Greg Krehbiel
There is something deeply troubling about the Catholic Church’s problem with sex
by Greg Krehbiel on 15 May 2009
I don’t mean to say that the problem is with the doctrines (nor do I mean to support all of them). The problem is in the culture. Something in the Catholic culture re: sex is disturbing at a very deep level.
This has been brewing in my mind for a long time. Part of it is disgust at the sex-abuse crisis and related problems. Part of it is bewilderment re: the insistence on mandatory celibacy for priests.
But a large part of it is just the drip, drip of a general sense of sissiness. There’s a cumulative weight of … something. I don’t even know if I have the right word for it. Some say the church is too “feminine,” but that doesn’t quite do it because femininity is a good thing. (At least in women.) It might be better to call it “anti-masculinity.”
The end result if that if you were to take all the messed up things I hated about the 70s, boil it down and make me drink it, that would be a good approximation of how I feel at mass. It’s trite, maudlin, sentimental and drippy.
But I digress.
Let’s review some general trends re: religion and Catholicism and see if they add up to anything.
1. Religion (in general) attracts women in disproportionate numbers.
Lee Podles has done a lot of work on this. The point is not that men aren’t religious, but that women are more religious. Furthermore, the more feminine a religion becomes, the less the men want to be involved. (The opposite does not seem to be true. Masculine forms of religion still attract women.)
I know some people like to dispute this, or say “it’s not like that in my church” (have you counted?), but the people who look for facts and statistics have found a clear trend.
2. Catholicism has been down on sex for a long time.
Modern apologists will take issue with this by referring to recent developments like John Paul II’s theology of the body and that sort of thing, but the Catholic Church has a long history of encouraging young women and men to the celibate life by implying that a married life is a sorry, second choice that God will (reluctantly, “Oh, okay, if you have to”) put up with if you can’t do any better (i.e., forsake sex “for the kingdom”).
For those also-rans who elect to marry, the church has a history of trying to regulate the heck out of their sex lives. Not during Lent. Not on Sundays. Etc. etc. When you look at what the church fathers and the medieval penitential writers say about sex, and the list of restrictions they encouraged, it’s pretty much impossible not to conclude that they regarded sex as a necessary evil. To get some idea of this, go to google book search and take a peak inside Law, sex, and Christian society in medieval Europe, by James A. Brundage.
Think about the message that’s sent by saying a priest has to be celibate. It doesn’t matter how many caveats and conditions you put on it. The celibacy requirement implies that holiness means no sex. It implies that you can choose girls or God, but not both. It’s like Merlin in some book I read — sex messes up the magic.
Obviously that’s not the whole story. Marriage is a sacrament, of course, and for every cultural trend you can find a counter-trend. (There are married saints … but very few. And I’ll bet I wouldn’t want to imitate their sex lives.)
My point is that there’s a strong anti-sex theme within Catholicism, and that theme has had an effect on the church to this day. To some extent people are getting over it, but it’s still a problem. (I suppose someone could argue that making marriage a sacrament actually goes along with the anti-sex attitude. I.e., “Ha ha, it’s a sacrament so we get to regulate it!”)
3. Catholicism is culturally anti-masculine.
Again, somebody will object to this. Somebody will say the power structure in Catholic Church is an all-boys’ club, the Vatican is full of men, only men can be priests, etc., so how can I say the church is anti-masculine?
For one thing, have you seen the frilly stuff they wear in the Vatican? Serge would just love it.
But seriously, would a masculine church be upset by the death penalty? Would a masculine church spend so much time worrying about gestures and vestments and how to fold the napkin? Would a masculine church allow the feminists to carve “male headship” readings out of the lectionary? Would a masculine church allow an entire profession to be stained by the charge of pederasty? (Imagine, for comparisons’ sake, if some percentage of construction workers were notorious pederasts, and everybody started equating “construction worker” with “pederast.” What do you think would happen?)
I realize that I’m being just a little silly in my examples here, but … look, some things are intuitively obvious. If you don’t believe me, check out the priest in the oovoo commercial. (Why did they portray him that way?) Or google “mark shea masculine and feminine.” Or just read the newspaper.
4. The priesthood — a gay profession.
Not all priests are gay. Probably not a majority. And manly men can become priests and retain their masculinity. I know some.
But let’s be honest. If religion is somewhat skewed towards the feminine to begin with, and Catholicism is even more skewed in that direction (and towards a deep distrust of sex), and priests are supposed to renounce marriage …. Isn’t that going to influence the kind of men who will apply for the priesthood? Isn’t it going to attract too many men who can’t deal with their sexuality — who are trying to run away from all those questions?
Of course it will.
If you don’t believe me, Google “gay subculture in priesthood” to see what I mean.
