More on Sex and the Synod

Saint Augustine and his
mother, Saint Monica: the
tensions of Catholic Sexuality

The synod address by Ron and Mavis Pirola, the Australian couple who are co-directors of the Australian Marriage and Family Council that is advisory to the Australian Bishops’ Conference on issues of Pastoral life was a wonderful call for the Synod Fathers to examine their own attitudes on human sexuality.  Too many Catholics—and perhaps especially those who are leading celibate lives—consciously or unconsciously view sex as something sinful but which is given some moral legitimacy in marriage if accompanied by a willingness for procreation.  Our attitudes on sex and human sexuality are greatly shaped by Saint Augustine.  Now, I need to say that I am normally a great admirer of Augustine.  I think he is the greatest mind in the two thousand year history of the Church,  including the Apostles.  But even Augustine didn’t always get it right.  Augustine himself had flirted with Manichaeism for about ten years, from his mid-thirties to his mid-forties and Manichaeism tinged his attitude about human sexuality with its Gnosticism.  Augustine believed that every sexual act, even in marriage, was sinful and was only justified by the desire to reproduce.  While the Church does not explicitly teach this negative theology of human sexuality, this attitude has never been effectively expunged from the Catholic mind.  The requirement that a couple seeking to be married must “be open” to the possibility of having children for the marriage to be valid is one indication of this.  The prohibition of contraception is another.  In practice, of course, the Church understands that sex provides for married couples a depth of intimacy that is inseparable from the physical pleasure; it does not bar from marriage couples who for reasons of age or health are unable to conceive and, indeed, it requires the sexual union of the spouses—at least once after the vows have been made—for the validity of the marriage.  But lurking in the shadows of the Catholic consciousness is the conviction that something so pleasurable as sex must not be completely right.   It was therefore a milestone of change in Catholic thought when a married couple stood up in an assembly charged with shaping the magisterium and declared that the fullest expression of grace in their sacramental life was found in their sexual intimacy.  As one priest I know expresses the same idea: the spouses making love is to the sacrament of Matrimony what the priest celebrating Mass is to the Sacrament of Holy Orders.  Maybe we have finally slipped the bonds of Augustine’s own anguish over the guilt his mother, Monica, instilled in him about his relationship with the unnamed love of his life whom he abandoned at Monica’s directive.  (Augustine tells us in the Confessions that Monica had arranged a marriage for him with a woman of his own social class that required Augustine to abandon the fourteen year “common-law” relationship he had with an unnamed woman.  He expresses the deep love he had for this woman, his faithfulness to her throughout their relationship, and, of course, she was the mother of his son Adeodatus.)   The marriage Monica arranged never took place as Augustine instead embraced a quasi-monastic life after his baptism.  One would think that as a good Catholic, Monica would have been more concerned to have her son regularize the union that had produced his son rather than arrange a new marriage that would advance his career, but Monica is not quite the spiritual figure to which popular Catholic hagiography has reduced her.  Read the Confessions: it is enlightening about the complexity of the mystery of sin and grace, in Monica’s life as well as her son’s.) 

Ah yes, the complexity of the mystery of sin and grace.  That leads us to the point of conflict for many in the Synod and for even more of those following it from our armchairs and monitors.

Now for what I am going to write, I am not a theologian and am not giving a theological evaluation, only an explanation of the phenomenon to the best of my ability.   “Gradualism” or “the Law of Graduality” is a proposed principle in moral theology that recognizes that the Moral Law (as revealed in Scripture and Tradition) sets a standard for which we must all strive but to which we do not all achieve immediately.  It is sometimes simplified to “you can only do the best you can do” but such caricatures reduce it to moral ambivalence.  An example of gradualism, one presented by Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, would be of a woman who marries a man who was abandoned by his first wife and left with three children.  Granted, the woman should not have married the previously-married man in the first place until he received a Church annulment.  But now that she is married to him, the Cardinal said, she cannot abandon him and the care of the children.  Of course, it can be argued, that yes she can stay with him, but live in a brother/sister relationship until his first marriage is resolved canonically.  Maybe she can; maybe she can’t.  She loves the man, he loves her, and they find great blessings in their marriage—including in the sexual expression of their love.  Maybe they can’t find the strength to live without this intimacy.  Maybe they try to live in a non-sexual relationship and from time to time they fail. “The grace is always sufficient for us to do the right thing,” one person once told me when I presented a similar situation.  Yes, it is.  But maybe the right thing isn’t what we outsiders to the situation always think that it is. We need to listen attentively to the stories of sin and grace before we unilaterally—like the scribes and the Pharisees—make up our heavy burdens and lay them on others’ shoulders. 

