Catholic teaching on sex examined

The penultimate Agape Latte of the year, sponsored by the Church in the 21st Century and Campus Ministry, was held on Tuesday. Students gathered in Hillside Cafe to hear Dr. Lisa Sowle Cahill of the theology department, a J. Donald Monan professor, speak on the topic of "Sexuality, the Church, Mom & Dad."

Agape Latte, which is designed for students interested in learning more about religion and faith, is held on the first Tuesday of every month. Free desserts and coffee are provided in Hillside, and include a lecture followed by a question and answer session.

Cahill acknowledged the complexity of the relationship between sexuality and the Catholic Church at the beginning of her lecture.

"We don't have enough forums to talk about sexuality in an open way," Cahill said. "If we don't discuss it, then the issue is just polarized and repressed."

In her lecture, Cahill emphasized the Catholic Church's effect on sexuality in our 20th-century culture. The women's movement in the 1920s and the gay rights movement in the 1970s brought about potential for momentous change in the meaning of sexuality, Cahill explained.

In Christian tradition until the modern period, the only form of sexual interaction allowed by church doctrine was for procreation. She cited the documents from the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican in the 1960s as a "watershed."

"The big phenomenon was that the Catholic Church was opening to the modern world, blowing the lid off traditional Catholic sexual teaching because the experience of laypeople was going to be incorporated," Cahill said.

In the documents from the council, love was, for the first time, recognized as having an equally important meaning as sex and marriage. The Church, however, still emphasized the importance of procreation, limiting sexual relationships to heterosexual married couples.

"In the 20th century, there was more of a feeling that gay people as well as straight people could enjoy love and friendship in sexual relationships," Cahill said. "It didn't need to be specific to a procreative relationship. It created a major opportunity for Christianity to appreciate love, sex, and marriage in a new way. The church tried both to accommodate the modern world and keep its traditional religious framework. But what do we do with this older value of procreation and parenthood? What kind of guidelines can we continue to give?"

Cahill said that she didn't necessarily have the answers to these questions, and encouraged the creation of an open dialogue, noting the value of learning from others.

Cahill cited the example of two seniors' theses on sexuality. Both students - one gay, one straight - shared the same problem: It is very difficult to devise sexual ethics that are faithful to Catholic tradition and relevant today. In responding to a question from a student about the global influence of the Catholic Church, Cahill returned to this idea of sexual relevance, posing the question of whether a church that is truly global can have a sexual ethic and ideal that appeals to everyone.

"Even though we are educated with and we adopt ideas of equality, we go into institutions that are set up to undermine that," Cahill said.

Cahill said that one's sexual integrity is demanding on personal, interpersonal, and social levels.

"First, who am I as a person who has a body, a spirit, a psychology? Second, is the level of sexual expression commensurate with the level of trust? Third, we all have identities that come from the communities to which we belong," Cahill said.

"We have to be faithful to these identities even as we challenge and negotiate them in the world."