In this post — If half of this is true, how is it possible to take the Catholic Church seriously? — Lee Podles made the following comment:
My darkest suspicion is that pederasty has been entrenched in the clergy as an inheritance from classical antiquity, and that only occasionally does it come to light. St. Peter Damian denounced it in the Middle Ages, but nothing was done to extirpate it.
It may be dark, Lee, but it’s not all that unlikely, IMO.
The bottom line is that there’s a huge problem here that many Catholics aren’t willing to face up to. Perhaps JPII saw this and that was part of his reason for promoting his “theology of the body.” I doubt it, but … maybe.
2009-05-15 » Greg Krehbiel
15 May 2009 @ 9:29 am
Some of this, I think, is the attitude or tendency (not limited to Catholicism) to take the easy way out on self-control. That is, asceticism in general (an evangelicals have our own, sometimes very backwards versions of this) says that the way to avoid sinfully misusing a thing is just to learn to avoid pleasure in material things entirely — then you won’t be tempted to misuse things in order to gain pleasure from them. But that’s not the biblical approach. And by that, I don’t mean this or that “prooftext,” but that the Bible’s overall approach is, “God gives you good stuff! Enjoy it! And when God wants to show you special favor, He gives you even MORE good stuff! The only thing is, YOU have to LEARN to choose how to use it wisely and avoid it on occasions or in circumstances where it would be sinful to indulge.” That’s real self-control, and that’s a lot harder than just learning to do without for safety’s sake.
So, instead of ancient and medieval fathers telling us to rejoice in God’s gift of sexuality, used wisely and virtuously, with a sober eye to avoiding sin in the process, they treat us to disgusting descriptions of internal bodily functions in an attempt to “put us off our feed,” so to speak. And if a culture imbibes that mentality for, oh, a thousand years or so, it really is going to skew perceptions in ways that are going to mess up everything.
15 May 2009 @ 9:30 am
BTW, I know that’s not the definition or purpose of asceticism. But that is one of its inescapable effects.
15 May 2009 @ 9:53 am
Greg,
This is a big problem today, although it doesn’t seem worse to me than any of the many other problems the Church has had in the past (e.g., Arianism). Unfortunately, sissiness is subtle, which makes it harder to weed out.
Although I do think the trend is getting better if anything. The average young priest seems to be much more masculine than the average old priest.
And I have to disagree with the line of thinking about vestments, etc. The problem isn’t the fancy clothes. It’s the dumb stuff people are doing in the fancy clothes. (as an aside, there seems to be a very strong relationshiop between how masculine a priest is and how excellent his vestments are and how reverently he performs the liturgy). Liturgy done well is masculine.
I think if we did a poll about any number of “masculine” issues, we’d find a pretty strong relationship between solid liturgy and masculinity. Unfortunately, solid liturgy is not as common as one would like.
pax,
Scott
15 May 2009 @ 11:38 am
I don’t know if you are actually interested in responses here, because when I tried to offer my perspectives on ‘If even half of this is true…’, you snapped back with:
I will say that if you’re not interested in responses, you should close commenting. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just a different kind of blog then.
Since commenting is open. I will offer a few thoughts.
I’m of the mind that even if ALL of this is true, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference with regard to what the Church is and my relationship to it. Either the Church is what it claims to be, in which case the sinfulness of it’s members is only a call for increased diligence, or it’s all a lie and you shouldn’t follow the Church even if there were none of these problems.
Celibacy and the all-male Priesthood are facts and those necessitate structure and style to the Church. This gives rise to certain attacks by the Enemy upon the Church. I would expect the Enemy to attack the Church in every way imaginable and some not imagined by me. This is not surprising in the least. I’d be surprised if we didn’t see some of the problems we do.
I understand that back when there were married priests the Church had different problems. If Church property was being expropriated and handed down to the progeny of priests, would the Church have different visible problems? I think so. Would these problems be worse than what we have now? I don’t know.
The Vatican has taken active steps to eliminate Gay priests. Priests should be models of true masculinity to be models of Christ. That being said, so what if there are effeminate priests? What is it to you? What are they going to do? CONVERT YOU!? Maybe there’s something to this hype about ‘homophobia’.
I think the proper first reaction to the problem of priests who are not good models of Christ is prayer, not criticism.
Have you heard of Edward DeBono? He writes books on thinking, thinking outside-the-box, innovation, that sort of thing. In one of his books, he points out something that has always stuck with me. Critical intelligence is overused. It’s a trap that smart people fall into and it’s lazy. It’s easy to criticize and find fault, you can _always_ do it and it puts you in a position of power.
Really, it seems to me that you are going out of your way to find opportunities to be critical. What does the Death Penalty have to do with anything?
