March 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!

There was a dream a few years ago (one which the less alert prophets of the sexual revolution are still heralding) to the effect that the human race had evolved to such a state of maturity that, if people were no longer intimidated by legalistic proscriptions, they were now ready to enter an age in which each individual would determine for himself what was right and wrong, true and false, in his own situation—as if sincerity and candor were enough to bring happiness, world peace, and salvation. Such excessive individualism and sujectivism have been condemned many times by the best modern popes and by others, but some of the revolutionaries got away with calling this nonsense 'the spirit of Vatican II,' and so added to the confusions of that Council.

According to this philosophy, which swept the world like a madness in the sixties, we encouraged youngsters to be candid about sex—and their illegitimate pregnancies and venereal diseases became epidemic. We opened the door to some 'adult' literature and films of redeeming social value—and we are deluged with suffocating filth. We felt compassion for those rare cases where horrible circumstances seemed to rival the horror of abortion—and now we wring our hands in disbelief as the pillars of our communities preside over the slaughter of innocents. We agonized over the predicament of effeminate men and masculine women—and now the pederasts are demanding their right to our children. Our hearts went out to those in difficult marriages—and now even Catholic theologians and canonists are in effect promoting trial and temporary marriages.

Weakened Faith

The culprits of this debacle are not the worldlings. What does the world know about sex, about family, about law? What does it even know about its own creature, the media, the vehicle of pornography and the rubber yardstick of this week's right and wrong? It thinks that the best thing a broadcast or publication can be is free, uncensored. And when we ask, "But is it right? Is it true?" the world, with its worldly smile, pities us and answers, "What is truth? Right for whom?"

And what does it know about adultery? It knows that some of it is probably good for a marriage (look at a counselling column in a ladies' magazine), it knows that abortion is good public policy, that divorce is the solution to marital problems, that masturbation is not only harmless but perfectly wholesome, that self-control is an impossible dream, that technology and management techniques can solve any problem, and that money is the measure of all things.

Given the world's truth and right, what could the world have done these last decades, except what it has done? No, the culprit is us Catholics. We believers, we followers of the Way, we guardians of the Truth, we sharers of the Life—we have stumbled, have stuttered, have lost our nerve. We have known all along about self-indulgence, for example, but somehow it seemed more politic or more 'caring' to stop calling it by its right name; and with the sharp edge of truth thus blunt, error flourished like a weed. We knew about fallen human nature confronted by occasions of sin, but we have declined to be censorious of those occasions because censoriousness is one of the few vices which the world acknowledges, howbeit myopically. We knew all along about both the splendor and the practical necessity of chaste living, but we did not want to lay ourselves open to charges of prudery, another of the few sins according to the gospel of darkness. We have not forgotten about the power of penance and asceticism, but it was easier to flatter people and call the flattery a theology of hope.

These observations are offered not in a spirit of self-flagellation (which would not be inappropriate) but as a sober prediction that the best historians who judge our age will discover a causal link between the loss of confidence in the Catholic faith and the signs of barbarity abounding: hedonism and promiscuity and crime of all kinds, of course, but also a lowering of other standards—commercial, political, academic—and even including terrorism, cultic murders, satanism, and the like. This decline in civilized standards is true not only of the Catholics who, for example, hearing less and less about the dangers of divorce and more and more about the dignity of divorcees, naturally considers that possibility when his marriage becomes troublesome. Rather, the high standards of Catholic truth and conduct affected the whole texture of society, worldwide, like a leaven, as long as they were stoutly proclaimed and practiced; and the lives of everybody have been diminished by the timidity and ambiguity with which Catholics have come to treat the eternal verities.

