Catholicism and Sexuality: A Roundtable Discussion

Kate: What would you say is the aspect of Catholic teaching on sexuality that you are most critical of?

Johanna: Do I have to pick one?

Laughter

Kate: You don't have to. It's hard!

Johanna: Well, I'll pick one, and it's kind of easy -- I don't know, I mean they're all easy to critique -- but I really don't understand the teaching against birth control! I just don't! It doesn't make any sense to me, particularly in the context of a Church that opposes abortion. I can understand where the Church is coming from on that, but then to couple it with not allowing people to prevent unintended pregnancies, thereby preventing abortion, really doesn't make any sense to me, especially when I began to learn a little bit about the papal commission on birth control after the Second Vatican Council and its recommendation that the Church change its position to allow birth control. The commission listened to the theologians and to married couples and to doctors and suggested that there was nothing inherently wrong with a married couple using contraception to regulate the size of their family. And then we got Humanae Vitae. This is definitely the one that sticks in my craw the most. I can't comprehend it. I remember being a teenager and asking these questions of Catholic adults whom I knew and respected, and asking it of priests, and not getting a full enough answer. I still struggle with it, I still disagree with it, I still think it's the most... I don't know, it's just the one that sticks out to me the most, but there are many more I could pick, too.

Jessica: Actually, when I read this question I thought about something, Kate, that you said back in the fall at an event in Boston on From the Pews in the Back. An audience member -- observing the fact that in our book issues of gender and issues of sexuality often appeared within the same stories -- wanted to know about the relationship between those two things in our own experiences and in the Catholic Church. Forgive me if I misquote you Kate, but what I remember is that you talked about how a lot of Church teachings on gender complementarity of men and women undergird all this other teaching about sexual ethics. For instance, the argument that sexual acts should be procreative feeds into the position on birth control, on abortion, on homosexuality, on non-marital sex, and all these things. And it really struck me, Kate, when you said that. Even though gender complementarity isn't necessarily seen as an issue of sexual ethics under some sort of definition, that might actually be the thing that I find the most contentious because of the way that that binary sets up the mentality for all these other positions that I really struggle with.

Kate: Yeah, it's funny because when I was thinking about this question myself -- well, I was thinking it is so hard to pick just one thing to be critical of! But the first one that pops into my mind all the time is obviously all of the teachings on gay and lesbian sexuality and how I find, especially having done work in queer theology, the teachings to be so... I mean, narrow-minded doesn't even encompass it. It's like tunnel vision. It's like looking at it from this one tiny perspective and then making a conclusion while forgetting that there are all these other lenses that can also be looked through to get a much broader picture of what's at hand.

But then I also thought to myself, and jotted into my notes, "complementarianism in heterosexual relationships," and how frustrating that is, for all of the reasons that you both mentioned, but also because in modern society these specific gender roles are caught up in other societal injustices. In my mind you can't talk about the roles of a man and a woman in a relationship and separate that from issues of domestic violence, or from issues of power imbalances in society in regard to gender, or from men having more financial independence than women, and from other issues that wouldn't come up when you're just thinking about it from a very basic theological perspective. But then when you're extending this theology into "how is this working in the real world," not taking into account the context within which these theological and philosophical ideas end up playing out, this often perpetuates injustice. And again in the case of the clergy sex abuse scandals, it's the idea that sex, yes it has these procreative and unitive possibilities and that's so wonderful, and so sacred, and so beautiful, but it also is tied up in power and in using sex to gain power and to take power away from other people. In not acknowledging that in the teachings of sexuality, it separates sexuality from the Church's mission toward justice in a way that is dangerous and really heartbreaking in a lot of ways.

Kate: So what would you say is one aspect of Catholic teaching on sexuality that you really appreciate?