This chapter examines three philosophical premises in Catholic thinking on sexuality and sexual health: distinctions between formal and informal values, natural and unnatural sexual activities, and value systems based on a fixed worldview and on a process/existential worldview. The construction of Catholic thinking on sexuality is examined starting with the positive but ambivalent influence of Hebraic thinking and the example of Jesus. The subsequent replacement of this healthy synthesis with a very misogynistic, anti-pleasure, and repressive sexual view is illustrated with quotations and teachings of Greek Platonic dualists, Gnostic thinkers, and Roman Stoics as these were adopted from pagan sources and incorporated into a negative view of sexuality, sexual pleasure, and women. This evolution is described in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and more recent times. Twentieth-century social changes that created a fertile seedbed for a rapid evolution of sexual values are brought into perspective, followed by examination of a tentative existentialist value system from a 1977 keystone evaluation of new directions in American Catholic thought. Finally, changes and the potential for further change are described for five problematic issues: anxiety and guilt, monogamy, homosexuality, masturbation, and abortion.

It was a classic, charming Broadway musical, a fictional but real confrontation of two sexual cultures. In Anna's Victorian Church of England culture, no man, not even the King of Siam, had the right to have many wives. The King, on the other hand, was raised a Buddhist in a Thai culture where nearly half the men even today admit to having had extramarital sex in the previous year, while a little over 98 percent of the women are kulasatrii, "virtuous women."

When I was a child, world was better place.

What was so was so and what was not was not.

Now I am a man, world has changed a lot.

Some things nearly so, some things nearly not.

'Tis a puzzlement. —The King of Siam

GROWING UP

From the early days of Christianity to the present, "Catholic culture" has referred to a clear set of religious beliefs and moral teachings that were defined and taught by a male hierarchy—the popes, bishops, and priests, or magisterium—to the laity, who accepted these "unchanging" teachings without question. A major focus of this "Catholic culture" has been for 2,000 years teachings about the origins, purpose, meaning, and morality of sex and marriage. Being a Catholic has meant accepting the Church's (the magisterium's) teachings on contraception, abortion, divorce, premarital and extramarital relations, priestly celibacy, homosexuality, erotic pleasure, and the impossibility of women priests. "Catholic culture" also included accepting the everyday moral and legal consequences of this understanding of sexuality.

When Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) opened the windows of the Church with the Second Vatican Council in 1962, the black-and-white child's world of the Catholic laity—"what was so was so"—cracked wide open. The world changed a lot. Increasingly, the laity were educated, often college graduates. Intellectually, they had grown up. In their adult world, some things were now "nearly so, some things nearly not." For clergy, the "shepherds," this was and still is a real puzzlement, a challenge to their teaching authority. In the past, dissenters left the Church. Today, they often remain loyal Catholics who choose in their conscience to disagree with the Pope on contraception, abortion, masturbation, married priests, optional celibacy, and other sexual issues.

Pope Paul VI (1963-1978) responded by removing some of these issues from the Council's agenda, hoping to end their discussion (Böckle & Pohier, 1976, p. 2). While the world had changed a lot, the bishops were not keeping up. A strong majority of Catholics rejected the Pope's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae condemning the contraceptive pill. Then, in January, 2002, the Boston Globebegan an exposé of what turned into hundreds of cases of boys and adolescents who claimed to have been sexually abused by five to six percent of the priests active nationwide in the 1960s and 1970s. Aggravating the abuse scandal was the greater scandal of the bishops covering up for abusing priests and their policy of repeatedly transferring them from one parish to another without warning the bishop or pastor in the new assignment. By mid-2005, court settlements went on the one billion mark (Cozzens, 2002; Gibson, 2003, pp. 271-341; Goodstein, 2003; Plante, 2004; Sipe, 1995, 1999; Steinfels, 2003, pp. 40-67).

In the West, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam accept the authority of one Supreme Being, the creator of this world, who in the end of time will judge all humankind. In these "religions of the Book," the path to salvation is revealed in the Torah, the Bible, or Qur'an. Interpreting these divine revelations has until recently been the sole responsibility of male priests, rabbis, imams, mullahs, or other males who claim some direct or indirect delegation by God. Among the many norms for a moral life in these sacred books, an unusual proportion of norms deal with sexual behavior—who can have sex, with whom, under what circumstances, when, how, and for what reasons.

In the Catholic tradition, a classic example is the debate over the morality of "artificial" contraceptive pills. After World War II, many social and economic changes left women reluctant to give up employment outside the home and the psychological freedom it brought them. The "Baby Boom" was underway, and the birth of feminism. Catholic clergy, and some laity, were concerned about the changing gender roles and sexual mores, the family, and their teaching regarding procreation as the prime meaning of marital sex. In 1958, Pope Pius XII (1963-1978) again approved the so-called rhythm method for natural family planning, and condemned the contraceptive pill as unnatural direct sterilization. In the same year, at the Lambeth Conference, Anglican bishops supported the moral use of the contraceptive pill. Catholics who disagreed with the Pope and chose to use the contraceptive pill were left to deal with severe guilt and anxiety over the state of their immortal soul, their repeated and unrepented mortal sins deserving of eternal damnation.

In 1963, Catholic Bishop Bekkers ('s Hertogenbosch, Netherlands) politely disagreed with Pope Paul VI and defended the use of the contraceptive pill on public radio and in his diocesan paper. In questioning the Vatican's natural law theology condemning the pill as artificial and unnatural, and reaffirming procreation as the primary goal of marital sex, Bishop Bekkers endorsed a new existential theology of marriage that was widely debated among European and American Catholic theologians (Maguire, 2001; Pyle, 1964).

This person-oriented existential theology of marriage created a problem for me a year later when, as a young priest in a small Steubenville, Ohio, parish, I heard the confession of a devout and perplexed Catholic wife. She and her Lutheran husband had nine children and adopted two more. Her husband insisted, "No more children. Enough. I mean it. It could end our marriage." He insisted on wearing a condom. She wanted to know if she could go along with this and still receive communion. I asked her to come back the next week and I would try to find an answer for her.

My fellow priests and the pastor all agreed: "No way." Finally, I found a footnote in a moral theology compendium, where two prominent German moral theologians said that in an extreme case like this, a Catholic spouse could agree to the use of artificial contraception. Moral theologians called it Probabalism: "If the majority says No, but you have a couple of respected theologians saying Yes, then follow your conscience.

A week later, I told her I had found two moral theologians who said she could go along with her husband, provided she told him she disapproved and provided she remained passive (Francoeur in Pyle, 1964, pp. 213-224).

My intentions were good, but 40 years later I still regret not being able to find a more realistic and humane response. At least my bishop, John King Mussio, allowed me to write an article for the front page of The Steubenville Catholic Register explaining my defense of the Pill in cases like this (Pyle, 1968, pp. 213-224). While the pope and bishops were still thinking in terms of an inflexible unchanging "natural law," Catholics—the laity and many theologians—were questioning "what was so was so, what was not was not." A new existential morality of marriage and erotic pleasure that focused on the quality of the relationship was emerging.

Early in the Vatican II Council (1962-1965), Pope Paul VI withdrew contraception from Council consideration and referred it to a special Commission. In 1966, that Commission issued a majority opinion favoring approval of the Pill and a minority opinion condemning it. In 1968, Paul VI rejected the two-thirds majority opinion and reaffirmed the magisterium's condemnation of the Pill in his encyclical Humanae Vitae(Greeley, 1979; Hoyt, 1968).

Keeping in mind these radical changes in the relationships between Catholic clergy and laity, we can now focus on the history of Catholic teachings about sexuality. There were changes in Catholic teaching in its early centuries, but the changes came slowly because communications were slow and only two percent of the people—mostly the clergy—were literate. Guttenberg's moveable-type printing press and the Protestant Reformation speeded up the pace of change, leading up to the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Today, global changes take microseconds on the Internet and World Wide Web (Thieme, 2005).

To understand Catholic culture today and its connection with sexual health, we need to look back in time at the classic distinction between natural and unnatural sex and the sexual values derived from two different ways of viewing creation—either as established by the Creator in Eden or as an ongoing creation in which we participate. We will also look at Catholic sexual teachings over the centuries and the secular cultures from which they borrowed. Finally, we will discuss attempts of some Catholic theologians to develop a healthier, more modern sexual culture. A brief discussion of five specific issues will tie all this together so we can end with a few insights into the future of Catholic sexual culture.

WHAT IS NATURAL SEX, UNNATURAL SEX?