Be these prognostications what they may, we have ample warrant to affirm with uninhibited vigor the Church's teachings on sex. But see what actually passes for Catholic truth. My parish bulletin recently carried a little meditation on fatherhood. Fathers when you and I were young, it said, were required by the times to be severe authority figures, but now things are so much improved that fathers are not ashamed to change diapers and push strollers. When you get past the weasel words of the essay, you discover that it advocates a kind of uni-sex, non-authoritarian parenthood—'parenting' it is sometimes called. Fathers, it amounted to saying, should be good friends and mothers to their children and good citizens toward their wives. I can't wait for the meditation on motherhood.

This sentimentality about mushy relationships has little to do with the traditional and Biblical Catholic teaching, and the essay's denigration of authority is quite alien to the Catholic spirit. The saints, for example, for all their piety and spirituality, are never sexless or spineless. They are masculine men, maternal or virginal women, and childlike boys and girls—and tough as nails when necessary. They find their models in the Holy Family.

 

What to Do

Given the jeopardy into which souls are daily thrown by triumphant errors about sex, what are we to do? How do we protect our loved ones and ourselves from the savages we must live among? It would be presumptuous for this article to prescribe solutions for the ills of society, yet some suggestions for how to cope with daily problems is demanded by the foregoing observations.

 

Family Life

A first consideration is that all is not lost. A fully Catholic attitude is alive in many hearts, though besieged. At a wedding reception recently, I was introduced to a man who was identified as "Aunt Edna's nephew." "Why am I always Aunt Edna's nephew," he asked wryly, "instead of just me myself?" Then warming to the subject, because of the champagne no doubt, he enlarged on the complaint. "I am always Aunt Edna's nephew, or Timmy's daddy, or Harry's partner, or Agnes's husband, or Margaret's brother. Why can't I be just me?" And he put on a look of wounded innocence.

He was, of course, savoring the delicious bonds of a tight network of family and friends, and spoofing the ideals of liberation and independence. Wise man, he knew to cherish the bonds between himself and others, without worrying about restrictive entanglements inhibiting his self-importance. His remarks show that it is still possible to maintain Catholic ideals of family life; they also show that one must make the effort to do so, as he did in distinguishing those ideals from the ideal of individual self-sufficiency.

This first suggestion to counter the sexual revolution, then, is that we make the effort to discern and embrace those family ideals. Sex has its pre-eminent expression in family, life, whether it is a question of conception or world population or of the mental and spiritual aspects of masculinity and femininity; and to understand sex, therefore, requires an understanding of the family.

The Church has illuminated family roles by adapting its nomenclature to the religious life: abbot, mother superior, sister, friar, father, brother. The Church invites us to call Mary our Mother, and Jesus Himself taught us to call God our Father and himself our Brother. Further, the Church is the Bride of Christ, as is the individual soul in union with Him. We usually contemplate these things to learn about the spiritual life, presuming that we understand enough about the flesh to learn about the spirit by analogy. One can also start the other way around, contemplating these spiritual truths in order to cast light on practical human relationships—viewing the family as it were from God's end of the scale. In fact, this is just what St. Paul does in chapter five of Ephesians.

Most explicitly, the Church has laid bare the treasury of its teachings on sex in such masterpieces as Pius XI's Casti Connubii (Chaste Marriage). Its teachings are infinitely more than the simple encouragement of tender feelings among spouses and children; rather the teaching is tough, complex, practical, sublime, socially enlightened, and a marvel of intellectual and moral beauty. We must take the trouble to learn it. And live it.

The family provides the orientation and the term of the child's development. His earliest virtues are the family virtues of obedience and trust; his greatest need and fulfillment is love, family love; the first skills he learns are domestic. His earliest friends are likely his siblings or cousins, or at any rate friends of the family from the neighborhood, a kind of extension of the family community. In later youth, courtship is wholesomest when informed by the idea of eventual marriage. Youngsters today are encouraged to think of dating as an end in itself, a kind of recreation. But it is no derogation of courtship that it be oriented towards marriage—no more than that the tea pot be oriented toward making tea. Courtship is elevated from casual entertainment to a higher dignity when its orientation is marriage, just as love-making in marriage is ennobled by its inherent purpose of begetting children.

