Spreading the Good News About Christian Marriage

Someone has got to tell people the whole truth. Sleeping together and having a long-term relationship before marriage do not guarantee a happy marriage but actually increase the possibility of unhappiness and divorce. Saving sexual love until marriage doesn't increase the risk of being incompatible, but instead actually increases the likelihood of mutual fulfillment. Understanding the real physical and spiritual bond that occurs in sexual union can help people not to undertake that bond lightly and avoid a lot of pain. . . . Some of the people that need to hear this good news are pastors, teachers, formators and lay leaders!

Forty years after the sexual revolution broke out in the sixties, its values are now an intrinsic part of our cultural beliefs, and they determine for most of us how we live our lives. Now that the sexual revolution has won, society is manifesting numerous ills, such as an over 40% divorce rate, that indicate how much we have lost. Most people who have grown up in the past forty years have never known any alternatives to the current attitudes to marriage. To put it mildly, this poses a pastoral problem. We face the huge task of articulating, teaching, and preaching a counter-revolutionary set of values in compelling terms, to win back hearts and minds.

Almost universally, people young and old (even believing Christians) hold to a set of beliefs about marriage that were not common forty years ago. One is that sexual intercourse outside of marriage is good and healthy, and that marriage is optional. Another is that if you do want to marry, you risk marrying someone with whom you will be incompatible if you don't have sex and spend a lot of time together before marriage. A third related belief is that having varied sexual experiences before settling down can help you have a better marriage and reduce the risk of divorce. A fourth belief is that Christian teachings should have no effect on a person's freedom to do what he or she thinks is right. We've all heard people say things like, "The Catholic Church has no business in my bedroom," and "Why should I let a bunch of old celibate guys in Rome tell me what to do with my sex life?" And while some men continue to see marriage as a trap ("that old ball and chain"), some women see marriage as patriarchal, a benefit only to males, and a lowering of the status of women to the level of property.

The Catholic Church makes the counter claim that marriage is deeply fulfilling to both men and women and that sexuality belongs in marriage. Could it be that we lost the battle for mind share partly because we weren't explaining things right? God (speaking through Revelation to the Church) is not a big meanie, trying to deprive people of their joy, but a loving parent who has laid down rules to guide His children in the ways that lead to complete fulfillment, spiritual, sexual, and psychological. Professor Michael Neri, who teaches a class on marriage to fourth year seminarians at St. Patrick's Seminary in Santa Clara, and who is also a marriage counselor, referred to the claims of the Church as "The Good News about the Christian vision of marriage" in a handout in a class at the San Jose Institute for Leadership in Ministry.

After an overview of some of the ideas and writings from some of the proponents of the sexual revolution that shaped our current world view, this paper focuses on how pastoral ministers can come to the defense of marriage. As a starting point, Catholic parish leaders can use theological writings on marriage after Vatican II, which point to the Scriptures to affirm "God's dream" for marriage, which over the centuries had been forgotten or distorted by some, and counter some of the harshness of a formerly-common legalistic view of marriage with a more personalist view.

The sexual revolution got some of its foundational underpinnings in the popularized interpretation of the ideas of Freud in the twenties and thirties, in which self control was redefined as repressive and unhealthy. (In Dorothy Day's autobiography1, she wrote about men who used lines about the neurotic consequences of represssion to hit on women as far back as the 1920s.)

Simone de Beauvoir in "The Second Sex," published in 1952 by Knopf, New York, compared women who won't have sex outside of marriage to prostitutes because both types of women required payment before giving themselves to a man, and de Beauvoir claimed that it was religion that had made women the "second sex." De Beauvoir's writings may have contributed to the acceptance of the sexual revolution by many women, like myself, who longed for an end to the double standard and to the belittlement of women.

