Sexing the Church: Gender, Power, and Ethics in Contemporary Catholicism

NOTES

1 . O R D E R A N D S E X U A L E T H I C S 1. Kathleen Sands argues that the contemporary phenomenon where “sex and reproduction are taken as the central concerns of religion ” is the result of the economic and social power of the religious right (Sands 2000, 5). In other words, religious conservatives have succeeded in making “family values” synonymous with religious values. Sands argues that the danger of this view is that when family becomes the locus of religion, issues of social justice and politics are ignored. Thus, religious views about justice and the economy are rendered irrelevant , whereas religious teachings about the family (sexuality and reproduction ) are seen as uncontroversial. 2. I am aware of the long history of the use of order in theological ethics, especially in the context of the distinction between created order and redemptive order. While that traditional usage of the concept bears some resemblance to mine, I am not interested in exploring the way that distinction works in Catholicism. Clearly, similar pairs such as nature /grace and law/gospel are also important to theological ethics. 3. See Augustine, City of God, book 13, chapter 13. 4. See Gudorf 1988 for a more detailed treatment of this shift. 5. The equality espoused in contemporary Catholicism is connected to the created order but not necessarily to the redemptive order as evidenced in the Church’s continued support of a male-only priesthood. Rosemary Radford Ruether has referred to this as “a contradiction between anthropology and Christology”—a trend that she notes exists in contemporary official Catholic documents (Ruether 1991, 98). NOTES 6. He is rephrasing Augustine’s own definition of order in The City of God. There Augustine writes that “order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place” (bk. 19, ch. 13). 7. Curran attributes the term “sacramentality” to Richard P. McBrien and “analogical imagination” to David Tracy (Curran 1999). 8. The terms “sex,” “gender,” and “sexuality” are all controversial. Many have noted that the approach, which I embrace here, of associating gender with cultural construction and sex with physical structure simply reinforces a dangerous dichotomy. In his book The Ethics of Sex, Mark Jordan adopts the practice of using the terms interchangeably and uses the term “sex” “vaguely and inclusively” to include sexuality and gender. He thinks, for example, that the terms sex and gender are “ambiguously physical and cultural, determined N O T E S T O P A G E S 9 – 2 3 144 and determinable” (Jordan 2002, 14). I discuss the debates about terminology at greater length later in this chapter. 9. Excellent studies include Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Sexism and God Talk, and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her. 10. While this claim is difficult to verify, there is much in Catholic culture that romanticizes maternity and even expressly suggests that women are only truly fulfilled through motherhood. 11. See Ryan 2001 for more on the difficulties faced by Catholic couples, especially chapter 6, “Faith and Infertility.” 12. Jordan claims that “one of the things that distinguishes Christian sexual ethics is the way it mobilizes power around sex” (Jordan 2002, 19). 13. Judith Plaskow, commenting about Judaism, writes, “Wherever we look in Jewish sources, it is clear that the regulation of women’s sexuality is absolutely fundamental to women’s oppression” (Plaskow 2000, 24). 14. Susan Ross’s work in several articles, as well as in her book, has influenced much of my thinking on these issues. See Ross 1991, 1992, and 1998. 2 . T H E O L O G Y A N D M A R R I A G E 1. For more-sustained historical accounts see Mackin 1982. 2. “It is reasonably accurate to see the beginning of the modern era of Catholic teaching on marriage the sacrament in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter, Arcanum divinae sapientiae, of February 10, 1880,” writes Mackin in his thorough treatment of this issue (Mackin 1989, 516). 3. Noonan participated in meetings of the Papal Birth Control Commission convened in the mid-1960s to advise the Vatican on contraception. In 1965, he lectured to the commission on the history of the Church’s view on contraception and concluded that “church teaching on this question had gradually changed, impelled by varying conditions of the times, and always with a view toward preserving basic respect for human life” (Kaiser 1985, 82...