Defining Love. A Cultural Imperative
Editorial from the FAITH Magazine September-October 1997
An excellent edition of Broadsheet, the confidential news sheet of Crux, recently drew attention to the messages of support sent by Tony Blair, William Hague and Paddy Ashdown to the Gay Pride Rally this year. The universal support was “brandished as evidence by the rally’s organisers that the whole nation now supports the cause of ‘gay liberation’.” There certainly is a clear message to the nation that the official doctrine of love in Britain as we approach the third millennium is the doctrine of “sex is for loving” and “sex is the deepest expression of love”. It actually has very little directly to do with one’s thinking on homosexuality as such. In our cultural definition of love, we are looking in the face of a heresy that is destructive and thorough-going and, like any heresy, threatens the right ordering of society. The acceptance of homosexual practice is only one example of how this works in practice.
I have deliberately stated the doctrine blandly as “sex is for loving” or “sex is the deepest expression of love” because it is that statement which is accepted by most people in Britain and indeed very many in the Church. However the ramifications are anything but bland. Sex is taken as being a way of loving, the fullest expression of love. It is an easy step from there to say that within marriage, sex must not be tied to the procreation of children. Considered as an act or expression of loving, it must then permitted with deliberate contraception. Once this is allowed, it is very hard to suggest that any engaged couple should abstain until marriage. Few people see Mr Hague’s cohabitation with his fiancée as more than a very minor peccadillo if that. Once the link with a permanent relationship is broken, other “deep loving relationships” must also be allowed their sexual expression; any really deep friendship between a young man and a woman will very likely arouse some sexual feeling and this is taken as an indication of the “natural” place of sex as an expression of loving. Some agony aunts might mention the importance of commitment but nobody will be prepared to draw a hard and fast line.
Once the use of sex is permitted in this way between men and women, it can only be prejudice that forbids it between loving homosexuals. Once the principle of “sex is the deepest expression of love” is admitted, you must necessarily allow sex between two men or two women who really love each other. And who is to deny that such a real love can exist?
The heresy has run into difficulties over the next logical development which is to legitimise paedophilia or, as is now coming to be called, “inter-generational sex”. The prejudices of those mothers who want to string up the child molesters might prove awkward to shift. However, even here, we can see the counter-attack in the stories that “just happen” to be gracing the front pages at the moment, of mid-teenage boys in “relationships” with older women. The stories are accompanied by outrage, of course but the debate is opened. The unthinkable is now “on the table” for negotiation and gradual acceptance. There is a cynical use here of the real difference between male and female. The same slant could not be given to the stories were they between girls and adult men. Equality can always be dispensed with when it proves convenient.
The progression is easy to predict: first of all there will be stories of adults who had fulfilling relationships themselves when they were young, then the paedophile lobby in various guises will advocate the importance of not foisting “guilt” on these young “lovers”. Alongside this, there are such initiatives as the Family Planning Association’s leaflet It doesn’t matter how old you are illustrated with teddy-bears and the general assumption that the age of consent may be ignored by consenting young people. We are not too far from creating a society in which “inter-generational sex” is common and accepted. If we allow that “sex is for loving” and “sex is the deepest expression of love” eventually the same principle will allow sex between adults and children where there is a “loving relationship”—especially if it is “committed and sincere”. An important victory for the “inter-generational sex” lobby, will be to make it politically incorrect to assume that sex between adults and children is always abusive.
If we wish to stop the rot, we will not be able to rely on the charge that these relationships are always abusive. To avoid any possible misunderstanding here, we must make it clear that without a shadow of doubt, they are always abusive. But we must argue that they are abusive even when they appear to be loving. And so we will also need to argue that many other forms of apparently “loving” activity are wrong and harmful. With fear and trembling, we have to unravel the whole fabric of this heresy, going right back to the very definition of love and sex that has given rise to the squalid developments that threaten to become our new “normal”. Going back we can see that with genuine diabolical dishonesty, the changes in sexual mores that our culture has allowed in the past forty years have always been introduced by masking the real damage done by the sins that are legitimised.
