Our People

Catholics and Sex

Open House Series, Catholic Club Menai

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
5 July 2005

1. Context and challenge
At the turn of the millennium the Medical Journal of Australia invited some experts to speculate on where we will go with love, life and sex in the years ahead. IVF providers Robert Jansen and Carl Wood argued that we have for decades now been gradually unravelling the ancient connections between love, life and sex and that in the years ahead we will separate them altogether. Just as “the contraceptive pill has assisted the development of recreational sex”, they wrote, so IVF will enable such ‘unorthodox’ but advantageous practices as single and lesbian parenting, eugenics and designer babies. A whole panoply of sexual options including “virtual sex” with a computer-generated 3-D image will be the way of the future. Natural sex and especially natural conception may come to be seen as altogether too unpredictable and… unhygienic.

Entrepreneurs of the lucrative embryo industry are always on the lookout for ways to extend their market and thus to break down any lingering taboos against the disintegration of life-making from love-making. Any caution is dismissed as ‘religious’ and therefore not be taken seriously in a modern, secular community; any government regulation or professional ‘interference’ is deplored. The marriage-based natural family and the sanctity of life, until now recognized in international and national laws and supported in umpteen subtle and more overt ways by culture and institutions are, on this view, obsolete.

Such articles and cases 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 it has been bad by any means. We have for instance made progress in our understanding of the dignity and rights of women and children, the importance of love and intimacy in marriage and family, the positive values of sex. But amongst the more problematical features with which a Christian vision of the human person and relationships must now contend I would mention four:

1. 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. 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! 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.
   
3. A consequence of individualism and consumerism has been a reluctance to engage in self-sacrifice or commit to long-term obligations to God or others. 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, the ‘vocations crisis’ in marriage and family life is arguably more grave than that for clergy and religious. Fewer and fewer people are deciding to marry at all. 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 challenge as well as a tragedy for many individuals, including people we all know and love.
   
   Sadly our culture tells young people to experiment sexually with multiple partners and kinds of sex, supposedly ‘safely’ (that is with a condom), and to live with several partners for short or extended periods, in order to have broad sexual experience and to seek an elusive ‘compatibility’  before or instead of marriage. The wisdom of the age is that this means people going into marriage will know what they are doing when they do so and so be more likely to succeed. The sociological evidence is of course in the opposite direction: those who cohabit are much less likely to marry at all and those cohabiters who do marry have radically reduced marital ‘sticking power’. The reasons are complex but one that is clear is that young people are being habituated in non-commitment. Having seen many relationships fail they are afraid to commit. Then they spend years in temporary commitments or non-commitments, learning how to have sexual relations and even how to live together without giving themselves unconditionally to the other. In a world in which nothing is for life’ any more – relationships, jobs, houses, ideals – we are training our next generation to live a life in which everything is temporary, conditional, revisable: a life without any life-long commitments.
   
4. 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’ or ‘contra-life’ 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
In such a context the Church has great difficulty in communicating her Gospel on matters such as love, life and sex, marital and family ethics, especially to young people such as yourselves. Yet 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 – offers us important insights into these very questions which we never hear about from the media and the other makers of public opinion. This tradition of reflection, brought to a new height by the extraordinary ‘Theology of the Body’ of Pope John Paul II 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 somebody. We identify and know people by what they look and sound like. If someone punches me or kisses or tickles or has sex with my body, they are doing this to me. Whatever happens to our bodies – sickness and health, hunger and satiation, location and movement, passions and perceptions – all affect the whole person. It is impossible to have any of these experiences just as bodies and not be affected personally. So our bodies are not just extrinsic instruments, costumes, machines or prisons for some internal ‘real me’ to use. They are constitutive of our being and they express or reveal us to others. Of course there is a spiritual dimension to us also. But like all animals, we are our bodies. All human life as we know it is embodied; we are and, according to Christian faith, even after our death we will through the resurrection be again, bodily creatures. However ‘spiritual’ we are, certain bodily things always bring us back down to earth!

Gender is one of those bodily givens. This is one of the insights of the Genesis story of human origins: that God created ‘original man’ as man and woman, “male and female he created them”. There are, as it were, two different models, two different ways of being human, bodily creatures: male and female. Sex is not just an optional add-on to an otherwise asexual being. Man and woman differ in the very depths of their being, not merely incidentally; and their maleness or femaleness is essential to their constitution and identity, permeating and colouring their activities and relationships. There are plenty of contemporary writers on these themes, such as those who say men are from Mars and women from Venus. One example that has struck me from my own observations is how early infants 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”. Contrary to Professor Singer’s proposals, Adam finds no fitting helpmate amongst the animals. He is / 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. Man and woman are so structured as to need each 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. 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 many ways in which men and women differ. But in Genesis, at least, this is no excuse for oppressive stereotypes: Adam and Eve are both made in the image of God and created as equal partners.

