SEX, LIES, AND THE REAL THING

God who created man out of love also calls him to love — the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes.

— Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 1604; emphasis added

Walk into any bookstore and you'll find its shelves are positively pregnant with books about sex. Thanks to texts on tantric sex, karmic sex, kosher sex, sex for one, sex for several, and sexy sex for sex's sake, our culture has advanced to the point where you can do it on a plane, you can do it on a train, you can do it here, or there. Yes, my friends, you can do it anywhere — with confidence, impunity, and even, if you are so inclined, with malice aforethought.

But in the midst of the sea of information about sex, the unanswered question is "Can you do it ...as a Christian?" To which the cynic responds, "Of course not!" And this goes double if you happen to be a Catholic Christian, in which case, the cynic would answer, "Not only can you not do it, you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking about it."

The cynics are wrong.

Uber-preacher Bishop Fulton Sheen once observed that "millions of people hate the Church for what they think she teaches. But there aren't ten people who hate the Church for what she really teaches." This is never truer than when the topic of Catholic sexuality is raised. By now you've all seen the widely distributed press release from the office for the National Association of Conventional Wisdom on All Things Catholic (NACWATC). For those of you who aren't in the loop, here's a copy of that famous document:

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TWO FALSE IDEAS ATTRIBUTED TO THE CHURCH

Memos aside, I suspect the majority of people would be truly surprised to discover that most of what they think of as official Catholic teaching about sex has actually been officially denounced as a heresy by the Catholic Church at one point or another. This is especially true of the two predominant categories into which most people believe Catholic sexuality breaks down: The Keep God Out of My Bedroom School and Aunt McGillicuddy's Antique Urn School.

THE MEDITERRANEAN APPROACH

The Keep God Out of My Bedroom School of Sexuality has a very impressive alumni mailing list. Think of it as the more Mediterranean, Must Leave Morning Mass Early So I Can Have Breakfast with My Mistress school of thought. People who hold this view of sex tend to believe that "as long as I am a basically good person, occupy my mind with spiritual thoughts, let Father dip into my wallet whenever he asks, and don't miss Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, I can do whatever I want with my body, because, after all, God doesn't really care about what happens with those dangly bits as long as I shake them only at consenting adults behind closed doors."

Although many Catholics past and present do hold to this way of thinking about sex, there is nothing Catholic about it. In fact, it isn't remotely Christian — even in the broadest sense of the word. This school of thought has much more to do with a kind of low church gnosticism than it does with anything Christian.

Think of gnosticism as the RonCo knock-off of Christianity. It is to Christianity what GLH2000 — "spray-on hair-in-a-can" — is to real hair: a diverse group of religious movements that grew up alongside Christianity. Although looking like the name-brand product, they are cheap and shiny, making up in marketing what they lack in substance. This, of course, is exactly why people can't get enough of them even to this day. One of the common themes uniting the various gnostic movements is the idea that the body is largely irrelevant and even undesirable. According to the gnostics, man is primarily a spiritual being, inconveniently weighed down by a slab of meat (commonly referred to as "a body") that it is our great misfortune to lug about.

The less popular, high church gnostics dealt with this dim view of the body by punishing it with extreme fasting, strict abstinence, and harsh sexual continence. And sometimes castration and suicide.

These people weren't invited to a lot of parties.

By contrast, the people who threw the best parties, what I call the "low church gnostics," were a lot like our modern-day Keep God Out of My Bedroom Schoolers. They believed that since God only really cares about our spirits, we could do almost anything we wanted with our body, especially if it involved other people's bodies. After all, since our bodies are bad anyway, why not let them do the bad things they were made to do? Although there aren't a lot of high church gnostics around these days, the low church kind are in abundance. In the contemporary world, low church gnostics are the helpful folks who argue that the Catholic Church — and really, all Christendom — would be much better off if it would just stop obsessing about sex and be what God intended it to be: a glorified social service agency that stinks of incense and good intentions.

Despite its staying power, gnosticism in all its forms has been denounced as either outright paganism or a heresy since the second century A.D. by such prominent Christian writers as Melito of Sardis (died 190 A.D.), Irenaeus of Lyons (130–202 A.D.), and Tertullian (160–222 A.D.). In fact, in an intriguing discussion between Anglican archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and John Paul II biographer George Weigel in 2007, low church gnosticism was fingered as Christianity's public enemy number one in the new millennium, for its ability both to seem Christian and to exhibit Christian piety all while undermining everything Christianity stands for as far as the body and relationship goes.

These prominent historical and contemporary Christians attacked gnosticism because, above all, Christianity is all about the body. The Christian knows that God doesn't love us just for our minds. He wants all of us. In fact,...