We could take the liberalisation of divorce as another example. Even in the Church, the tendency is always to look on the “soft” side of divorce, to see the “irretrievable breakdown” that is nobody’s fault. In the rough and tumble of everyday life as seen in pastoral ministry it is often a good deal more heartbreaking than that. Time and again we sit and inwardly weep for the good husband or wife who has been deserted after fifteen or twenty years of faithful and loyal companionship. In explaining why the divorced and remarried cannot go to Holy Communion, I have always found it easiest simply to draw up an example of such a case and invite people to consider how it would be if the Catholic Church officially permitted the spouse who had cynically broken his or her promises and left grief, destruction and betrayal in their wake, to waltz up the aisle with their new “partner” and go to Holy Communion with her full blessing.
Again the pictures of “gay love” are generally dishonest in the extreme. The thoughtful and chaste Catholic homosexual will wince in disgust horror at the “gay scene” of our larger cities which threatens to entrap them in their weaker moments. The “safe sex” industry itself is witness to the casual forming and breaking of sexual relationships as a feature of the gay culture. Whilst of course there are more stable friendships, we have to remember that sex in both casual and committed relationships is justified as “the deepest expression of love”. It is not possible to draw a hard and fast line anywhere along the gradient.
We must have the courage to admit that the definition of sex simply as “for loving” and as “the deepest expression of love” is both false and dangerous. We have to turn to the only body which maintains a coherent moral doctrine concerning love and sex, the magisterium of the Catholic Church: only there do we find a clear alternative which offers a way of life to fulfil the human spirit. The prohibition of artificial contraception within marriage has been the limiting case in practice. Once the use of artificial birth control is conceded, the rest follows—as in fact we have seen historically. It follows in principle because the principle is the same: “sex is for loving” and “sex is the deepest expression of love”. We say instead that sex is for procreation within a specific state of loving, namely marriage. Within that state it is only rightly ordered if open to procreation and outside that state of loving its use is always objectively immoral.
It is indeed a thorough-going doctrine. Every deed, word and even every deliberate thought is sinful if it is willed for sexual pleasure outside of the context of marriage. “How repressive!” runs the battle-cry even from within the Church. Surely we should be more concerned with love and with our prayer life? Sadly, it has all been seen before, though never so widely accepted. The quietists tried to pull a fast one, arguing that if one was really devout, sexual activity simply could be ignored. And every orthodox teacher of prayer, whether dry and scholastic or sweet with the fragrant odours of pious sentiment has insisted the same, namely that as an absolute requirement of the Christian life, impurity of thought has to be firmly resisted. No they have not been obsessed with it; such questions occupy a small and proportionate place in their writings. And no, they have not been harsh or unforgiving. They have recognised that sexual sins are not necessarily the worst and they have been merciful in the case of the failures of human weakness. We know and perhaps many will confess with humility and sorrow from personal experience the need for such mercy and understanding. But we must be aware to the danger of the slightest compromise in doctrine. Woeful though it may be to modern sensitivities, the saints and doctors have all insisted, absolutely and universally on the sinfulness of every impure thought and the gravity of that sin if delibrately consented to. There is not a counter-example in the history of Catholic Christian spirituality.
Perhaps it is to be expected that this doctrine will be sold short in our preaching and catechesis. To proclaim it with any conviction almost invites social and intellectual martyrdom. There is also the predatory seeking of the permissive culture for “hypocrites” to assuage its conscience. In any case there aren’t many priests who are prepared to stick their necks out to defend the teaching of the Church. One is reminded of the public meeting at which the dreadful man asked the committee of Catholic experts whether any of them assented whole-heartedly to Humanae Vitae. How terribly rude!
It is much easier to go along with the romantic view and teach that sex must be reserved for a genuinely loving relationship. That way of putting it sounds very moral and can even be made to appear quite responsible. “Mature Christian sexuality involves openness and commitment to others” is one statement offered for schools to use in their sex-education policy. It sounds so lovely. What a pity it would be for some dinosaur to escape from the lost world of Catholic orthodoxy and suggest that we should be closed to others if they encourage us to unchastity.