In his rambling and often repetitive Playboy Philosophy2 published in 18 installments starting in the December 1962 issue of Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner expanded (in words in addition to the usual pictures) on his vision of women as playmates. His arguments for "free love" without marriage or commitment and without the conception of children were backed up by now largely debunked research claims of the Kinsey Institute and other sexologists. As Cal Thomas noted in his recent article about the 50th anniversary of Playboy magazine, Hefner's dreams of a new society untrammeled by religious beliefs about sex have since then come true -- with negative consequences that Hefner should own up to being largely responsible for. As Thomas wrote, Hefner's "`free love' was neither free nor love3."

Hefner's arguments were butressed by his claims that any intelligent, non-neurotic, educated, non-repressed, non-Puritan would have to agree with him, Kinsey, Ellis, and others who said there should be no restrictions on sex of any kind. His only exception to his claims for the goodness of all forms of sexual expression was homosexuality, which he called inversion, although he was against the laws against sodomy because they could be used against heterosexuals too. The list of things Hefner spoke out for are now all freely accepted in the popular culture: pornography, adultery, obscene speech, premarital sex, masturbation, anal and oral sex, contraception, and abortion. Only a few sexual practices tolerated or condoned by his magazine haven't gained complete acceptance from the average American: bestiality and child sex with adults. (However, the support of Hefner and the psychologists he quoted for the harmlessness of adults having sex with children probably had something to do with the lack of response by some Catholic prelates to the child molestation by some priests and to the rationalizations of the perpetrators about how what they were doing was at worst harmless and at best loving and liberating.)

The total acting out of the mores of the sexual revolution was made possible in large part by the availability and acceptance of reliable contraception and supported by the legalization of abortion (in 1973), which provided a way to deal with "contraceptive failures." (Not so incidentally, the Playboy foundation has always been a large contributor to organizations that provide these services.)

With these ideas having caught on, where are we now? When I used google.com to search for something or other one evening, I serendipitously came up with the following illustration of how someone who has never heard what the Church teaches might react, in a high school girl's blog (online web log).

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Every Wednesday evening, I go to a religious education class at Corpus Christi, the Catholic church near my house. I've never been baptized or anything, so it's this class for the dumb kids who never learned anything and now they have to catch up on roughly seven years of church knowledge. . . . One girl, a cheerleader at Akimel, became outraged when she learned that it's a sin in our church to have sex before marriage. She spent the whole class with a dejected look on her face, and I could tell she was wondering if she picked the right religion to take up. 4

Following is an example of how at least some practicing Catholic Christians take it for granted that Church teachings about marriage are outmoded. One divorced man leading a Renew group I attended had been married twice outside the Church and told the group casually that he continued to go to Communion while in those marriages. At a Renew meeting at his house, he introduced the woman he was courting to be his third wife, and she told the group how they told their dreams to each other when they woke up in bed together in that morning. Nobody seemed to disapprove or be at all surprised that a Renew leader did not observe the laws of the Church concerning marriage, and that he was apparently engaging in non-marital sex in the mornings before holding class.

There are probably many causes for the lack of conformity with Church teachings among Catholics as there are for the prevalent moral attitudes outside the Church. Besides the fact that many if not most of us were convinced by the rhetoric of the sexual revolution, the Catholics of my generation emphasize social justice issues over personal sexual morality. We are afraid to seem sexually prudish or condemning. We don't want to be too negative. As a result, I've personally known people who either graduated from Catholic school, went through 12 years of parish catechesis, or went through an RCIA program, and who have never heard what the Church teaches on marriage, or have never heard it presented in a way that shows the rules as a gift instead of a burden.

The attitudes of one churchgoing young man I once worked with, let's call him Chuck, are also illustrative of this problem. Chuck was involved with a Catholic woman, and they both liked to travel. At a funeral lunch for another coworker's father, we both were talking with John, who is an older Italian-Catholic man. John asked Chuck whether he was seeing anybody, and Chuck showed John a photo of him (Chuck) and his girlfriend in front of a tent they had shared in the Himalayas.

John then asked Chuck a question seldom heard these days, "Are your intentions honorable?" Chuck's reply was, "Oh definitely."

