February 1981 Print

by Malcolm Brennan

Centuries ago when the Church was assaulted by the Reformation, she survived and triumphed by launching a counter-Reformation in which she asserted with renewed vigor especially those parts of the Faith which were most often under attack. Thus, instead of watering down the Catholic practices which gave offense to the Reformers, the Church promoted a great flowering of prayers for the dead, veneration of saints, penitential practices, candles, incense, rosaries, reception of the Sacraments, ecclesiastical authority, and so on. Nowadays the Church and the whole world are confronted by a sexual revolution that is well established in the seats of power and the hearts of men. And while the Magisterium (as opposed to many churchmen) has refused to surrender the sacred grounds against divorce, contraception and married clergy, it is nevertheless past time for Catholics to launch a sexual counter-revolution!

 

Sex is so widely indulged in our society because, paradoxically, it is so little esteemed. Most of the sexual abuses affronting us on every side come from low opinions of what sex is all about.

The Loner

Prurience is such a smashing success because, we are told, there is no harm in just looking. Who is hurt, the sexual revolutionaries ask, if someone chooses to while away an hour titillating himself with visions of the voluptuous and the lewd? Surely, there is no crime, we are assured (often in legal and psychological terms), in someone escaping from his drab little life for a time and living an exotic adventure in fancy—better he do it in the privacy of his imagination than become a matter for the police. What is the matter with you rich and powerful people, they want to know, are you afraid that we ordinary folk will have a little fun? (The question is often posed, by the way, by rich and powerful people who have a financial interest in getting us ordinary folk to spend money on their pornography.)

The key words in these apologies for sexual self-stimulation are no harm, no crime, while away an hour, have a little fun, escape. If we find a moment of consternation in trying to refute these arguments, it may be because we too have fallen into the habit of thinking about sex in the way that the revolution usually presents it, as merely fun, and merely harmless, and merely personal (or, as they sometimes like to say, deeply personal, meaning it is nobody else's business).

The fact of the matter is that, contrary to such paltry ideas of sex as at most amusing and at worst harmless, sexual stimulation is, like the rest of sex, a gift of God. By it He encourages our participation in His continuing creation of the human race. Unfortunately, the modern empirical temper invites us to look at the thing the wrong way around. We habitually look at what we take to be the fact of sex, concentrate most of our attention on sorting out its elements and varieties, and then note as a matter of secondary interest various opinions that people have entertained about the fact—and tentatively adopting, if we feel the need, an opinion which leaves us least uncomfortable. To one who has such a habit of thinking (and who has not imbibed it more or less?) sex is not primarily a gift of God (nor an expression of love, nor a release of neurotic tensions) but is primarily a physical fact toward which people, even God Himself, have adopted various attitudes.

But God did not find Himself confronted with a certain bit of creation called sex, condemn most of it as being rather nasty, but then, because he had to deal with the real world as it is, allow some forms of sex in a special set of circumstances called marriage—marriage thus being a compromise of high principle with stubborn reality. On the contrary, God invented sex in all of its physical details as well as its grand purposes. He did so freely, that is, He was not constrained by the given facts of sex, because they did not exist until He willed them into being. God's purpose in inventing the details of sex, we are told by holy Church and holy Scripture, was that we might "go forth and multiply." By sexual reproduction we are to help God to "fill up the number of the elect."

So, what harm is there in salaciousness? It is an offense against God because it separates sex from His divine plan of creation, which alone gives it dignity. Also, it is an affront to the human race, which has the serious corporate duty of perpetuating itself. Finally it trivializes the person who engages in it because it squanders a precious faculty as if it were a plaything. In all of these aspects, the individual who engages privately in illicit sex wrenches the whole universe around himself as the center, and he uses his own good pleasure as the standard by which creation is to be used. And as his own interest is supreme, other things are subordinated to himself as the end. Let us hope that most sexual offenders do not do this consciously, for this self-serving is the very definition of the worst of sins, pride.

The Partner

If we turn our attention from private sexual acts to those which involve another person, we see not a new kind of sin but a more explicit debasement of sex and people. In illicit liasons such as fornication, adultery, and homosexuality, each partner subverts the other to his own pleasure. Neither partner augments the manhood or womanhood of the other, but each subordinates his partner's human dignity to his own self-gratification.

