Sex, women & the church: the need for prophetic change: Part one

Catholic New Times, Dec 14, 2003 by Luke Timothy Johnson

The consequences of the sexual-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States continue to unfold.

On the surface, the crisis is about sex. Beneath the surface, the crisis is about the church's teaching authority. The crisis of the last year and a half is only the most dramatic example of how questions about authority and sexual morality have become intertwined over the past several decades, and how together they threaten the integrity of the church.

Many conservative Catholics blame the bishops for failing to teach and for ceding their authority to therapists and lawyers, and blame homosexual priests for failing to keep their vows. They think the ordination of "manly men" will go a long way to restoring integrity to the priesthood, and thereby to the church. They call for reform, but only of morality. There is no need to debate the issue of a male celibate priesthood, because, it is repeatedly declared, all that is needed is "fidelity, fidelity, fidelity," as Richard John Neuhaus (editor in chief of First Things and George Weigel, author of The Courage to Be Catholic) have written.

Readers of Neuhaus and Weigel, two of the more prolific and outspoken Catholic commentators on the scandal, will find in my analysis some points of similarity as well as a basic agreement on the need for the church to recover holiness.

I differ sharply from such observers, however, in the lessons I draw from the crisis. Conservative thinkers argue that the crisis demands no fundamental change in church teaching or structure. They deal with the crisis by isolating it. They see it involves both sex and power, but they connect them only superficially.

Nowhere in Neuhaus's and Weigel's writing on the crisis, for instance, is there any awareness that God may be calling the church through the cataclysmic changes of recent decades to a more fundamental consideration of what fidelity really means. Does it mean only the fidelity of believers to the hierarchy, or does it demand, more fundamentally, the fidelity of the entire church to the living God? Because I believe that God is speaking to the church through the present circumstances, and calling the church to a more fundamental reform, I think it is necessary for us to distinguish the accidental and the essential in Catholic teaching, and to discern more accurately the ways in which issues of sex and power must be addressed if the church is to bear a truly prophetic witness in the world.

The church's prophetic teaching

Over the span of my lifetime, official church teaching on sex has remained both severe and consistent. When I was a child, the church forbade masturbation, divorce, adultery, fornication, abortion, and artificial birth control. Male and female members of religious orders took a vow of chastity and ordained priests were obligated to celibacy. As I approach the age of sixty, none of these positions has been substantially modified.

This Catholic sexual ethic is, moreover, countercultural within an American society that, over the same sixty-year period, became ever more profoundly individualistic and pervasively sexualized. In this cultural milieu, the church's teaching on sexuality can be regarded, in important ways, as prophetic. It speaks of a vision of the world defined by God over against practices that distort creation.

Demanding fidelity in marriage challenges a contemporary ethos in which easy divorce testifies to the erosion of a sense of mutual obligation and covenant. Insisting that religious and clergy be celibate is a witness to the power of the resurrection against a culture whose lust for pleasure and acquisition proclaims that this mortal existence is the only life to be had. Restricting licit sexual activity to marriage declares that sexuality is first meant to be covenantal and mutually responsible, not an exercise in personal gratification. Most striking, the church's unwavering stance against abortion stands in the classic prophetic tradition of the protection of the powerless. The church's sexual teaching can, in short, be regarded as a necessary moral challenge to American culture.

The teaching of any religion on any moral subject, however, must always involve more than words from a pulpit or statements in the press. Teaching is real and convincing only to the extent that it is actually embraced by believers, embodied in their practices, coherently and consistently expressed by the community of faith.

The reception of Catholic sexual teaching by Catholics themselves-both clergy and lay-is an essential ingredient of that teaching. Only to the degree that moral teaching is expressed by the attitudes and actions of Catholics themselves can it challenge anyone. Only if a prophet's message is clear, consistent, internally coherent, and corresponds to the prophet's own manner of life should a prophet be heard.

It is precisely here that a profound change has occurred over the sixty years of my life, a change that has compromised and perhaps even discredited the church's sexual teaching.