Conference of Catholic Youth Services

CYS House Clovelly

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
23 January 2004

1. Context and challenge

Have a look at the current TV Times. There are now several programmes premised on the normalcy, even desirability, of unchaste homosexual activity. There are a few that mix sexual attraction with witchcraft or vampirism or both. There are a series of totally unreal ‘reality TV' programmes which contrive to throw hormonally supercharged teenagers together into Big Brother's TV brothel or some little brother's desert island. Voyeurism is the all-important ingredient here. There are a few match-making, maarrying and wife-swapping programmes where the life-long and exclusive parts of the marriage vows are not much in focus. And there is always Compass , the ABC Religion Programme, to tell us that Christians in general and Catholic in particular haven't got a clue about sex.

Such programmes do not just appear out of the blue. They emerge from, and are to some extent representative of, the enormous social and cultural shift of the past few decades. Not all of these developments have been bad from a Christian point of view. The emphasis on freedom, physical intimacy and love echoes much in our Catholic tradition. But amongst the more problematical features with which a Christian vision of the human person and relationships must now contend and which present the arena for evangelisation in the contemporary scene I would mention four:

•  An individualism which privatizes sexuality and sexual morality. Orientations and values are now seen as personal choices, made according to taste. Autonomy, understood as freedom from Nature — from God and his order in the cosmos, from the requirements of practical reason, from any limit to the human will — has also become in the post-modern era freedom even from our own natures. [1] Not only nature, but anything which restricts freedom — including commitments like marriage or the demands of the common good — is seen on this account as the enemy of happiness. [2]

•  A consumer mentality , whereby even the body, sexuality and children are planned, quality-controlled, exchanged, even traded, with consent. Sex becomes a recreational activity and fertility a customer choice. Like most consumer goods, we want sex often and enjoyably and with no strings attached. If you are not having it regularly and in various ways, you are presumed to be repressed or sad in some way. The sex supermarket or sex-mart both over-estimates the importance of sex – as if no-one could be happy who had not had sex in the last few days – and trivialises or under-estimates its power – as if it were no more humanly significant than defecating.

An extreme example of this is a recent proposal from Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, now at Princeton. Celebrating the triumph of individualist consumerism over superstitious religious taboos, he declared that the last taboo – against bestiality – must go the way of those against contraception etc. Animals be protected from unnecessary suffering, he thought, but there is nothing special about humans or human sexual acts which make ‘mutually satisfying' sexual relationships with household pets a problem! [3] Singer was no doubt being deliberately shocking, but his other previously unthinkable causes such as abortion-on-demand, embryo experimentation and euthanasia for handicapped infants moved from shocking to commonplace in only a generation.

•  A consequence of individualism and consumerism has been a reluctance to engage in commitments and self-sacrifice, the submission of oneself to obligations to God or others. [4] This, I recognize, is only part of the picture, but it is I think a significant part of why in Australia, as in most first world countries, there is a vocations crisis in marriage and parenthood arguably more grave than that for clergy and religious. Fewer and fewer people are deciding to marry at all; of those who do, most cohabit before marriage despite the evidence that this radically reduces marital ‘sticking power'. [5] They marry much later, outside of church, and are much less likely to stay together. They have few if any children, and many of those children will grow up in fragmented or complicated families. All this presents a massive social and evangelical challenge as well as a tragedy for many individuals, including people we all know and love.

•  A related cultural shift has occurred with respect to children who are no longer presumed to be an ordinary part of coupling. ‘Safe sex', in the modern world, is condomised sex, and that's not just for HIV-AIDS prevention but also for baby prevention. The condomisation of sex and the demonisation of children tend to go hand in hand. In a ‘contra- ceptive ' [6] or ‘contra- life ' [7] culture we are socialized not to love our bodies, life and children but rather to fear our fertility, to withhold it even from our spouses, to cauterize it temporarily or permanently. In the process our civilization is becoming literally sterile.

2. Some Good News

These four features of the contemporary sexual scene – the individualism, consumerism, non-commital-ness and child-phobia – present Catholics with a wonderful evangelical opportunity. For I am convinced that the anthropology articulated in our long tradition – stretching back thousands of years to the genesis of the Old Testament, through the New Testament, the Fathers and Scholastics, through to Paul VI and most importantly John Paul II [8] – offers important insights into these very questions sometimes missed even by faithful Catholics and totally bypassed by the current sexual fashion. They are certainly little understood in the world around us. This tradition of reflection, brought to a new height by the extraordinary work of the present pope in exactly these areas, especially in his series of Wednesday audiences between September 1979 and November 1984 now collected together as The Theology of the Body [9] offers really Good News about sexuality to a world that needs it now more than ever.