But the principle that sex is only for family within a specific state of loving is the doctrine that we must proclaim as St Paul did to the Corinthians and St Augustine to the Christians struggling to come to terms with the collapse of the empire. We have to realise, perhaps with a sense of shock, that in this matter “He who is not with me is against me”. If we compromise with the “sex is for loving” morality, we are implicated in all the consequences of it. Our whole society is implicated in the abuse of children to the extent that we have knowingly allowed the principle of sex and loving that leads to it.
Indeed the thorough establishment of the sexually permissive culture is so complete, even within the life of many Christians that the only way out is to face up to the need for a radical conversion of life and present it as such. Instructing a convert to Catholicism or an engaged couple with limited exposure to orthodox Catholic teaching, it is impossible to present the teaching of the Church on sex and marriage as simply an extension of the romantic notion of love. The sheer disbelief and wonder on the faces of people who hear the Church’s teaching for the first time mean that it can only sensibly be got across as a completely radical alternative lifestyle in which we reject the secular understanding of love and sex and put something completely different in its place.
Most young people will grow up with the idea that love is a feeling that happens along involuntarily. Presumably the hope is that in marriage, the romantic feeling will always be there. It is small wonder that so few are prepared to commit to marriage on such a view. They already know that romantic and sexual feelings for others can come and go. It is equally predictable that young people will go through a series of relationships until some acceptable compromise is reached, itself unstable but possibly good for a few years. The violence of many such relationships also follows naturally. Even if the “love” is based on a transient feeling any “sexual relationship” will give prompt the craving for total commitment and possession as a “right”. Hence the rage and jealousy often boiling over into physical violence that characterise the shifting and interchanging relationships of our national “Club 18-30”. We do indeed have to offer a radical alternative but we should not be fooled into thinking that we are rejecting anything remotely beautiful.
Against the idea that love is a feeling, we teach that love is an act of the will. It is what we choose to do. In a young couple, of course it can be greatly enriched and enhanced for a time by an intense romantic feeling. But what will remain is the will to love and to minister to the other. When the feeling is no longer there, the will to love can remain and a deeper “feeling” can take its place, one with a firmer and more lasting foundation. All of this can be found in those spiritual teachers and doctors: they can guide the way in the love of God and in the love of friendship.
Love, on this understanding, can take many forms, from the celibate friendship of two religious living under vow to the easy friendship of young people drawn by a shared love of Christ, to the depths of love formative of family. Only in the latter does sexual expression find any place and even there not as the “cement that binds the relationship” or any role so indispensable. For many reasons within a marriage, sex may have to play a lesser part. In none of those cases need the marriage be threatened unless sex has already been allocated an importance that makes it essential to the “happiness” of the marriage. The cement that binds any relationship is solely the love of God expressed in the love and mutual ministry of one to another.
We can say, in fact, that all love is of one kind. It finds its type, origin and goal in God himself who is the definition of love. Every human friendship is based on the goodness of the other person who is made to the image and likeness of God. When I love another, I love God in them. It follows too that every human friendship will need to have the cross at its heart because none of us lives up to the image of God. We are wounded by original sin and we exacerbate the wound by our own personal sins. Hence every friendship will need to encompass repentance and forgiveness. Every genuine friendship will ennoble those involved. The present trend of building greater and greater numbers of “single occupancy” dwellings is itself an indication of the loss of the value of friendship and the loss of status and character in the individual member of our singles-based society. Perhaps the fear is at least partly that every close friendship will now be thought of as tending to sexual activity. The goodness that is built up by friendship is thus denied very many.
Even more are denied the status and nobility of marriage. Every man and woman has the possibility of sharing in the work of God in the creation of new people and in their upbringing. The taste of this genuine spiritual care can raise the spirit and life of the most humble man and wife as they exercise the role of father and mother in their home. The deepest expression of their loving on earth will be the lifelong fidelity, loyalty and recognition of goodness with which each continues to bless the other. The highest expression of loving ultimately will be in the reunion of the whole family in Christ before the throne of God in heaven.
