The Church Fathers' Contempt
for S E X and for WOMEN
"Nothing is known about the sexual activities or marital status of Jesus. The subject is simply not mentioned anywhere. Some of his disciples, however, were married and there is no indication that sexual activity in anyway stood in the way of their devotion. Nor is it suggested anywhere that, polluted by coitus (intercourse), they were impure when they were preaching. And yet, the Western Church has ever since the fourth century attempted to impose sexual abstinence on bishops and priests. Church councils instructed the married clergy to refrain from having sex with their wives, but found that such instructions were difficult to enforce.
Some cheating on the rules must have also existed from the very early days. St Jerome (341-420) thundered against cohabitation of supposed hermits. Jerome confessed: 'in my fear of hell, ... I have often found myself surrounded by bands of dancing girls ... The fires of lust kept bubbling up before me when my flesh was as good as dead.' He therefore knew that cohabitation was but a sham: 'whence come these un-wedded wives, these new types of concubines, nay, I will go further, these one-man harlots? ... They call us suspicious if we think that anything is wrong.' The practice has, of course, never died. Thousands of Catholic priests live in sin with their concubines, often conveniently defined as housekeepers'.
Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome were the most prominent theologians of the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries. Ambrose (339-397), Bishop of Milan, when he was not inciting anti-Jewish hatred and defending the right of Christians to burn synagogues, wrote treatises extolling virginity and demanding that people have as little sex as possible. At the time, priests were still allowed to marry and Ambrose demanded that they should give up sex. They had, according to him, to refrain from intercourse with their own wives. The rest of the population should be reminded that the purpose of sex was procreation. Having sex with one's pregnant wife was unacceptable. In fact, Ambrose called for his congregation to 'either emulate the beasts or fear God'. Animals, he explained, are only 'animated by the urge to preserve their kind, not by the desire for sexual union. For, as soon as they perceive that the womb is gravid, they cease to indulge in sexual intercourse.' If his audience was not convinced by the parallels to the animal kingdom, Ambrose exhorted them to 'Control your lust and look upon the hands of your Creator, who fashions a human being within the maternal body. If he be at work, will you profane the peaceful sanctuary of the maternal body with carnal desire?' He also considered it shameful for older people to have sex.
The Church's extreme discomfort with sex necessitated the creation of sex-free zones surrounding Jesus. Semen seemed especially dirty to her, In a letter to Bishop Anysius, Pope Siricius (384-399) wrote in 392,' Jesus would not have chosen to be born of a virgin had he been compelled to regard her as so incontinent that the womb in which the body of the Lord took shape, that hall of the Everlasting King, would be defiled by the presence of male seed.' Jovinian, a Catholic theologian, incurred the Church's wrath by disputing Mary's virginity; the Church continues to teach that Mary's hymen remained intact. Jovinian, who contended that` married and celibate life were of equal merit, held that Mary retained her' virginity at conception but that she lost it at child-birth. For publishing; a book containing such heretical ideas, Jovinian was excommunicated by Pope Siricius. Furthermore, Ambrose got Emperor Theodosius to flog and then exile Jovinian."
" St Jerome, in his treatise Against lovinianus, also attacked the theologian (Jovinian). Jerome, who translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into the popular language of the Roman empire of his day, (the Latin Vulgate Bible), was ... an important influence over the Catholic Church. In his adamant belief that virginity was the preferred human state, Jerome even spun a story about Jesus' preference for John over Peter, allegedly because of John's virginity.
Some later theologians developed the notion that the original sin for which Adam and Eve had been expelled from paradise was sex. Jerome likes the idea of a sexless paradise. According to him, coitus was not part of the prelapsarian (prior to the fall) world: 'And as regards Adam and Eve we must maintain that before the fall they were virgins in Paradise: but after they sinned, and were cast out of Paradise, they were immediately married.' (It was apparently contrary to God's plan that Adam and Eve would eventually get around to actually using the sex organs that God had built into them!) ...