According to ancient Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers (300 B.C.E. to 300 C.E.), sexual passion distorted a man's reason. The sole moral justification for sexual relations, in their view, was procreation. This view of the nature of sex was adopted by early Christian thinkers, particularly by Augustine of Hippo (c. 300 C.E.). Medieval Christian theologians extended this early view classifying sexual acts as either natural or unnatural. Fornication, rape, incest, and adultery were considered natural but illicit indulgences in sexual pleasure, because they occurred outside marriage and did not provide for the rearing of offspring. These potentially procreative acts were "natural sins." In this philosophical view, masturbation, oral sex, and anal sex were more serious violations of the natural order because they were both unnatural (non-procreative) and illicit (outside marriage). This distinction between natural and unnatural sex pops up in most debates today about the morality of homosexuality.

BETWIXT AND BETWEEN TWO WORLDVIEWS

Fixed Worldviews
For at least 3,000 years, two quite-different worldviews (Weltanschauung) and belief systems about the nature of creation have coexisted and developed in Western thought, directly influencing and coloring all religious-based discussions of sexual issues and health. Since the time of the Persian religious philosopher Zoroaster (c. 600 B.C.E) and the early Greek and Roman philosophers, Western thinkers have chosen to picture our world in one of two ways (Francoeur & Noonan, 2004, pp. 1141-1142; Francoeur, 1982/1992, 1987, 1990, 1994, 2001).

Some religious thinkers have interpreted the world in terms of a fixed worldview with unchangeable natural law, in which the moral nature of every creature and every sexual act was established in the beginning by the Creator. Whatever changes we observe are superficial. Other religious thinkers picture an evolving world in process in which the nature of all things are changing as our ongoing creation continues, with sexual morality depending on the quality of individual relationships.

The fixed worldview with its unchanging archetypes, and the process worldview with its emphasis on the reality of ever-changing environments and unique developing individuals, represent two ends of a broad spectrum from which have been derived two different and opposing sexual value systems (Cahill, 1985; Gudorf, 1994, pp. 14-18). Remember Bishop Bekkers "new existential theology of marriage," and the Vatican's "natural law morality"? Their premises lead to two quite different sets of conclusions.

At one end of this philosophical spectrum, adherents of a fixed worldview claim that when God created the first humans, he established the unchanging nature of male and female, gender roles, marriage, and heterosexual morality for all time. The biblical story of Genesis describes all humans as fallen from an original state of perfection and grace because of the rebellion of Adam and Eve. This corrupt nature can only be redeemed by God's grace, self-discipline, mortification of the flesh, and by avoiding any indulgence in pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. With Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, God established the heterosexual nature of our sexuality, the primacy of the male over the female, and monogamy. The command "increase and multiply" identified the true and only purpose of sexual pleasure and relations.

Hassidic and ultra-orthodox Jews, orthodox/fundamentalist Muslims, and fundamentalist Protestants commonly draw on this worldview in articulating their sexual values (Antoun, 2001; Armstrong, 2000; Carpenter, 1999). In the Roman Catholic tradition, the Vatican adheres with unswerving vigilance to a natural law position as interpreted by the magisterium, the Church's ultimate teaching authority. Catholic advocates with a fixed worldview commonly condemn "artificial" contraception, masturbation, oral sex, premarital sex, divorce, consensual extramarital sex, homosexual relationships, and women in positions of Church authority. But the range of what is accepted, tolerated, and forbidden sometimes varies widely from individual to individual, from priest to priest, and from congregation to congregation.

Process Worldviews
At the other end of the spectrum is the process worldview, in which human nature is viewed as still evolving, still being created with human cooperation. The basic assumption in this worldview is that human nature has never been without flaws. Physical and moral evil are the unavoidable dark side of our struggle to grow as persons to our fuller potential in the image of Christ, the Second Adam. Good and evil are linked together as we explore and discover new, deeper expressions and meanings of our human potential and sexual nature. Certain general principles of what is right and wrong in human behavior are acknowledged, but specific decisions about what is right and wrong depend on applying these basic premises to our relationships, sexual and otherwise, and their context (Table 1).

Table 1. Two Opposing Views of Our World

Basic Issue/Factor	Type A Christian Beliefs	Type B Christian Beliefs
Basic World Vision	A finished and fixed cosmos, not evolving but waiting for the Second Apocalyptic Coming of Jesus	A cosmogenesis, an evolving universe struggling to fulfill the Incarnation of Jesus' love in the world
Typology	Like the universe, humankind was created perfect and complete in the Beginning. Theological understanding of humans emphasizes Adam, the mythic first human	Like the universe, humankind is incomplete and not yet fully evolved. Theological emphasis shifts to the Second Adam, Jesus, at the end of time
Origin of Evil	Evil results from primeval "fall" of a perfect first couple who introduced moral and physical evil into Eden/Paradise	Evil, pain, and suffering are a natural part of a finite creation/growth and the birth pains that are involved in our groping as still-evolving humans
Solution to the Problem of Evil	Redemption by identification with the crucified Savior. Asceticism and mortification of the body and its sensual nature	Identification with The Adam, the resurrected Jesus, model of the recreated human
Authority System	Patriarchal and sexist. Male-dominated and controlled. Autocratic male hierarchy makes all decisions. Male clergy distinct from the laity	Gender egalitarian: "In His kingdom there is neither male nor female, freeman nor slave, Jew nor Roman"
Concept of Truth	Emphasis on "one true Church" as the sole possessor of all truth in a sacred text "Absolutist and exclusive."	Recognition that other churches and religions possess different perspectives of the truth, with some elements of revelation clearer in them than in "the one true Church"
Concept of Sacred Texts	Fundamentalist, often evangelical, word-for-word (literal) clarity. Revelation ended with the Apostles	Emphasis on continuing revelation and reincarnation of perennial truths and values as humans interpret tradition and participate in an ongoing creation and revelation
Liturgical Focus	Redemption and Good Friday. Purgatory. The supernatural as distinct from the natural	Easter and the creation challenge of incarnation. Epiphany of numinous cosmos and God within
Social Structure	Gender roles clearly assigned with high definition of proper roles for men and women	With Jesus not making a distinction between men and women, gender roles are flexible and allow women roles as ordained priests, ministers, and even bishops.
Ecological Morality	Humans are stewards of the Earth, given dominion by God over all creation	Emphasis on personal responsibility in a continuing creation/incarnation.
Community Image	Carefully limited, emphasis on individual Isaiah "remnant." Results in exclusive sects	Inclusive, ecumenical, catalytic leader among equals
Goal of Life	Supernatural transcendence of natural world	Unveiling, epiphany, revelation of the divine in all creation
Sexual Morality and Ethics	Focuses on laws and conformity of all genital acts and erotic pleasures to those laws	Emphasis on persons and the Christian qualities we express in our relationships. With God, we create the human of the future and the future of our humanity.
Sexual Morality	Sex is the "monster in the groin," that must be controlled, abstained from, and mortified.	Sexuality is a positive, natural, creative energy in our being as sexual (embodied) persons. It is in the biblical sense intimately "knowing" another person and becoming part of their ongoing maturation and creation
	Masturbation is an immature sexual outlet, hedonistic, narcissistic, and potentially addictive	Masturbation is usually a natural, healthy outlet that children and adolescents use to explore their erotic potential and body pleasure. For adults, self-loving, alone or with a partner, can be a healthy alternative to intercourse or oral sex
	The natural and primary purpose of coitus is procreation in marriage	Erotic love is an essential component in our personality that is part of every relationship
	Sex is basically "below the belt" in our genitals	Sex is diffused, permeates our whole body, personality, and everything we do. Our whole body has an erotic potential. Our lives express a panerotic potential (Stayton 1992; Timmerman 1993 pp. 53-55).
	Natural sex is heterosexual, coital, procreative, and monogamous. The alternative is celibacy.	Sex is "polymorphic perversity," our "panerotic potential." Healthy sexual relationships can be part of polyamorous relations, intimate networks, sexually open marriages, and other alternatives to traditional monogamy. Healthy sexual intimacy can also be part of a deliberately childless marriage. Diversity will be the rule in the 21^st century.
	Non-coital heterosexual sexual pleasure and all homosexual contact are unnatural	Non-coital erotic pleasure can be a healthy sexual expression. The quality of the relationship determines its moral value, not what is done by whom to whom and how.
	Marriage is "until death do us part"	A legal or religious divorce can be a healthy recognition that a marriage has died, aborted. It can be a healthy resolution for both adults and their children.

SOURCE: Adapted from Francoeur & Perper, T. (2004). In R. T. Francoeur & R. J. Noonan (Eds.), Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (pp. 1141-1142); Francoeur, 1987, 1990, 1994, 1996, 2001).

