For the Church to Truly Face Its System of Sexual Trauma, It Must Embrace the Sacred Trauma of Human Sexuality

By Peter Isely
SNAP Wisconsin
November 8, 2012

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There is a story I recently heard, it may be apocryphal, but even it is, it happens to be true.

When Napoleon was trying to humiliate the Pope by forcing him to crown him and even taking the crown from him, the Pope told Napoleon: “I know you are trying to destroy Christianity. But you will fail. We the church have been trying this for almost 2,000 years and we have failed.”

We survivors spend a lot of time witnessing on church steps, at legislative hearings, and inside courtrooms about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups. We’ve made our point, I think, that these terrible crimes have wounded many, many lives. And they have seriously damaged and eroded the public trust citizens once had in an important social institution which is responsible every day for safeguarding the lives of millions of our children in schools and churches.

This afternoon, however, by way of this wonderful public recognition, I want instead to honor and defend what it was that the clerical sex offender attacked in me and my fellow survivors, not only as youngsters, but whenever we speak out about what happened to us; what the official church opposes, even hates and despises; what is, apparently, the chief enemy of the hierarchy and, as I heard it recently put, the church’s “greatest competitor”: sex and human sexuality.

What I am about to say is not novel, but we need to remind ourselves, after so many years of struggle, what exactly it is we are fighting for. To paraphrase our possibly apocryphal Pope from earlier: the church has tried to destroy human sexuality for 2,000 years, and even with a world-wide system of clerical sexual violence and cover up it has failed.

As long as the church opposes human sexuality it will invite in or create sex offenders in the priesthood. If the church does not recognize, or refuses to recognize, what human sexuality actually is, then it will never recognize the extraordinary harm that has occurred to potentially millions of children and it will pave the way for another, maybe worse, generation of offenders.

Why does institutional Christianity, its theology and its legal codes, continue to oppose human sexuality so much, even after its now global sexual catastrophe? How does this opposition go hand in hand with letting loose sex offenders into homes, schools, and churches? How does opposing sexuality create and empower sexual predators?

These are questions that the church has yet to provide any meaningful answers, choosing instead to drone dogma or cite pastoral cliches.

Nietzsche rightly observed: the renunciation of desire, sooner or later, will turn into the desire to renounce. That’s the self-defeating paradox every fundamentalist is trapped in. You cannot get rid of human desire. Try it. You will fail.

And hedonism and sexual “fulfillment” and “experiences” are really no answer either. New age liberal hedonism is equally self-defeating. The pursuit of pleasure also turns into something else, a terrible forced duty to pursue pleasure. Thus, the very real sufferings of sexual addictions, compulsions and perversions of all kinds, which show no sign of abating.

As we know, official Christianity generally accepts sex only as a “necessary evil” because it serves the natural purposes of procreation. Sex without procreation, according to the church, reduces us to the level of the animal.

But, isn’t it the exact opposite?

Sex becomes spiritual, frees itself from the animal, only when it abstracts from its natural end and becomes an end in itself. Sex does not bury us but throws us out of nature. There is really nothing natural about human sexuality. Or I should say: it changes nature itself. Plato knew this, as did Freud. For Plato, Eros, the erotic attachment to a beautiful body, was the first step towards the Supreme Good. And insightful Christians have always discerned in sexual longing a striving for the Absolute.

Too much of Christian institutional practice has been engineered to try to eliminate “the excess of nature,” as one philosopher put it, which is human sexuality. In doing so they have tried to eliminate what they see as the source and agent of sexuality: the human spirit, the human soul. Because, as we all know, sex is about engaging in the trauma that makes us human—the speech, words and gestures of symbolic play and passion, of dressing and undressing, of revealing and concealing.

That is why sex always threatens to overturn and shatter us. If you have not been derailed, destroyed and utterly destabilized by the experience of sexual passion or the ache of sexual hunger—you have, I would argue, missed out on something that is eternal and sacred in human action. The Catholic Church, of course, actually elevates the ideological fantasy of absenting oneself from the trauma of sexuality as a condition for belonging to its clerical class. Is it such a surprise that out of this clerical class so much sexual violence has erupted?

The Christian doctrine and practice that aims at getting rid of its great competitor by reducing sex to animal functions and procreation is the principle reason why I and so many others became casualties of the church’s war against human sexuality—which is actually intensifying and worsening in recent years.

Aristotle said that the day you become a slave is the day you lose half your soul. We were placed as children into what constituted an underground system of sexual enslavement in rectories, seminaries, and parishes.

Each of us survivors of these childhood sex crimes by clergy must live after. We survivors cannot return to what we were before the abject spiritual touch of the predator entered our bodies. But our lifelong work to release ourselves and our church from this enslavement, allows us, the sexually vanquished, the chance to remake and reinvent the sexual act. We are, as it were, the founding members, the pioneers, of a new sexuality, a sexuality based on what the offender and the church could not kill in us: the sacred potential of sexuality, the radical emancipatory truth of sexuality, and the shattering potential that sexuality has to not only destroy but to save.