In case you might not remember, the question, "Are your intentions honorable?" used to mean, "Are you just using this woman or are you going to marry her?"

When I asked Chuck some time later what he meant by having honorable intentions, since they weren't even engaged at the time, the gist of his explanation was as follows. So far (after about a year of spending almost all their free time together--including bedtime) they were getting along great. He would sincerely consider marrying her some time in the unspecified future if they didn't run into any major incompatibilities. When I looked uncomfortable at the conditional nature of their arrangement, he said, "Well, you've got to be careful. Divorce is expensive."

I figured that Chuck and his Catholic girlfriend were relying on their consciences. As Catholics who were trained in my day knew, we are supposed to make moral decisions based on an informed conscience. If we trust that the Church's teachings are true and for our benefit, we are going to find out what they are, and follow them with the help of God. I suggested to Chuck that the Church's teachings are for our happiness not for our frustration.

I told Chuck that surveys have revealed that people who marry after living together actually get divorced at a higher rate than those who don't live together first. I also told him that I remembered seeing in the news in the late 70s after the sexual revolution had been in full swing for about a decade that the editors at Playboy magazine were surprised when they surveyed people about their sexual satisfaction. Those who were chaste before marriage, who don't live together, and who were faithful to their spouses reported higher satisfaction than other couples.

Catholic theologians and apologists since Vatican II have been exploring ways to get this Good News out to the people that need to hear it. (Some of the people that need to hear it are pastors, teachers, formators and lay leaders!) Aside from being able to quote surveys that contradict the current wisdom, we can go with the theologians back to the Scriptures, to show the awesome dignity and centrality of the marriage mystery to the Christian faith.

The wrong vision can only be overcome by a right vision. To use the wording I used earlier, which was used in one of Professor Neri's classes on marriage, we need to put forth again "God's dream for marriage."

Another phrase I quoted earlier in this paper from Professor Neri, "The Good News about the Christian vision of marriage" is close to the title of a book by Christopher West, Good News About Sex & Marriage .(Servant, 2000). West, whose website www.theologyofthebody.orgis linked from the Natural Family Planning group website that is linked from the San Jose diocesan website, is a graduate of Pope John Paul II's Institute for Marriage and the Family. West has taken it as his life work to put forth and explain in laymen's terms the ideas that Pope John Paul II presented in a series of addresses in the early years of his pontificate, which has been collected in a book called Theology of the Body. West's companion book is: Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary on John Paul II's "Gospel of the Body" (Pauline, 2003).

Here is a quote from Christopher West's web site, that I think sums up what we have been learning in class about the shift in emphasis after Vatican II:

The Second Vatican Council marked a shift from a merely "juridical" presentation of marriage, typical of many previous Church pronouncements, to a more "personalist" approach. In other words, rather than focusing merely on the objective "duties," "rights," and "ends" of marriage, the Council Fathers emphasized how these same duties, rights, and ends are informed by the intimate, interpersonal love of the spouses. "Such love, merging the human and the divine, leads the spouses to a free and mutual gift of themselves, a gift providing itself by gentle affection, and by deed; such love pervades the whole of their lives, growing better and growing greater by its generosity."5

And here are some words of Our Lord Himself about the indissolvability and unity of this love:

Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.' They said to him, 'Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away? He said to them, 'For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so [Matt 19: 4-8].

And here are some of the deeply meaningful passages about marriage from the letters of St. Paul:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her," adding at once: "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church [Eph 5:25-26,31-32; Cf. Gen 2:24.]

Someone has got to tell people the whole truth. Sleeping together and having a long-term relationship before marriage do not guarantee a happy marriage but actually increase the possibility of unhappiness and divorce. Saving sexual love until marriage doesn't increase the risk of being incompatible, but instead actually increases the likelihood of mutual fulfillment. Understanding the real physical and spiritual bond that occurs in sexual union can help people not to undertake that bond lightly and avoid a lot of pain.

The word needs to be spread to every one who leads in every parish and to everyone who comes in contact with the parish at every age. We've got a big job ahead of us.