Perhaps there is no other area which so pits the Church against so much of the post-modern era as the matter of sexual ethics. Camille Paglia in her book Sexual Personae rightly says, “Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture” (Vintage, NY 1991) . And it is precisely in these categories---nature and culture---that the Church and society have been clashing for at least since the time of the Renaissance. From that time on, western intellectuals determined to explore the matter of human sexuality according to the norms of autonomous “reason,” without any reference to revelation and the teachings of the Church based on it. And from that time it has seemed to succeeding generations of the intellectual heirs of modernity that the Church has played the reactionary, impinging on the autonomy of “science” to determine what is human, normal, harmless, and thus good, with respect to human sexuality.

With the publication of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humane Vitae , at the very height of the Sexual Revolution in the west, wherein the Pope reaffirmed the indissolubility of sex, marriage, and the ends or purposes of the sexual act, the Church has all but stood alone and appeared to many to represent retro-thought itself, a hopeless dying echo of the Dark Ages of humanity.

One fruit of the Sexual revolution which has swept the west, besides ubiquitous pornography and the spread of virulent and often lethal diseases, is the phenomenon of open homosexuality which mobilized early into a militant political and social force which very few politicians today dare to oppose. It is especially here that the opposition between two different views of “nature” come into stark relief. Today this revolution has reached a point where both artists and intellectuals, with relatively few exceptions, when they wish to criticize the Church or chastity, modesty, etc., seem to enjoy nothing more than indulging in shock tactics and theatre, an “in-your-face” deliberate confrontation between what is construed as modern liberation versus patriarchal oppression.

It would be naïve in the extreme to think that members of the Church, or religion itself for that matter, from clerics and theologians to teachers and lay persons could entirely escape the effects of the Sexual Revolution. Fueled by an astonishingly sophisticated and ever developing technology, especially television and computer technology, which serves prurient interests as a lucrative and exportable business (amounting to no small percentage of this country’s Gross National Product), almost everyone outside a cloister is exposed daily to some degree and intensity of lust-inducing advertising or "entertainment," and in such proportions as to make Caligula himself envy.

This being the case, it is a wonder not that some clergy and religious leaders have fallen, but that not more have been seduced by a culture of lust. As the old adage has it, you can only go into a brothel for so long and only observe. What happens, then, when society itself begins to look more and more like a ubiquitous brothel in a high-tech digital hall of mirrors?

It is precisely one’s world view relative to the origins and meaning of life itself which is critical in determining one’s attitude toward sex. The Church teaches that existence itself is a pointing, a pointing to the One who is the Ground and Origin of all life, and hence of all meaning, to the One who not only creates life but who creates its boundaries, its limitations, its potentials. And since God, who is uncreated Being, made human beings in His image and likeness, male and female, who in union are the channels of contingent, created life, it can only be with reference to Him that human sexuality and its ends can be fully understood.

The created bodies of human beings with their particular diverse parts reflect this referential meaning. Just as the hand is oriented to holding something or making tools, a female breast and nipple are ordered primarily to a baby's hunger (and secondarily, with that view in end, to the arousal of the mating instinct in males), so the genital parts of the human being circumscribe the ends---the teleology---to which they are oriented. The male, then, by definition, is made for, is oriented to, the female, and vice versa. Therefore only when this orientation is properly respected is there completion, fulfillment. Psychological structures, if we are whole persons, without contempt for creation, must align themselves to the reality of complementarity and gender, according to the order of creation.

Every age but ours recognized this. It was part of the “common sense” of humanity which even children understand; a common sense which has all but collapsed today into a philosophy of transgression and sexual anarchy. Anything else was viewed not long ago as something amiss, a perversion of the ends of creation. And any notion of "reason" which flouts it was considered unreasonable.

Paul VI did not say that every time the sexual act occurs there must be an explicit intention of begetting children ---there may, he said, be serious reasons for wanting to limit the size of a family, apart from selfishness and greed--- but he did say that unless this act is indulged and completed as a communion between two persons who are in principle committed to each other for life by their openness to the natural ends of the sex act itself, it devolves into a corruption; a corruption of the miraculous ends of creation. That the marriage contract is implied in this act is seen from the fact that any child begotten of this union is helpless and in need of the protection and care of the couple, male and female, that begot her or him for very many years. The children of the marital union, likewise, become, in time, the primary protectors of their aged parents according to the beautiful cycle of the natural law.

