The headlines, of course, are all about the HHS Mandate and response of the Catholic Bishops to last Friday’s blusterfest by Obama. The accepted narrative on Catholics and sex is, of course, that Catholics are mostly repressed, want to keep women enslaved to pregnancy and deep down they just don’t “get” sex the way the rest of the world does.
All of that is false, of course, particularly the last bit. Catholics “get” sex — they understand it more fully, more deeply and more ecstatically than most people realize because the church has admittedly not been great at teaching what she knows, and even when she does teach it, people don’t avail themselves of the teaching. Have you or your friends ever actually read Pope Paul VI’s brief and frankly prophetic Humanae Vitae?
For the past two weeks the Patheos Bookclub has been talking about Christopher West’s latest book, entitled At the Heart of the Gospel. It is an exploration of the saving power of sex — the “saving power of sex! Imagine that — from someone in a church that supposedly knows nothing about sex and doesn’t like it!
You can read the first chapter here.
Better yet, you can listen to him talk about sex, and love and the theology of the body with Tony Rossi:
“I had eaten from what I call ‘the fast food gospel of the culture’ which promises us immediate gratification for all our desires. But by eating the fast food, I ended up like the guy in the movie ‘Super Size Me.’ He ate McDonald’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a whole month, and he was dying. That’s me in my college years. I was dying inside . . . John Paul’s Theology of the Body takes us into a banquet!”
Check it out. As Dostoyevsky said, “the world will be saved by beauty”.
Tony Rossi is not the only one at Patheos writing about sex:
So is Katrina Fernandez. Here she is writing about Beautiful sex and the Impact of Porn in Marriage
So is Kathryn Lopez who wants to let the church’s teaching on contraception actually be heard in its fullness, not its caricatures. As does Marc Barnes
To boldly go: where John Paul II has led
Also, check out Brandon Vogt’s review of West’s book.
Yeah…we’re all talking sex. And it’s not the message the mainstream keeps telling you it is. It’s deeper, and it’s authentic, and it makes one rich instead of poor, full instead of empty.
CatholicVote: The poor really don’t spend the day copulating, Mr. Kristof
False is rights. Prudery and puritanicalism are protestant phenomena, not Catholic. A Jesuit I once knew said that Catholicism is actually quite sensual, you see this is you spend any time in Southern Europe and visit her churches. But I agree with Anchoress that the narrative is being spun to portray us as “hung up” to further the HHS mandate into acceptance.
Instapundit takes great pleasure in linking to scientific studies which show that married sex is the best sex. Anything to puncture the conventional wisdom of the Left is his purpose, I suspect.
To me, the bishops are so fixed on sex, contraception, and gay marriage because sex is so related to power and authority.
And to bishops, power is very, very important. They want it, and you can’t.
Re: Porn
Actually, a very effective contraceptive is pornography, as well as various sex toys.
Porn and sex toys greatly facilitate having “sex,” and without necessarily having to involve another person. If you’re the only person in the room, there is no way you can conceive. That is a much higher effectiveness rate than other contraceptives like the Pill or condoms.
So if we follow the logic of the anti-Catholic Obamaites, Catholic employers should be required to pay for porn and sex toys, if not also pay for “sex therapists” (aka prostitutes).
Well, you answered your own question in your article. Catholics talk about sex so much because they “get” sex better, more fully, more deeply, more ecstatically than anyone. Better than the all rest of us. And being loving, giving, Christian folk they simply cannot hold back from sharing EVERYTHING they know, feel and “get” with everyone else, over and over, and over, and over. And if their insistence that what sounds, at times, like spiteful venom is actually this loving concern sounds awfully self-serving, well, that’s just another thing that Catholics “get” better than everyone else.
Carry on.
You asked, “Have you or your friends ever actually read Pope Paul VI’s brief and frankly prophetic Humanae Vitae?”
Well, yes — because you have mentioned it more than once over the years, I figured I’d better go read it for myself. I may have to read it again after recent events.