MARCH 2 2019
SEX AND THE CHURCH
Of course I mean the Roman Catholic Church, our mother church and the largest Christian Denomination. Almost all churches have a hymn with a march-like melody and war-like words, “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war” and “Like a mighty army moves the church of God”, totally untrue today, of course, but still appropriate because the R.C. Church is organized like an army.
Here’s the striking comparison: We all know that an army has a commander in chief: well, the church has the Pope; the army has generals, and the church Cardinals; the army has colonels, and the church Bishops, the army has officers and the church Priests; the army soldiers and the church the lay people.
For a long time, the army had no female officers, just as the R. C. church still has no females in its ranks. In the army just like any church where God is male, male is God, and that, of course, means sexual trouble.
Looking back
There was a time, long ago, when sexual matters were less complicated. Take Abraham. When this wise man charged his most trusted servant to go to his ancestral grazing grounds to find a wife for his son Isaac, the Bible tells us that Abraham secured his servant’s oath by commanding him to place your hand on my thigh.
The thigh in the Bible is often used as a euphemism for sexual organs, which represent the source of Abraham’s reproductive powers and the fate of his progeny. The image of having someone swear an oath by placing his hand on another man’s genitals might jar us, but this practice speaks to the lack of prudishness in ancient times. Actually our word ‘testify’ is based on the Latin word testes or testicles and derives its meaning from this custom.
“Pen is” becomes “Penis”
It plays through my mind that the saying, “The ‘PEN IS’ mightier than the sword”, should slightly be shortened to read, “The PENIS mightier than the sword.” Indeed, the PENIS is destroying the church. The PEN, the written and spoken word, has gone out of fashion with Fake News and a US president whose total being reflects that.
The same is true of the church. It is not that the Bible is wrong: where the church errs is that it sees Scriptures as the only HOLY WORD, while God’s Created Word is not recognized as HOLY and thus abused to the point of DEATH.
Sex is part of the Created Word. We all are sexual beings. To deny this is to deny our humanity.
The trouble is that the church in general lives on two planes: The Sacred and the Secular. It sees the Bible and the church as HOLY, and the rest, including humanity, as secular. THAT IS WHAT IS WRONG. Sex is as sacred as the Bible, because it is created by God, and hence holy.
The church, as an institute today, has become an anomaly, is no longer a viable entity because it does not recognize CREATION as divine, which debases the value of the church.
The same happened to the Jewish religion, which was based on temple service and on a hierarchy of High Priests and lower ranks, on animal offerings and Mosaic Laws.
When Christ pledged his life to restore Creation, he made LOVE his law, so the temple became superfluous. At the precise moment Jesus died on the cross the heavy curtain between the Holy and the Holy of Holies was severed from top to bottom, a sign that Temple worship had reached its “best before date”, even though there still was forty years of grace before the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D.
With the church, as an institute, on its deathbed today, with the Bible as a guide, our main focus should be on CREATION, God’s Primary Word and the church’s ultimate destination. By denying human sexuality the church has written off creation as being God’s precious work of art.
Already in the Garden of Eden the two different sexes were present, first in animals, then in humans. That is the creation order. Just as there is homosexuality among animals, so it occurs among humans. Get used to it: it’s natural.
Jesus told us that in the New Creation there will not be marriage. This doesn’t mean that there will not be sex: of course there will be. Of course people will fall in love. Of course Jesus fell in love: he experienced all human emotions. Of course the saints in the New Creation will express their humanity in all possible ways, artistically, musically, literarily, and also sexually. How all that will be expressed, is still a mystery, but it all will come out, and is something to look forward to. It is about time that the church confronts the truth that God also created sex, an undeniable human trait.
Everything will be revealed.
We live in eschatological times, which mean that the TRUTH of all human actions will be exposed.
That was evident again when Pope Francis held a 4 day conclave involving some 190 clerics, mostly cardinals: it was all about SEX in the church. And nothing was solved. Latin is the official language of the church, so “Pariuntur montes, nascatur ridiculus mus”, is fitting: The Mountains – the Big shots – copulated and the result was a ridiculous small mouse – the results were peanuts.
How totally outdated was that spectacle, that gathering in Rome! All male, all uniformed, all only half-way formed, as a good marriage makes a person whole: woman and man are made for each other.
What the clergy in all faiths forget, is that we live in different times: the old answers are useless. I don’t think I am wrong when I say that God is not dead, but he’s no longer active: Jesus has taken over.