Before we move into the details of Catholic culture and sexual health, let me offer an illustration.

All religions have some kind of sacred text—the Qur'an, the Bible, the Torah, and other canonical texts. Interpretation of these sacred texts depends on the fixed or process worldview the interpreter adopts. A 1987 document from the Episcopal Church of Northern New Jersey, titled Report of the Task Force on Changing Patterns of Sexuality and Family Life, describes the quite-different role divine revelation, sacred texts, and traditional teachings have for people who adopt the process viewpoint:

The Judaeo-Christian tradition is a tradition precisely because, in every historical and social circumstance, the thinking faithful have brought to bear the best interpretation of the current realities in correlation with their interpretation of tradition as they have inherited it. Thus, truth in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is a dynamic process to be discerned and formulated rather than a static structure to be received. The Bible is misunderstood and misused when approached as a book of moral prescriptions directly applicable to all moral dilemmas. Rather, the Bible is the record of the response to the word of God addressed to Israel and to the Church throughout centuries of changing social, historical, and cultural conditions. The Faithful responded within the realities of their particular situation, guided by the direction of previous revelation, but not captive to it. (Thayer 1987, pp. 1-10; Spong, 1988)

Practically no religious group or individual totally adheres exclusively to one or the other of these two worldviews. The vast majority of religious-minded people mix different Type A and Type B elements in their lives (see Table 1). Some mainstream churches today manage to accommodate advocates of both worldviews among their members. The Episcopal Church of the USA, for example, has ordained women priests and openly gay priests and a gay bishop despite opposition within their own communion. Despite such variations, overall, religious groups and individuals tend to favor one or the other perspective and set their sexual values accordingly.

Recalling the distinctions between natural and unnatural behaviors, and the fixed and process worldviews, we can get to the heart of the matter, the factors that have molded and shaped Catholic beliefs on sexuality and sexual values, and their impact on sexual health.

FROM HEBREW ANTHROPOLOGY TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Teilhard de Chardin, the pioneering Jesuit paleontologist who developed a synthesis of evolution and Catholic theology/spirituality, warned us that "Nothing can be understood outside its history" (Cited by Maguire, 2001, p. 32). To understand the contributions and obstacles Catholic culture has made to sexual health, we need to look back in time to sharpen our perspective, to see where Catholic thought about sexuality started, and how it has evolved and changed in its 2,000-year history.

Hebrew Roots
In Jewish belief and the Talmud, heaven consists of "Sabbath, sunshine and sex." The key to this comfort with sex and passion lies in the way the Hebrews understood human nature. In Hebrew anthropology, the human is a whole person, a psychosomatic unity. Their word nephesh refers to "the essential and vital quality of life itself," "the whole person." There is definitely no place in Hebrew thought for a disembodied "soul." The Hebrew language doesn't even have an equivalent for the Greek word psyche or the English word soul. The writers of the four Gospels reflect this holistic anthropology, using the Greek psyche only once (Mt 10:28), while they use the Hebrew nephesh 60 times.

When we read the Bible and try to talk about humans in dualistic terms of body and soul, we are reading Greek philosophy into the text. The holistic Hebrew description of "human" is incompatible with Plato's idea of a soul imprisoned in a body of flesh. The Hebrew concept of "flesh" is neither evil nor opposed to the "higher" parts of man. The Hebrew word for "flesh" refers to the whole of our creaturely experience, both physical and mental, to "the situation of man before God." "Flesh" includes the whole "earthly sphere," our environment, and not just the body (Francoeur, 1965; Lawrence, 1989, pp. 6-9, 128).

Except for the Essenes, who withdrew from "corrupt public life" and were waiting patiently for the messiah, Hebrew tradition did not value sexual asceticism, celibacy, or the single life (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, pp. 18-19). Marriage was a civil, secular matter established when the couple had sexual intercourse. Jewish marriage is not a sacrament, but intercourse is a mitzvah, a religious duty, a meritorious performance, and a charitable and humanitarian act. "In Jewish history coitus has been consistently and unambiguously valued for the sheer joy and pleasure of it, even where procreation was obviously impossible" (Lawrence, 1989, p. 17). Nonetheless, Judaism has a very strong patriarchal bias, as do all major religions, along with a minor puritanical current that sees some aspects of sex as defilement or contamination (Ex 19:15; Lev 15:16ff. 22:4).

The Epistle of Holiness of Nahmanidesadvises Jews to prefer the Sabbath for sexual intercourse because it is "holy unto the Lord." According to Herman Wouk, a contemporary Jewish writer,

What in other cultures has been a deed of shame, or of comedy, or of orgy, or of physical necessity, or of high romance, has been in Judaism one of the main things God wants man to do. If it turns out to be the keenest pleasure in life, that is no surprise to a people eternally sure God is good. (quoted in Lawrence, 1989, p. 30)

The Jesus Movement
Jesus and his apostles and disciples were Torah-abiding Semites, Jews through and through, so it is not surprising that much of the very sex-positive values of Judaism carried over into the first centuries of the Jesus Movement that later became known as Christianity. In The Poisoning of Eros, Raymond Lawrence (1989), an Episcopalian scholar, reminds us that in reading the New Testament, we still prefer the lens of pagan Greco-Roman syncretism to the authentic Semitic lens. When we use the Semitic lens, it is obvious that Jesus took every opportunity to place himself squarely against the patriarchal structure of his Jewish culture, challenging his disciples to become even more comfortable and sex-affirming than their Jewish heritage.

In the time of Jesus, strict patriarchal Jewish practice did not permit a man to speak publicly even to his own wife, much less to a strange woman. But on several occasions, Jesus talked at length with women in a public place in ways that would be considered brazen, unheard of breaches of social propriety. In chapter four of his Gospel, John tells how when Jesus and the disciples arrived at midday at Jacob's well, the apostles went into town, leaving Jesus alone with no bucket to get a drink from the well. When a woman arrived, Jesus asked her to get him a drink. That opened a conversation in which Jesus, a Jew, talked with this woman at length, despite her being a Samaritan, despite her having had five husbands, and despite her living with a man who was not her husband.

There was also a public sinner, probably a prostitute, who let down her hair as a public gesture of intimacy, wet the feet of Jesus with her tears, dried them with her hair, and then kissed and anointed them with oil (Luke 7:36ff). Similar incidents are recorded by Mathew and Mark. There was an unnamed woman who anointed Jesus' head with oil, and Mary of Bethany who anointed and dried his feet with her hair but without tears or kisses. And there were women who left their homes to travel with Jesus and later with the apostles. Observant patriarchal Jews were surely shocked by these brazen breaches of social custom (Fiorenza, 1998; Lawrence, 1989, pp. 62-63, 75-77; Moltmann-Wendel, 1982).

Alongside these sex-affirming, gender-egalitarian views in the writings of the apostles, we find many more blatant examples of patriarchy and misogyny (hatred of women) that echo through the centuries in statements by the early Fathers of the Church, Augustine, Jerome, and Aquinas, theologians of all sorts, and yes, even popes (Gudorf, 1994, pp.10-11).

To understand the evolution of Christian sexual culture from the early sex-affirming Hebrew anthropology and life of Jesus to Christianity's later persistent discomfort with sex and pleasure throughout its subsequent history, we have to look at three interwoven philosophical influences from classical Greek and Roman thought. How these traditions and culture interacted, who borrowed from whom, and to what extent these cultures affected the lives of free men and women, citizens, serfs, and slaves, no one knows. The interactions and back-and-forth exchanges are too complex to decipher after 2,000 years.

Even so, we do know that Jerome, Origen, Augustine, and others used Plato's and Plotinus' dualistic world of souls exiled and imprisoned in the tomb of our bodies to support and enrich their developing Christian theology. Additional sex-and-woman-negative philosophy was picked up from the Stoics who were obsessed with abstaining from anything pleasurable or involving the body. Finally, there was a variety of Gnostics, who believed a good God created our souls and an evil spirit created our bodies. Some Gnostics who considered themselves Christians placed sexual renunciation at the very heart of Christian moral life. Within three centuries after Jesus, the majority of Christian thinkers had adopted the negative views of women, sex, and pleasure from these pagan sources.

Adopting these pagan sexual values gave Christians political cachet in 325 C.E., when the not-yet-converted Emperor Constantine recognized the political advantages of uniting church and state under "one God, one faith, and one church with one empire and one emperor" (Carroll, 2002; Küng, 2003, p. 47).

