Mothers' Day: Catholic Bishops Would Be Better Fathers If They Acted Like Good Mothers

As Mothers' Day arrives in many parts of the world, I'm thinking back to the following posting that I wrote in May 2009. It still seems pertinent to me, with its arguments that the bishops of the Catholic church would be far better bishops if they acted more like good mothers and less like bad fathers.  Here it is (with Mothers' Day wishes to readers):

After I posted yesterday about the inability of the U.S. Catholic bishops to convince either Catholics or society at large about their interpretation of what respect for life entails, my friend and fellow-blogger Colleen Kochivar-Baker left a comment. Colleen notes that my posting dovetailed with what she posted on her Enlightened Catholicism blog the same day.


Colleen’s posting focuses on the homily Pope Benedict gave this past Sunday at a Mass in Jordan. And she is absolutely right: her critique of that homily dovetails in a remarkable way with my analysis of why the U.S. bishops are failing to convince either their co-religionists or the wider public that the Catholic church really means what it teaches about the value of life.

Colleen notes that Benedict’s homily follows a well-trodden path in speaking of male-female complementarity and the “special” vocation of women. As Colleen notes, Benedict has been emphasizing this theme for some time now: in 2004, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the then Cardinal Ratzinger issued a “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.”

That document enunciates the same themes Benedict highlighted this past Sunday: e.g., that women have a “particular dignity, vocation and mission” in church and world, a mission centered on “building peace and fostering love.” Benedict speaks of women as “bearers of love, teachers of mercy and artisans of peace, bringing warmth and humanity to a world that all too often judges the value of a person by the cold criteria of usefulness and profit.”

Benedict bases his theory of male-female complementarity in part on the Genesis creation narratives. But as Colleen notes, Benedict’s understanding of those narratives seems not to be informed by sound exegetical research, since

[w]hat Benedict usually leaves out in his references to Genesis is that biblical scholars see the first chapter of Genesis describing the creation of ha adam out of adamah. That is creating an 'earthling' (ha adam), from earth (adamah). There is no gender definition implied in the original Hebrew.

The Hebrew in which the Genesis creation narratives are written implies that God creates humanity first and foremost. The distinction of human being into gender is a secondary moment in the creation process. The calling to be human—fully human—transcends any biological calling to be male or female.

This is not merely a niggling observation about the need for exegetical accuracy as we interpret the bible. It is a profoundly important observation about what being human is all about, in the mind of the author(s) of the Genesis creation narratives. If we are called by these narratives to live our lives according to some divine purpose implanted in us by virtue of creation, that purpose is first and foremost about being a human being—a human being made in God’s image. It is only secondarily (and tangentially) about being a man or a woman.

In elevating the male-female distinction to the level of God’s divine plan for human beings and arguing that these stories lay down separate biologically-grounded roles for men and women, Benedict and many other Christians today are missing the point: they are turning into an idol something in the text that was not meant to have divine status. They are reading biological imperatives as divine commands, which then translate into commands about gender roles for faithful men and women.

There is no gender definition implied in the original Hebrew: Colleen’s analysis of the story is absolutely correct here. There is no gender definition implied, and to the extent that we now read these stories as stories about male-female complementarity (and separate male-female gender roles), we’re misinterpreting them by imposing on them preoccupations that were not part of the worldview of the authors of the text.

And how does this insight dovetail with what I posted yesterday? In yesterday’s posting, I argued that the U.S. Catholic bishops have failed to convince many of us with their ethic of life, because they ground that ethic in paternalistic example and a paternalistic worldview. I argued that to be convincing about life, the bishops would have to do what seems not to come naturally to them these days: they’d have to act maternal for a change.

They’d have to think like mothers. They’d have to think like what they keep insisting the church is to all of us, a mother. They’d have to start wrapping their arms around the world the way God does in the very first image of God we meet in scripture, in those very same Genesis creation stories, which speak of God creating the world by folding matter under her divine wings and brooding over it until it comes to life.

To convince us about life, the men wearing bright robes while brandishing big croziers need to begin acting like good mothers. As I wrote, if the bishops want to be convincing when they talk about life, they need to cultivate the maternal virtues that, as Benedict’s homily last Sunday rightly notes, are central to any profound ethic of life.

They’d need to begin nurturing the young and the weak, healing the sick, tending the earth and making it flourish, creating a safe and welcoming space for others, building a community of homes in which everyone has welcome places throughout the land. They’d need to start doing these things themselves and stop relegating them to some woman somewhere, or any woman anywhere (the paternalistic rhetoric of the magisterium assumes women are objects, generic care-providing things).