In their decision to maintain the celibacy of the clergy, present-day popes carry the history, tradition and dogma which were developed by people of Jerome's ilk. Jerome taught that 'The truth is that, in view of the purity of the body of Chrlst, all sexual intercourse is unclean.' Indeed, 'A layman, or any believer, cannot pray unless he abstain from sexual intercourse. Now a priest must always offer sacrifices for the people: he must therefore always pray. And if he must always pray, he must always be released from the duties of marriage.' " (Double Cross, by David Ranan, p. 253-55)
"Augustine was a fifth century Bishop of Hippo in North Africa and a prominent Church Father who had enjoyed a full and varied sex life before turning to God. He lived with one mistress for fifteen years with whom - through a glitch in contraception - he had one child, abandoned her, took on another mistress and finally became a Christian. At that stage, he 'discovered' how evil sex was and how offensive sexual acts were as even birth took place between the organs of defecation and urination. He was the man, according to the Catholic theologian Uta RankeHeinemann, who was responsible for welding Christianity and hostility to sexual pleasure into a systematic whole. To Augustine, original sin was transmitted through the sexual act, thereby making copulation evil. Even when taking place within marriage, coitus was evil. It could only be redeemed by aiming the sexual act at procreation. Augustine interprets original sin as Adam and Eve's decision to have sex with lust, instead of choosing to copulate without lust. According to this theory, unless saved through God's grace, original sin condemns all human beings to eternal death and damnation.
The importance of Augustine's views cannot be overstated. His teaching continues to form part of Catholic dogma. Augustine accepted that 'The union ... of male and female for the purpose of procreation is the natural good of marriage. But he makes a bad use of this good who uses it beastially, so that his intention is on the gratification of lust.' Adultery was, of course, out of the question but Augustine developed the concept that even sex with your husband or wife could be sinful: 'The married believer, therefore, must not only not use another man's vessel, which is what they do who lust after others' wives; but he must know that even his own vessel is not to be possessed in the disease of carnal concupiscence.' Since the word "vagina" is the latin word for "the container for one's sword", he is herein reducing women to their vaginas)... “Nothing is so powerful in drawing the spirit of a man downwards" St. Augustine wrote, "as the caresses of a woman.”
Augustine evidently found his own erections hard to come to terms with. He bemoaned the fact that unlike all other human organs, the penis had a mind of its own and would not obey the will. It was, according to him the direct result of Adam and Eve's transgressions] A obsessed Augustine continues that 'carnal concupiscence' is acceptable for procreation but 'in no case happens to nature except from sin, is the daughter of sin, as it were, and whenever it yields assent to t commission of shameful deeds, it becomes also the mother of many sin Augustine explained how the 'seductive stimulus... produced shame, This man, whose own carnality drove him crazy, feverishly agonised over Adam and Eve's sex life and developed his theory which delivered tot Church generation after generation of fresh recruits. Through the coital act, which, ever since the expulsion from paradise, is possible only wit the aid of lust, the parental lust transmits the original sin from parents t offspring. Baptism, a service offered by the Church, was the mechanism which cleansed the baptised from this burden. The attraction of the theory to the Church was obvious. If people could be convinced that the only way to prevent their children from going to hell was Church baptism, the Church would collect the worried faithful - as a fisherman gathers fish in his net.