One could go on and on, but perhaps enough has been said to indicate that right ideas about sex, both in the broad and the narrow senses, and much else besides, are clarified and fostered when we make the effort to understand the many facets and dimensions of family life.

 

Ideals and Conduct

Right ideas, like right thinking, is a term that strikes the modern ear in a way that raises the modern eyebrow. But let us go ahead and admit it: we know what is so, we know what is right. 'Straight teaching' is what the word orthodoxy means, and we have no license to hide it under a bushel. These matters of belief and principles of conduct ought to be proclaimed out of a love of truth and in obedience to the divine injunction, of course, but they also turn out to be invaluable, indeed indispensable, as to the most practical ways of dealing with our fallen natures.

We sometimes speak of a man being unprincipled or of not living up to his principles. Yet when a man does not live up to high principles, he lives up (or down) to low ones. The person we call unprincipled is in fact one who follows the principles of self-interest, or looking out for number one, of keeping an eye on the main chance, of getting something for nothing. It is true, then, that every human action is based upon a principle, of one kind or another.

Now, if we wish to encourage our families in right conduct with respect to sex, it would seem perfectly obvious that we should help them to know right principles: modesty, purity, chastity, virginity, Christian marriage and family life. Unfortunately, it is not perfectly obvious to everyone. There are many, especially among the educators of youth, who simply reject the whole notion of principled conduct, that is, of actions done because of a principle, like purity, actions which are consciously chosen, sometimes requiring keen discernment and great strength of will, and which run quite counter to one's comfort and natural sympathies. Instead they speak of stimulus and response, of human conduct being a response to certain stimuli—as if people were laboratory animals. B. F. Skinner, famous Harvard psychologist, once claimed he could get all the children of Chicago to go to church every Sunday. It was just a matter of finding the right stimuli (rewards like bubble gum and punishments like canings, I suppose) that would produce the desired behavior. As for piety, that was a commodity he had never seen, but church attendance was a measurable behavioral pattern.

When such spokesmen for the revolution discuss motivation, they show an equally low estimate of human conduct, because motivation for them is not the principle on account of which an action is done (that is, an ideal of conduct), but motivation is the same as appetite. The most elevated motivations of this sort are things like self-realization, having a good feeling about oneself, maintaining self-respect. Notice how self-centered the best motives are; if some element of generosity or altruism creeps into motivation, it can only be rendered intelligible by calling it self-enrichment.

When it is a question of behavior in its moral dimension, people of this cast of mind speak immediately of moral dilemmas, as if the anguish-ridden dilemma were the only characteristic to distinguish moral conduct from any other. If this were the case, one could say nothing about the morality of the care-free prostitute or the conscious-less abortionist. This practice confines morality to only those cases where two conflicting moral claims have about the same weight, and it reduces questions of right and wrong to matters of psychological turmoil. But most moral matters have nothing to do with dilemmas—for example, whether to covet your neighbor's wife, or whether not to, surely are not equally valid alternatives, no matter how strong the temptation nor agreeable the wife. In fact, there is no such thing as a moral dilemma in the objective order: the world is too well put together "in measure, and order, and number" for there to be a sinful virtue or a virtuous vice.

In place of these clumsy, partial, and obscure notions of human behavior, the Church offers a view which is profound, which accords with common sense and ordinary experience, and which takes human actions seriously. Human beings, it says, can know. They do have understanding, they can comprehend the meanings of things—and things, therefore, do have meanings (like purposes, for example). Furthermore, human persons are able, at least after the age of reason, to understand that a thing or an action is good or bad. They can do all this because they have minds, intelligence. In addition, they have wills, the mental capacity to choose freely, especially between right and wrong. They can understand an idea, like modesty, and can freely choose to conform their conduct to it, or not. Over and above these natural gifts, people can have faith, extending and deepening their knowledge enormously, and they may receive grace, strengthening their wills heroically.

