{"id":64,"date":"2012-04-04T13:57:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-04T19:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/04\/front-porch-theology-wondering-about-the-church-and-sexuality\/"},"modified":"2016-05-02T11:12:25","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T17:12:25","slug":"front-porch-theology-wondering-about-the-church-and-sexuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/04\/front-porch-theology-wondering-about-the-church-and-sexuality.html","title":{"rendered":"Front-Porch Theology: Wondering About the Church and Sexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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Last night I sat with my friends on their front porch, enjoying the summery twilight warmth and the explosion of azalea and dogwood blossoms, and passing around copies of the Dayton City Paper<\/i>\u2018s unexpectedly unsnarky and informative cover interview<\/a><\/u> with Archbishop Dennis Schnurr. My friends asked me what I thought of the news<\/a><\/u> that Christoph Cardinal Sch\u00f6nborn, Archbishop of Vienna, had overruled the decision of a pastor to deny an elected position on the parish council to a man living with another man in a registered domestic partnership. The man had appealed the pastor\u2019s ruling to the cardinal, who met personally with the man and his partner. After the meeting, the cardinal says, he rethought his initial instinct to uphold the letter of Church law\u2013which prohibits those living in \u201cmanifest grave sin\u201d from holding Church office\u2013because, having found the man eminently qualified for the position in every other way but his relationship, he asked himself what Jesus would do in a similar situation.<\/p>\n

Cardinal\u00a0Sch\u00f6nborn\u2019s statement has been hailed by liberal Catholics and by gay rights groups as a kind of glasnost<\/i> in the Church\u2019s traditional attitude toward what not-so-liberal Catholics and members of what might be termed straight rights groups tend to call \u201cpracticing homosexuals\u201d (the phrase always makes me want to ask if folks think they\u2019re headed to Carnegie Hall). And of course it\u2019s been met with a storm of outrage and disgust and condemnation by conservatives, and those preoccupied with \u201cthe gay agenda,\u201d and upholders of every jot and tittle of canon law.<\/p>\n

My friends are strong proponents of and participants in traditional marriage. (They\u2019re practicing heterosexuals.) \u201cI don\u2019t see how the cardinal can get away with that,\u201d the wife said last night. \u201cEither there\u2019s a rule or there isn\u2019t. Either the Church teaches that being in a gay relationship is grave sin or it doesn\u2019t.\u201d Her husband was more willing to play the devil\u2019s advocate, at least for the purposes of the conversation. \u201cBut the Gospels are full of incidents where Jesus threw the rule book out the window,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe,\u201d she countered, \u201cbut only when the rule got in the way of the real teaching. What\u2019s the teaching here? Is the Church serious about saying sex outside of a traditional marriage is grave sin, or not?\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the question. And I have to be honest that it\u2019s the question that, of all the questions and doubts and pinches I still experience about Church teaching and practice, came closest to keeping me from reverting. I have found a way to live peaceably with what I still sometimes think is an overemphasis on the anti-abortion part of the seamless garment. I accept as unchangeable mystery the limitation of ordained ministry to men. But the Church\u2019s teaching on what constitutes chastity appropriate to one\u2019s state in life? I gotta tell ya, it\u2019s a stopper. And on the porch last night, it knocked me into silence.<\/p>\n

At that point, my friends\u2019 neighbors strolled by with their dog. \u201cWe\u2019re solving the world\u2019s problems,\u201d I joked. \u201cGood luck with that,\u201d they laughed.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s what I confess out of that front-porch silence. I have absolutely no trouble believing and promoting Church teaching that our sexuality is a gift of God designed to allow us to share in his generous creativity, and \u00a0also to give physical expression to the unique intimacy of committed love. That the cheapening of that gift is a tragedy of human experience and a perversion of God\u2019s intent for us, I have no doubt whatsoever. That we as Catholics have an important and healing message about the sacredness of sexual expression to share with a world in desperate need of it, I know to be truer now than ever. And it\u2019s not just Catholic bloggers who are saying so, as Frank Bruni\u2019s recent\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0review<\/a><\/u> of the HBO show Girls<\/i> bears eloquent witness.<\/p>\n

