Why is the Catholic Experience of Sex so Different from the Protestant Experience of Sex?

. . . It’s the different image of God that Catholics hold.

The following description from Fr. Greeley (taken from How to Save the Catholic Church?), as much as I might disagree with him on sundry theological prescriptions, is as different from the Protestant alone with the alone God as can be:

The power of the sexual drive propels us to intimacy, to union with another, to the formation of a community rooted in love, which becomes a model of the committed, passionate love of God. Our religious sensibility helps us appreciate this power of the sexual drive to reveal how community should be lived if it is to be truly human, if it is to be ‘in the image of God.’ The cosmic union that is the goal of sacramental (revelatory) sex is a model from which we learn how to live all our human relationships — those among individuals, communities, religious groups, and nations. The intimate relationship of lovers, shored up by passion and commitment, sheds light on how to overcome the mundaneness that can eventually destroy any relationship or community.

There you have it. The Catholic experience of sex is different from the Protestant experience of sex, because they hold different views of how God acts in the world. It should be no surprise that, as a result, they also hold different views of sex, and practice sex differently. I feel like I should say “sex” just once more, because sex is not something you see frequently on religious blogs. Your Protestant friends will never look at you the same again!

This whole discussion started with the post Increasingly Secularized Americans Are Sexless, But Catholics Might Be Bucking the Sex Trends. So if this discussion tickles you, then you might want to go back to it and read forward. The present post is the third in the series. There will be more. I might eventually get around to finally discussing Jean-Luc Marion’s uber-Catholic The Erotic Phenomenon, which would nicely fill out my earlier argument that phenomenology is the present day de facto Catholic philosophy.

The following scene from Monty Python’s monumental The Meaning of Life, much like the rest of their work does, contains a lot of truth (in this case about how Protestants differ from Catholics):

If you’re looking for something completely different go to: Extraterrestrials Aren’t a Threat to Theology, Because They Aren’t New to the Ancient Church

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