And concerning these matters, which the world has forgot, centuries of experience during this reign of the Holy Ghost have taught the Church a huge body of precious lore about clarifying the understanding and fortifying the heart, valuable lore about the virtues and vices, about good and bad habits, about pious practices and devotional exercises, about the meaning and purpose of people and things, about evil companions, temptations, occasions of sin, self-deceptions, guardian angels, and about public customs and institutions which affect moral conduct—to say nothing of the sacraments and their relation to right living. All this wisdom, this patrimony of the Church, for several centuries supported secular societies even after they had rejected its source, but now almost all is lost and scorned.

One of the worst forms of this turning away from the principles and wisdom of the faith is the practice of telling people that they must decide questions of conduct and belief for themselves, as if there were no revealed truth. This perversion of a regard for personal and individual responsibility is what someone has called the "your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine school of theology"—common enough among those without the faith but now also rampant among "Catholics." Lest these observations be thought extravagant, consider this advice which appeared in the counselling column of a weekly diocesan newspaper (cited by Paul Hallet in the National Catholic Register in 1978). A woman writes in that her daughter, who is divorced, has fallen in love with a divorced man and wants to marry him. Here is the advice:

Your daughter's situation has become all too common. She did everything to make her marriage legal the first time, even leading her husband to join the Church. Now she is stuck with the binding nature of what she has done.

Can she marry again and stay in the Church? I honestly don't know. What is the Church?

There is no person with a rule book available, no one to say "yes, you may do this," and "no, you may not do that." Your daughter must make a choice, and she must take personal responsibility for the choice she makes . . . can she receive the sacraments? I honestly don't know. But I think that is her decision . . . Remind her that choosing not to re-marry is also a decision she must answer to God for.

Modern men, women, and children are pushed and pulled around by the most powerful forces of greed and lust that money and technology can command, and this chap tells them there is no help, they are on their own. If this is not giving a stone to those who ask for bread, then Our Lord's curse is inane.

Healthy sexual conduct is best promoted in two ways. First, the principles of purity, modesty, virginity, chastity, and family life ought to be taught. They are not abstruse and arcane, though the books propounding them have gathered dust of late. We must not despair of human nature as do the champions of the sexual revolution who, as noted at the beginning of this essay, advocate sexual indulgence because what people do really does not matter, and they cannot help themselves, anyway. We, by contrast, must have enough confidence in the human nature which God gave us and which His Son redeemed—especially when it is suffused with faith, hope, and charity—to believe that these principles, high and spiritual though they be, are not beyond the real understanding of ordinary people, even quite young ones (or rather, especially quite young ones). Like most essential matters of the faith, these ideals have this strange quality, that while they may be truly and really grasped by the simple and unlearned, yet they provide an endless store of ever new perceptions to even the most acute minds. The principle of modesty, for example, can be learned quite early on, and there never comes a stage of development when the thoughtful believer will find its rich meaning exhausted. To be sure, this confidence in the capacity of human understanding, if it is not to become mere wishful thinking, must also recognize that the knowledge of the sexual virtues does not appear unbidden, as by spontaneous generation, in minds darkened by original sin, especially in minds daily assaulted by error and vice. Whence the need that they be taught.

Secondly, and concurrently with the teaching of right ideals, right conduct should be fostered. It should be promoted with the whole array of supports and reinforcements that have succeeded in other generations, like penances and devotions, and it should be promoted as conduct which is right by virtue of being concrete expressions of those ideals. This means that we should not try to induce certain patterns of behavior of which we approve, probably with good reason, solely by means of rewards and punishments of a different order than the order of virtue, nor certainly by subconscious conditioning. That is how to train a dog. People, on the contrary, deserve to know what their actions mean, that is, to know the ideal of which this action is an expression.