Plato's Dualistic Influence
Six hundred years before Christ, the earliest images of Eros reveal the Greek god of love as irrational, uncontrollable, mad, and foolish. Counter to the holistic Hebrew anthropology, the Greco-Roman world adopted a dualistic cosmology in which there was a constant conflict with the soul and mind seeking liberation from the prison of the fleshly body. In this view, the body is somehow the source of evil. In The Laws for his utopian Republic, Plato claimed that the world would benefit enormously if all sexual pleasures were abolished and all non-procreative sexual relations outlawed.

For Plato and Socrates, all expressions of sexuality were morally inferior to sexual abstinence, whether these were marital or extramarital, or with a same- or other-sex partner. Sexual relations of a man with a boy were less inferior to abstinence. Because any of these expressions involved the body and its senses, they were more or less harmful to the soul's health. As Socrates advised his friend Xenophon, it takes at least a year "to recover from the scorpion's bite" (Lawrence, 1989, pp. 8-15).

After the disastrous war of 66 C.E. and the rebellion of 125 C.E., Rome disenfranchised the Jews. With the Jews ostracized, Christians were increasingly open to influence by the Platonic, Stoic, and Gnostic cultures surrounding them. Christians inhaled these philosophies with every breath they took. Neo-Platonism colored much of Augustine's views of sex, and through him, most of Christian and especially Catholic thought down to the present day (Francoeur, 1992, 1994).

A Wedding of Stoic and Catholic Sexual Teachings
Stoicism, the preeminent philosophy of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian movement, endorsed a form of Platonic dualism. Seneca the Younger, a contemporary of Jesus and tutor to the emperors, was the leading Stoic philosopher. His advice? "Do nothing for the sake of pleasure." Sexual desire, he warned, is "friendship gone mad."

It is also shameful to love one's own wife immoderately. In loving his wife the wise man takes reason for his guide, not emotion. He resists passions and does not allow himself to be impetuously swept away into the marital act. Nothing is more depraved than to love one's spouse as if she were an adulteress. (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 11)

Centuries later, Jerome repeated this Stoic maxim: "Anyone who is too passionate a lover of his wife is an adulterer" (Against Jovinian I, 49). More recently, in his General Audience on October 8, 1988, Pope John Paul II publicly endorsed this same Stoic value of "adultery with one's own wife" (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 62; Der Spiegel, n. 47, 1980, p. 9).

The Stoics believed the ecstasy of sex was dangerous, hard to control, and dangerous to men's health. It subverted men's rational control. Sex was part of the burden the soul struggles to jettison as it rises to the divine. The Vestal virgins and many pagan temple rituals required sexual abstinence before and during their ritual celebrations. The Stoics expressed their contempt of the flesh by abstaining from sex while at the same time indulging in sadomasochistic orgies (Lawrence, 1989, p. 10; Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 99).

Another Stoic contemporary of Jesus highly admired by Christians, Musonius Rufus, maintained that:

Men who are not wantons or immoral are bound to consider sexual intercourse [morally] justified only when it occurs in marriage and is indulged in for the purpose of begetting children, since that is lawful. [Sexual intercourse is] unjust and unlawful when it is mere pleasure-seeking, even in marriage. (Lawrence, 1989, p. 11)

Gnostic Worldviews and Catholic Sexual Teachings
Alongside the Platonic and Stoic dualisms, a third influence helped turn Christianity even more against sex and pleasure. The deeply pessimistic Gnostic cosmology probably originated in Persia in the century before Jesus, or perhaps earlier in Babylonian myths. This worldview stressed the worthlessness and baseness of all things. The body was a "corpse with senses, the grave you carry around with you". Demons created this world. The soul is a spark of light from another world captured by demonic powers and banished into this world of darkness, chained to the dark prison of the body (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, pp. 15-16).

The early Gnostics tried to create a harmonious blend of pagan and Christian values. They interpreted Christian faith as a special kind of knowledge (gnosis), which the soul/mind can use to transcend the sphere of this earth and enter the divine heavenly sphere. Like the Stoics, the Gnostics often wavered between sexual asceticism and libertine behavior, both motivated by their contempt for the body.

Early on, Gnosticism was condemned as a heresy and defeated. However, over the centuries, Gnostic views have been resurrected by the Albigensians and medieval Cathars, and more recently by the French and Irish Jansenists and some New Age spiritualities (Ehrman, 2003; Lawrence, 1989, p. 95; Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, pp. 15, 48-49).

From the Apostles to the Middle Ages
Although Jesus said practically nothing about sex, he did openly oppose the Jewish patriarchal structure in his comfortable friendship and respect for women. His message, however, apparently had little effect on the males who led his Church after his crucifixion in 67 C.E.

Historians widely acknowledge that the Apostle Paul was the major influence in opening up the early Jewish/Christian community to the secular and Stoic culture of imperial Rome. That influence, spread in his travels and a dozen Epistles written to Christians in Corinth, Ephesus, Galatia, Rome, and elsewhere, culminated in 327 C.E. with Constantine's recognition of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire.

Recently, biblical scholars have suggested that some of the patriarchal Stoic household values and advice—e.g., that women remain silent and subject to their husbands—that we find in Paul's Letters, may have been inserted by a follower after his death more as a political strategy than as a put-down directly aimed at women. Both of Paul's parents were Roman citizens and Jewish converts. Living in Tarsus (Asia Minor), Paul got his Jewish education in Jerusalem, where he became a nationalistic zealot and probably a Pharisee. He was fluent in Aramaic, but also in Greek and probably in Latin. He was exposed to Hellenistic and Roman Stoicism before his conversion to Christianity. Scholars are still debating whether Paul, or his followers, may have introduced the Stoic, Gnostic, and Jewish apocalyptic values and views on marriage and women that are so foreign to Paul's liberating thought found elsewhere in the Epistles (Bristow, 1991; Fiorenza, 1984, pp. 154; Horsley, 1997, pp. 140-252; Lawrence, 1989, pp. 31-77; Maccoby, 1998; Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, pp. 33-46; White, 2004, pp. 260-271).

Despite being a Roman citizen educated in Stoic values, Paul ended four of his letters urging his followers to "Greet one another with a holy kiss." (Peter also closes his epistle by urging his followers to share the "kiss of love.") This expression of the early Christian community was a powerful and important gesture in the early Jesus movement, but it was quickly neutralized when Clement of Alexandria (c. 200 C.E.)and his contemporary, Athenagoras, reminded Christians of a law that penalized "any man who takes a second kiss for the motive of pleasure. … Anyone stirred by this kiss to lusty thoughts will be deprived by God of eternal life." Pretty serious business! Eventually, Paul's "kiss of peace" devolved into an innocent liturgical handshake (Lawrence, 1989, pp. 84-85).

After the death of the apostles and Paul, male Church leaders quickly reestablished an exclusively patriarchal rule. They found handy and potent weapons in the prevailing Stoic morality, in Platonic/Neo-Platonic dualism, and Gnosticism. In one example, biblical translations and commentaries turned the Gospel brothers and sisters of Jesus into stepbrothers and stepsisters from Joseph's first marriage, and then into cousins. Joseph became as virginal as his wife Mary, who conceived Jesus by the Holy Spirit and gave birth in a spontaneous Caesarean section that left her hymen intact and her vagina unpenetrated. The birth of Jesus was so virginal, there was not even a placenta (sordes in Latin). Later translations of the New Testament promoted celibacy by turning the wives of the apostles into sisters and then into housekeepers (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, pp. 27-39, 343-344).

During the third century, the obsession with sex repression triumphed in the Christian church. At the Council of Elvira (309 C.E.), almost half of the 81 canons adopted dealt with sex. These canons reflected an irrational fear of sex as defilement and contamination, and established its importance over every other ethical issue, including murder. Sexual purity—abstinence—was clearly proclaimed as the Christian standard. Sex in almost every imaginable form was proscribed or severely limited. After Constantine united church and state in 325 C.E. and controlled the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, it became increasingly popular for Christians to outdo the Stoics in their repression of sex (Küng, 2003, pp. 45-49).

Augustine (354-430) has been, next to Paul, the greatest influence on Christian thought, both Protestant and Catholic. Augustine followed the Manichean dualism of Zoroaster in his youth, before he finally gave up two mistresses, converted to Christianity, and became a bishop. Augustine rejected Manichean dualism, but continued teaching that original sin was passed from parents to offspring by the passion and desire inherent in sexual intercourse. A Christian Platonist until his death, Augustine held that "Man but not woman is made in the image and likeness of God." As Augustine saw it, "nothing so casts down the manly mind from its [rational, spiritual] heights as the fondling of women, and those bodily contacts which belong to the married state." Augustine was dogmatic about the "shame which attends all sexual intercourse," even when engaged in by a married couple for the sole purpose of procreation. According to Augustine, "sexual intercourse is always performed with lust and therefore needs to be hidden." The sexual organs were "obscene parts" (Maguire, 2001, p. 19; Ranke-Heinemann, 1990).