Augustine even found an explanation for polygamy. Men, in biblical times, were permitted to have many wives 'where the reason was for the multiplication of their offspring, not the desire of varying gratification. Women, on the other hand, were not allowed such luxury. As the plurality of husbands would not result in more pregnancies, 'but only a more frequent gratification of lust, she cannot possibly be a wife, but only a harlot'. The beauty of marriage, in Augustine's eyes, was that it made the sinful lust necessary for the sexual act, pardonable. In fact, even sexual acts which served lust and not procreation - provided that nothing was done actively to impede procreation - were fine within the confines of marriage. Augustine was willing to forgive such coital acts; they are 'permitted, so far as to be within range of forgiveness, though not prescribed by way of commandment'. Human weakness, which could lead to lustful behaviour outside marriage, made Augustine accept such behaviour within marriage. They may 'be tolerated, that no lapse occur into damnable sins; that is, into fornications and adulteries. ... the married pair are enjoined not to defraud one the other, lest Satan should tempt them by reason of their incontinence 1.37
Augustine drew the line when it came to contraception, which he defined as criminal, describing 'lustful cruelty, ... [which] resorts to ... poisonous drugs to secure barrenness' .38 Knowledgeably, beautifully and attractively, Augustine describes lust and then defines it as a venial sin within the confines of marriage and a mortal sin outside or if it involves contraceptive measures. Augustine became instrumental in fusing pleasure with sin, a notion which would trouble generations of Catholics.(Double Cross, by David Ranan, p. 253-54)
"In attempting to understand the Catholic Church's abhorrence of masturbation, one must also travel back to Augustine. Solitary self-gratification, an act of pure lust, in which orgasm is sought in an environment which, by definition, cannot procure offspring, is, to Augustine, the essence of sin. Thus, one of the most natural human activities, which most children start when they are two or three years old, has been and still is vilified by the Church, because of a few sexually repressed Church Fathers who lived more than fifteen hundred years ago. . .(Double Cross, by David Ranan, p. 257)
"Various penitentials which appeared between the sixth and the tenth centuries prescribed three years to life for intentional homicide as well as for oral intercourse. Penances for anal intercourse were three to fifteen years, whereas the time suggested for coitus interruptus was two to ten years. Anything from forty days up to seven years was apparently suitable for couples who had sex with the woman on top of the man. ..homosexuality was punishable by seven to fifteen years' penance, whereas manslaughter only received seven to ten yeOne of the outcomes of the concerted anti-sex drive of the Church Fathers was a very wide restriction on the days on which sex was permitted by the Church. Restrictions on sex - only within marriage, ideally for procreation and thus under no circumstance in any form which precludes conception - did apparently not suffice. Sex was not to take place on Sundays, on all (any) religious holidays, over the forty days of Lent and not on the days prior to Communion. As there was nothing in the scriptures on this matter, local bishops could go wild in their battle with the evil of lust. At a synod in 966, a bishop in Verona banned sex on Fridays. For a while, in Ireland, sex was banned by the Church on Wednesdays and Fridays in addition to Sundays ... a thirteenth-century Archbishop Canterbury, Stephen Langton, considered a wife's life of lesser value than her husband's adultery-free life. If a man demanded sex from his wife even in childbed, then 'Rather must the wife suffer herself to be killed than that her husband should sin'. Rules in the Church were made men who understood the fire in male loins but had no such empathy for the female need for sex. In the twelfth century, the chancellor of the University of Paris - in those days a Church institution - told men how to treat their wives if they demanded to have sex on a holy day. A husband was to 'quell her impudence with fasting and beating'.
Theologians agonised over important issues such as whether monk and priests' wet dreams were sinful. Some were of the view that there could be no ejaculation of semen without sin. Others devised sliding scales, according to what they assumed were the reasons behind the dreams: too much food or drink; or, perhaps, erotic day dreaming which produced the nocturnal emission. Convoluted methods were devised by the Church to pinpoint exactly the aspects of sex that were sinful. Cardinal Robert Courson, who died as a Crusade preacher in 1219, explained that 'If a man know his wife for the purpose of procreation or in rendering her due, the first and last parts of that act, during which he strives after God, are meritorious, whereas the middle parts, during which the whole man is ruled by the flesh and becomes all flesh, are venially sinful."
Books on sexual positions are not a modern-day invention; thirteenth-century Church theologians gave minute instructions as to the acceptability and sinfulness of non-missionary positions." (Double Cross, by David Ranan, p. 258-60)
"Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) is probably Christianity's foremost theologian. His major work, Summa theologica, is a complete scientifically arranged exposition of theology and a summary of Christian philosophy. Next to Augustine, Thomas is also the Church's highest authority on sexual matters. It is, therefore, of some importance to be aware of the language used by the man - whose teaching still influences the Catholic Church today in matters of sexual morality - when referring to marital intercourse. Thomas's deep-rooted disgust has defined and moulded the Catholic Church's attitude to sex and impregnated the minds of her faithful. In his writings, Thomas described marital sex as: filth (immunditia), a stain (macula), foulness (foeditas), vileness (turpitude), disgrace (ignominia), degeneracy (deformitas), a disease (morbus), a corruption of the inviolate (corruptio integritatis) and an object of disgust (repugnantia). Thomas, therefore, considered 'The man who is too ardent a lover of his wife acts counter to the good of marriage if he use her indecently, although he be not unfaithful, he may in a sense be called an adulterer." (Double Cross, by David Ranan, p. 258-60)
"He (Pope John Paul II) teaches that sex is a beautiful gift of God. But he can't admit that most of his predecessors taught that it's always ugly and disgusting. Leo I (440-461) said, 'All marital intercourse is a sin,' and Innocent III (1198-1216), 'The consummation of marriage never takes place without the flames of lust.' Two 17th century popes said all foreplay, even sensuous kissing between married couples, is a grave sin.
