VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast
Barbie Latza Nadeau
A growing chorus in Rome, straight and LGBT, echo Pope Francis as they ask the assembled bishops at a critical summit, “Who are you to judge?”
VATICAN CITY—Hundreds of celibate men from the Roman Catholic Church have spent the last week hearing people who actually have sex actually talk about it. The topics range from who should have it to when they should have it and how they should have it, which, according to British Bishop Vincent Nichols, is “not what we bishops talk about mostly, quite honestly.” Novelty aside, the real question is whether these avowedly chaste men of the cloth are listening.
The last time anyone at the Vatican openly obsessed about sex as much we’re seeing at the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops being held in Rome was back in 1968 when Pope Paul VI penned Humanae Vitae. That encyclical letter on the heels of the Second Vatican Council became the how-not-to manual of Catholic sexuality for some, and what amounted to a theological cold shower for others. The letter reiterated the unbendable teachings of the Catholic Church during the height of the sexual revolution, essentially banning everything that was revolutionary at the time, starting with The Pill, but hardly ending there. While the rest of the Western world explored free love, Catholics were instead told “no” to premarital sex, birth control, masturbation and homosexuality.
Pope Paul VI and the Church at that time could be forgiven for puritanical idealism. Humanae Vitae was in response to unbridled sexual liberation, written well before the advent of the Internet or sexting, when pornography was either pulp or peep show, and when “50 Shades of Grey” was what happened when priests accidentally washed their white clerical collars with their dark cassocks. So it is little wonder that Pope Paul VI’s Church defined sex as nothing more than a sort of marital perk between men and women that was “noble and worthy” with a special emphasis on the sins of using contraception. It was not necessary to try to avoid pregnancy, the pope said, because the Church teaches that sex is meant only for the purpose of procreation. Essentially, anyone having the type of sex that isn’t open to giving life—like gays and lesbians—shouldn’t be having sex at all.
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