Since you brought it up, I’ll offer that I used to be in favor of the Death Penalty, but now, I’m not and it was because of the Church’s teaching. Really, how can you defend it when it’s so obviously racially biased and the DNA evidence has found so many cases of wrongful conviction? I’m really thankful that the Church brought me around here.
I don’t believe that the Death Penalty is always and everywhere bad and that’s not the current teaching, if you listen closely, it’s that it’s unnecessary today in our democracies and should be opposed. There may come a time when it becomes self-defense and then it would be justified. I think it may have been justified for Iraq to execute Saddam to defend their Society from those who would bring him back into power.
Why do you doubt that JPII was trying to fix these problems with his TOB? Why doubt? Why not hope?
Why focus on the liturgical clothing and the like? Rather than see this as some kind of encroaching deviant sexualizing, isn’t it more likely the case that these are just throwbacks to styles that are easy to misunderstand now?
If there is a ‘deep distrust’ of sex among clerics, it’s not entirely surprising is it? It must be difficult to be celibate and hear all those confessions about problems with purity. My direct experience with Priests have been positive, though. How does this ‘deep distrust’ affect you personally, Greg?
Elsewhere, you’ve said that you won’t post on Catholic and Religious subjects for complicated reasons you won’t go into. Somehow, that doesn’t stop you from posting things like this and “If even half of this is true…”.
If there is a problem here and you can see it, maybe you are being called to do something about it. I don’t think these rants on your blog are constructive, though. Real research like what Mr. Podles does I welcome, unfocused rants, less so.
In today’s Church lay people can do a lot to set the tone and direction. Liberals in the Church take every opportunity to take advantage of this. Perhaps there’s something you could do that would be positive, here. Do you pray about these problems?
15 May 2009 @ 12:17 pm
It seems to me that there is good reason to avoid enjoyment of things altogether if you take Jesus seriously when he says, “If your eye offends you, pluck it out”.
15 May 2009 @ 12:47 pm
Pentamom — There is certainly a tendency to respond to a good thing that can be abused by forsaking it altogether. That’s why we had Prohibition.
Scott — I can’t decide which is the more “masculine” trait — to be a good soldier who follows the rules or to be a rebel who doesn’t care about the rules. (I’m not saying they are morally equivalent, I’m only wondering which one is more “masculine.”)
JH — This post was in response to various things I saw here and there (Jimmy Akin, Mark Shea and others fussing about the treatment of Christopher West, Rod Dreher commenting on the “revelation” that Rembert Weakland is gay, etc.), which all seemed to me like an effort to decide what color carnation to put on top of a garbage heap.
You ask why all this bothers me. First, because I don’t like sitting through it. Second, because I don’t know if I should expose my children to it.
You also ask if I pray about it. Do you think it would make a difference? I don’t.
Herr Doktor — I don’t think that follows at all. The “pluck out your eye” comment is if your eye leads you into sin, not into enjoyment.
15 May 2009 @ 1:07 pm
Ah, but the sin in question is no doubt enjoyable (“tempting”). The passage clearly seems to mean that if something tempts you it is (at least somtimes) btter to remove the means whereby you are tempted. If it does not mean that, I would like to know what it DOES mean.
15 May 2009 @ 1:09 pm
Jesus is clearly not saying, “If your eye offends you in certain instance, close it in those instances”.
15 May 2009 @ 1:43 pm
>The passage clearly seems to mean that if something tempts you it is (at least somtimes) better to remove the means whereby you are tempted.
Yes, that’s what it means.
15 May 2009 @ 1:50 pm
Yes, Herr Doktor, that makes sense, but my point was that you don’t make enjoyment the bad guy, and you don’t fight temptation by persuading yourself that attractive human beings are “really” piles of bile and offal or that delicious food is “really” excrement-in-waiting. Certainly there are things that it’s best to avoid because the enjoyment of them leads you into sin, and you aren’t capable of exercising self-control in that area (or perhaps more properly, the appropriate self-control in that situation IS avoidance) but stifling or despising enjoyment as such is not the appropriate response. It’s hard to square that idea up with many other things in the Bible, e.g. the way blessings (yes, material and sensual ones) are portrayed as signs of God’s favor, the Song of Songs, references in Proverbs to how folly leads to loss of enjoyment, etc.
15 May 2009 @ 2:05 pm
I agree with Pentamom, that part of the problem is that when people don’t know how to control a problematic behavior, they ban it outright. The thing is, that works with hallucinogens, not so much with food. For some behaviors, they are only problematic in some people, such as alcohol consumption.
I think there are addictive personalities, and people who have that personality are more likely to try to control behavior in others. For instance, people who have alcoholics as relatives are more likely to want to place severe restrictions on alcohol.
I wonder if people who enter a life of self-denial for religious reasons are disturbed for some reason when they experience any kind of pleasure, and when they see somebody else having fun, they feel like they have to put an end to it right away.
