Sexuality, Gender and Priesthood

To be Catholic has always meant to be open to the whole truth, to find truth in all situations. The Church, as a human institution, has never completely actualized this. No human institution can or has. This is why the great theologian Karl Rahner used to write that we are always systematizing, but we never have a system.
A system is a closed reality, and as a close reality it will always shut out part of the whole of reality. For this reason, a system is a partial reality and as a partial reality, is always in need of updating. There are many who are threatened by this. There are some who are so threatened by it that they react with outrage.

Vatican II sought to update the Church. There were those priests and laity who resisted it then and there are those who resist it now. There are some who are waiting for the “Vatican II generation” to die off so that the Church can go back to the glory days of repressing religious liberty, repressing dissent, controlling society, hating Jews, and making the whole world Catholic. I hope they don’t want to reinstitute the crusades. There are some who accept Vatican II, but think that the Church is not doing enough to combat the “dictatorship of relativism” that they think is taking over Western society. I think for conservatives of both stripes any really negative news about the Church threatens them because it undermines the authority of the Church in the eyes of the world. Both groups, children of God, loved by Christ, are very nervous about further updating—ordaining married men, ordaining women, nuancing Church teaching about homosexuality, accepting the use of birth control by married couples.

It seems that they think that the Church can be a closed system, ignoring the flow of time and the new realities that time brings—more intelligent understandings of sexuality and the human body. It seems that they continue to resist the idea that humanity is progressing. Yes, it is true that as human beings progress there are moments of regress—some brought about by conservatives, some brought about by liberals, some just brought about by collective human sin—greed, hatred, fear of the other.

As an American Catholic, I cannot help but ponder the great progressive reality of our nation. We ushered in an era of religious liberty when the Vatican taught that religious liberty was an error. It took almost two hundred years for the Catholic Church to catch up with the American Declaration of Independence and the American Bill of Rights. In the end, it was the writings of John Courtney Murray, an American Jesuit influenced by the non-Catholics who had instituted and lived religious freedom for two hundred years, that convinced the Second Vatican Council to accept religious liberty as a fundamental human right. For years the Bishops had suppressed Murray’s writings. In the end, he won out. If he had not, the Church would still be trying to make Catholicism the official religion of every country of the world, including the USA.

The point is that at Vatican II, thanks to lessons learned from non-Catholics, the Church changed its teaching. The Church progressed. It is now time for the Church to learn again. Once again theologians who are learning from outside of the Catholic tradition are being suppressed or ignored. Theologians who argue that it is the humanity of Christ and the baptism of the person that allow for a person to be ordained rather than some attachment to the maleness of Jesus. Theologians, citing surveys that address the difficulties of celibate life, who hope the Church will go back to a thousand year old practice of allowing married men to be ordained. Theologians and psychologists who question the Church’s position that homosexuality is in some way disordered.

These are touchy issues. Anything dealing with sexuality is, but look at what happens when the Church stamps a gigantic “we have already figured this out” onto a very complex, evolving issue, look at what happens to the priesthood.
I think most reasonable people who know priests know that most of them are very good people. Many of them struggle with celibacy. Is this struggle with celibacy part of what has brought about the various pedophilia scandals that have and will continue to shock the world? In some cases, perhaps. In most cases, the pedophilia scandal really concerns a very perverse understanding of authority and power and how disordered authority and power can disorder one’s understanding of sex. It also is connected to a very strange residual understanding of the Church as some kind of “perfect society,” the image of which must be maintained or the faithful will lapse into the “dictatorship of relativism.”

To effectively help people resist complete relativism and nihilism, I think that the Church has to come to terms with what is natural. I will reach back into our tradition and I will help it come to terms with reality. According to St. Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of the natural law, one ought to do what is good. The human goods are those toward which we are naturally inclined—life, family life, knowledge, reasonable conduct and society. When it came to understanding family life and reasonable conduct, Thomas studied what he knew—the science of the time. If he were alive today, he would avidly read the most recent studies of human sexuality. Thomas came to the conclusion that all human sexual acts must be open to procreation because it seemed to him that that was what happened in the natural world, which for him was found in the local barnyard. He did not know that monkeys, our closest natural relative, engage in sexual acts which are not procreative but which perform important social functions.

I also think that Aquinas, if he were alive today, would study as much of the social sciences and philosophy as he could. He would have learned much about history and historical consciousness. He would learn that an important aspect of the nature of human society is that it evolves. It changes. Finally, after learning of all of the suffering that we have witnessed over thousands of years, Aquinas would conclude, with Jesus, that what is good for human beings is love and sexuality is an important part of human love.

If we all take a moment and reflect on how our gay and lesbian neighbors love, how much they love their kids (family life for Aquinas), how much they give to society, if we all take a moment and reflect on the gifts of all of the women who have discerned an authentic call to the priesthood, if we all take a moment and listen to the married men who have discerned an authentic call to the priesthood, and if we reflect on the ways that very bizarre attitudes about authority and power have dominated the Catholic church even up to today, we would admit that it would help the Church to listen to many of the modern and post-modern psychological and cultural studies of human sexuality and gender. At a time when the Vatican denied the truth about the disgusting sexual exploitation of children, it is time to be Catholic—to be open to the whole truth. It is time to update Catholic understandings of sexuality, gender and priesthood.