Editorial from the FAITH Magazine September-October 1997
An excellent edition of Broadsheet, the confidential news sheet of Crux, recently drew attention to the messages of support sent by Tony Blair, William Hague and Paddy Ashdown to the Gay Pride Rally this year. The universal support was “brandished as evidence by the rally’s organisers that the whole nation now supports the cause of ‘gay liberation’.” There certainly is a clear message to the nation that the official doctrine of love in Britain as we approach the third millennium is the doctrine of “sex is for loving” and “sex is the deepest expression of love”. It actually has very little directly to do with one’s thinking on homosexuality as such. In our cultural definition of love, we are looking in the face of a heresy that is destructive and thorough-going and, like any heresy, threatens the right ordering of society. The acceptance of homosexual practice is only one example of how this works in practice.
I have deliberately stated the doctrine blandly as “sex is for loving” or “sex is the deepest expression of love” because it is that statement which is accepted by most people in Britain and indeed very many in the Church. However the ramifications are anything but bland. Sex is taken as being a way of loving, the fullest expression of love. It is an easy step from there to say that within marriage, sex must not be tied to the procreation of children. Considered as an act or expression of loving, it must then permitted with deliberate contraception. Once this is allowed, it is very hard to suggest that any engaged couple should abstain until marriage. Few people see Mr Hague’s cohabitation with his fiancée as more than a very minor peccadillo if that. Once the link with a permanent relationship is broken, other “deep loving relationships” must also be allowed their sexual expression; any really deep friendship between a young man and a woman will very likely arouse some sexual feeling and this is taken as an indication of the “natural” place of sex as an expression of loving. Some agony aunts might mention the importance of commitment but nobody will be prepared to draw a hard and fast line.
Once the use of sex is permitted in this way between men and women, it can only be prejudice that forbids it between loving homosexuals. Once the principle of “sex is the deepest expression of love” is admitted, you must necessarily allow sex between two men or two women who really love each other. And who is to deny that such a real love can exist?
The heresy has run into difficulties over the next logical development which is to legitimise paedophilia or, as is now coming to be called, “inter-generational sex”. The prejudices of those mothers who want to string up the child molesters might prove awkward to shift. However, even here, we can see the counter-attack in the stories that “just happen” to be gracing the front pages at the moment, of mid-teenage boys in “relationships” with older women. The stories are accompanied by outrage, of course but the debate is opened. The unthinkable is now “on the table” for negotiation and gradual acceptance. There is a cynical use here of the real difference between male and female. The same slant could not be given to the stories were they between girls and adult men. Equality can always be dispensed with when it proves convenient.
The progression is easy to predict: first of all there will be stories of adults who had fulfilling relationships themselves when they were young, then the paedophile lobby in various guises will advocate the importance of not foisting “guilt” on these young “lovers”. Alongside this, there are such initiatives as the Family Planning Association’s leaflet It doesn’t matter how old you are illustrated with teddy-bears and the general assumption that the age of consent may be ignored by consenting young people. We are not too far from creating a society in which “inter-generational sex” is common and accepted. If we allow that “sex is for loving” and “sex is the deepest expression of love” eventually the same principle will allow sex between adults and children where there is a “loving relationship”—especially if it is “committed and sincere”. An important victory for the “inter-generational sex” lobby, will be to make it politically incorrect to assume that sex between adults and children is always abusive.
If we wish to stop the rot, we will not be able to rely on the charge that these relationships are always abusive. To avoid any possible misunderstanding here, we must make it clear that without a shadow of doubt, they are always abusive. But we must argue that they are abusive even when they appear to be loving. And so we will also need to argue that many other forms of apparently “loving” activity are wrong and harmful. With fear and trembling, we have to unravel the whole fabric of this heresy, going right back to the very definition of love and sex that has given rise to the squalid developments that threaten to become our new “normal”. Going back we can see that with genuine diabolical dishonesty, the changes in sexual mores that our culture has allowed in the past forty years have always been introduced by masking the real damage done by the sins that are legitimised.
