Sexuality and Catholicism.

In his preface to Sexuality and Catholicism, Thomas C. Fox writes that Catholicism, once notable to members and outsiders alike for its confident certainties about itself and its beliefs, is entering a third millennium unsure of its own identity. Fox traces those identity problems to the church's teachings about sexuality and gender. The problem, ironically, is that the papal confidence in traditional formulations and its own authority, especially as exercised by John Paul II, has undermined our confidence in the church's credibility. Fox's argument, familiar enough, is that the magisterium, counter to the judgment of most of the laity, many Catholic moral theologians, and even some bishops, reaches unpersuasive moral absolutes by discounting the relevance of experience and history and by employing an unrevised natural law approach that confuses the determinacies of biology with the indeterminacies of personal responsibility.

Despite his frequent use of the term, Pope John Paul II does not "dialogue." Rather, he futilely seeks to make his version of sexual orthodoxy a criterion for religious orthodoxy. Worse, he uses questions of sexual discipline and doctrine such as Humanae vitae as measures of loyalty, especially with regard to the clergy. Placing enormous explanatory weight on sexual issues himself, Fox argues that the divergence between lay experience, measured mostly through polls, and magisterial recalcitrance undermines church authority and lessens its presence in the world. Fox asserts rather than demonstrates the last part of this argument.

In his conclusion, Fox provides something of a representative summary of his charges and his tone:

They [progressive Catholics] ignore

a theology that fails to make

distinctions in the gravity of sins.

They ask how sexual intercourse 

with the use of a condom is always

"an intrinsically evil" act. They

ask how the use of a condom to

prevent the spread of the AIDS

virus, even within marriage, can

be as morally wrong as passing the

virus to another. They ask how artificial

birth control can be regarded

as evil in all cases and

natural family planning can be

viewed as good if the intention not

to conceive a child is the same in

each instance. They ask how a

compassionate church can teach

that gays and lesbians can never

under any circumstances express

sexual intimacy. They ask how

the church can teach a host of sexual

absolutes that never take into

consideration circumstances. Can

artificial insemination, even with

a husband's sperm in order to

have a child, be gravely wrong?

The list could go on. "It just doesn't

make sense," is the common response.

Many Catholics raised in

the faith hang on, disregarding

the teachings. The young, more

frequently, simply don't want to

be bothered.

Fox is highly critical of papal tendencies toward enunciating moral absolutes and centralizing church governance, yet despite these dire trends he exhibits an almost bubbly confidence in the future of Catholicism. John Paul II is attempting a "restorationist" project that soon will be sympathetically but firmly rejected as "a reorganizing period before the church continues with its renewal journey" begun with the Second Vatican Council. This renewed forward journey, among other things, will include married and women priests.

Fox's language about the church sometimes veers backward to a recognizable Reformation confidence in grasping and revitalizing an untarnished core of Christianity which can be confidently separated from its institutional deformations. "Is there a place in the church," he asks, "for monarchical authority when Jesus himself repudiated political power and when Jesus and the earliest Christian generations needed to radically reinterpret the concept of Messiah . . . replacing it with the prophetic character of Jesus' ministry?"

Throughout this book, Fox's most often cited source is the National Catholic Reporter, where he serves with distinction as editor. In a way the book could serve as a primer for new subscribers. Readers learn that the Vatican occupies 108.7 acres, that Thomas Aquinas "wrote the book on natural law theology," that "Christians generally view Saint Augustine (354 430), bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa, as the greatest teacher of Christian antiquity."

However, readers learn little of Augustine's hard-earned skepticism about things sexual or about sex's murky connections with power and control. The Vatican's prohibitions are the only kind of power and control exposed by Fox. Empirical data pointing more to Augustine's than to Fox's conclusions say, studies of cohabitation and subsequent divorce or studies linking contraceptive use and abortion rates--don't find their way into these pages. In chapter 9 on "Population," Fox takes at face value the Clinton administration's claim that it did not intend to include more easily available abortion by promoting the much-debated term "reproductive health" at the UN's Cairo conference.

A failing of a different, but still important, magnitude is Fox's omission of that devout/bemused kind of Catholic irony once frequently heard in school yards but still available in translation in neighborhood bars and at bingo games. For instance, in chapter 8 on "Carnal Love," Fox divulges the utterly baffling news that, according to Andrew Greeley's data, Catholics enjoy sex more than most others. The data show "Catholics are significantly more likely to have sex weekly or more often than all others combined (sic!) and also more likely to have sex frequently than are liberal and fundamentalist Protestants." But don't Greeley's survey results run counter to Fox's principal argument? Given this data, one might be inclined to think that maybe moral absolutes are more fun than we postmodems are allowed to think; perhaps (Freud might at least help here) they are necessary to stimulate erotic desires over the long run? Perhaps couples whose familiarity has dimmed their sexual zest should now be advised to slip into something more comfortable and read Veritatis splendor? Remembering the next morning, needless to say, to hide it from the teen-agers.

Or maybe not. We must, to be certain, await Greeley's or someone else's next study. At any rate, this much is certain. Thomas Fox's view of the church is perennially attractive. His focus never strays from the Jesus of the Gospels whom he finds constantly preaching forgiveness, who mostly tells us about his and our caring Father, and who himself rarely teaches about sex. Fox writes that "Decades, even centuries, from now church historians may look back at the Second Vatican Council's stress on God's love and mercy as its most lasting legacy." Sexuality and Catholicism aspires to contribute to that deep, rich, and complex Catholic legacy. We can't imagine a worthy church without such aspirations.