By 600, Pope Gregory the Great had declared that "sensual pleasure can never be without sin." Anselm of Laon, who died in 1117, honored as "Father of Scholasticism," defended the thesis that the amount of pleasure in any action determines the extent of its sinfulness. Albert the Great taught that sexual pleasure is an evil punishment, filthy, defiling, ugly, shameful, sick, a degradation of the mind, a humiliation of reason by the flesh, debasing, humiliating, shared with the beasts, brutal, corrupted, depraved, and infects us with original sin. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, taught that "sexual pleasure completely checks the use of reason, stifles reason, and absorbs the mind" (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, pp. 177-178).

These views of sexual pleasure took on new meaning in the early 1100s when Peter Lombard advocated recognizing marriage as a seventh sacrament. Because marriage involved sex, it had to be the lowest of the seven sacraments, intended for third-class Christians. Lombard also told Christians that the Holy Spirit flees the room when a married couple has sex, even if they do it without passion or to make new virgins for the kingdom of heaven (Lawrence, 1989, pp. 30, 150). The main effect of this was to extend the clergy's control over sex rather than to bless sexual pleasure. In addition, Aquinas even argued that the less passion a husband has for his wife, the more children he will have and the healthier they will be (Summa Theologiae III q.65a.2ad 1; Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, pp. 153-159, 181).

Despite being a sacrament, the ideal marriage was purely spiritual, a "Josephite marriage" modeled on the virginal union of Joseph and Mary. With procreation, the only justification for marriage, even a wife who remained frigid and did not experience any passion or emotion in sexual intercourse could not prevent the transmission of original sin to her offspring. William of Auvergne (d. 1249), the bishop of Paris, advised married couples to "flee all physical pleasure." In his view, it was wonderful when "young men remain cold with their wives, even when they are beautiful" (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 155). (In 2001, Pope John Paul II canonized Luigi and Maria Beltrame, who lived the last 26 years of their marriage as "brother and sister.")

Abelard, a leading medieval theologian, a bit of a scoundrel, University of Paris professor, and the famous lover of Heloise, was one of the few to oppose this ancient and medieval antisexual value system:

No natural pleasure of the flesh may be declared a sin, nor may one impute guilt when someone is delighted by pleasure where he must necessarily feel it. … From the first day of our creation, when man lived without sin in Paradise, sexual intercourse and good tasting foods were naturally bound up with pleasure. God himself has established nature in this way. (Quoted by Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 169)

When their scandalous secret marriage was discovered, Heloise's guardian sent her to a convent and had his servants castrate Abelard in his sleep (Lawrence, 1989, pp. 150-157, Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, pp. 168-171).

By the 1200s, Catholic clergymen were either living a fully monastic life or as celibates in quasi-monastic rectories. Simultaneously, Gnosticism had reemerged as Catharism and Albigensianism, allowing the celibate male clergy to announce the salvation message of Jesus, telling Christians who were blessed in the new sacrament of marriage that they should abstain from marital intercourse on the following days:

· All Thursdays in memory of the arrest of Jesus (54 days a year),

· All Fridays in memory of the death of Jesus (another 54 days),

· All Saturdays in honor of the Virgin Mary (another 54 days),

· All Sundays in honor of the resurrection (54 more days), and

· All Mondays to remember the departed souls (54 days).

In addition to banning marital intercourse on 270 of the 365 days of the year, intercourse was banned on the 40 days before Pentecost, Christmas, and Easter.

This left a scant 61 days when marital sex was morally acceptable. But, if the wife became pregnant, she and her husband could not have intercourse at any time during the nine months of pregnancy and during the 40 or 80 days between birth of the baby and "churching" (purification) of the new mother. Sex was also banned on the seventh, fifth, and third days before receiving the Holy Communion (Lawrence, 1989, pp. 30, 134-165; Timmerman, 1986).

Who created these calendars banning marital sex most of the year? Who created these blatant denunciations of sex, women, and pleasure? Men! Males "convinced of the superiority of their sex." Specifically, the all-male, increasingly celibate church hierarchy, the monks, hermits, clergy, bishops, and popes, in councils and in academic debates. In Western society, all this public discourse was resolutely designed by males to control sex and women (Duby, 1997/1998).

And who passed this sex-negative, anti-woman value system on to the local parishioners, the Christian serfs, peasants, town merchants, and craftsmen? That task fell to the local male clergy. Between the third century and the Middle Ages, the sacrament of penance—commonly referred to as "confession"—shifted from a public communal admission of shared sinfulness during the liturgy to a penitent kneeling in a dark confessional confessing his or her sins to a local pastor. These mostly uneducated, at best semiliterate pastors relied on "penitentials," do-it-yourself guides with lists of sins and their appropriate penances of fasting, pilgrimages, singing "penitential psalms" in public or private, private or public prayers, and self-flagellation (for monks) or whipping by the parish priest for the laity. Twenty-five percent to forty-five percent of the sins listed in extant penitentials are sexual sins, including involuntary and voluntary loss of semen, all forms of non-reproductive sex, oral and anal intercourse, rear-entry and woman-on-top positions, and sex at various banned times. The penitentials were very popular until suppressed in the twelfth century, when the newly developing system of Church (canon) law filled the need. In some places, abbreviated lists of "sins of the flesh" were given to adolescent boys as a guide to confession (Lawrence, 1989, pp. 135-140; Tannahill, 1980, pp. 150-153).

The Last 500 Years
After 1,500 years of sharing a common history of sexual values, the Christian world experienced a schism. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Henry VIII fermented the Protestant Reformation and challenged the Vatican's sexual mores and celibate clergy, allowing divorce, married clergy, and eventually contraception and abortion. Meanwhile, the Catholic branch of Christianity maintained its more traditional sex-negative restrictive values.

The Renaissance brought the evolving or process worldview to the surface and into open confrontation with the "traditional" fixed worldview. The paradigm shift from fixed to evolving process began in the heavens, in the 1500s, when Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo challenged the prevailing belief in an Earth-centered planetary system. (It took 400 years before the Vatican finally apologized for the Inquisition's persecution of Galileo.)

Publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Speciesin 1858 unleashed heated debates featuring clergy armed with "biblical facts and chronologies" and agnostics like Thomas Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog," debating the literal interpretation of the Bible and the new theory of human evolution. Sixty-five years later, in Dayton, Tennessee, the "Scopes Monkey Trial" created national headlines, when advocates of the fixed and process worldviews again did battle in court and news headlines. The same debate and conflict of worldviews rattled through American society in 2004 as Creationist and "Intelligent Design" advocates went to court in Texas, California, and Bible-Belt states to limit the teaching of evolution and to force school boards to include their fixed worldviews in school science textbooks and curricula (Francoeur, 1965).

In the past century, men and women experienced more radical social changes than our ancestors in any other century in human history. Radical changes came in every aspect of our lives, communicated around the world at ever-increasing speeds, by telegraph, radio, television, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. In the twentieth century, we

doubled our life expectancy from 47 years to near 80,

reduced our fertility below replacement level,

created the contraceptive Pill,

introduced and popularized scientific family planning,

fermented feminism,

fought for and gained civil rights,

launched the gay rights movement,

legalized abortion and divorce,

discovered the leisure of retirement,

went from radio to television to computers and the Internet,

traded walking and horses for bicycles, automobiles, jets, and space travel,

walked on the Moon,

conquered diseases with vaccines and antibiotics,

searched our bodies and the womb with ultrasound, PET, CT, and MRI scans,

developed the atomic bomb and nuclear energy,

pioneered sex-change operations and genetic engineering,

introduced reprotech: embryo transplants, surrogate mothers, and frozen sperm (Francoeur, 1970),

cloned our first mammals,

encountered HIV/AIDS on a global scale,

fought two world wars and wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, and elsewhere,

enjoyed the Charleston, cheek-to-cheek body clutching, jitter-bug, bebop, rock, Elvis, the Beatles, heavy metal, rap, and fusion, where couples split up and danced alone (after centuries-old, gender-separated group dancing had been replaced by mixed-gender group dancing in the Renaissance, and the waltz and minuet at arms length),

and what else? (Francoeur, 1999, pp. 201-213; Thieme, 2005).

