One is bad; the second is worse; the third is vile, perverse and sacrilegious; the last is very good.
1. The Negative
Shame, guilt, fear, and suspicion have always accompanied the relationship of religion with sex...for good reason. By virtue of concupiscence (the disorder of our attractions, especially sexual, resulting from the Fall), sex is deeply infused with violence, objectification, domination, seduction, deceit, manipulation, jealousy, resentment, and decadence. The more sensitive spirits are especially attuned to this; and so the most religious among us often despise and fear sex. The Shakers required celibacy of all. The Manicheans considered it as evil, not coming from God. Within Catholicism, Augustine is (often unfairly?) associated with a negative view; Calvinism in its doctrine of total depravity further exaggerated this suspicion and brought it to America with the Puritans. French Jansenism expressed a similar disapproval from the 17th century, influencing the Irish Church and then Irish-American Catholicism into the mid-20th-century.
By the 1950s, however, this Irish Jansenism was a thing of the past. I have scrutinized my own guilt and shame around sex, for over 60 years since I emerged from childhood in the late 1950s. My conclusion: my persistent, intense but quiet guilt has been neither neurotic nor Jansenist, but wholesome in that it motivated my faith-inspired drive for chastity and fidelity, as it has been fruitfully channeled by lifelong confession of sin and associated habits. Shame is something different. Guilt is awareness of wrongdoing and itself a correct, truthful reaction to sin. My guilt came from my Catholic catechesis; I am grateful for it. Shame is not related to a wrong act but an overall disgust for oneself, rooted in how we imagine ourselves viewed by others. It cannot be confessed, forgiven and repaired in the manner of a specific offense. My shame exploded in puberty with my sexuality. It did not come from wrongdoing. Nor was it caused by the disapproval of the Church: I recall no negativity from my parents, priests, sisters or brothers. It was not mentioned: the "null curriculum." I developed it on my own. For example, around age 12, 7th grade (everything bad happened to me in that year???) I did my paper route every afternoon and disliked it. Partly because, for reasons I have never comprehended, I always experienced an involuntary erection. I realize now that it was entirely invisible to the public. But I felt a flaming shame, as if the entire world stopped and stared at me with disgust. It was a long journey to be free of that kind of self-generated shame. I would have benefited from a clear, positive catechesis about sex. But I did imbibe from the respectful, shy silence and especially the example of my parents, as well as the broader community including married, ordained and religious, a reverence and sense of the inherent goodness of sex.
2. The Trivial
The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s ushered in the opposite extreme: sex is not bad; nor is it sacred; it is no big thing; it is trivial. Pornography/masturbation, hooking-up, cohabitation/contraception, homosexuality and such are not a big deal: mere natural urges, ways to release tension and stress, nice ways to express affection. The abortion regime is, of course, an outcome of contracepted-sterile, non-unitive, non-spousal, free sex. There has been a progression however: the revolutionary casualness of Playboy Hugh Hefner of the 1960s has given way to the heaviness, the indignant rage of the LGBTQ and "Trans" crusades. They are deadly serious that we cannot be serious about sex; and that the Church dare not disapprove of these behaviors, that it absolutely must bless their lifestyles.
3. The Sacrilegious
In recent years, a very small but deeply troubling trend has emerged among Catholic leadership. It is a confused, perverse, sacrilegious conflation of sexual sin with an alleged mysticism. Jean Vanier, his mentors, the priest-brothers Fathers Thomas and Marie-Dominique Philippe, and more recently Jesuit-artist Marko Rupnik sexually abused women under their spiritual direction while cloaking it as a mystical encounter. This has involved even abuse of the sacrament of confession: as when a priest absolves his partner in sin and thereby incurs an automatic excommunication for himself. This is sacrilege at many levels: obviously the abuse of one who has entrusted herself to you; abuse of authority, ordination, sacrament; abuse of the male and female bodies, both temples of the Holy Spirit. It is at once contempt for sacrament and sexuality. It is a sin straight out of hell that screams to be consumed by the very fires of that inferno. However, it gets worse. The crimes of the Philippe brothers were known 70 years ago and yet they were able to continue their wrongdoing. The sins of Rupnik were clearly known and yet he remained undisciplined by the Jesuits, apparently protected by friends in the Vatican, for a long time until public furor forced the matter. And now we have in Cardinal Fernandez, Pope Francis' closest advisor and head of the Dicastery for the Faith, a history of writings that confuse and conflate unchaste sex with mystical engagement with God. He has not been accused of wrongdoing; but his writings express the very confusion and perversion that produce such unspeakable sacrilege. Victims of abuse have spoken out forcefully; he has not clearly repudiated his writings. Our Church is familiar" with sexual sin...the Renaissance popes, our recent horrific priest scandal...but such vile untruth in the inner circle of the Pope is (to my knowledge) unprecedented. We live in dark times.
4. The Iconic
In his catechesis on the human body, also called Theology of the Body, St. John Paul II gave us (in my view) the most significant, authentic development of Catholic theology of the 20th century. "Significant" because it strikes us deeply, in our sexuality, the very core of our identity; "significant" because he gave us the authoritative answer to the sexual revolution which rocked the West in his time; "authentic" because it brought into clarity and depth the inspiring, sublime, iconic understanding of sexuality at the heart of our Catholic faith...in the words of Genesis "male and female we created them"; in the erotic, romantic poetry of the Song of Songs; in the spousal imagery of Hosea about God's longing for Israel; in the finale of the Scriptures with the bridal embrace in Revelation; in the sacramentality of marriage as sacred; in the conjugal-celibate love of the early virgin-martyrs for their Lord; in the great traditions of Renaissance art so admiring of the human form. Decisively he overcame the suspicion and fear of sex that ever hovers over religion. He brought us to see that attraction of male and female for each other...flawed by sin, but still inherently tender, reverent, generous, exclusive, fruitful, faithful, chaste...is an icon of the very internal life of the Trinity, a "communio" of persons. Far from being in itself bad, sinful or threatening, it is the most beautiful reality in the natural, material order since it is ordered to reflect, in marriage, the inner life of the Trinity as generous, life-giving, pure, sacrificial, and loyal. And so, he added tremendous affirmative, positive energies to the traditional Catholic reverence for chastity and the fidelity of marriage and consecrated life.
Conclusion
And so, with St. John Paul we renounce the trivial and the sacrilegious views and decisively move beyond the negativity that has been part of our tradition. At the same time, we do well to preserve the truth in that legacy: sexuality is so sacred that it is at the same time potentially dangerous. John Paul would be the very first to recognize that by virtue of our sexual concupiscence, sex can be a horrifically destructive force. It is to be received with immense reverence and gratitude, but also with more than a touch of fear and awe. Rudolph Otto unveiled the "holy" as evoking both fascination (positive) and fear (negative.) In our approach to God, we are drawn to his love and mercy, but cannot fall in adoration of his holiness and truth. Not in the paralysis of anxiety and shame, but in fascination and worship. And so, regarding our masculinity/femininity, in all its fierce eroticism, we enter into veneration, of our own identity and destiny, but also in that of the opposite sex.
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