Catholic Sexuality: Hellenism and Self-reliance

Last Friday, there was a comment storm on the National Catholic Reporter site about news that some want to reconsider priestly celibacy. It had the usual anachronists who thought that because Christ did not anoint female priests (he anointed no priests at all), that we could not do so now. Everyone agreed that celibacy stared in the fourth century after Constantine mandated Catholicism for the Empire (although he left Rome out of the great Councils because it was an Aryan backwater).

 I brought up that the issue was not celibacy so much as Sacred Continence, which came from the stoic ideal of asexual friendship as being superior to marital relations. Sacred Continence, which forbids any priest who has had sex with his wife recently from celebrating Mass. Doing so was considered unclean. Indeed, this view dictated Augustine's contention that Original Sin came through birth by women. It is why Christ had to be both asexual and born by a perpetual virgin. The attachment to this gives us the attachment to the Eden myth as reality rather than what it is, a parable about blame. This also led to an asexual bias in Christian morality, so that obvious observations in natural law are ignored because they conflict with the ideal that sexuality for its own sake is wrong and that asexuality is a form of innate holiness, with celibacy merely the discipline to apply that holiness socially.

There is nothing particularly Christian about an asexual bias. although St/.Paul seems to have been an asexual (he was probably not gay). He was a Jew from Tarsus, not Palestine, so this type of Hellenism was easy for him to teach to those he converted to Christianity. He wrote this way before any major persecution of the Church since his own.  Anyone who pays attention to my posts on asexuality in Catholic sexual teaching, and its misogynistic overtones (which also lead to not ordaining women) have heard this all before. Here is the new point.

From Jesus Maccabees to Jesus of Nazareth to the Martyrs for Christ through Nero (666) and Diocletian, the question was the imposition of Hellenistic philosophy on the people of God (first against Judah and then against the Church). It is ironic that after the Church became the religion of the Empire, it fully embraced its Hellenistic sexual ideal. By doing so, it essentially spits on the tombs of all of the martyrs who resisted it, including our Lord. This is a more powerful argument than simply attacking the asexuallity of the clergy, although both have their roots in Hellenistic misogyny. The only way out of this is to ordain women.

Today's debate was about abortion, with one of the usual trolls saying that one cannot be Catholic and pro-choice. I offered the usual arguments on negative and positive rights, the impracticality of regulating first trimester abortions and the dependence of both parties on keeping the issue alive. I will not repeat them here. There are a few new points, however.

There is no longer a Catholic vote, so one cannot say that it is non-Catholic to vote Democratic. The argument is settled on Roe. All eight Justices after Thomas consider it to be settled law. All but a few who have passed the Bar Exam know the reasons why this is the case. The base pro-life vote in the Church is about 43 percent. The base pro-choice vote is about the same. 16% are the mushy middle which jump between parties based on how abortion is dealt with.

If partial birth abortion is the focus of the day, the middle goes Republican (as when Hillary defended the practice to rally her base rather than showing this as another issue where Trump is ignorant - as PBA is already illegal). The middle goes Democratic when it is reminded that the pro-life movement is the GOP at prayer and there is more than just a little opportunism in how they frame the issue. That is how Obama won the Catholic vote in 2008, largely at my urging. Hillary ignored my earlier advice to her and lost the vote for that reason and because she did not take care of Obama voters who won't vote for an all-white ticket.

The antidote for dealing with Roe is to deal with preventing abortion through economic means. So far, nothing new. What is new are my my comments on how the Kingdom of God cannot abide self-reliance.

The Kingdom of God, as Jesus talked about it was not about going to Heaven but bring Heaven to Earth. Jesus said that it was difficult for a rich man to accept the kingdom. It would take the kind of contortions that camels would have to make to go through "the eye of the needle" which was a gate in the city wall where a camel would sit on a sled in a certain way and be pulled through.

Jesus did not have an income ceiling to be saved. What he stressed was faith in God to provide in all things. The primary characteristic of wealth is self reliance. It is hard to accept the Kingdom of God when you rely on yourself. Recall the story of the rich man who finally had his barns fool of grain and died the next day. He was not a fool for having wealth but for depending on it. There are no U-Hauls following hearses.

The Magisterium is very clear about society acting when employers and the free market cannot provide for families. Casti Connubii 119-122 are quite clear that the antidote for abortion is a living wage freely paid or social welfare if the market cannot provide. Charity is a one-time thing. Continuing income supplements are a matter of the public purse (even if granted through tax subsidies like the Child Tax Credit put in originally by Gerald Ford or a Negative Income Tax as described by Milton Friedman. The question is no longer whether such things are good, only if the amounts are adequate. They are not, which is the major driver in abortion - roughly 72 percent of the time.

 The question for pro-lifers is not whether a family supplement is enacted. It is already in place. The question is whether it should be adequate to achieve relative social and economic equality for most families. The USDA estimates that it takes $1000 per child per month to live decently (not including daycare). This would essentially end the need for three-quarters of abortions. Not providing such a support level while banning abortion would be considered cruel by most civilized people. The question for pro-lifers is whether they support an adequate level or whether you believe in the kind of self-reliance that Jesus condemned?