Sex Au Naturel (5 page)
Authors: Patrick Coffin
The older approach may be harmonized with the new by seeing them as two beams, one standing vertically, the other lying horizontally. The two intersect, like the cross, the sign of contradiction par excellence.
Catholics have always believed that the doctrines of the Faith aren’t dependent on particular ways of explaining them, nor on positive polling data. If
Humanae Vitae
bears the whiff of divine truth, it is because God has guaranteed by the Holy Spirit that the teaching is His. But other problems have appeared, which stand as a threat to accepting the teaching. One is worth singling out.
In the decades since the appearance of
Humanae Vitae
, a false god has arisen that poses a tremendous challenge to those wishing to understand—let alone practice—the historic Christian teaching on artificial birth control. This false god’s popularity shows every sign of spreading. A whole parallel religion has been thrown up in its support, and in the spread of devotion to it. It has a clergy (Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt,
et al
), sacraments (pornography, fornication, adultery), a special rite of absolution (abortion), a devotional practice (masturbation), a creed (the Playboy philosophy), and even an evangelical revival (the Sexual Revolution).
What is it?
It is the non-procreative orgasm.
As false idols go, it makes a kind of diabolical sense. If you were Satan and you wanted to draw people away from the Lord of Life, what better way to bait them than with a plausible counterfeit? Since every normal person past puberty desires sex, it’s a stroke of genius to put into his or her mind that the spark of life is identical to the Flame.
And so it was that loving and giving were replaced by lusting and taking, lust being the inverted equivalent of “all-sufficient grace” in the cult of the non-procreative orgasm. As long as the natural tie between sex and babies remains severed, the cult can flourish. Nothing like the imagined sound of a baby crying to spoil the picnic!
Father John McGoey was a kindred spirit of Dorothy Day. She mentions him in her autobiography,
The Long Loneliness
. The Scarboro Foreign Missionary to China wrote over a dozen books on family life and sexual development. One of the many McGoeyisms that have stuck with me is this:
There is nothing good about pleasure; it’s merely enjoyable. And there is nothing bad about pain; it’s merely unpleasant
. How many sexual and relational problems would be solved overnight if this were understood?
McGoey, who died in 1995, understood well that chastity is vital to personal happiness. Chastity is to personal love, he said, what budgeting is to finance. One side effect of contraception has been a lowering of respect for—even the need for—the virtue of chastity. The very term “making love” suggests that love can be manufactured by sex. With God’s help, life can be made; but love must be willed. Sex is no more inherently loving than a salute is inherently respectful (e.g., a soldier may despise the officer he salutes).
You can guess where this is going: Without contraception and the eclipse of chastity it provoked, the Sexual Revolution would never have gotten out of first gear. Without the ease and short-term convenience of the Pill, the Sexual Revolution is a Ferrari with an empty tank.
Scripturally, the inability to distinguish sex from love, which is to say, the immaturity that refuses to embrace necessary pains and avoid destructive pleasures, is known as a stronghold (2 Cor. 10:4). The only sure victory over a stronghold or attachment to the idol of false sexuality is a corresponding surrender to the love of the Creator of real sexuality—the Christian life is the surrender of our will over to God’s as we enter into Christ’s surrender to the Father. From this surrender comes victory over all created things (addictions, people, vainglory, temptations, and false idols) that prevent us from loving God aright, and our neighbor as ourselves.
Apart from commenting on the negative reaction to his encyclical, Pope Paul did not vigorously defend it. The only other major work he produced after that was the 1975 Apostolic Exhortation on Evangelization,
Evangelii Nuntiandi
. It wasn’t until Pope John Paul II made the teaching the cornerstone of his papacy did the message of
Humanae Vitae
get its groove back and, with that groove, a new chance at acceptance.
Acceptance tends to be related to one’s view of authority, which, in turn, can be tied to a general crisis of faith. This was certainly true for me before my escape from dissent.
1
^
For a succinct summary of the early controversies, see Janet E. Smith,
Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 7–18.
2
^
George A. Kelly examines the major players who led, and were led by, this sudden shift in “The Bitter Pill the Catholic Community Swallowed,” in
Human Sexuality: What the Church Teaches Today
(Jamaica Plain, MA: Daughters of Saint Paul, 1979), 13–101.
3
^
Arius (died AD 336) taught that since Jesus is the Son of God, He must be younger somehow, and therefore not truly divine. The Church’s denunciation of Arianism in the Council of Nicea in AD 325 led indirectly to the development of the Nicene Creed.
4
^
“After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him. Jesus said to the twelve, ‘Will you also go away?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God’” (Jn. 6:66–69).
