More Romanism

Comments from my spouse...I should have paid more attention to the attributions, but....

I should explain that my wife is bona fide, both sides, Irish Catholic, formed by nine years of parochial education, as opposed to my half-arsed, hemi-demi-semi mixed-heritage Catholic exposure.

The tenor of this piece she was reading makes a lot of sense, and it was that the Catholic position on sex made sense...once.

It made sense when about a fifth of all children born alive didn't live past age five, which happened until the middle of the 19th century. (NB: don't believe the bullshit about uniformly higher rates of death. That level of infant mortality is about all a low-reproductive-rate mammalian species can sustain and still exist.)

It made sense when few marriages lasted more than 15 years or so, and when most represented economic, not romantic, alliances.

Celibacy made sense when providing for a family became the chief preoccupation of all but a fortunate minority of people who married, thus interfering with one's capacity for altruism.

Unfortunately, the ideas that once made sense have outlived their value, and have outlived a conscious appreciation of the reasons that once supported them. In business schools, this is called "institutional momentum," widely taught as a very hard force to stop. I once worked for a cultural institution that had existed since 1799, and which had deployed essentially the same solution to its problems every generation since 1867. That momentum was unstoppable, but it was nothing compared to two millenia of Christian institutional momentum.

One some level, Christianity has appreciated the challenge of the present for over 150 years. The present battlefield is same-sex marriage. Much is rightly made of the parallels between today's arguments and those arrayed against emancipation. Similar arguments were made later (and in my lifetime) against interracial marriage. No one that I can see is eager to point out that Christianity was just as violently opposed to the introduction of antisepsis to perinatal care, a generation before the Civil War, and skeptical (at least) of anaesthesia at nearly the same time. (Institutional Christianity was, at least: the same can't be said of most Christian physicans.) These earlier battlegrounds remain like moraine fields marking the retreat of a glacier. The initial reaction of institutions is to oppose change, rather than reassess principle.

It is harder to assess why Christian institutions have lately become fixated on sex rather than social justice as the touchstone of faith. How else can one explain that a Catholic church that encouraged and succoured sub rosa liturgies and political resistance in places like Ireland and Poland now suppresses the same impulse in Latin America? Social justice hasn't anything to do with abortion--the johnny-come-lately of doctrinal issues--or birth control, or celibacy, so it has be content with the doctrinal table scraps.

Putting a Protestant spin on it, how does one explain a concept of sex education that obsessively extols the wonders of sex, and then says (to adolescents adrift in a sea of their own hormones) "you can't have it until you partake of this arbitrary contract."

Dammit, this isn't religion: this is psychosis. Of course, one could argue that the line between religion and psychosis has always been a bit fuzzy, but psychosis that supported resistance to political oppression had the excuse of good intention (which in Catholic doctrine is a really big deal).

Funny thing is that the Jewish magician didn't have anything to say about abortion, or birth control, or same-sex marriage, one way or the other. He did say something to the effect that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It's one of those awkward scriptural moments that seems to get filtered out.