Having survived a century like no other century in human history, it's no wonder men and women in all cultures, not just the U.S., are confused and threatened by all the radical changes we are encountering (Francoeur & Noonan, 2004b). Gender roles are being challenged everywhere. Patriarchy is being challenged by gender egalitarianism. Relationship values are replacing procreation as the prime motivation and function for sexual erotic desire and sexual passion/pleasure are no longer a sole concern or right of the male. The secular and religious mythologies that supported several thousand years of patriarchy no longer have meaning. We are in a global paradigm shift, in a radical transition, creating a new social world. And there is no haven or retreat where we can go to escape these changes. As the last great Ice Age melted, it took several thousand years for our ancestors to find their way from hunter-gatherer, nomadic, gender-egalitarian cultures to the patriarchy of urban life in the Middle East and Indus Valley. We are now experiencing similar birth pangs, finding our way to a new level of human maturity and consciousness, beyond the patriarchy that worked so well for so long, but no longer functions.

CREATING A NEW MEANING FOR SEXUAL HEALTH

The Reformation and Renaissance marked the emergence in the West of a critical mass of educated, middle-class bourgeois Christians who began to challenge both secular and religious values and structures. Democracy was emerging along with the concept of civil rights and responsibilities. The human species was growing up, the child painfully becoming an adult.

Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, leading moral-development psychologists, have described the stages we pass through from childhood to become responsible, self-actualizing persons:

· Between birth to roughly age 2, we begin developing a moral consciousness.

· In childhood, we develop an egocentric morality, a morality of bending the rules, reacting instinctively, and learning painfully that punishment often follows disobedience.

· In adolescence, we develop a heteronomous morality where we accept a morality imposed by outside civil and religious authorities and learn to live in a law-and-order society.

· Finally, hopefully, we become autonomous mature individuals, internalizing a self-actualizing morality of cooperation based on universal ethical principles (Francoeur, 1983, pp. 17-29).

If each of us needs to develop from a child's egocentric morality to a law-and-order moral guidance from our elders and on to an autonomous morality of internal convictions, is this also true of the moral consciousness of a society or culture? Can we characterize the secular and religious moral development of Greece and Rome, and the history of Christianity through the Middle Ages as having a heteronymous law-and-order morality? Did the Renaissance open the door to individuals and Western culture to begin developing an autonomous conscience-driven morality? In Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan (1996) extend the biopsychosocial research of the late Clare Graves to track the emergence of consciousness and worldview from clans to tribes to networks to nations to global to whatever is now emerging. They conclude that communities and societies grow in moral maturity much as outlined by Piaget and Kohlberg.

For some, surviving in our radically changing social environment means holding on to what we find so reassuring and comforting in our religious and secular heritage. Survival, salvation, means regaining our stability by embracing rigorist fundamentalist religious and secular views. As Tevja explained in The Fiddler on the Roof, "What holds this village together? Tradition, tradition!" The fixed worldview described in the left column of Table 1 fits quite nicely into Piaget and Kohlberg's heteronymous morality in which an outside authority, the bishops and clergy, articulate and teach Catholic sexual doctrine to an adolescent, uneducated laity who are expected to follow their shepherds without question (Francoeur, 1982, pp. 55-65; Patterson, 2004).

The other strategy involves a grassroots shift toward an autonomous internalized morality based on adult responsibility and an educated conscience. Among American Catholics, this shift started several decades before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. As Christine Gudorf reminds us,

The Roman Catholic Church (and Christianity in general) has in the last century drastically rethought the meaning of marriage, the dignity and worth of women, the relationship between the body and the soul, and the role of bodily pleasure in Christian life, all of which together have revolutionary implications for church teaching on sexuality and reproduction. In effect, the foundations of the old bans have been raised and their replacements will not support the walls of the traditional ban. (Quoted by Maguire, 2001, p. 39; Jung, 2001)

Fortunately, both Catholic and Protestant groups have been working on a new existentialist, person-and-relationship-oriented sexual ethic. The prime Catholic contribution is a 1977 report authored by Kosnik, et al. (1977), invited and "received but not endorsed" by the Catholic Theological Society of America. This report is definitely worth comparing with the equally widely ignored 1970 United Presbyterian Work Study Document on Sexuality and the Human Community, the 1991 United Presbyterian General Assembly Report on Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Social Justice, and the Northern New Jersey Episcopal Church Report of the Task Force on Changing Patterns of Sexuality and Family Life (Thayer, et al., 1987).

In their report on "new directions in American Catholic thought," Kosnik, et al. (1977, pp. 92-95) focused on sexual morality in terms of the quality and consequences of a particular relationship in the context of eight moral criteria or values. (These eight values are summarized here by Francoeur using the original 1977 report and a 2005 comment by Kosnik.) In essence, they focus on persons and the moral quality of their relationship, not on who does what genitally with whom. This is not a permissive, promiscuous, anything-goes value system. It is, in fact, a very demanding, maturing, and healthy morality.

To be morally acceptable, according to Kosnik, et al. (1977), a sexually intimate relationshipshould be:

Self-Liberating—A means of personal growth toward maturity, not a way of giving oneself totally to another person without allowing for self-growth and expression.

Other-Enriching—More than non-exploitive; looking to the future and actively concerned with the needs of the other person(s); expressing a compassionate and consistent concern for the well-being of others.

Honest—Deception and pretense damage a relationship, but total candor and honesty are not always the wisest choice.

Faithful—Faithful to the commitment a couple makes with each other and continually renegotiate to adjust to changing circumstances and keep their relationship dynamic. Fidelity should not be used to isolate the partner from all other social relationships, an effort that can lead to jealousy, distrust, and destructive possessiveness.

Socially Responsible—Serving the best interests of the couple, family, nation, and world.

Life-Serving—A sexual relationship can serve life by being procreative, by building the human community, and by encouraging the couple to serve the needs of other persons; ministering in a healing way to the fears, hurts, and anxieties of the other.

Joyous—Sexual expression should be playful, nurturing, creative, and celebrate the delights of erotic pleasures (Stayton, 1992).

Finally, for Catholics, and many others in the Judaeo-Christian tradition:

Transcendent or Spiritual—Expressing a Christ-like dimension of love: Sexually expressed and celibate unions should be spiritual, leading individuals to transcend their own egos and physical limits to join in loving communion with others, with the Earth (our nurturing womb), and, for many, in communion with a transcendent God. For those who choose a celibate expression of their sexuality, the goal is a creative integration of all these criteria that "can tolerate the unfulfillment of these in its pursuit of a more creative growth toward integration (A. Kosnik, personal communication, 2005).

Catholic (and Protestant) scholars have barely started to develop a healthy existentialist sexual value system (Cahill, 1985; Gudorf, 1994; Keane, 1978; Whitehead & Whitehead, 1997, 2001). It is too early to tell what contribution the recent Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Catholic Theological Society of America documents cited here may make to this effort. Thus far, these attempts have been given little formal recognition or attention. Kenneth Anich, an associate professor of psychology at Divine Word Seminary in Iowa, has suggested one possible reason for this lack of discussion,

From the viewpoint of a counseling psychologist, I can see why this list of moral criteria didn't get very far. The criteria, self-liberating, other-enriching, etc., are nice sounding but it seems to me they leave a lot of room for the individual person to convince him/herself that what they are involved in is liberating when it really is abusing. It is an argument used by pedophiles. As humans we have a limitless capacity for self-delusion when it fits our needs. I find these criteria wonderful talking points but in the end not entirely helpful in making moral or ethical judgments in specific situations. (Personal communication, 2005)

In her study of Sexuality and Spiritual Growth, Joan Timmerman has suggested reducing the risk of self-delusion and self-interest by following six steps in our adult decision-making:

1. Be clear of who you are and the kind of human you want to become.

2. Consult all the sources of moral reasoning and wisdom available to you: Scripture, tradition, communal and personal experience, law, imagination and works of imagination, moral rules, and our family values and customs.

3. Identify and discuss your alternatives.

4. Anticipate as best you can the consequences of your decision for the primary parties, the wider network of your relationships, and for society as a whole.

5. Given the self-understanding, data, and evaluation of consequences, what choice do you make.

6. Are you comfortable and at peace with this decision? (Timmerman 1993:124-25, 129-30)

TRANSITIONING

Until the nineteenth century, the common belief was, and still is for many, that men planted their seed—"semen"—in a handy incubator, the woman's uterus, where it was fleshed out by menstrual blood—"uterine milk"—that became, after nine months, a male heir or a daughter. This reproductive power balance gave males a dominant control in society. The discovery of ova and sperm, fertilization and conception, that 55 percent of all the offspring's genes are from the mother and only 45 percent from the father, plus the major contribution females make during pregnancy, began shifting the social power balance toward gender equality and equal rights. It took the Catholic Church 400 years to officially accept Galileo's solar-centered planetary system, at least a century and a half to integrate theology and evolution (Francoeur 1965). The Protestant churches have accepted this more recent gender-equal social power and social system, even as official Catholic doctrine refuses to acknowledge the 55/45 shift that is rippling through the world.