We are not speaking here of the conscious or even the subconscious motives of such a person, nor of the complex of emotions and longings that he may have, but of the objective facts of the case. One's intentions and one's accomplishments may be quite different. For example, no one in our hygenic age intends a veneral disease epidemic, but millions accomplish it by their voluntary actions. Similarly many a fornicator, adulterer, and homosexual may cherish the very tenderest sentiments and generous emotions toward his partner, but still he is debasing another person and a gift of God. He treats his partner's divine gift of masculinity or femininity as a toy, and he treats despite-fully the Providential plan for human creation.

Abortion

Another kind of disorder which characterizes the sexual revolution generates such revulsion for the deed, such pity for the mangled baby, such frustration with the girls and women lured into it, that it is hard to see objectively. Perhaps a simply enumeration of what abortion does will put it in perspective. First, abortion destroys the innocent life of an unbaptized infant, a little person for whose salvation Our Savior groaned. (We naturally hope that the tiny victim is safely in the hands of God; but a disturbing thought is that God has given us a hand in seeing to the safety and the salvation of our neighbors, and we are failing these little neighbors by the millions.) The person of the child was created not by the parents' lust, but by the Father's love, and to treat this mighty and individual creative act contemptuously must surely tear at the very bowels of creation.

Secondly, abortion turns the mother into a murderess. We may presume various degress of guiltlessness among those who obtain abortions, but as one who counsels many unexpectedly pregnant girls and women, I can affirm positively that vast numbers who seek abortion know exactly what they are doing. "I know it's a little baby," they say, "but I just can't handle it right now." When a woman is willing to kill her baby, what will she not do?

Abortion either makes the father into an accomplice in his child's murder (often he is the driving force), or his rights of fatherhood are violated in the worst way imaginable. There is a corresponding involvement of grandparents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters—for all these kin have a sort of claim upon the child, as he has a birthright to their love. Thus other members of the families are involved, often as agents and always as victims, in spilling their own blood and violating the bonds among themselves.

Finally, the medical people connected with an abortion bear a terrible burden of guilt. (We speak again not of the psychological state of remorse but of the objective fact of guilt.) And sometimes those whose connection with an abortion is materially remote are nevertheless intimately united with it: politicians, bureaucrats, manufacturers of medicine and equipment, and especially that army of activists and profiteers that crusades for abortion. Each of the 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 abortions in the world every year entails the most foul moral corruption of scores of people. And once again we see the trivialization of sexuality and of human beings themselves. Procreation becomes not a divine gift but a human error. Its issue in God's image is discarded in a plastic garbage bag. Family bonds of the most sacred kind are violated. All of this to avoid embarrassment or inconvenience.

Contraception

Artificial contraception, when practiced by married couples (to put the best possible face on it), is peculiarly representative of the sexual revolution's confusions about sex. To some it seems to promote uninhibited expressions of affection between husband and wife—and surely the world can stand more affection—while it is also proof of their social concern in a world threatened by a population explosion. In the face of this morally responsible use of modern technology, Pope Paul VI, it seems to many, dredged up an anachronistic and insensitive prohibition against it, the taboo of a less enlightened and less compassionate age.

The mistake in this thinking is not different from what we have seen in other triumphs of the sexual revolution. It presumes that sex is a private possession, a physical object that one is free to use in whatever ways seem to suit one's individual needs. But sex is not a brute fact, morally indifferent, amenable to any employment, and deriving its character, therefore, from whatever personal intention its owner consciously prescribes. It does have a character of its own, it does have an inherent dignity. This character and dignity it has by virtue of its purpose.

This feature of sex—that the reality of it includes its inherent purpose—is not peculiar to sex only. Take a familiar object like a tea pot. Its reality consists not only of its bowl, lid, spout, and handle, but also and mainly the principle according to which these parts are arranged as they are, the principle of brewing tea. This principle of the tea pot, its purpose, is what the ancient Greeks called its logos and the Romans its ratio— it is the 'idea' or 'reason' of the tea pot. This purpose (principle), which resides in the tea pot and gives it its nature, is not to be confused with the purpose (motive) which resides in the one who uses it. One may use a tea pot to wash socks or mix paints, and while there is no great harm in such uses, they clearly do not conform very closely to the tea pot's inherent purpose.

Now, the purpose inherent in sex is no mystery: it makes babies. All those complicated parts and intricate systems, all that agony and ecstasy, are not just random, brute facts; they are organized in nature according to a principle, the principle of reproduction. Pope Paul explained what the Church has always taught, that sex (like the rest of creation) is to be used in accord with the purpose for which God created it. This does not mean that one must postpone the use of sex until one's motives are identical with God's—who would presume?—but it does mean that men and women who use sex may not exclude or positively frustrate its divinely ordained natural purpose.