What I wonder about, in conscience and in reason and in as much humility as I can muster, is not the heart of that teaching, but the belief that the expression of our sexuality\u2013this great and awesome gift of God\u2013is limited to only some people. What other gift of God do we call sin in all but one context? If physical intimacy, which we humans experience as both a powerful drive and a great blessing, is indeed only a good within a marriage between a man and a woman who are, all things such as reproductive capability being equal, open to conception, and is grave sin in any other situation, it\u2019s difficult not to suspect that God designed a good many of us to undergo penitential suffering as a way of life. And every part of what I know and believe about a loving, generous God denies that, so I wonder.<\/p>\n

Can our sexuality drive us to grave sin? You betcha. Any abuse of this gift that exploits, cheapens, wounds the self or another is indeed sinful. And in that arena, we are all vulnerable, the married as well as the single or celibate, the straight as well as the gay. Elizabeth Scalia, in a response<\/a><\/u> to the\u00a0 Sch\u00f6nborn\u00a0statement, rightly takes us to task for seeming to forget that\u2013for emphasizing the sins of homosexual persons while we sometimes appear to gloss over the very real insults to traditional marriage and the sacredness of sexuality by heterosexual persons.<\/p>\n

I would go further in my wondering, though, than Elizabeth does in her corrective. What if, in spite of what the Church has traditionally taught, persons attracted to the same sex are not fundamentally disordered but simply ordered differently? Why would we not want to encourage the same ideal of lifelong commitment, open to the generosity of parenting in the ways that are possible? (I know, I know. This question also questions the Church\u2019s traditional teachings on gender roles and reproductive technologies, not to mention arguments from natural law. I know. But still I ask, and I pray for understanding.) Why, taking it further\u2013and here of course is where I will hear cries of slippery slopes\u2013shouldn\u2019t we concentrate less on making sex itself the sinniest of sins and more on teaching people in all states of life what constitutes commitment and intimacy and generous love for them in their circumstances? I am not advocating opening the sacrament of Matrimony to same-sex couples\u2013still less the acceptance of adultery or pedophilia or bigamy or bestiality or any of the other Well, There You Go<\/i> analogies.\u00a0I am not advocating anything, really, just wondering.<\/p>\n

In the particular case in question, I am wondering if a disabled man so deeply committed to sharing all aspects of his life and love with another man that he has registered a legal partnership, and so deeply committed to his faith that he wants to give his time to the life of his parish, is by nature so manifest and grave a sinner that his gifts must be put aside as unworthy.<\/p>\n

Because, of course, none of us is worthy\u2013either of the gifts God gives us or the love of another human. But if some are unworthier than others, maybe we need to be absolutely clear about it. Maybe we should stop even pretending we can hate the sin and love the sinner if the sin is as constitutive of the sinner\u2019s identity as our experience of sexuality. Maybe we should simply say, at the church door, only the perfectly chaste need apply. Which would leave, pretty much, Jesus and his Mom. I\u2019d say they\u2019d be lonely, but I suspect they\u2019d be off among the less than perfectly chaste rest of us, inviting us to grow in love.<\/p>\n

We weren\u2019t any closer to solving this or any other of the world\u2019s problems when my friends\u2019 neighbors returned from circling the block. The answer to the wife\u2019s question is easy, actually: Yep. The Church considers any sexual relationship outside of traditional marriage a grave sin. I give assent of will to that teaching as I do to every other mystery, though I pray that we can find more charitable ways to proclaim it than the kind of toxic guff that fills comboxes. The question of what Jesus would do is, in Cardinal\u00a0 Sch\u00f6nborn\u2019s mind as in mine, only speculative and always subjective. My other wonderings are harder. I don\u2019t expect them to be answered in this life, and I apologize if they trouble anyone else\u2019s conscience. In the mean time, my soul will sit on the porch and rock and pray.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I sat with my friends on their front porch, enjoying the summery twilight warmth and the explosion of azalea and dogwood blossoms, and passing around copies of the Dayton City Paper\u2018s unexpectedly unsnarky and informative cover interview with Archbishop Dennis Schnurr. My friends asked me what I thought of the news that Christoph […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nFront-Porch Theology: Wondering About the Church and Sexuality<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Last night I sat with my friends on their front porch, enjoying the summery twilight warmth and the explosion of azalea and dogwood blossoms, and passing\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/04\/front-porch-theology-wondering-about-the-church-and-sexuality.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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