5
^
See Patrick Coffin, “Code Blue: Hollywood and Self-Censorship,” in
Saint Austin Review,
vol. 2, October, 2001. Films that earned Oscar nominations from 1965 to 1973 reflect a decidedly permissive shift in the moral content of American cinema: from
A Man for All Seasons
and
The Sound of Music
to the R-rated
Midnight Cowboy
and the X-rated
Last Tango In Paris
in less than eight years. Named for a 1920s Postmaster General, the Hays Code was a set of self-imposed censorship guidelines for studios that governed the moral content of American cinema from 1934–1965. Led for many years by a feisty Catholic layman named Joseph Breen, the Code was closely affiliated with the Catholic Legion of Decency, which was praised by Pius XI in the first papal encyclical on the media,
Vigilanti Curae
(1937).
6
^
Cited by James Cardinal Francis Stafford in his lucid personal recollection “The Year of the Peirasmòs: 1968,” originally published in
L’Osservatore Romano
on July 26, 2008. Accessed at
http://www.calcatholic.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?id=2782389d-da2c-40ce-8d7f-071d2345291c
.
7
^
Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World
Gaudium et Spes
(December 7, 1965), no. 51 (hereafter sited in text as
GS
)
.
8
^
Footnote 14 reads, “Certain questions which need further and more careful investigation have been handed over, at the command of the Supreme Pontiff, to a commission for the study of population, family, and births, in order that, after it fulfills its function, the Supreme Pontiff may pass judgment. With the doctrine of the magisterium in this state, this holy synod does not intend to propose immediately concrete solutions.” This is no endorsement of dissent, but seems to convey a sense of tentativeness.
9
^
Interview with Dr. Germain Grisez by Ann Carey in “How Dissenters Tried to Sway the Birth Control Teaching,” in
Our Sunday Visitor
, August 3, 2003, accessed at
http://www.osv-publishing.com.periodicals/show-article.asp?pid=830
. Grisez worked with John Ford, SJ, who served on the Papal Commission.
10
^
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen,
The Heart of a Pope
, taped homily, Saint Agnes Church, 1979, courtesy Ministro-Media.
11
^
As published in Robert McClory,
Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission and How
Humanae Vitae C
hanged the Life of Patty Crowley and the Future of the Chu
rch (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1995), 171–187.
12
^
McClory,
Turning Point,
138. McClory’s one-sided account is relentlessly sympathetic to the part of dissent.
13
^
Sheed,
The Church and I,
243.
14
^
J. Budziszewski in “Contraception: A Symposium,” in
First Things
, December 1998, 18–19.
15
^
Pope John Paul II, Encyclical letter on the Regulation of Birth
Humanae Vitae
(July 25, 1968), no. 12, (hereafter cited in text as HV )
16
^
For a concise overview of this shift, see John S. Grabowski,
Sex and Virtue: An Introduction to Sexual Ethics
( Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2003).
Chapter Two
Is my gloom after all, shade of His hand outstretched caressingly?
—Francis Thompson,
The Hound of Heaven
In the halcyon days of my dissent, I had no real arguments against this teaching of the Church. What I had was an attitude.
I didn’t like it.
In most respects my Catholic upbringing was typical. While Nova Scotia had no parochial school system, my public school education included weekly catechism classes, and my Sundays included Mass with my father. My mother entered the Church twenty years after getting married, having been instructed by the now-retired Bishop Colin Campbell of Antigonish. The Catholic charismatic renewal and the Cursillo Movement swept through Eastern Canada in the late 1970s, and with them came many spiritual blessings to the local Church and to our family.
But I was a more rambunctious kid than most, and rather less teachable. At one Mass, as the procession made its way past our pew, my dad tried to settle my five-year-old self down by pointing to the priest. Catching sight of his cape-like vestments, I supplied amusement for the congregation and mortification for my father by hollering, “Look, Dad, Batmaaaan!”
But when it came to the Consecration, I remember feeling a strange sort of awe. Though I was too young to know why, I took the light aroma of incense as a token of something entirely “other” going on in that sacred moment. I was nowhere near able to understand transubstantiation, but I somehow knew that, in the hushed moment after the shimmering bells sound had quieted, God was
there
.
My uncle, a permanent deacon, got a bunch of us involved in various youth events. A major turning point was a Teen Challenge retreat weekend (the youth wing of Cursillo) in which God gave me the grace of faith in Jesus Christ as God’s personalized invitation to be in a relationship with Him. And I immediately wanted to know more about the Church, which had provided this life-changing experience, and to get my hands on as much theology as I could.