3. We are our bodies

The traditional Judeo-Christian conception of the ethics of love, life, sex, marriage and family – which has been so much enriched in recent years by reflection upon human experience in personalist phenomenological philosophy – begins with three simple but profound points, often missed in contemporary culture: we are our bodies; what we do with our bodies affects who we are; what we do with our bodies says something.

We are all some body. If someone asks who Matilda is, we often point to her body or describe what she looks like. If someone strikes me or kisses me, whatever they do to my body, they do to me. And whatever happens to our bodies happens to us: sickness or health, hunger or satiation, location, perception, passions all affect the whole person. It is impossible to touch and be touched, be hugged, have sex, have the range of tactile and sensuous experiences, just as bodies and not be affected personally.

So our bodies are not just extrinsic instruments, like costumes or prisons for some internal ‘real me'. They are constitutive of our being and they express or reveal us to others. Our bodies give us our concreteness. That doesn't mean we are merely bundles of chemicals and electricity, of flesh and bones, with no spiritual dimension: the material does not explain the living body entirely, and the body does not exhaust the richness of the human person. We are a unity of physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual elements. Like all animals, we are our bodies . It is true that we are different from other animals in that our bodies make concrete a spiritual reality as free, rational, self-conscious, loving beings… images and children of God, siblings of the Son, temples of the Holy Spirit, destined to eternal (bodily) life with the saints. Nonetheless all human life as we know it is embodied; we are and, according to Christian faith, even after the resurrection will be, bodily creatures. However ‘spiritual' we are, certain bodily things always bring us back down to earth.

Gender is one of those bodily givens. Sexuality is part of our design make-up and there are two different models, two different ways of being human, bodily creatures: male and female. Sexuality is not just an addition to an otherwise asexual being, a kind of optional extra added to the body or soul. This is one of the insights of the Judeo-Christian Genesis story of human origins: that God created humankind, ‘original man', as man and woman – ‘male and female he created them'. They differ in the very depths of their being, not merely incidentally; and that sexuality is essential to their constitution and identity, permeating and colouring their activities and relationships. There are plenty of contemporary writers on these themes. But one piece of evidence which recently struck me is how early infants can distinguish male from female, compared with how late we discover race, colour, ethnicity, size, shape or other less radical distinctions.

The Genesis story offers another insight too: it is not good for man to be alone; we are made for love; it is our origin, vocation, destiny. Only the woman Eve satisfies Adam's yearning: only she can adequately complement and partner him. So it is, says Christ, that a man leaves his parents and indissolubly cleaves to his wife. Our bodies have a nuptial meaning. Put baldly: they are made for marriage. Much of John Paul II's Theology of the Body has been an exploration of ‘the nuptial meaning of the body'. He has shown that reflecting upon this profound truth can reveal so many things: about ourselves, each other, creation, the Church, even that Trinitarian God who is the author of all these good things. It is a far cry from the days when even some Christians said the body, sex, physical expressions of love, are evil, dirty, ungodly. John Paul has shown how they can reveal much about the deepest mysteries of the human person and ultimately of God himself.

The joining of Adam and Eve as one flesh also highlights the social complexity of sex and marriage: people leave one family to form another, but in the process they bring together the families from which they came, the ‘in-laws', i.e. people who are now related by law. Through procreation, not only the couple themselves but those in-laws then become ‘blood relatives' to each other.

But why is the Genesis story so insistent that nothing will satisfy the man's deepest longings except a woman. The thought seems to be this: man and woman differ in complementary ways: each is so structured as to need the other and to find completion only through union with the other. Thus ‘male' and ‘female' can be understood only in terms of each other, the contrast and reciprocality of the pair. And because sexual union is so significantly different a way of touching for male and female, the very sexual act reveals something of the complementarity between the sexes. But there are lots of other ways in which men are said to be from Mars and women from Venus. This is not, of course, a justification for oppressive stereotypes: the idea of the creation of humankind in two sorts as equal partners should dignify both sexes and invite both to express qualities like gentleness and strength, activity and receptivity, in appropriate ways.