The analogy with eating is instructive: one need not consciously will the health of the body and the maintenance of the human race every time one eats, but one is not free to eat such things or in such a way that nourishment is frustrated and health damaged. The ancient Romans are said to have prolonged their gluttonous feasts by induced vomiting; contraception similarly fosters indulgence but spills the seed.

Family Disintegration

One last consideration of misused and misunderstood sex in these latter days is the plight of the family. Its disintegration is so commonplace that we become inured to its significance. In fact we are so conditioned to the cause of the individual—his needs to be met, the achievement of his personal goals, development of his unique potential, his individual self-realization—that we begin to lose the habit of thinking about the family or any social group. For in too much current thinking the group is more a collectivity of equal, atomic individuals than it is an organic body. But in Catholic thinking a group like the family is not an aggregate of homogeneous individuals, united as a practical means of each pursuing his own self-interest. Rather it is the harmonious concordance of diverse members, united for the common good of all, which includes the individual good of each.

The most responsible spokemen for the triumphant revolution in morals and values (as opposed to its cynical opportunists) assert that the individual's first duty is to seek his own self-gratification (usually there is a politer word: self-improvement, self-realization, self-fulfillment), and he ought not restrict this pursuit except as it jeopardizes the self-gratification of another, who is equally entitled to it. This they call the pursuit of happiness. Its indispensible condition is personal liberty, the uninhibited freedom to follow one's personal inclinations. What unites people, according to this system, are temporary contracts voluntarily entered into because they offer a promise of self-fulfillment.

In brilliant contrast, a Catholic's caring and concern is directed outwardly, from the self toward other people, namely God and his neighbor, to whom he binds himself with hoops of justice and charity. The nature, sanctity, and permanence of these bonds is sometimes more and sometimes less, according to the nature of the case and the dispensations of Providence. And among the most intimate, sacred, and enduring of those bonds are those of the family. (Even on those occasions when a Catholic looks inwardly with an eye to self-improvement—as in the examination of conscience—his ideal is not self-fulfillment but self-emptying, that is, humility and penitence. He is a giver instead of a getter.)

It is the bonds that a person maintains that, in the Catholic view, are the measure of the good life, not the bonds that he throws off: his attachment to the land or love of the sea, his care for his neighbors, loyalty to his friends, commitment to an ideal, fidelity to a cause. These bonds are all incomparably elevated by justice and charity. And among the most precious of such unions is the family, especially that founded upon and strengthened by the sacramental grace of matrimony. Now, it is no mere linguistic curiosity that the words which describe one's status in the family do two things: they designate a relationship (that is, not an individual condition but a condition of concord and harmony with other people), and they designate a gender (which shows how much sexuality is a part of family life). It is more usual than not for one person to enjoy several of these designations at once (like mother, daughter, grand-daughter, sister, wife, aunt, niece), and each of these signifies some special feature of that person's sexuality. Thus to be a niece is to be feminine in a way different than a sister is, and to be bound differently as well.

When family bonds loosen, therefore, important parts of people's sexuality are dissolved or stifled. They become de-sexed, or their sexuality is confined to a narrow range of activity, the erotic. Furthermore, they are denuded of the profoundest kind of human fellowship. It is a mistaken idea of freedom which makes a man independent of his family ties, which liberates a woman from her husband and children, which frees boys and girls to rely on their own childish resources, or which isolates people from their natural kin. And inasmuch as they are de-sexed, denuded and isolated in these ways, they are de-humanized.

These then seem to be the disorders characteristic of the sexual revolution: individual salaciousness such as pornography promotes illicit sexual liasons, contraception, abortion, and familial disintegration. The abberation in each case is based upon a trivialization or devaluation of something which Catholic teaching holds to be precious: either a lowered estimate of the sexual impulse, of the mating act or its issue, or of the bonds which unite families. These lowered standards amount in the last analysis to despair, despair about whether there is any worth and dignity and meaning in people and what they do. Is the human person an organism whirled about by all but unmanageable physical and psychological impulses to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and conditioned by inscrutable economic and cultural forces? Or is he rather a child of God, called to accomplish a noble enterprise, and responsible for its achievement?

Part II: WHAT WENT WRONG? In next month's issue