We could take the liberalisation of divorce as another example. Even in the Church, the tendency is always to look on the “soft” side of divorce, to see the “irretrievable breakdown” that is nobody’s fault. In the rough and tumble of everyday life as seen in pastoral ministry it is often a good deal more heartbreaking than that. Time and again we sit and inwardly weep for the good husband or wife who has been deserted after fifteen or twenty years of faithful and loyal companionship. In explaining why the divorced and remarried cannot go to Holy Communion, I have always found it easiest simply to draw up an example of such a case and invite people to consider how it would be if the Catholic Church officially permitted the spouse who had cynically broken his or her promises and left grief, destruction and betrayal in their wake, to waltz up the aisle with their new “partner” and go to Holy Communion with her full blessing.
Again the pictures of “gay love” are generally dishonest in the extreme. The thoughtful and chaste Catholic homosexual will wince in disgust horror at the “gay scene” of our larger cities which threatens to entrap them in their weaker moments. The “safe sex” industry itself is witness to the casual forming and breaking of sexual relationships as a feature of the gay culture. Whilst of course there are more stable friendships, we have to remember that sex in both casual and committed relationships is justified as “the deepest expression of love”. It is not possible to draw a hard and fast line anywhere along the gradient.
We must have the courage to admit that the definition of sex simply as “for loving” and as “the deepest expression of love” is both false and dangerous. We have to turn to the only body which maintains a coherent moral doctrine concerning love and sex, the magisterium of the Catholic Church: only there do we find a clear alternative which offers a way of life to fulfil the human spirit. The prohibition of artificial contraception within marriage has been the limiting case in practice. Once the use of artificial birth control is conceded, the rest follows—as in fact we have seen historically. It follows in principle because the principle is the same: “sex is for loving” and “sex is the deepest expression of love”. We say instead that sex is for procreation within a specific state of loving, namely marriage. Within that state it is only rightly ordered if open to procreation and outside that state of loving its use is always objectively immoral.
It is indeed a thorough-going doctrine. Every deed, word and even every deliberate thought is sinful if it is willed for sexual pleasure outside of the context of marriage. “How repressive!” runs the battle-cry even from within the Church. Surely we should be more concerned with love and with our prayer life? Sadly, it has all been seen before, though never so widely accepted. The quietists tried to pull a fast one, arguing that if one was really devout, sexual activity simply could be ignored. And every orthodox teacher of prayer, whether dry and scholastic or sweet with the fragrant odours of pious sentiment has insisted the same, namely that as an absolute requirement of the Christian life, impurity of thought has to be firmly resisted. No they have not been obsessed with it; such questions occupy a small and proportionate place in their writings. And no, they have not been harsh or unforgiving. They have recognised that sexual sins are not necessarily the worst and they have been merciful in the case of the failures of human weakness. We know and perhaps many will confess with humility and sorrow from personal experience the need for such mercy and understanding. But we must be aware to the danger of the slightest compromise in doctrine. Woeful though it may be to modern sensitivities, the saints and doctors have all insisted, absolutely and universally on the sinfulness of every impure thought and the gravity of that sin if delibrately consented to. There is not a counter-example in the history of Catholic Christian spirituality.
Perhaps it is to be expected that this doctrine will be sold short in our preaching and catechesis. To proclaim it with any conviction almost invites social and intellectual martyrdom. There is also the predatory seeking of the permissive culture for “hypocrites” to assuage its conscience. In any case there aren’t many priests who are prepared to stick their necks out to defend the teaching of the Church. One is reminded of the public meeting at which the dreadful man asked the committee of Catholic experts whether any of them assented whole-heartedly to Humanae Vitae. How terribly rude!
It is much easier to go along with the romantic view and teach that sex must be reserved for a genuinely loving relationship. That way of putting it sounds very moral and can even be made to appear quite responsible. “Mature Christian sexuality involves openness and commitment to others” is one statement offered for schools to use in their sex-education policy. It sounds so lovely. What a pity it would be for some dinosaur to escape from the lost world of Catholic orthodoxy and suggest that we should be closed to others if they encourage us to unchastity.
