A laughable canard that gets bandied about major media, liberal commentary, and popular culture is that Catholic priests spend their time lecturing their congregations against using condoms, against having sex before marriage, and against tolerating homosexuality.
In 18 years since college, I have attended about 1,000 Masses in about 15 dioceses (though mostly in Washington) and I have heard approximately zero homilies laying out church teaching on sexuality. The first time I ever heard a priest mention contraception from the pulpit was when the Obama administration was trying to force Church institutions to pay for it. The first homily I heard that covered homosexuality was a lecture that we Capitol Hill Catholics weren’t doing enough to stop violence against gays.
In short, the Catholic Church in America — in my experience — spends very little time articulating, justifying, or insisting on its teachings about human sexuality. So little time, in fact, that most people, Catholic or not, don’t know what the Church teaches.
Catholic teaching on sexuality is not merely a series of “Thou Shalt Nots.” Pope John Paul II beautifully articulated the “theology of the body,” which taught how God made the bodies of men and women with beauty and function that point us to the divine. This is a much needed teaching in a time when our pop culture peddles a vanity that yields both a narcissism and self-loathing.
The Church teaches and always has taught that sex, love, marriage, and fertility are gifts from God, and that they all belong together. Mooring family formation to marriage, sex to family formation, and mutual and sacrificial love to all three is a powerful teaching that obviously deserves a second look in this country, where about three in every five babies born to noncollege women are born out of wedlock.
The Catholic Church also teaches that, absent norms of modesty and chastity, respect for human dignity will erode. Renewing the ideas of human dignity and chastity would help stem the epidemic the Me Too moment laid bare of harassment and sexual predation.
Which brings us to Theodore McCarrick, the former cardinal and former Archbishop of Washington. McCarrick preyed on young men in seminary for years, and is accused of molesting a boy he had baptized. Upon his installation in Washington. The Washington Post praised McCarrick as a “moderate” who put more attention on the world’s poor than on “church teachings on homosexuality, abortion and the ban on women’s ordination.” McCarrick was the archbishop for all my years reporting on Capitol Hill.
While socially liberal secular critics of Christianity charge “hypocrisy” when reading about leading prelates being licentious and predatory, that’s the wrong charge. Most of Church in America has largely been reluctant to talk about sexuality, and now we know why: They were afraid to preach what they knew the clergy wasn’t practicing.
We laymen are now learning that celibacy within the priesthood was more a guideline in many corners of church than a requirement. Consensual gay sexual contact among priests may not be applauded, but it is often tolerated in a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” way.
Church leaders who didn’t want to practice, preach, or enforce church teaching on sexuality knew they would be fine as long as they didn’t publicly reject the teaching. The result was a flock and priesthood left without a moral compass.
In one article this week defending Pope Francis from accusations that he kept McCarrick as close adviser despite knowledge of his predations, the author repeatedly mentions that the seminarians with whom McCarrick got into bed were over the age of 18. The writer, Andrea Tornielli, also adds: “No one has ever said that to invite seminarians close to the priesthood and young priests to sleep with him, ‘Uncle Ted’ (as McCarrick called himself) used forms of violence or threats.”
You can see in those words the mores of the sexual revolution: That consent is the only thing necessary to make sexual acts morally licit. But those mores, the “Me Too” moment has shown us, don’t work — not even on their own terms. Especially not when the person demanding it has authority over his victim. “Consent” has proven a woefully inadequate threshold to prevent abuse, and the case of a priest seeking sexual relations with seminarians is perfect demonstration as to why.
And of course, a sexually active priest is not morally equivalent to the unmarried couple that goes a bit too far on a Friday night. He is, rather, like the married man who cheats on his wife.
If sexual activity is something of a norm among the priests of some archdioceses, that’s not a minor problem. That’s infidelity. And in the case of McCarrick, it is something far worse.
But, hey, at least it’s not hypocrisy.
