The clock is ticking...
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Alan:
Human sexuality is explosive.
Understandably, church authorities try to circumscribe this unpredictable force with ritual and restraint.
Still, a crucial distinction must be made between total repression and wise direction.
The core question is this: "Should the irrepressible flow of "unsanctioned" sexuality be channeled, or should it be categorically condemned?"
The tragic downside to relentless repression and condemnation is that church authorities are losing their ability to provide any direction at all.
Another decisive distinction lies in the everlasting shadowland between "imposed perfection" and "reasonable accommodation."
"We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.” Rev. Thomas Merton, Trappist monk
In effect, too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
The profoundest truths are paradoxical.
We might also ask if absolutist determination to prevent mistakes is a worse strategy than accommodating a reasonable number.
Only when mistakes are made -- and they will be made! -- do we have real raw material with which to correct our mistakes. Only in the wake of error do we have "dough to knead" into serviceable bread.
Notably, the New Testament's Greek word for "sin" is "hamartia," an archer's term for "missing the mark."
Anyone who does target practice knows that we learn much from our errant shots.
Indeed it is, specifically, the. subsequent correction of "what we did wrong" that enables us -- over time -- to hit the target dependably.
My Dad liked to say: "All things in moderation."
Somewhere in my early adulthood, the following premise occurred to me: "All things in moderation, including excess."
Finally, we confront the Church's selective treatment of "which" moral quandaries demand "perfection" -- and which quandaries deserve accommodation.
These are judgement calls: sometimes church authorities decide on perfection, sometimes on accommodation. (The unfolding moral theology of "usury" reveals the church's mutable shift from "perfection" to "accommodation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury)
History teaches that most wars are ego exercises performed by the rich and powerful.
Remarkably, the Church rarely expresses opposition to war.
And when she does, the most punctilious practitioners are quick to ignore ecclesial naysayers.
In this regard, their disregard for church authority is so peremptory, so powerful, that there is precious little discussion of the "moral conflict" at all, and subsequently there are few (if any) historical footnotes that a moral conflict ever took place.
War is a universal norm that "no one" -- certainly not the church -- meaningfully resists.
"Bring it on!"
It is "the way of the world" that when "the authorities" pave way for "the next war," "the faithful" are first to beat drums and wallop them with such cacophonous din that the collective sound of every unsanctioned orgasm is overwhelmed like nuclear detonation drowning the sound of a struck match.
Consider.
Christ offered no moral teaching more central, more pellucid, than "Love your enemies."
Yet in response to this disarmingly straightforward enjoinder, the church has no misgiving about blasting every designated enemy from the face of the Earth.
No misgiving whatsoever.
None.
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Excerpt: "(Young people are alienated by) how religious leaders talk about sex. In America, young people emphatically don’t like religions that preach negative messages about sex. They don’t like to be told that sex is bad or that premarital sex is a paving stone on the road to hell or that homosexuals are in any way, as the catechism says, “intrinsically disordered.” The conservative insistence on birth control as “immoral,” as Chaput would have it, is, for young Catholics, a turnoff. Donna Freitas, a scholar of religion and a Catholic who studies college students’ attitudes toward sex, wrote as much in 2010: “Catholic students especially spoke with great sarcasm about the ‘don’ts’ with regard to sex in the Catholic tradition, which make them feel alienated, and which make them think that Catholicism is utterly out of touch.” To underscore her point: 98 percent of Catholic women have used birth control at some point in their lives, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Social conservatives like to point to the widespread use of the pill, and the subsequent sexual revolution, as the beginning of the end of American morals, the gateway to the erosion of family and marriage, the beginning of the end of a healthy respect for sex as an act of great emotional significance, as well as the means of procreation. But recent data fail to support this thesis. Teen pregnancy rates have sunk to record lows, according to a report last year by the Guttmacher Institute. Teenagers are waiting longer than they did in the 1990s to have sex for the first time, and when they do have sex, it is usually in their later teens, with contraception and a steady boyfriend or girlfriend."
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- Lisa Miller
- Belief Watch
The kids are all right — but disagree with bishops on sex and birth control
The headline last week in the National Catholic Reporter, the country’s go-to source for all things Catholic, might have run on the satirical news site “The Onion”: “Vatican admits it doesn’t fully understand youth culture,” it said. Next week, perhaps NCR will run a follow-up piece: “Bishops admit they have no clue about sex.”
The Obama administration has tried to be sensitive to the bishops’ claims to conscience. After much yelling about the trampling of religious liberties, most notably by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the administration last week unveiled adjustments to its health-care plan that would allow religious organizations to abstain from offering their employees contraceptive coverage under their group plans while, at the same time, requiring insurers to offer the coverage separately. The compromise is a win-win-win, the Department of Health and Human Services argues. The religious employer can follow his conscience. The woman gets the coverage, if she wants it. And the insurer doesn’t have to pay the higher costs associated with unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. In an editorial, The Washington Post supported the compromise.
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But some bishops just won’t be satisfied. Three American bishops said on Jan. 30 that they’d sooner go to jail than submit to the contraceptive mandate. The archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, called the administration’s concessions “minimalist” and used the phrase “immoral services” as a euphemism for birth control. The spokeswoman for the USCCB, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, said the accommodations “did not completely satisfy concerns related to conscience rights,” and Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s fuller response was equally chary.
What these most conservative advocates want, it seems, is for American women to be thrust back to a time before Vatican II, when legal birth control was scarce, expensive and difficult to procure.
Which brings me back to the NCR piece, and the Vatican’s articulated lack of understanding of youth culture. The hierarchy is worried enough about its hold on the young to have held a closed-door conference in Rome from Wednesday through Saturday at which bishops listened to experts on youth in an effort to improve their messaging to the young and recapture some of the generation who — in the developed West, at least — are falling away. In preparation for the conference, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, said he’d been listening to Amy Winehouse.
Ravasi will probably come to this on his own, but in case he doesn’t, here’s a clue: Young people care about sex.
And it’s not just having sex that they care about. It’s how religious leaders talk about sex. In America, young people emphatically don’t like religions that preach negative messages about sex. They don’t like to be told that sex is bad or that premarital sex is a paving stone on the road to hell or that homosexuals are in any way, as the catechism says, “intrinsically disordered.” The conservative insistence on birth control as “immoral,” as Chaput would have it, is, for young Catholics, a turnoff.
Donna Freitas, a scholar of religion and a Catholic who studies college students’ attitudes toward sex, wrote as much in 2010: “Catholic students especially spoke with great sarcasm about the ‘don’ts’ with regard to sex in the Catholic tradition, which make them feel alienated, and which make them think that Catholicism is utterly out of touch.” To underscore her point: 98 percent of Catholic women have used birth control at some point in their lives, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Social conservatives like to point to the widespread use of the pill, and the subsequent sexual revolution, as the beginning of the end of American morals, the gateway to the erosion of family and marriage, the beginning of the end of a healthy respect for sex as an act of great emotional significance, as well as the means of procreation. But recent data fail to support this thesis. Teen pregnancy rates have sunk to record lows, according to a report last year by the Guttmacher Institute. Teenagers are waiting longer than they did in the 1990s to have sex for the first time, and when they do have sex, it is usually in their later teens, with contraception and a steady boyfriend or girlfriend.
So, despite all the hysteria about the eroding effects on values of social media and YouTube and the fear that the availability of birth control will lead to a nation of hedonistic narcissists, the kids are all right. They’re sensible and self-protective. But they’re less likely than ever to take advice about personal morality from older men who think they know better.