 

Heroic Virtue

A final point. No person is so insignificant or so lost in depravity that he is not entitled to know the ideal of heroic virtue. Too often, I am afraid, we offer as our highest ideal some low minimum of the avoidance of the worst of sins. Thus some act as if the best that can be hoped for in regard to fornication among young people is that it be confined to engaged couples. After all, they say, let's be realistic. (That's what they always say when they are about to demolish a standard.) Copulation among youth, they say, is no longer the big event that it once was; and if we can persuade people to associate it with marriage, at least we will have reduced the level of casual promiscuity. Or at an older level, married couples are encouraged to use contraceptives lovingly and responsibly. Similarly, homosexuals are counselled to make their relationships meaningful.

This will not do. This will not do at all. It is like encouraging thieves to steal smaller amounts or murderers to kill smaller people, in the hope that they will begin to taper off and finally do nothing. But virtue, especially in regard to sex is not doing nothing. Modesty, purity, chastity, virginity, and the family virtues are very dynamic activities indeed. In fact, what higher form of human activity is imaginable than the practice of virtue? Of course, if human conduct is the mere following of behavior patterns, as conditioned by obscure stimuli, then virtue is no more than a trivial self-deception in a very glum anthropology.

Nor is it unrealistic idealism to expect people, especially Catholics, to form their behavior upon motives which are supernatural. The fear of damnation is an extremely effective supernatural motive—not the highest ideal, to be sure, but powerful. No one has rescinded the Biblical proverb that the fear of the Lord is the beginning, if not quite the end, of wisdom. If the fear of hell is less than a perfect motive, it is still a thousand times superior to motives of self-enrichment and niceness. In the first place it works better, and in the second place it deals with the real world, which includes heaven and hell.

But as powerful as fear is in resisting the forces of darkness, it may not be sufficient in these days. The nefarius insinuation of evil into the world may be so extensive that nothing less than an exalted ideal of holiness will suffice for ordinary men, women, and children to avoid serious sexual sin. Back in an age when only a fool would have said in his heart there is no God—and such times have been—the fear of God's judgment may have been enough to develop a life of moderate virtue, because the fear was based upon a lively knowledge of God's intimate Presence in human affairs. But for modern men, even believers, God is remote, separated from ordinary activities as religion has been excluded from public affairs. We like to rely on ourselves and only turn to Him to give His benediction to the completed work of our hands.

The risks of this practice are tremendous today when spiritual dangers go largely unrecognized: the low ideals, the occasions of sin, errors about sin and grace, smug vanity, the lying tempter, institutionalized self-indulgence, and so on. Perhaps the only adequate and practical defense against being drawn into really serious sexual offenses (both narrowly erotic and broadly familial) is a positive program of spiritual perfection, a realistic policy of nothing less than sanctity, a total commitment of mind and heart to holiness. Perhaps in these days there is no option for a comfortable plateau of moderate sinlessness; perhaps our only choice is either to ascend the formidable mountain of spiritual perfection, or be thrown into the abyss.

The assaults upon us are so strong against our wills and so subtle against our minds that probably even modest achievement in the areas of single and married chastity can be attained only through those holy practices which the saints have commended, such as the practice of the presence of God, of interior prayer, of fastings and vigils, of spiritual and corporal works of mercy, of devotion to the Passion, to the Sacred Heart, to the Christ Child, to the Blessed Mother and the saints, and of frequent and humble recourse to the sacraments.

In those ages when the lure of false doctrines was the most serious threat to the faithful, the Church triumphed by clarifying true Catholic doctrine. Perhaps our age of brutalizing hedonism and stultifying low-mindedness is to be conquered by Catholics quietly sanctifying their masculinity and femininity. And while those past doctrinal achievements had to be led by brilliant theologians, which God raised up, it may be that the spiritual rejuvenation which we await will be accomplished by God through the ordinary Catholic practicing the virtues of his station in life.

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