Before I begin in earnest, I suspect that my title may already have some people’s panties in a wad (pun definitely intended). Chill out. That’s a part of my point. Furthermore, I also understand that the “world” I speak from will be foreign to some, if not many, Catholics. In order to avoid hasty generalizations, I limit my views here to personal recollections, confessions, and memory. Nothing more, nothing less.
For about 8 years of my childhood and early adolescence, my family was an associate member of the Bread of Life Charismatic Covenant Community based in Akron, Ohio. We joined while living in Lorain, Ohio and eventually moved to Reynosa, Mexico with the self-appointed missionary group from the community’s inner circle (Servants of the Cross), after their first mission failed in Honduras. In Mexico, my family was among the founding members of Seguidores de la Cruz and El Rancho Nazaret, new titles applied to the group’s reinvented identity by Dick Herman (who also led the controversial and officially disaffected from the Diocese of Cleveland Bread of Life community).
This community was certainly the exception to other similar communities that existed, and continue to exist, in the Catholic Church or within the ecumenical group The Sword of the Spirit. Its greatest, defining characteristic was its fierce independence contained to a group of relatives: the O’Connor family. (Dick’s wife is an O’Connor as is Sister Casey and their resident priest, Fr. Tim, and a few more.)
There are hundreds of thousands of words I could type—both beautiful and ugly—about this group but they are only relevant to this post because this was where I first heard the words ‘modesty,’ ‘chastity,’ ‘purity,’ and alike. (If you want to see some more testimonials about the community, here is a link to the Facebook group started by children of Bread of Life members.)
Something I learned very quickly was that, amidst the constant talk and attention about modesty, there was a thriving subculture of sexual repression that bred an intense, sexually inflected, and oftentimes extreme and explicit “naughty” discourse among the boys and young men. Adolescent boys talked about sex constantly when left alone. (And, perhaps, the older men too?)
This is not very surprising. To any outsider, it is rather expected and hum drum. All the same, this rather extreme context has a direct—and oftentimes identical—carry-0ver into the more common, albeit still obscure, culture to be found at places like Franciscan University of Steubenville, Christendom College, EWTN, Catholic Radio, Ave Maria, and all the affiliated conferences and literature. Again: this, too, is a culture I has been immersed in and know intimately.
One clear example of this was, and I suspect still is, the sexually repressive subtext of youth ministry.
I’ve been a participant, chaperone, leader, “young apostle,” organizer, keynote speaker, and music minister at countless retreats, conferences, and parish programs. Just about any adolescent—and youth minister—knows about the strange sexual tension that you can find in these places.
In the course of a weekend you can: piously have and listen to conversations about tales and exploits (called testimonies) about sex, masturbation, and pornography; experience a wide range of therapeutic/spiritual emotions that create a true feeling of existential release and euphoria and even sexual arousal; participate in a series of innocent and licit physical intimacies that are particularly present during the rituals of these events that are carefully planned by a team experts, a “core team.” (As we will see, in certain limited cases, you can just have sexual encounters with attendees or, more commonly, on the bus ride there and back.)
These is a deep beauty to these erotic events. I have had truly moving, liberating, and important experiences at these places. After the rigid and prescriptive life we led in the community, I was able to embrace my father and mother and say “I love you” in a way I had not done before during an “exercise” at a youth retreat. There is unquestionable, lasting value in that.
Also: I was an earnest, pious kid. I knew others who didn’t suffer from my own repressive anxiety and were able to go through these weekends and evenings in at least two different ways: (1) without sexual pretense whatsoever (or so it seemed to me) or (2) with an explicitly sexual pretense (they just openly came to retreats to try and get laid, pure and simple).
This is but one example, but I could name many others. The point to it all is that, within a Catholic culture that invokes the grammar and doctrine of modesty, there is a predictably hidden potential for sexual and erotic desire. These are not bad things in and of themselves; indeed they are actually quite beautiful. But they can also become nasty and crass—perverted, in other words. At the very least, they are spiritually and psychologically complex to deal with.
The bottom line is this: in my experience, perverts love modesty. And we already knew this: Puritans love modesty, Catholic Puritans included.
Especially men. Men in these sorts of circles love to talk—especially to each other, in special homoerotic man-on-man talks—about the swimming suit we don’t need to see and the temptations we avoid and, while doing so, indulge in a sort of Catholic karma sutra. It provides a subtext for men to relish in the repressed desires pent up by the discipline and shame of certain masculine religious dispositions to the body and sexual passions. All the while, it feeds their Puritanical delusions of piety, driven home by an entire specialized discourse about the body.
(Please note: Not only men; I know more than a few women chastity speakers who do not meet their own criteria in many, explicit ways.)
It allows someone who is governed by the Apollonian to satisfy the Dionysian in a single, psychoanalytic stroke.
Where this leaves us is not clear to me. I doubt it is entirely different, better, or worse than other places. I don’t think anything should be done or “fixed” necessarily. After all, if Freud was right about anything–and I think he was—he surely showed that sexual repression is more prevalent than we often like to admit—and that’s the point! (Surely he is wrong that everything must be sexualized to be understood correctly.) This comic strip rightly shows how secular US culture is uniquely inclined to problematic Puritanisms of and about sex, parallel to my Catholic memories.
What I can say is that, when people try and go on rants about modesty (like this link shows, shared by my friend John Lopez, about the petty dogma of Sola Skirtura), I am not circumspect for no good reason.
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