Last week I spoke with a retired Roman Catholic teacher. The informed laity is fed up with the church. Basically its structure has become irrelevant: in a sex-saturated society where little is taboo, she simply stated that clergy should be allowed to marry and women ordained. That would solve the sex-problem in the Catholic Church and fill the many vacant clergy positions as well.
Morris West – who was a monk for 12 years – wrote a trilogy on the papacy: “The shoes of the Fisherman”, “The Clowns of God”, and “Lazarus”, all good descriptions of Vatican intrigue and the stubbornness of the Curia. It seems to me that Pope Francis has become a victim of the bureaucracy there. Too bad: I had high hopes for him.
New Reformation impossible.
By failing to recognize CREATION as God’s PRIMARY word, I am increasingly convinced that the church, any church, is beyond reform: most buildings are ecological disasters, the ecclesiastical offices too ingrained, the confessions too ossified, and the preachers too prone to please. So the churches slowly die, and in their dying cause a lot of grief, because, I must confess, I love the church.
Yet there are refreshing voices.
One of them is Hans Küng, now retired- he’ll be 91 in March – and living in Switzerland. He is the most famous Roman Catholic theology professor, author of many books, of which I have a number one simply entitled, The Church, another Eternal Life?
Here’s what he wrote a while ago:
The rule that Catholic priests must be celibate is responsible for the crisis in the church. Now is the time to challenge that requirement. From the United States to Ireland to Germany, the widespread abuse of children and adolescents by Catholic priests has done enormous damage to the image of the church. It also reveals the depth of the crisis.
In Germany Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg, speaking as chairman of the Conference of German Bishops, has made a public statement on behalf of the Church. His declaration that the cases of abuse were “heinous crimes”—together with the bishops’ statement of February 25, 2010, asking forgiveness from all the victims—are first steps toward dealing with the crisis. But much more must be done.
Zollitsch’s statement, moreover, contains serious misrepresentations that need to be challenged.
Consider his first claim: sexual abuse by priests has nothing to do with celibacy. Objection! Although there is no question that abuse also occurs in families, schools, and youth organizations, as well as in churches that do not have the rule of celibacy, why are there such an extraordinary number of cases specifically in the Catholic church, whose leaders are celibate?
Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions.
In fact a glance at the New Testament shows that although, Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone.
Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2). According to 1 Timothy 3:2, “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (not “of no wife”!).
During their ministry, Peter and the other apostles were married. For many centuries, married life was normal for bishops and presbyters and—outside the Roman Catholic Church—remains so today, at least for priests, in all the churches of Eastern rites united with the Holy See as well as in Orthodox Christianity. Rome’s rule of celibacy contradicts the gospel and ancient Catholic tradition. It should be abolished.
The second claim by Archbishop Zollitsch: it is “completely false” to trace the cases of abuse to defects in the structure of the church. Objection! The rule of celibacy did not exist during Christianity’s first millennium. Under the influence of monks (who lived in voluntary abstinence) it was instituted in the Western Church during the eleventh century, in particular by Pope Gregory VII, against the staunch opposition of the clergy in Italy and especially in Germany. Only three German bishops dared to promulgate the decree from Rome; thousands of priests protested it. In a petition at the time, the German clergy asked rhetorically whether the pope was “unfamiliar with the word of the Lord: ‘He that is able to receive it, let him receive it?’” (Matthew 19:12). In this, his only statement on the question, Jesus advocates voluntary abstinence.
Yet the rule of celibacy, together with papal absolutism and exaggerated clericalism, became one of the pillars of the “Roman system.” Unlike priests in the Eastern churches, the celibate clergy of the West remain completely separated from the laity, primarily by abstaining from marriage. They constitute a dominant social class of their own, fundamentally superior to ordinary Christians, but completely subordinate to the pope in Rome. The rule of celibacy is the main reason for the catastrophic shortage of priests, the serious neglect of the Eucharist, and the widespread breakdown of pastoral care—a problem that has been papered over by merging parishes into “pastoral units” ministered to by badly overworked priests.
What would be the best way to attract more young people to the priesthood? Abolish the rule of celibacy, the root of the whole problem, and allow the ordination of women. The bishops know this and should have the courage to say it out loud. They would have the vast majority of Catholics behind them. All recent polls show that the laity favor allowing priests to marry.
So far Dr. Hans Küng.
The Roman Catholic Curia will not heed these words, and so keep on tacitly condoning sexual abuse and prolonging the crisis besetting the entire ecclesiastical system.
In these last days everything is coming to a head. All human structures are being challenged, and found wanting, including the ecclesiastical entities.
It simply means that we must get ready for the Greatest Surprise of all times: the sudden and unexpected return of Christ in all his glory.