Type A traditionalists, Type B liberals, and the vast majority of Catholics and others in the world of grays betwixt and between A and B face the challenge of creating new icons, new images of transcendence, new descriptions, new spiritual dimensions of human life, and new ideas and God talk that speak to women and men in our increasingly digitalized world. Catholic images of sexuality, love, transcendence, spirituality, and the divine created in the Renaissance world no longer communicate in our rapidly emerging, prefigurative digital world.

Process theology will inevitably gain momentum because it will describe a cosmic structure congruent with our daily experience of this ceaseless flow. We recreate ourselves in and through the forms and structures of our [digital] technologies; the digital world is interactive, modular and fluid, so inevitably our lives and how we think of ourselves are becoming interactive, modular and fluid too. We can make this passage with sanity only if we know and have confidence that God is God and will defend Godself and cannot perish, when everything in this life including our ideas about God is transient and passing. (Thieme, 2005)

FIVE PROBLEMATIC ISSUES

1. Dealing with Sexual Guilt/Anxiety

The tension between Catholic culture and sexual health is very complex, peppered with questions about Catholic (and Christian) "masochism, an allergy to pleasure, contempt of the body, and angelism." But the results, according to Jacques-Marie Pohier (1976, p. 106), include for Catholics a "massive dose of guilt and anxiety" apparent in

· a strong dose of misogyny persistently expressed by male celibate clerics,

· a basic fear of women's sexuality and sexual potential,

· a Christian, particularly Catholic, masochistic allergy to pleasure and the unsolved problem of how sexual pleasure fits into Christian life and values, and

· the widespread avoidance of comprehensive sexuality education in Catholic—and public—schools by educators and parents.

Catholicism and Christianity are not alone in having difficulty dealing with sexual pleasure. The vast majority of human cultures and religions today are still not comfortable dealing with sexual pleasure (Macy, 2003; Raming, 2003; Pohier, 1976, pp. 106-107).

Why are these noxious, unhealthy premises still alive and still very effective in American Catholic culture? Why are there still so much misogyny, fear of women, and such a strong allergy to sexual pleasure in the air we breathe?

If American Catholics are so sexually sophisticated, why then do sexual counselors and therapists so often encounter deep-rooted, subconscious anxiety and guilt related to sexual pleasuring in their clients? Why in our culture is sexual pleasuring still so burdened with massive doses of guilt? On the surface, we talk and read about the importance of foreplay, the importance of becoming comfortable with one's own body and feelings and our partner's body, with erotic sensibility, with real communications, and with sexual fantasy and imaginative playfulness and pleasuring. Too many American therapists would agree with psychiatric psychoanalyst Jean Lemaire, founder and former president of the Association Française des Centres de Consultation Conjugale, and his therapist partner, Evelyne Lemaire-Arnauld, in Paris, who wrote that:

The most salient fact is that genital activity [in all of Western culture] is freighted with massive doses of guilt. This in itself, it should be noted, is a generalized phenomenon. It is to be found in most cultures, and particularly in the overall complex known as Judaeo-Christian culture. But the carryover of this basic fact into behavior is more or less marked among Catholics, and those with a traditional upbringing often allude to the massive presence of such guilt feelings.

The frequent effect of the presence of guilt feelings during foreplay is to restrict fantasy and imagination activity, with the result that the partners give and receive less satisfaction during the sex act itself. The progressive discovery of the partner's body and erotic sensibility is often felt to be something sinful, even when the two people have been made aware of the necessity and importance of this activity.

Catholics seem to be imbued with a markedly distinctive image that sets them off from other Christian circles in more than one respect. This image is translated into their day-to-day behavior patterns also, particularly when they have been deeply influenced by a traditional Catholic upbringing and education (Lemaire & Lemaire-Arnaud, 1976, pp. 72-73).

2. Dealing with Monogamy

During the 1960s sexual revolution, Margaret Mead described America as a "prefigurative culture" whose traditional icons and myths no longer communicate to younger generations. Among our preexisting cultural forms, marriage and family "have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored [for our computerized world]" (Langdon Winner, quoted by Thieme, 2005). Today, half of America's first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce, while 40 percent to 70 percent of married persons have engaged in extramarital or co-marital sex. Recognizing that we are experiencing a major "elemental restructuring," Christine Gudorf (1994, p. 79), a leading Catholic ethicist and author of Body Sex and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics, concludes that "Marriage can take many shapes and forms. Institutions such as churches and states should allow various forms of marriage, and should be open to any marital roles/patterns which are non-abusive, just, and socially responsible."

3. Dealing with Homosexuality

In a 1986 letter to the American bishops on the pastoral care of homosexual persons, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF, 1986 #3) reminded the bishops in a statement of morals, that is not "infallible" but needs to be seriously considered, that

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is not a morally acceptable option. (Quoted in Gramick & Furey, 1988, pp. 1-11)

The Vatican's position is the same today as it was in 1986, or in 1977 when authors of the Catholic Theological Society report concluded that

It bears repeating that there is much that is uncertain and provisional about the subject of homosexuality. Much research needs yet to be done, much pastoral experience yet to be accumulated before more than tentative pastoral guidelines can be formulated. It bears repeating, however, without provision that where there is sincere affection, responsibility, and the germ of authentic human relationships—in other words, where there is love—God surely is present (Kosnik, et al., 1977, p. 218).

While the CDF has not changed its position, much new information has been gathered on the history of homosexuality, its nature and causes, biblical and theological perspectives, and the empirical sciences. In many areas of pastoral guidelines, Catholic culture has made major advances (Curb & Manahan, 1985; Francoeur, 1988, 1989; Gramick, 1983, 1988; Nugent, 1984, 1992). The tension between formal and informal values, and between an unchanging fixed worldview and a flexible existential worldview is evident when John R. Quinn, Archbishop of San Francisco, replied to the Curia's 1986 letter on pastoral care of persons with a homosexual orientation:

We cannot fulfill our task [as pastors and bishops] simply by an uncritical application of solutions designed in past ages for problems which have qualitatively changed, or which did not exist in the past. (Quoted in Gramick & Furey, 1988, p. vii)

In September 2005, the Vatican announced that gay priests and seminarians would no longer be accepted in the ministry. John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, clarified the message and its legal context. The statement that there will be "No gays in the priesthood" doesn't actually mean "no gays in the priesthood." In the Vatican's mind, it means, "As a general rule, this is not a good idea, but we all know there will be exceptions. We know many lay Catholics and priests, especially in the southern hemisphere and Europe, ignore the church's teachings on contraception, chastity and extramarital sex (for men)."

The Vatican has for centuries maintained that laws express an ideal, a perfect state of affairs, which many people will inevitably fall short of. The law describes the way things should work if we were not frail humans but perfect like the angels. The problem is that American Catholics, being largely Anglo-Saxons and raised in democracies, have a different view of laws. "A law is a law, and we need to obey it." A Catholic can suffer much angst and carry about massive doses of shame and guilt, for being gay, leading a gay lifestyle, or using contraceptives for good reasons (Allen).

4. Dealing with Masturbation

The scientific evidence is overwhelming. Newborns exercise their urge for genital pleasure even in the womb, and often after birth. Adolescents and young adults discover very beneficial knowledge about their sexual responses, and tension release in self-loving. Adults of all ages, single and married, benefit from self-pleasuring. Despite these clear sexual health benefits, who knows how long it will take before the formal Catholic condemnation of self-loving changes (Curran & McCormick, 1993; Kosnik, et al., 1977, pp. 220-224; Gudorf, 1994, pp. 91-96, 105).

A new process morality of masturbation, however, can be found in The United Presbyterian Work Study Document on Sexuality and the Human Community, quoted here from Francoeur (1982, p. 666):

Since masturbation is often one of the earliest pleasurable sexual experiences, which is identifiably genital, we consider it essential that the church, through its teachings and through the attitudes it encourages in Christian homes, contribute to a healthy understanding of this experience, which will be free of guilt and shame. The ethical significance of masturbation depends entirely on the context in which it takes place. Therefore, we can see no objection to it when it occurs as a normal developmental experience or as a deliberately chosen alternative to inappropriate heterosexual activity. We can see valid ethical questions raised about masturbatory practices which become compulsive or which inhibit normal heterosexual development. In most instances, however, we believe that masturbation is morally neutral and psychologically benign.