Another point worth gleaning from the story of Eden: God saw that what he had made was good. Whatever some people have said at various times, the body and sexual love are God-made things and they are good things. Our natures and destinies, revealed in and through our bodies, are created in the image and likeness of God. With them comes enormous power and potential, privilege and promise. Adam and Eve are told by God to be fruitful and multiply, to engage physically; and they are told to take command of the earth, the physical world around them, as its stewards and beneficiaries. Rather than fearing its power, its physicality, sex is to be enjoyed and celebrated: Christianity should be inviting more and better sex, not less and guiltier sex.

That said, of course, the same story tells us of our brokenness. The original man and woman sin against God, each other, themselves, creation. In the process they mess up their relationships with God, each other, themselves, creation. They become disintegrated. This is what John Paul II calls ‘historical man and woman'. It is to restore the harmony with God, each other, ourselves and all creation that God comes with his redeeming power we call grace; above all, that God comes in Jesus Christ. He it is who redeems our love, live, sexuality. He takes upon himself our flesh that he might share in all its delights and strengths, but also its temptations, vulnerability, even death. The Word-made-flesh makes his home amongst us and goes with us even into the grave. And from the cross and the tomb and sacramental body he promises us healing in this life and resurrection of the body, indeed of all that we are, in the life to come.

That is extraordinary Good News. But as we make our pilgrimage through this life, we continue to live with the complexities and consequences of our good but damaged natures, capable of so much yet weak and confused at times. We need to explore anew not just what we are in our created natures but what we, including our bodies, are for.

4. We are what we do with our bodies

So, the Judeo-Christian tradition and sound philosophy insist, we are our bodies. We are also what we do with our bodies. For if the body and those things which it signifies about our psychology and spirituality are largely givens, basic to our natures, there is much else about us that we make for ourselves. Our choices, including our sexual activity, our procreation and our fundamental commitments such as marriage and family, are self-creative. How? Because choices predispose us to further choices of the same or a similar sort or within the same horizons; they make certain things come more or less easily next time around; they make us into particular kinds of persons. Right choices make further right choices easier; wrong choices make further wrong choices more likely next time around. What we do, and the habits we get into, affect our identity, relationships and destiny. That is why we call some people life-savers and others murderers, some lovers and others rapists: they do certain things and those things affect who they are.

The classical wisdom was that some things such as love-giving in friendship and marriage, life-giving in parenting and nurturing, truth-telling in communication, and so on, are objectively basic to human beings. They are what we need to flourish and are why we choose what we do. We don't choose these values, they choose us, as it were. Ethics, on this view, is simply the pattern for living ‘the good life', a reasonable life, a life that will, whatever hardships it involves, ensure our ultimate fulfilment. Rather than being a matter of personal preference or the imposition of some external authority, ethics tell us what our choices will make us, and challenge us to be more truly human, authentically ourselves, and so genuinely happy. And that includes being happy with and in our bodies. What we choose, then, are not the values and norms themselves, but if and how we will respond to them. It is not just that we our bodies, but that we are what we do with our bodies.

5. We say things with our bodies

What we do with our bodies also says something. Our bodies can be a means of communication, of conversation, through dress, eye contact, facial features, dance, mime, gesture. Sexual activity is part of bodily self-expression: it tells people things, especially about ourselves. So the Bible describes sex as language or knowledge: a revelation of the self, the language of self-giving and of personal commitment.

Sexual intimacy can be a beautiful form of human expression in which each explores the other emotionally and physically, forming a special bond of trust, wantedness and love. We can say with sex honestly, “I love you, I give you myself completely, as I am; I let you see me, as I am; I invite you to be part of me; I trust you not to hurt me”. Sex can unite in conversation, communicate feelings, hopes and promises, tell a love story, a life story, be an experience of union and transcendence.

But sex can also cloud thinking, become self-centred, exploitative, manipulative, oppressive, humiliating, obsessive, even violent. We can lie with sex, saying “I love you, I give you myself completely”, but with our fingers crossed, really meaning “just while its fun” or “just for tonight” or “as long as it gives me pleasure”. It is can be a specially powerful kind of lie, told with the whole person, physically and emotionally. Thus the sexual language can be an occasion for, a means to, and an expression of the most noble and other-directed side of our nature. On the other hand, it can be used to tell a lie, allowing or excusing using another person to masturbate in or with.

