholic Church has viewed birth control from the earliest times to the present day, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S. 1967.

(2) Bernard Häring , My Hope for the Church, Hampshire, Redemptorist Publications 1999, p.85.

(3) Ibid. p.104.

(4) Jack Dominian: Being Jack Dominian, Reflections on Marriage, Sex and Love. SPCK, London, 2007

(5) Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, Jerusalem Nachtgespräche, Herder, 2008.

(6) Raphael Gallagher, C.Ss.R., Forty Years after Humanae Vitae, in Reality, Dublin, July-August, 2008.

(7) An excellent, well-researched discussion of the birth control controversy is the booklet by Elizabeth Price: Seeing Sin where None Is, published for Catholics for a Changing Church by Blackfriars Publications, 13 Laneside Close, Chapel-en-le-Frith, High Peak, SK23 OTS, 2000.

(8) John T. Noonan, Contraception, 1965 edition, p.498.

(9) Geoffrey Robinson: Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: reclaiming the spirit of Jesus. Columba Press, Dublin, 2008.

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