Our culture is increasingly confusing pornography, philosophy, art, entertainment and sex. This is called the pornosophic culture. We are already reaping the whirlwind. It is future generations which will suffer even greater, more brutal effects, if that is possible. Divorce, the abandonment of children and the elderly, as well as existential loneliness for all----to say nothing of illnesses and death from the perversion of sex, follows all this like night follows day.

How do we counteract such a strong (and memorable) drive, make young people, especially, understand rather that sexuality's beauty and holiness cannot be perverted without consequence?

We must help them to see sex for what it was intended by God to be: one of the most incredible ways in which we most resemble the Creator God, the union of "opposites" (or, better, of complements) into an explosion of love and life into creation itself! To steal that participation in divine creation for pure selfishness, naricissism, is a Promethean, fearful, hubris.

Homosexuality

Now, while what follows here applies to homosexuality in particular, the same truths apply to any kind of corruption of the ends of sex. We should add immediately, however, that only God can judge the culpability of persons who fall in this matter. (For example, an experimenting young teenager, who, under the untamed impulses of a flowering and overwhelming sexuality, commits masturbation is presumably not making as mature a judgment as an adult who, resisting God’s grace and reason, does the same.)

Homosexuals see themselves today as indulging one of the many legitimate sexual choices which are open to human beings qua human beings who, it is suggested, are able to transcend the confines and limits of the human body and “outdated” social conventions. They see it simply as a harmless part of the human repertoire. And against a Darwinian background of the meaningless emergence of life itself, such sexual options may indeed seem like mere personal choices of no particular consequence.

But anarchy must follow.

While it is true that against a background of atheism and meaninglessness, homosexuality can seem innocuous, it is of a piece with everything which must follow from such premises. “Thou shall not steal,” given this same Darwinian background, may seem reasonable to one person who has just been robbed, but it may seem a quaint nonsense to the thief. If there is no objective meaning to the world and universe, then there is simply that: no objective meaning to the world and universe. There may be arbitrary social contracts, but they are tenuous at best, normative not at all in any ultimate sense; more the product of convenience than anything else. And some may not want to play that “game”. And if this is so---though a politician was recently punished in the halls of academia and the press for saying it out loud---pedophilia, polygamy, sex with animals---“whatever floats your boat”--- are all simply arbitrary alternative "choices" of an individualistic, subjective, values system. But alienation from the "other" with respect to gender always implies alienation from oneself first.

There is something else to consider too: nature itself strikes back at the un-natural . It is all well and good to say “I am simply exercising my choice,” but when 40 million have died from AIDS and over 20 million more are to date infected and ready to infect more people, nature itself is rejecting what is not congruous with it. Likewise, when millions of babies are torn from their mother’s wombs in abortion consciences are repelled, however much we may try to repress it, because it is nature which is violated, to say nothing of the moral law. This is death, blood, and bone we are talking about here. Nature's law dictates that human beings must reap what we sow--- now or later. Promiscuity, of whatever kind, has become an increasingly lethal risk.

The Church's feminism

When women are used and exploited sexually and then thrown away as useless objects in our pornosophic society, sometimes abandoned to grow old or poor alone --- all of which is rightly abhorred by the Church --- feminism is right to deplore it and even to want it punished. But feminists themselves today, in the interests of “empowerment,” are all too often showing increasing signs of ambivalence about such devil-may-care sexuality, as witness their differences over the rock star Madonna's influence and the rock and pornosophic culture in general.

Here it may be said that the Church is the true representative of a balanced feminism, despite its stand with respect to the ordination of women which has nothing to do with power and everything to do with the diversity of charisms in the context of servanthood.

Creation is meaning itself, the very condition and ground of it. Reject it ---and we must go with it. The Creator’s commandments are intended to order our desires and actions to creation’s ends . Only if we walk off the roof will gravity seem a harsh thing.

To choose otherwise is to play God, to set up a parallel counter-universe, and to risk the disease, death and existential loneliness which must accompany every philosophy of transgression and culture of decadence.

Stephen Hand is editor of TCRNews.com