What, then, is the truth we tell by sex? Traditionally Christians have understood sex to have two, inseparable dimensions or significances. First, bodily, sexual self-giving is ‘making love'. It represents a choice of the good of friendship, a purpose of giving and receiving love, of being united with another person; it constitutes us as ‘lovers' in our identity, relationships and destiny; and this kind of union is a unique form of communication of love by touch. Secondly, bodily, sexual self-giving also represents a choice of the good of life, a purpose of giving and receiving life, to the other and from the other and through the other; it constitutes us as potential parents in our identity, relationships and destiny. Sexual union is a unique form of communication by touch, not just of love but also of life. Sex is, in fact, the only kind of conversation, language, touching, which both unites people ‘as one flesh' and also gives life to a new human person. The same sexual kind of touch which most intimately unites simultaneously makes life-giving possible, so that the couple, formerly united only through affections and promises, can actually become blood relations through their child.

Of course, there are many ways of developing a deep and loving relationship without sex, and of relating sexually without genital sex. But on the traditional view (genital) sex which does not say love and life is not good sex, not reasonable sex, not honest sex; if we seek to exclude either, by damaging our bodies or our sexual acts, permanently or temporarily, we are having sex ‘with our fingers crossed'; we are telling a lie or make-believe with body language. So too when we engage in unloving intercourse with our spouse, or fornication or adultery with someone who is not our spouse, or pornography or masturbation or incest or rape… Christian faith and experience teach that the full expression of sexual love is when a married couple give themselves to each other honestly and completely: any other use of sexuality is a diminishment, impoverishment, debasement of the sexual language, at most imitating marital sexual love, but in the process demeaning both marriage and the persons themselves, their faculties and language.

And this is where the crunch comes for many people. Most are happy enough with sentimental talk about the significance of sexual love, as long as this is some kind of distant ideal. But we are less happy with the notion that anything less is an impoverishment and unreasonable and that this has immediate, practical implications for what we should choose and do.

7. Chastity or sexual integrity

The virtue of ‘chastity' has had a bad press in recent years. It has a name for being a moralizing policeman, a frigid prude denying her sexuality altogether or ‘lying back and thinking of England', a schizoid Jeckel-and-Hyde constantly at war with himself, a spirituality of repression. Well if chastity is that, it is a vice rather than a virtue, something which does us violence rather than integrating and freeing us.

Another term for chastity might be sexual integrity. Chastity or sexual integrity heightens, liberates and integrates our sensuality, passions, emotions, affections, sexual desires. It is that character trait that makes both for coherence between our sexual choices and our total moral life (the me-making part of moral choice), and for honesty and integrity in our use of the sexual language (the me-telling part). Chastity is saying what you mean and meaning what you say with sex. Its rôle is so to integrate the various dimensions of sexuality into one's life as to put it at the service of human happiness. It enables us to put a loving and intelligent order into our sexual passions, to temper and direct them so that they harmonize with our life as a whole, making us particular kinds of sexual persons: tender, warm, affectionate; passionate without being brutal, self-expressive without being exploitative, strong yet gentle, serving rather than harming the other. So it is a doing virtue rather than an avoiding virtue, an empowerment rather than a restraint on the free expression of love, a precondition to happiness rather than an enemy of it.

Consider for a moment the characters in Lord of the Rings , especially our latest movie instalment, The Return of the King. The friendships of our heroes are deep and lasting. The fidelity of Sam to Frodo, for instance, is inspiring, as is that of Merry and Pippin. All the good relationships are chaste. Some flow from or lead to marriage. Others tell of friendships and of single life. Tolkein did not know the rules of contemporary television and movies. Had he known them Aragorn would have hopped into bed with both the elfin Arwen and the princess Eowyn (cross-dressing as a soldier) and the hobbits would have starred in the Gay Mardi Gras and lived happily ever after in a polygamous gay marriage.

But in Middle Earth chastity is for everyone, at least every good and noble person, and unsurprisingly given Tolkein's deep Catholic faith, this reflects a claim of the Christian Gospel. It is not only a virtue for ‘holy men' like Gandalf or driven men like Frodo. We all need to cherish and reverence the goods at stake in sex, marriage and family life, according to our particular vocation and for the good of self and others. So single people, married couples, consecrated celibates – all must face temptations against chastity and integrate their sexuality into their married and parental love. This will not be achieved effortlessly; for many people it will involve a constant struggle against desire and habit.

So there is a real need to explore for ourselves and evangelise others regarding this crucial virtue for the sexual person – a liberating if difficult integration of character and authenticity of action, and one which will require the development of commonsense habits, a constant openness to grace, counsel of wise others, all in the face of temptation and fallings of various kinds. Sexual frustration may still be commonplace for many: here we bump up against the perennial problem of suffering, of unfulfilled desire. Sexual integrity may help, but it will not eliminate this. What will be essential is the support of the Christian community, fellows in the great struggle with temptation, and the support of God's divine gifts of a teaching church with sacraments of healing and strengthening.