That noble-sounding rhetoric of the magisterium re: male-female complementarity and the “particular dignity and vocation” of women is a trap and a cop-out. It’s a trap for women and a cop-out for men. It entraps women because it allows men all over the globe to slough off responsibility to do what women are always expected to do and men need to do: care for the young and the elderly and the weak, cherish the earth and make it flourish, build welcoming homes across the globe, nurse the sick. The paternalistic rhetoric of male-female complementarity is a cop-out for men because it lets men off the hook when such necessary human tasks arise. It allows men to relegate the most significant tasks in the world to some woman somewhere, who is not even respected as she undertakes these tasks, and is regarded as interchangeable with all women in the rhetoric of paternalism.

Benedict's reading of Genesis allows men to be not who they were meant to be—full human beings capable of a wide range of emotions and responsibilities—but less human. Benedict twists Genesis to permit men to become something they were never meant to be, half-human beings with no instinct for care, nurture, tenderness. In being paternal without being maternal, in fulfilling their “God-given” role as real men, men end up being stunted human beings, even as men profess to be the lords and masters of creation under the divine imperative of Genesis.

Human beings who do not aim at being fully developed humans, who combine in their persons and lives male-female tasks, are incapable of effective leadership of communities of care centered on an ethic of respect for life. The bishops cannot and never will obtain buy-in for their life ethic until they begin to show that they themselves take the ethic of life seriously, in all its ramifications. As a start, they could begin to listen, for instance, as mothers listen carefully to their children, to hear the words inside the spoken words, the cries of the speaking heart hidden in the words.

One of the supremely ironic effects of the current papal regime’s call for a purge of gays in the priesthood and in seminaries is that this purge is likely to weed out precisely those men in ministry most competent at modeling the gender-complementarity that should be the goal of any balanced human psyche, and, in particular, of the psyche of any human being in ministry. The church’s current ugly, preposterous attempt to convince us that the only good priest is a manly man—a man modeling a macho, swaggering maleness that demeans women—will eventually starve the priesthood of candidates most gifted for pastoral ministry.

And it will also eventually undermine the church’s teaching about respect for life even more profoundly than it has already been undermined by a generation of bishops who have unthinkingly bought into the rhetoric of gender complementarity with its attendant presuppositions of the male's obligation to dominate and the female's calling to submit. If the bishops ever want to convince us that they really do respect life—all life, from cradle to grave—then they need to drop the act of the domineering papa and the gay-bashing that goes with that act, and act like good mothers for a change.

From One Royal Wedding to Another: Kate and Wills Marry, and I Remember Charles and Diana

When I wrote yesterday about Austen Ivereigh's anti-gay heterosexist take on the Kate and Wills show, I said in a comment to TheraP that I had not intended to mention the royal wedding at all on this blog.  I chose to do so only after having read Ivereigh's comments, which, in my view, deserve attention as one in a series of male-entitled heterosexist blasts he has made against his gay brothers and sisters in recent years at America and elsewhere.  Blasts that baffle me, since I wonder what causes him to invest so much energy in issuing persistent reminders to his gay brothers and sisters that they do not count and must not expect to be included in his Catholic church.

And now, having set my foot on the path of wedding commentary, I find myself unable to get off that fateful path until I've reached its end.  Or, as our British cousins say (and changing metaphors wildly), In for a penny, in for a pound.  Or, As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.  Or something like that.  Both seem appropriate here.

I didn't watch the royal wedding.  I find myself little interested in it except as a cultural phenomenon, as an illustration of our willingness to permit those who rule us to mount lavish spectacles designed to manipulate our consciousness and distract us from the real business of our lives.  I find the royal wedding interesting as an illustration of our never-quite-vanquished hankering for a Father who knows best and has our best interests at heart--if only we relinquish our adulthood to Him and let Him return us to perpetual childhood.  In this light, I find the fawning wedding-inspired commentary of many American conservative thinkers about monarchy and all it might do for us, if we could only find the right father figure to whom to yield ourselves, fascinating.  And repulsive, in how it misses the point about what we really need to become a humane society today.

I also find what has been taking place with the Kate and Wills show interesting because it brings back sharp, evocative memories of the wedding of Charles and Diana, which was surrounded by equal fanfare and similar fawning media adulation.  I didn't watch the Chuck and DiDi show, either, though when it was staged, I happened to be living and studying in Canada, a country linked to the Crown, many of whose citizens still preserve a certain nostalgic fondness for the monarchy--though many others find the fuss about the royals baffling, and the institution itself embarrassingly archaic (and a drain on the British economy).