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’. 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.

Another point worth gleaning from the story of Eden: “God saw all he had made and indeed it was very good”. Adam and Eve are told by God to be fruitful and multiply, and so to engage physically; in this way they will take command of the earth, as its stewards and beneficiaries. Rather than fearing its power, its physicality, sex and the rest of the created order are to be enjoyed and celebrated. Christianity, one might dare say, should be inviting better not 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 become disintegrated, 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 grace, above all in Jesus Christ. He it is who redeems our lives, our loves, our 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 the Eucharist 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! Compare it to Peter Singer’s taboo-free sex with pets or the IVF industry’s partner-free sex with computers: the Gospel really is so much better news than the demeaning version of sex and love so often served up to us by our culture. But we are children of our culture too, and however noble our bodily natures we are weak and confused at times. We need periodically 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.

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.

Many today would respond with something like Humpty-Dumpty’s claim in Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” We give sex the meaning we choose, whether by private choice or agreement. It has no meaning intrinsic to itself, no natural significance. But from the classical perspective the “sex is what I make it” approach is a severely privatized notion of the language of love, alienated from faith, community and tradition; it is also dangerously abstracted from our biology, our animality, failing to do justice to the objective power and significance of the sexual body language, the ideas it inevitably expresses. We debase our sexual language, devalue the currency of sex, and underestimate its power, every time we try to make it express something different from its inherent meaning.

5. What sex says
So far, so good. We are our bodies; so what we do with our bodies affects who we are and what we say. The sexual act or language has a natural significance: it is not merely what we make it. While there has not been space to develop these thoughts fully here, they will upon reflection make sense to many people. But now a problem arises: if sexual self-expression is a natural language which can be used and abused, what does it naturally communicate, objectively signify, intrinsically mean?

Traditionally Christians have understood sex to have two, inseparable dimensions or significances. First, bodily, sexual self-giving is ‘making love’ – something our culture vaguely remembers in the language it still uses for sex. It represents a choice to give and receive love through union with another person. It constitutes us as ‘lovers’ in our identity, relationships and destiny. 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. Sex constitutes us not just as lovers but also as potential parents in our identity, relationships and destiny. Once again it is a unique form of communication in this respect, the only mathematics by which 1+1 = 1, and then 1+1 = 3. The same act which unites people ‘as one flesh’ can also give life to a new human person.

The ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s began the disintegration of the sexual act, of the life-giving dimension from the love-giving dimension, which has led us a generation later to hear voices for pet-sex and computer-sex and umpteen other ways of disintegrating life from love, and love from marriage. Much of this was well-meaning if rather naïve. The prophets of the sexual revolution promised that lots of (sterile) sex would be a cure-all for almost everything: sexual tension, loveless marriages, unwanted pregnancies, even war. But a generation later we seem more sex-crazed than ever, our marriages are collapsing at an alarming rate, unwanted pregnancy rates have soared fuelling previously unthinkable rates of abortion and ex-nuptial child-bearing and child-raising, and there is no sign of us giving up on war. Instead of ‘making love not war’ as the flower-power brigade proposed we have adopted the ‘all’s fair in love and war’ mentality and engage in both with equal pragmatism and abandon.

To say that sex should say both life and love is not to deny that 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 or homosexual acts 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.

6. 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.

Chastity is for everyone, not just monks and nuns. 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 married couples, too, must face temptations against chastity and integrate their sexuality into their married and parental love. This will not be achieved effortlessly, whether you are single or married. For many people chastity involves a constant struggle against desire and habit—a struggle that may often seem hopeless, even pointless. So there is a real need to explore the nature of this virtue for the sexual person, as 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 especially through the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist, counsel of wise others, all in the face of temptation and fallings of various kinds. Sexual frustration will 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. But the practice and support network of NFP is crucial for couples as are other supports for singles if we are to live chastely in a world influenced by ideas hostile to chastity such as those I outlined at the start of this talk.

But our world is at a cross-roads. As John Paul II put it so incisively put it, we must choose between ‘a civilization of life and love’ and a culture of lies and of death. It is a choice we make with our hearts, minds and bodies. Do we believe the Good News about the sacredness, dignity and responsibilities of love, life and sex, marriage and the family? Are we willing to give it a go, to commit to living it with God’s help?