15 May 2009 @ 2:20 pm
I am only trying to point out that those proponents of Christianity who practice an ascertism which seems rather extreme to you or me do have their biblical reasons for doing so. It might not be based on a “balanced reading” (if such a thing should be possible), but it is based on the teachings of the most authoritative figure from a Christian point view, and indeed even stated in an even more extreme way by him than anyone would normally find palatable. Everyone I know (and of course I don’t everyone) seems to think that Jesus is using hyperbole when he tells you to pluck out your eye. Very well, but the question remains: Just how hyperbolic is this injunction? Regarding food as excrement is certainly less drastic than actually plucking out your eye. So maybe these people are on to something, as far as I can tell, at least with regard to their own personal constitution or situation.
15 May 2009 @ 2:30 pm
I certainly agree that some people go overboard with ascetisism in one form or another and make life difficult for others. (I have no use for prohibitionsists or people who regard food as excrement, though I have fortunately not encountered anyone of the latter type and would be inclined to think that this is a very small minority.) Here I am only dealing with the “biblical” issue and the attempt to take the “bite” (if you will) out of the teachings of Jesus.
15 May 2009 @ 2:58 pm
Greg,
> You also ask if I pray about it. Do you think it would make a difference? I don’t.
Yes, I do think it could make a difference.
15 May 2009 @ 10:45 pm
I am not talking about ascetic practices in particular, but the general philosophy of asceticism, which by effect if not by design teaches that the closer you can get to not taking any kind of sensual pleasure, the better you’re doing. If you take an ascetic approach to food because you know you don’t handle food appropriately, that’s one thing. But if you are attempting to arrange your life around the belief that the closer you can get to not taking any pleasure in food whatsoever, without actually starving or malnourishing yourself, you’re creating a disorder in your outlook on life that’s going to have all kinds of negative implications. The same goes for sex, or money, or what have you. Acting like an ascetic because you know you can’t handle some good things is good; believing that the less of all good things you have, the better overall, is arguing with God, which is always a losing proposition.
15 May 2009 @ 10:49 pm
As for the food is excrement thing, I’m referring to the writings of some medievals who thought that the way to curb gluttony was to remind you of all the unappetizing things that happen to food after if passes over your palate, and the way to control lust was to talk about how women’s bodies have bile swishing around inside them that eventually becomes this, that, or the other unappetizing bodily fluid — and who’d want to be intimate with THAT? But what that does is deny that a good gift of God is a good thing, rather than teaching you to understand that not all good things are equally good in every way at every time to every degree, and how to act upon it. Cutting off your hand is much more consonant with understanding HOW good things are good, and when they might not be; telling you that the thing you were doing with your hand is really bad all the way down is usually false.
16 May 2009 @ 6:28 am
This general philosophy of asceticism, as far as I can tell, is not very prevalent among Catholics, Protestants, or any other group that I can think of in contemporary western socieities. I don’t think there is any reason to worry about it.
16 May 2009 @ 8:17 am
*Scott — I can’t decide which is the more “masculine” trait — to be a good soldier who follows the rules or to be a rebel who doesn’t care about the rules. (I’m not saying they are morally equivalent, I’m only wondering which one is more “masculine.”)*
My opinion is that being a good soldier who follows the rules is more masculine—but with the caveat that those rules are followed because a soldier knows those rules are an effective way to destroy the enemy, protect the homeland, and so on.
This is like liturgy. A masculine priest understands that liturgy is *work*. It isn’t a stupid game, a sing-a-long, or the weekly meeting of a community volunteer organization. Although from many liturgies, you could easily be misled!
pax,
Scott
16 May 2009 @ 8:52 am
Whether it is widely practiced or not is a different issue from whether it informs the moral theology of one or several groups of Christians. If the moral theology is traceable back to people who thought that way in the past and wielded great influence, it is still relevant.
16 May 2009 @ 9:50 am
I really don’t see in what regard this general philosophy of asceticism (from the middle ages or earlier) informs the moral theology of any large group of Christians in any significant way.
18 May 2009 @ 10:47 am
Well, I think it exactly informs the Roman Catholic approach to sexuality. That’s my whole point. I guess we just see it differently– to me, it’s as clear as anything.
18 May 2009 @ 11:43 am
When I was a kid, I was impressed by the lack of ascetism among Catholics. They had carnivals where you could gamble and drink beer. The sour-pussed kill-joys were rather protestants.
The only area in which I could identify anything that smacks of asceticism among Catholics would be the celibacy of priests, which I think has much to do with a certain passage (I can’t look it up now) where Paul recommends such a practice (or does so at least by implication). Whatever asceticism is still there apparently comes from the teaching of the apostle.