But the principle that sex is only for family within a specific state of loving is the doctrine that we must proclaim as St Paul did to the Corinthians and St Augustine to the Christians struggling to come to terms with the collapse of the empire. We have to realise, perhaps with a sense of shock, that in this matter “He who is not with me is against me”. If we compromise with the “sex is for loving” morality, we are implicated in all the consequences of it. Our whole society is implicated in the abuse of children to the extent that we have knowingly allowed the principle of sex and loving that leads to it.
Indeed the thorough establishment of the sexually permissive culture is so complete, even within the life of many Christians that the only way out is to face up to the need for a radical conversion of life and present it as such. Instructing a convert to Catholicism or an engaged couple with limited exposure to orthodox Catholic teaching, it is impossible to present the teaching of the Church on sex and marriage as simply an extension of the romantic notion of love. The sheer disbelief and wonder on the faces of people who hear the Church’s teaching for the first time mean that it can only sensibly be got across as a completely radical alternative lifestyle in which we reject the secular understanding of love and sex and put something completely different in its place.
Most young people will grow up with the idea that love is a feeling that happens along involuntarily. Presumably the hope is that in marriage, the romantic feeling will always be there. It is small wonder that so few are prepared to commit to marriage on such a view. They already know that romantic and sexual feelings for others can come and go. It is equally predictable that young people will go through a series of relationships until some acceptable compromise is reached, itself unstable but possibly good for a few years. The violence of many such relationships also follows naturally. Even if the “love” is based on a transient feeling any “sexual relationship” will give prompt the craving for total commitment and possession as a “right”. Hence the rage and jealousy often boiling over into physical violence that characterise the shifting and interchanging relationships of our national “Club 18-30”. We do indeed have to offer a radical alternative but we should not be fooled into thinking that we are rejecting anything remotely beautiful.
Against the idea that love is a feeling, we teach that love is an act of the will. It is what we choose to do. In a young couple, of course it can be greatly enriched and enhanced for a time by an intense romantic feeling. But what will remain is the will to love and to minister to the other. When the feeling is no longer there, the will to love can remain and a deeper “feeling” can take its place, one with a firmer and more lasting foundation. All of this can be found in those spiritual teachers and doctors: they can guide the way in the love of God and in the love of friendship.
Love, on this understanding, can take many forms, from the celibate friendship of two religious living under vow to the easy friendship of young people drawn by a shared love of Christ, to the depths of love formative of family. Only in the latter does sexual expression find any place and even there not as the “cement that binds the relationship” or any role so indispensable. For many reasons within a marriage, sex may have to play a lesser part. In none of those cases need the marriage be threatened unless sex has already been allocated an importance that makes it essential to the “happiness” of the marriage. The cement that binds any relationship is solely the love of God expressed in the love and mutual ministry of one to another.
We can say, in fact, that all love is of one kind. It finds its type, origin and goal in God himself who is the definition of love. Every human friendship is based on the goodness of the other person who is made to the image and likeness of God. When I love another, I love God in them. It follows too that every human friendship will need to have the cross at its heart because none of us lives up to the image of God. We are wounded by original sin and we exacerbate the wound by our own personal sins. Hence every friendship will need to encompass repentance and forgiveness. Every genuine friendship will ennoble those involved. The present trend of building greater and greater numbers of “single occupancy” dwellings is itself an indication of the loss of the value of friendship and the loss of status and character in the individual member of our singles-based society. Perhaps the fear is at least partly that every close friendship will now be thought of as tending to sexual activity. The goodness that is built up by friendship is thus denied very many.
Even more are denied the status and nobility of marriage. Every man and woman has the possibility of sharing in the work of God in the creation of new people and in their upbringing. The taste of this genuine spiritual care can raise the spirit and life of the most humble man and wife as they exercise the role of father and mother in their home. The deepest expression of their loving on earth will be the lifelong fidelity, loyalty and recognition of goodness with which each continues to bless the other. The highest expression of loving ultimately will be in the reunion of the whole family in Christ before the throne of God in heaven.