Rethinking the Sex Crises in Catholicism and Anglicanism Part 1, by Sarah Coakley, ABC Region and Ethics, July 15, 2010

Rethinking the Sex Crises in Catholicism and Anglicanism, Part 1

By Sarah Coakley
ABC Region and Ethics
July 15, 2010

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/07/14/2953473.htm

Anyone who has attentively followed the press coverage of the recent sex scandals in the Roman Catholic church in Boston, on the one hand, and of the divisions over homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, on the other, may have become aware of certain pressing contemporary 'cultural contradictions' on matters of sexuality and desire that these two crises enshrine, and to which I wish to draw explicit attention.

It might be objected that even to name these two areas of ecclesial public furore in the same context is already to have committed a dire, and offensive, fallacy of "castigation by lumping" (to quote Jeffrey Stout). For surely the abusive and illegal activities of paedophile Roman Catholic priests must in no wise be conflated with the honest and open vowed relationships of gay Episcopalians, including one of such who is now a bishop?

To this we must reply immediately that of course the difference is ethically crucial - not only in the eyes of the law, but in terms of the unequal power relationships, and the protective shroud of ecclesiastical secrecy, that have marked the Roman Catholic scandal in contrast to the Anglican one.

Yet at the same time one cannot help noticing, simply by reflecting on the strange coincidence of these two, very different, instances of ecclesiastical turmoil over same-sex desire, that a latent "cultural contradiction" of great significance is here made manifest.

There is a deep and pervasive public pessimism, on the one hand, over the very possibility of faithful celibacy, and yet an equally deep insistence that certain forms of sexual desire must at all costs not be enacted. This first cultural contradiction was forcefully, if perhaps unconsciously, expressed by the ex-Jesuit writer Garry Wills.

In his famous New York Times article "The Scourge of Celibacy," from 2002, Wills claimed that "the whole celibacy structure is a house of cards, and honesty about any one problem can make the structure of pretence come toppling down ... Treating paedophilia as a separate problem is impossible, since it thrives by its place in a compromised network of evasion." Wills ends the article triumphantly, declaring that the "real enemy is celibacy."

Yet at the beginning of the same article Wills had inveighed against "the worst aspect" of the crisis, "the victimization of the young" and "the clerical epidemic of ... crimes." In other words, celibacy is regarded as impossible, compromising, and delusive - the whole system smacks of unreality. And yet those who do have unmanageable and illegal desires must be held to account and punished: they must and should be celibate.

Here, then, we detect our first - and most profound - "cultural contradiction": celibacy is impossible, but celibacy must be embraced by some with unacceptable and illegal desires.

Sarah Coakley identifies cultural contradictions which cloud our thinking about sexuality.

Now of course once the familiar liberal-conservative divide is imposed on this first "cultural contradiction," we get a certain diversion from it and an ostensibly much clearer division: the liberals happily condone faithful vowed gay relationships while condemning illegal and abusive paedophile ones, and the conservatives - whether Protestant or Catholic - disavow and ban all of them by appealing to biblical injunctions against sodomy, or by some reference to natural law.

This division however - between pro- and anti-gay, liberals and conservatives - then tends to get most of the public attention in ecclesiastical circles and in the press, thereby diverting us from the underlying - and unsolved - cultural conundrum: How can sexual control be demanded of anyone if celibacy is intrinsically 'impossible'? To this issue we shall shortly return.

A further, and second "cultural contradiction" seems to afflict the treatment of homosexual, versus heterosexual, desire in contemporary popular discussion of the church divisions. For it is a marked feature of both the Roman Catholic and Anglican sex-crises that almost all the press attention is focussed on same-sex relationships, whether paedophile, "ephebophile," or (mature) homosexual. It is as if, by comparison, no crisis at all afflicts the heterosexual world vis-?-vis church life and what we might call the general "economy of desire."

