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

2. THEOLOGY AND MARRIAGE

2 THEOLOGY AND MARRIAGE Whatever things have deviated from their right order, cannot be back to that original state which is in harmony with their nature except by a return to the divine plan which, as the Angelic Doctor teaches, is the exemplar of all right order. —Pius XI 1930, 49 Sex for procreation is good; sexual passions are unruly; marriage is a sacrament. The values embedded in these three statements are not just expressions of Catholic sexual ethics; they reflect the core of Catholic theological beliefs about nature, creation, grace, and sin. Consequently, to better answer the question How does the concept of order clarify Catholic views about gender, sexual ethics, and Church authority? we must probe Catholicism’s core theological claims. Put more directly, the interconnections between theology and sexual norms are too central to ignore. Catholic claims about the purposes of sexual intercourse and the place of sexual activity in the context of the God/human relationship rest upon as well as reinforce a particular view of what it means to be male or female in the context of God’s created order. Marriage, as the legitimate locus of sexual intercourse, institutionalizes those gender roles and attitudes. There is an order to sexual activity and, more generally, to the male/female relationship that is ultimately connected to the properly ordered relationship between God and creation . In Catholicism, marriage has traditionally played an important role in enacting that order. Views about procreation and gender are central components of Catholicism’s precise and well-developed theology of marriage. It is a theology grounded in an understanding of marriage as mirroring the covenant of God and his people, especially as exemplified by the S E X I N G T H E C H U R C H 22 “marriage of Christ and the Church.” Like the covenant between God and the people of Israel and God’s gift of his son, marriage is, in the words of Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, “the wise institution of the Creator to realize in mankind His design of love.” Marriage is not “the effect of chance or the product of evolution of unconscious natural forces” but rather a deliberate part of God’s created order (Paul VI 1968, par. 8). The view that marriage reflects an essential component of God’s relationship to humans grounds the normative claims of Catholic sexual ethics. In this chapter, I identify three basic assertions about the connection between marriage, the created order, and God: 1) the primary meaning of marriage is sacramental; 2) the primary end of marriage is procreation; and 3) the primary virtue in marriage is chastity. These assertions reflect a theological order, one that entails a certain relationship between male and female. The institution of marriage and gender roles reinforce one another and work to maintain what Catholicism views as God’s created order. This chapter underscores the ways the concept of marriage as a sacrament captures the vertical dimension of that order; the ways the teleological language of ends captures the social dimension of that order; and the ways the virtue of chastity focuses on the agent and the importance of self-mastery in maintaining that order. References to the meaning, end, and virtue of marriage reflect views about sexual activity in marriage. The documents and themes I explore in this chapter all exhibit a concern about how to justify sexual intercourse and, more precisely, how to legitimize its pleasure. As noted earlier, concupiscence or immoderate desire is both a sign of and a punishment for a disordered self. Defining what constitutes moderate or appropriate desire is a central task for these documents that has implications for all three types of order mentioned above— the vertical dimension, the social dimension, and the agent-centered dimension. The line between legitimate sexual pleasure and “unbridled lust” is thus a fine one in these documents. Nevertheless, the most significant developments in the contemporary period, which begins with Leo XIII’s 1880 encyclical letter on marriage, are the shift in the construal of sexual pleasure and the implications of that shift for the meaning of procreation. Leo’s document is in some ways an arbitrary starting point since it T H E O L O G Y A N D M A R R I A G E 23 is preceded by a rich history of Catholic theological reflection on sex and marriage.1...