The entire tradition was: Sex outside marriage is dirty. Within marriage it is also dirty. The only question is the degree of dirt. Marriage, said St Ambrose, is a crime against God in that it changed the state of virginity that God gave every creature at birth. During intercourse, couples should keep their minds on Jesus and the stork. All sex is pornographic, destined to deprave and corrupt. It cannot be spiritualised. Sex, said Augustine, the converted fornicator, must not be sexy. Nuns mustn't eat beans, Jerome decided, because they titillate the genitals. Today, we would send these holy popes and theologians to a sex-therapist.
John Paul praises the sanctity of marriage but can't admit that for centuries his predecessors thought it so lewd that it was never blessed by the church. At best, couples gave their legal consent outside the church, and never with the blessing of the clergy. As Chaucer's Wife of Bath, first married at twelve, put it, 'Five husbands have I had at the church door.' How could clerics bless a thing so sinful they couldn't indulge in it? Marriage was too sordid to be a sacrament until the 16th century.
Like Paul VI, John Paul tries to choreograph what couples do in bed by promoting sex during 'the safe period'. This is a bizarre idea in that human females, unlike animals, seldom know when they're infertile even after using thermometers, calendars and higher
mathematics. A case of sexual hide-and-seek. Couples had better be as accurate as a
Mafia hit-man.
The method might have suited clever cloistered nuns, not busy mothers, many of whom can't read or write and perhaps have no electric light. If safety belts in cars were as safe as the safe period they would be outlawed. What the Pope can never bring himself to
concede was that nearly all pontiffs condemned the safe period or what we might call 'sex
for fun'. Their view was clear: sex has only one purpose, procreation. To have sex and not intend a child, worse, to have sex and intend not to have a child is to commit adultery with one's wife.
John Paul teaches that a human being exists from the first moment of conception, hence every abortion, even of a three day embryo, is murder. Not essentially different from what Jack the Ripper did or Timothy McVeigh. Very well, but why did he not admit
that nearly all his predecessors said the opposite.
He teaches that every embryo and fetus is an innocent human being. Why doesn't he say that most of his predecessors said explicitly that every unbaptised infant, far from being innocent, is stained with original sin, a kind of venereal disease? Each babe, as part of the massa damnata, is under the devil's dominion so that if it dies unbaptized, they are
so disgusting to God they cannot look at him, nor can he at them, for all eternity. Not that
tradition ever explained how Adam could hand on original sin when sin is in the soul and
the soul comes not from parents but directly from God.
John Paul teaches that only celibacy is in tune with the sacrament of holy orders, conveniently forgetting that Jesus chose married men as his apostles. Also, if Peter were to return to earth today, not being one of the Pope's castrati, John Paul would have
declared him unfit to serve as a curate in a city slum."
an article by Peter de Rosa, the author of a history of the popes called Vicars of Christ: the Dark Side of the Papacy
For more on this topic, see my Church vs. Sex on the reasons that the Catholic Church is so obsessed with everything sexual.
For a great treatise on the history of sexual problems
the Roman Catholic Church has had over clerical celibacy, see
expert testimony, by Fr. Tom Doyle, O.P.
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Towards the end of his life, Augustine considered the use of force
acceptable for the purpose of theological 'correction' In 'The Correction
of Donatists; he wrote 'For many have found advantage (as we have proved,
and are daily proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by
fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching.'
Augustine only reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was right to
inflict punishment in order to improve the spiritual welfare of heretics.
However, his espousal of coercion to enforce faith was to become Church
doctrine.