The law of gradualism acknowledges that we develop morally.  We are not all the way yet at perfection.  We take two steps forward and fall one step back. 

This isn’t the same as moral relativism in which there are no moral absolutes—it is the acknowledgement that we all grow in our relationship with God and we all have room yet to grow in our relationship with God and none of us will be all the way there by the time we are summoned to the judgment seat.  If we were we would not need a Redeemer. 

If you check my entry for July 19, 2014 you will see that I wrote then about the theory of moral development which Lawrence Kohlberg, a Harvard professor of psychology, developed a half-century ago.  There has been criticism of Kohlberg’s schema over the intervening decades, but I think it still has great validity.  We move in our moral development from a fear of punishment through a fixation on law to a genuine appreciation of the moral good.  (I am skipping several steps here—check out Kohlberg for a more nuanced appreciation of his ideas.)  I think this corresponds to the principle of gradualism.  As I mature both psychologically and, from a Christian perspective, in my relationship with God I come to an ever-deepening appreciation for what is right and what is wrong.  As I move along the spectrum, I can not only move beyond a fear of punishment or the hope for some eternal reward, but I can transcend the bonds of the law and see the moral good for itself.  I can also see evil, not simply as it is defined by the law, but as it takes on its evil character from the situation in which it finds itself.  An example of this—to resort to the trivial for ease of understanding—I like my glass of whiskey at the end of the day.  There is nothing wrong with a glass of whiskey.  However as the first leads to the second and the second to the third and so on, the moral good (the relaxing glass of whiskey) takes on an evil character.  Another example, somewhat more complex.  I make love to my wife.  That is a good thing.  It is, as the Pirolas point out, a celebration of the Sacrament of Matrimony.  On this particular evening, my wife is not sexually responsive and I force her, not physically but still force her, to have sex with me.  A moral good has become evil in a way that the moral law does not foresee.  The moral law says that the wife has an obligation to satisfy the husband—and vice versa.  But the Law of Love, which is the true moral good, knows that this must be done freely and without coercion.  Those who focus solely on the Moral Law most often can’t get a clear vision of the Law of Love (aka the Gospel), which, again, was the flaw of the scribes, and the Pharisees.  There are those who are frozen in their own moral development and confident in their own righteousness without compassion for the complexity of others’ lives.  This moral fixedness is neither spiritually or psychologically healthy and can’t be allowed to be the moral guideposts—they are the blind guides leading the blind (Matt 15:14).    

Sex and the Synod

Ron and Mavis Pirola who spoke
on sexuality at the Synod on the
Family 

I am anxious to get back to the history of Anglicanism and to tie up the reign of Queen Elizabeth so that we can move into Jacobean Anglicanism where the story takes on several curious twists and turns, but this Synod on the Family is just producing so much important news signaling some interesting developments in the Church’s History-In-The-Making that I need to give it the attention that it is due.

Ron and Mavis Pirola are an Australian Couple who have been married for fifty-five years and have four children and eight grand-children. They are co-directors of the Australian Marriage and Family Council which is an advisory body to the Australian Bishops Commission for Pastoral Life.  Pope Francis invited the Pirolas to be among the lay auditors at the Synod.  As auditors they do not vote but have speaking rights on the floor and were among the first scheduled to address the Synod.  They gave a rip-roaring talk about the role of sex in marriage that could best be titled: The Joys of Sex.  They spoke very frankly how it was sexual attraction that brought them together in the first place almost six decades ago and how it continues to play the central role in their marriage even now when they are in their seventies. 

“The little things we did for each other, the telephone calls and love notes, the way we planned our day around each other and the things we shared were outward expressions of our longing to be intimate with each other.”

As if that wasn’t hot enough for a room full of aged celibate males to take in, they became more explicit and continued

“Gradually, we came to see that the only feature that distinguishes our sacramental relationship from that of any other good Christ-centered relationship is sexual intimacy, and that marriage is a sexual sacrament with its fullest expression in sexual intercourse.”

This is great because it lifts the veil—albeit discreetly by today’s standards—from the fact that husbands and wives actually “do the dirty” and moreover it is an essential part of their sacramental life—a conversation to bring the churchmen down from their lofty intellectualized towers.  But they went far beyond that. The Pirolas also spoke about sex in more than its role in traditional marriage. They told the story of friends of theirs, also devout Catholics, whose gay son asked to bring his partner to Christmas dinner with the family.