Our world is at a cross-roads. As John Paul II has so incisively put it, we must choose between ‘a civilization of life and love' and a culture of lies and of death. Or in a more recent movie idiom, between the Fellowship of the Ring on the one hand and Sauron's realm of Mordor on the other. It is a choice we make not just with our hearts and minds but with our bodies too. Do we believe and are we willing to live and to preach the Good News about the sacredness, dignity and responsibilities of love, life and sex, marriage and the family?

1. See Angelo Scola , “Il disegno di Dio sulla persona, sul matrimonio e sulla famiglia: riflessione sintetica,” Anthropotes 15(2) (1999), 313-358 on the denial of the humanum , interchangeable sexualities and the androgeny of modern life.

2. Jeffrey Stout, Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas , The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame: UP, 1981); Alasdair MacIntyre , After Virtue (2nd ed, London: Duckworth, 1984); Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self (London: Norton, 1984); Robert Bellah , Habits of the Heart (New York, Harper and Row, 1985); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: the Language of Morals and their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). Cf. Joyce Little, The Church and the Culture War: Secular Anarchy or Sacred Order (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995); Bryce Christensen, Utopia Against the Family (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990); Michael Novak , “Abandoned in a toxic culture,” Crisis 10 (1992), 16-17; the several contributions in Kenneth Whitehead (ed), Marriage and the Common Good (Sound Bend in : St Augustine's Press, 2001).

3. Peter Singer , “Heavy Petting,” http://www.nerve.com/Opinions/Singer/heavyPetting/, reviewing Midas Dekkers , Dearest Pet: On Bestiality (trans. Paul Vincent, London: Verso, 1994); Singer , “The beast and the bees,” Weekend Australian 21 April 2001, R1; cf. Kathryn Lopez, “Peter Singer Strikes Again: This could be your kid's teacher,” National Revi ew 5 March 2001; Jonah Goldberg , “Taking Singer Seriously: Don't do it,” National Revi ew 14 March 2001.

4. Survey after survey the world over show that people are less inclined than they were a generation or two ago to make sexual fidelity, lifelong marriage and parenthood their personal goals. Motherhood is no longer seen as even part-constitutive of womanhood, or fatherhood of masculinity. The proportion of people who regard marriage and children as burdensome and restrictive has more than doubled in a generation. And interestingly the same surveys show that the proportion of people who regard sacrifice as a positive moral virtue has more than halved. Cf . Barbara Whitehead , “Dan Quayle was right,” Atlantic Monthly 271(4) (April 1993) cited in Little , op .cit., pp. 103-5; Mary Eberstadt , “Home-alone America,” Policy Review 107 (June 2001).

5. E.g. Larry Bumpass and James Sweet , Cohabitation, Marriage and Union Stability: Preliminary Findings (Madison Wis: Center for Demography and Ecology, 1995); Institute of Family Studies (Australia), Family Formation Study (1991).

6. E.g. John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio: Apostolic Exhortation on the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World (1981), §6; Pontifical Council for the Family, The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality: Guidelines for Education within the Family (1995), §§92, 136; John Paul II, Evangelium vitæ : Encyclical on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life (1995), §15.

7. Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, William E. May and John Finnis , “‘Every marital act ought to be open to new life': toward a clearer understanding,” Thomist 52 (1988): 365-426; Germain Grisez , Living a Christian Life (Quincy IL: Franciscan Press, 1993), ch. 8; William E. May, Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life (Huntington ind : Our Sunday Visitor, 2000), ch 4.

8. Cf . Benedict Ashley op, Theologies of the Body (Braintee MA: John XXIII Medical-Moral Research & Education Center, 1985); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, Columbia UP Press, 1988).

9. John Paul II, The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston, Books & Media, 1997); Richard Hogan & John LeVoir , Covenant of Love: Pope John Paul II on Sexuality, Marriage and Family in the Modern World (New York, Image Books, 1984); Mary Shivanandan, Crossing the Threshold of Love: A New Vision of Marriage (Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1999); Christopher West, Good News about Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions about Catholic Teaching (Ann Arbor MI: Servant Publications, 2000; there is now an Australian edition also); Christopher West, Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary on John Paul II's “Gospel of the Body” (Boston: Pauline Books, 2003).

Some useful websites include: http://www.catholicculture.com | http://www.nfpoutreach.org | http://www.purelove.net | http://www.theologyofthebody.net