5. Dealing with Abortion

Some texts of Hippocrates and Aristotle indicate a widespread belief that human development in the womb involves a sequence of three life-giving principles or "souls." Based on his observations of naturally miscarried embryos, Aristotle concluded that when a man planted his "seed," its early development was due to a vegetative life principle. At about four weeks, the embryo began to take on the shape of what looked like a primitive fish due to an animal soul. At about six weeks, 40 days, some human embryos developed male-appearing genitals, indicating they had a human life-principle. Embryos only developed female sexual anatomy and life principle at about 80 days. Forty versus 80 days explained why females were much less rational and far more emotional than men—a good reason why male-female friendships were impossible, and same-sex relations accepted or at least tolerated.

Augustine, Aquinas, and others adopted this common "scientific explanation." Terminating an early pregnancy, before quickening, was not considered abortion, infanticide, or homicide. It could, however, be considered an immoral interference with a natural process. This was the common belief between the fifth century and the close of the Middle Ages.

Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) allowed termination of an "unformed" fetus before quickening and condemned abortion of a fully formed human fetus after quickening. In the Renaissance, new embryological observations led Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590) to outlaw all interference with human embryos after conception. But Pope Gregory XIV (1590-1591) reaffirmed the position of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, allowing termination of pregnancies in the first trimester, only to be reversed by a later Pope when microscopists claimed they could see a preformed human in what they thought was the human egg or sperm. If "ensoulment" occurred at conception, then all abortion was immoral. This became the current Catholic position. Protestants took the opposite position, holding that ensoulment was spread out over three or four months, so early abortion could be accepted (Francoeur, 1970, pp. 66-68; Lewin, 1922, p. 83; Maguire, 2001, pp. 31-41; Moore & Persaud, 1998, pp. 4-12).

Another point to consider is that the Catholic bishops have not convinced Catholic women that all abortions are murder. A 1986 Yankelovich survey found that American Catholic women are as likely as Protestant women to obtain an abortion. Over half of the Catholic women surveyed personally knew someone who had had an abortion and two-thirds of these said that the abortion was the right thing to do. In the same survey, 65 percent of Catholic women and 54 percent of Protestant women thought abortion in general was morally wrong. Yet half of these Catholic women felt that abortion was morally acceptable for an unmarried teenager, a woman on welfare who can't work, or a married woman with a large family. More than three-quarters of American Catholic women surveyed found abortion moral for a woman who had been raped, was the victim of incest, was carrying a fetus with a serious genetic or developmental defect, or when the pregnancy threatened the woman's life (Catholics for a Free Choice, 1986; cited by Gudorf, 1994, p. 246).

A puzzlement? Yes. On one side, it seems, are the pope, bishops, and formal statements of the magisterium. On the other side, are Catholic women and men who are part of the informal sensus fidelium. And yet, as Maguire (2001, p. 35) reminds us,

The Roman Catholic position on abortion is pluralistic. It has a strong pro-choice tradition and a conservative anti-choice tradition. Neither is official, and neither is more Catholic than the other.

Looking to the Future

Vern Bullough, America's leading historian of sexuality, has noted that

Though Christian theologians have periodically attempted to rid Christianity of the Gnostic-Manichean-Stoic outlook on sex, they have not been entirely successful. Thus, though the Puritans did emphasize the joys of marital sex, they continued to condemn all sexual pleasure outside of marriage, including masturbation, as sinful. In fact, despite its embrace of the joys of marital sexual union, New England Puritanism seemed to have the same Christian obsession with sex that was present in the early Church Fathers. It is only as Christian theologians have tried to break with traditional Christian interpreters that they have been successful in undoing some of the Christian ambivalence about sexuality. Even so, Christianity cannot avoid accepting a major responsibility for much of the psychological harm and guilt anxieties its traditional antisexual attitudes still cause today for too many men and women. (Bullough, 1987, p. 283)

This statement summarizing Catholic culture and its connection with sexual health suggests that we end with four brief seminal insights into the future of Catholic views on sexuality and sexual health.

The first statement is a series of three questions from C. Jaime Snoek, a prominent European Catholic priest and theologian of the 1960s. Written four decades ago, before gender-inclusive language replaced man/he, Shoek's three questions reflect a prophetic insights that is just beginning to penetrate thinking on sexual morality.:

How will the man of tomorrow live his sexual life?

Will he have won greater inner freedom?

Will he have destroyed the tyranny of genitality and replaced it by a more discrete form of eroticism, more widespread, more communicative, permeating all human relationships? (Quoted in Francoeur & Francoeur, 1974, p. 199)

Diarmuid O'Murchu, a Catholic priest, social psychologist, and author of Quantum Theology, replies that:

… human sexuality has outgrown its functional and exclusive focus on the procreation of new life, adopting a more inclusive ambience of mutual enrichment of the spouses, as well as the possibility of procreation within the context of monogamous marriage. … Genitality is no longer reserved for heterosexual monogamous relationships, never mind for marital union. It has become a dimension of human intimacy in the many different situations in which people seek to express tenderness, affection, and mutuality. (O'Murchu, 1997, p. 190)

Today, as never before, the challenge of developing a healthy and informed conscience, the ultimate guide in moral decisions according to Catholic doctrine, is complicated when the majority of Church authorities live in a fixed world and the majority of lay Catholics live in a process world with the two camps speaking two very different languages. For example, a few weeks before Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI in June 2005, a priest in the Midwest told me about a private discussion he had had with a high-ranking Curia member visiting in a neighboring diocese. When the pastor asked the Vatican official how he should handle questions about controversial subjects like masturbation, premarital sex, birth control, married priests, and women priests, he was told that "silence" was the only acceptable public response. Meaning that, in public, pastors should state the official teaching and not comment or discuss it. Whatever is said in the confessional or one-on-one counseling is strictly private and stays that way.

We all experience a child's life, where our parents teach us the rules, "what is so is so". Then, as we grow up and cope with the turbulence of adolescence, we question the rules we were taught. In a world of "some things nearly so, some things nearly not", Timmerman reminds Catholics that "The precise meaning of being adult is to have no human model, but to find one's [own] way, as a physical copy but a spiritual original, to make the divine model [of Christ] present in a new way" in our lives (1993, p. 128).

Timmerman's major emphasis on the spiritual places a very positive value on Eros/desire. In a healthy sexuality, spiritual growth and sexual desire are interconnected energies. In our sexual unfolding and spiritual awakening, we have to deal with the anxieties, shames, fears and sex inhibiting messages we picked up in our childhood. "About this [challenge) we have no message from the Lord. … Certainly this task [of achieving human maturation] is accomplished by trial and error, by taking risks and making mistakes, and slowly muddling through to maturity". This shifts the fundamental moral paradigm beyond mothball judgments and conformity to categorical blocks of canned laws to achieving spiritual growth and moral formation. In Timmerman's conclusion, "Intercourse is the equivalent in sexual development of the stage of self-transcendence in spiritual formation. In a setting of mutual love and care, it is probably the most profound experience of self-transcendence" (Timmerman 1993, pp, 52-55, 62; Sarrel and Sarrel 1980).

Finally, two brief statements.

First, Dan Maguire, author of Sacred Choices (2001, p. 23), observes that:

Nothing survives that cannot adapt to change, including the world's religions. They have been adapting, correcting themselves, and coming up with new ideas all through the centuries. If they hadn't changed, they would not be taken seriously today.

And then two sentences from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, before he became Pope Benedict XVI,

Over the Pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority,

there still stands one's own conscience,
which must be obeyed before all else,

if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority.

This emphasis on the individual,

whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal,

and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups,

even of the official Church,

also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism."

(In: Commentary on the Doctrine of Vatican II, vol. 5, p.134, edited by Herbert Vormgrimler)

In this brief statement, Pope Benedict recognizes a Catholic's conscience as the "supreme and ultimate tribunal", bringing us back to the King's "puzzlement". The King realizes that in the ultimate analysis, as a mature person, each of us has the moral responsibility to think carefully for ourselves in a world where "somethings are nearly so, and somethings nearly not". In reality life is a constant puzzlement for each of us.

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CATHOLIC CULTURE AND SEXUALITY (Originally published in: ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SEXUAL HEALTH, Volume III, Chapter 3)

The Author (February 16, 2005)

Abstract

Table 1. Two Opposing Views of Our World

CREATING A NEW MEANING FOR SEXUAL HEALTH

Looking to the Future

CATHOLIC CULTURE AND SEXUALITY
(Originally published in: ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SEXUAL HEALTH, Volume III, Chapter 3)