“They fully believed in the church’s teachings and they knew their grandchildren would see them welcome the son and his partner into the family,” they said. “Their response could be summed up in three words: ‘He’s our son.’”

This has sent a legion of the neo-trads totally and completely out of their minds, admittedly not a long journey.  At the Synod, Cardinal Burke is “pained” by the proceedings.  Just as well for him, then, that he mostly likely will over on Aventine with his Knights by the 2015 follow-up meeting where the input of this year’s synod will be discussed and acted upon after a year of reflection.  His Eminence can lead the Malta-teers in practice sword charges against imaginary Islamic hordes, unless of course, he gets his rapier tangled up in that 27 feet of scarlet silk he likes to trail behind him.  Closer to home, our friends at LifeSite News are rousing the peasantry to take their torches and pitchforks and storm the Synod Aula by reporting the dangerous ideas being advocated by such figures as the Bishop of Antwerp, Johan Bonny and Archbishop of Wellington, John Dew.  Archbishop Dew is a member of the Synod; Bishop Bonny is not. 

And the mob is arming.  Just check out the Katholic Krazies and their blogs about the SinNod as they have retitled it.  Their usual hysterics totally miss the point about what is happening because they want to stick their heads in the sand and pretend that the toothpaste of the modern world can be put back into the tube of Ozzie and Harriet.  Would that that were possible, but we as Church are confronted with the task of how to bring the Good News of Salvation to a world that no longer follows the traditional norms of Christian morality.  And part of that evangelization effort requires the Church to re-evaluate its teachings to bring them into line, not with post-Christian culture—but with contemporary knowledge of the behavioral, social, and medical sciences.   Doctrine is not something static.  It never has been.  Our understanding of the Truth is something that develops through history.  It took the Church three centuries to be able to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity.  It took the same amount of time to articulate clearly the Divine Nature of Jesus Christ.  This is not say that the ante-Nicene “Fathers” of the Church did not believe either doctrine, but both doctrines required drastic paradigm shifts from the Church’s origins in a rigidly monotheistic Judaism that could not begin to comprehend God as being personalized in three distinct persons or in how a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, could share fully in the Divine Nature.  Similarly, the oldest stories of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary date from the fourth century but it was not until the 8^th century that it found itself officially accepted in the Western Church and only in the 20^th was it defined as an infallible dogma.  The precise nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist was a matter of debate until the 13^th century at the Fourth Lateran Council and even subsequent to that definition, the doctrine has been refined by subsequent councils and papal teachings.  Truth is eternal but our appreciation of the Truth is evolutionary. 

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the threat of modernism, a heresy which undermines the objectivity of Truth, led to an almost total paralysis of Catholic theological scholarship.  This radically changed the dynamic by which academic theology “informs” the Magisterium and left the Magisterium on its intellectual own—a precarious stance for intellectual credibility at any point of history.  The work of theologians in the first half of the 20^th century was at best ignored and far too often censured in what was a theological dark ages.  It was Pius XII who began to open the doors again to a dialogue between scholarship and the Church’s teaching office, but it was a very tentative opening and especially so in the final years of his papacy when Pius’ health issues gave rein to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, of the Holy Office (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) to take over doctrinal supervision unsupervised himself.  It was a dreadful time when such theologians as John Courtney Murray, Jean  Daniélou, Marie-Dominque Chenu, and others were silenced.  Even the saintly mystical Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was prohibited from publishing his scientific findings.  John XXIII, Vatican II, and Paul VI opened the windows to a renewed effort at serious dialogue between theology and the various sciences, but the negative reaction to the publication of Paul’s encyclical Humanae Vitae caused a reaction in which those branches of moral theology that dealt with sexual issues were frozen shut.  Theologians like Charles Curran, Margaret Foley, Anthony Kosnik, John McNeill, Jacques Gaillot, among others were censured by Rome and forced from teaching positions and, in some cases, even from their religious communities and priestly ministry. The frankness of this Synod—and the tone set by Pope Francis—indicates that the thaw is on and the Church is open to dialogue again with the world outside its stained-glass windows to come to a better understanding of human sexuality, human relationships, and human reproduction.  It is long overdue.  Yeah Francis.  You go Synod Members.  Thank you Mr. and Mrs. Pirola—keep on making love.