Bishops rush in 
        and  other sins against Nature    
                            William Johnson Globe and Mail Jan 24/01

The bishops rushed in last week where angels should fear to tread. Gerald Wiesner, president of theCanadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, sent a lette of rebuke to Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson. "It is with profound regret that on behalf of the Roman and Eastern Catholic Bishops of Canada, I write to criticize and protest the greetings and congratulations that were sent from the office of the Governor-General of Canada to Messrs. Kevin Bourassa and Joseph Varnell and to Mines. Anne Vautour and Elaine Vautour, on the occasion of a service held 14 January 2001 in the Toronto Metropolitan Community Church purportedly to recognize their relationships as legal marriages."

The bishops acted fast, just two days after the marriage ceremony between two same sex couples. The old addage "Rome moves slowly," didn’t apply.

I’m not concerned about the performance of Ms. Clarkson, but I’m troubled by the theological, social and political imlications of the bishops’ intervention.   If there’s one area of faith and morals when the bishops should be slow to judge, it’s that of human sexuality and marriage. The Church’s historic record is an almost un-mitigated disaster.

The New Testament spoke little about sexuality and marriage. That little shows openness and acceptance. Jesus, unlike most rabbis, consorted in his public life with women as well as men. He showed mercy to the woman taken in adultery. He chose married men as his apostles, and manifested himself to women after his death. He quoted Genesis: "A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh," and added: "What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder" (Matthew 19:3-12).

St. Paul, the earliest contributor to the New Testament, was married and, as he wrote (I Corinthians 9:5), he travelled with his wife, just as the other apostles did. But, soon, the teaching of Jesus and Paul was contaminated by two pagan philosophies in the early centuries of the Christian era, Gnosticism and Stoicism.

Gnosticism taught that God created the soul of humans as pure spirits, but demons created matter and imprisoned those souls in human bodies. The pleasures of the body, sexuality, were evil. Stocism taught that all camal pleasure should be resisted as debasing humans. Under these alien influences, the Fathers of the Church, such as St. Jerome  and St. Augustine, came to consider sexuality to mankind in Paradise, and a product of the Fall. Augustine believed that original sin - by which all humans are condemned to hell eternally unless redeemed by baptism - was transmitted by sexual intercourse.

Virginity, which Jesus did not speak of, came to be considered the ideal. Even in marriage, spouses should have sex as little as possible, and then only to procreate, or to avoid adultery. To have sex for pleasure or love was a sin. Couples should avoid sex before going to church. Priests should not have sex with their wives. Eventually, by 1139, priests in the Western Churchwere forbidden to marry.  Married couples must have intercourse in the classical position, otherwise they sinned gravely. For St. Thomas Aquinas, the most influential theologian on sexuality even in the 20th century, to have sex with the woman on top, or oral sex or anal sex, or coitus interruptus, or sex with contraceptives, was "a sin against nature" and a more serious sin than having sex in the correct position with one’s mother.

Marriage, in the early Church, had been according to the Roman custom: a man and a woman decided to live togeiher in marriage. Some chose to formalize their decision in a church, others did not, but there was no rule requiring church marriage until 1563.

Over the years, though, the celibate clergy obsessively turned theology into moral theology - all the multitudinous ways of sinning through sexuality.

The chain of reasoning that developed into Catholic moral theology - a history of bad biology and worse superstition - from the early centuries to the last has been documented. I strongly recommend German Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. Her careful scholarship docments the Church’s descent into semi-Gnosticism, and she shows the need for reform. Bishop Gerald Wiesner might discover there that the bishops face a greater problem than the Governor-General.