But anyone surveying the cultural and political scene with a dispassionate eye would surely have to come to other conclusions: the general erosion of the instance of life-long marriage in North America and Europe, the rise in divorce rates, and the concomitant upsurge in the number of single-parent families, are all well-known to us in secular discussions, but are by no means absent from church-attending, or indeed Protestant clerical, families.

Only a short time ago, for instance, the clergy of the Diocese of Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts received a mailing calmly announcing that one of their suffragan bishops was undergoing a divorce. One could not but be struck by the air of enforced "normalcy" and psychological adjudication that hung over this letter - no regrets, no confessions, no distress even, and certainly no reference to either bible or Christian tradition: just an insistence that the couple had been "faithful in caring for ... each other" in the past, but were now "clear" about the fact that their marriage was "ending."

Clergy were further informed by their suffragan bishop, in pyschologized language, that "I want to assure you that I am taking care of myself in this period of change." Apart from one reference to an "excellent Spiritual Director" that the bishop had now decided to see, there was no theological reference in her letter at all.

I wish to cast no specific judgments on this case since I have no independent information about it at all, and - even if I did - the matter would surely be morally complex, and demanding of due compassion. But in fact, the news of the ending of this marriage made me much sadder than the letter would seem to warrant. I cite the case only to note an instance of the current culturally-condoned acknowledgement of the impermanence of marriage, even in the ranks of bishops in the Episcopal Church.

Yet my more important, second point here is this: despite the extensive evidences of clerical divorce, and (quite differently) of clerical abuse or philandering - both Catholic and Protestant - in heterosexual encounters or relationships, the more emotive issue of clerical homoerotic desire currently tends to continue to glean much greater public attention in the press and related publications than anything to do with heterosexual sex.

It is as if, suddenly in the early 21st-century, homoeroticism has become sufficiently open to discussion to be publicly - and emotively - dissected in the press (and then either condoned or condemned). And yet it is insufficiently integrated into a general discussion of desire to make comparisons with heterosexual patterns of behaviour a worthy topic of sustained theological reflection.

Yet one might well say, as did David Brooks in 2003, that our age is in a crisis - not so much of homosexuality - but more generally of erotic faithfulness. However, this is scarcely a chic reflection, granted the current prurient obsession with homosexuality, and the accompanying diversion from heterosexual failures.

A third, and final, "cultural contradiction" that I want to propose hovers over the common assumption that celibacy and marriage are somehow opposites: one involving no sex at all, and the other - supposedly - involving as much sex as one or both partners might like at any given time. But this, on reflection, is also a perplexing cultural fantasy that does not stand up to scrutiny.

The evidence provided by Richard Sipe's book, Celibacy in Crisis, is revealing here. Not only does faithful (or what Sipe calls "achieved") celibacy generally involve a greater consciousness of sexual desire and its frustration than a life lived with regular sexual satisfaction. But married sexuality, on the other hand, is rarely as care-free and mutually satisfied as this third "cultural contradiction" might presume.

Indeed a realistic reflection on long and faithful marriages (now almost in the minority) will surely reveal periods of enforced "celibacy" even within marriages: during periods of delicate pregnancy, parturition, illness, physical separation, or impotence, which are simply the lot of the marital "long haul."

And if this is so, then the generally-assumed disjunction between celibacy and marriage will turn out not to be as profound as it seems. Rather, the reflective, faithful celibate and the reflective, faithful married person may have more in common than the unreflective or faithless celibate, or the carelessly happy, or indeed unhappily careless, married person.

Now I shall return fleetingly to these three "cultural contradictions" later, For by then, I trust, we shall have gleaned some resources for addressing them. But for now, we cannot go further without attacking a different sort of cultural presumption head-on: that of the supposed pyschological dangers of celibacy or of any so-called "repressed" sexuality.

Here we may be surprised to discover what Freud himself said on this matter, and to him we shall now turn. Could it be that Freud actually gives us, despite himself, certain back-handed resources for thinking afresh theologically about the nature of "desire"?