Almost all of the Canadians with whom I studied in the 1970s and 1980s ignored the monarchy.  Some were actively opposed to it.  One friend would deliberately turn stamps (with the head of the Queen) upside down before she affixed them to letters.  The only ardent monarchist I ever met in my years in Canada was, as it turned out, the Polish-born friend about whom I've blogged elsewhere, who was for monarchy anywhere: he supported any king, queen, prince, or princess anywhere in the world.  Just because.  As a matter of principle.  Because that was how things were meant to be.

As a guest in another country, I didn't normally get into intra-national political discussions, unless my Canadian friends invited me to do so.  When I did so, I almost always found them jocular and mannerly, even when they were characterized by good-natured sparring between my Canadian friends and "the" Americans.  "The" Americans who were nothing like me, since I hadn't grown up in the parts of the U.S. with which my Canadian friends were familiar and which they used to form their opinion of the Yanks.  I was very surprised, indeed, to discover that I was a Yank in Canada, when I had been taught throughout my formative years that whatever in the world a Yankees might be, I was to be the precise opposite, with ever fiber of my being.

And, though my family tree is brimful of Revolutionary soldiers, a number of whom died fighting in battle to sever the ties of the American colonies to the Crown, I myself haven't ever given a great deal of thought to monarchy or its alternatives.  I don't quite understand the hankering for royalty many Americans have--not because I'm particularly opposed to monarchy, but because whatever monarchy represents seems long ago and far away to me, given the experiences that shaped me as I grew up in the U.S.  If I was shaped in any overt political direction by my parents and schooling, that direction would most likely be called Jeffersonian democracy, with strong hints of agrarianism.  I was taught to admire and try to emulate those who sought to make democratic society truly democratic, and to provide economic advantages (hence the agrarianism) to every citizen, so that all citizens might find some way to sustain their lives and communities, and become fully participating members of democratic society.

When Charles and Diana married, I was teaching a summer course at a Jesuit college in northern Ontario.  The Jesuits who ran the university were French-Canadian to a man, as were almost all of the students in their college.  The summer was good for my French, since I found myself in a sink-or-swim situation at faculty gatherings, in which I had to speak French if I wanted to communicate at all.  I ended the summer with a better grasp of spoken French than I had ever had after years of schoolroom French--though, admittedly, the French I spoke after that summer was heavily overlaid with a joual accent that would have horrified the Sorbonne-educated woman who taught me French as an undergraduate.

And the clash between the standard French I'd been taught in college and what I heard around me during that wonderfully instructive summer sometimes led to ludicrous misunderstandings, including my inability to know how to reply when I answered the phone in my office--an office assigned to a Père Pion, who was away for the summer--and thought I heard someone saying, "Papillon?"  I had no idea what to say when these calls came through, until I finally realized I was hearing people asking for Fr. Pion in a Québécois accent.  Not for a butterfly.

The French Canadian students and faculty at this Jesuit school were gloriously hospitable.  I'll never forget passing the beautifully tended little garden on which one of the Jesuit brothers lavished daily care, and having him pull out of the ground a number of radishes, hold them up to me, and say, Mais manger-en!  Ce sont médicinales.  Just as I won't forget the librarian who taught me to recognize edible wild plants of the area that her grandmother had picked for spring salads--also with medicinal qualities.  

Or the wonderful party the French students threw on one occasion--precisely what it was, I've forgotten, though it had some church significance, as well as I can recall.  It may, in fact, have been St. John's day.  The party taught me how gifted some cultures are at creating the conditions for celebration by pooling the limited resources available to individual members of the community so that, when those limited resources are gathered together and turned into the basis for a celebration, everyone benefits from them.  

A few pieces of fresh fruit here added to several slices of cheese there, along with flowers from someone's garden and a bottle of wine and loaf of bread from another person's larder: and there was the party, with more than enough for everyone.  After we had eaten and listened to music, I remember we walked outside in a kind of procession, which the students of the Anglican college on the same campus gathered to watch in silence: two cultures, with entirely different predispositions and radically different histories, on silent (and somewhat tense) display with the events of that interesting evening.  And I, caught between them, since by cultural and ethnic background, I certainly belonged with the wary, watching Anglos, but happened to be processing with the French with whom I'd affiliated myself when I became Catholic.

This was the context in which I heard news of the marriage of Charles and Diana that summer.  Needless to say, the French Canadian students and faculty among whom I was living as the royal couple married were anything but enthralled with the wedding and its fanfare.  They laughed uproariously at the news that many fellow Canadians and many Americans intended to stay up far into the night to watch the royal ceremony on television.  Why would anyone want to lose sleep to watch that man with such big ears marry? they'd ask when we gathered to discuss the news of the day.

And so it went, and so it goes as Kate and Wills marry: and I have absolutely no idea where this particular posting is going, or why I am sharing these fond memories, other than to point out that things don't seem to change--not fundamentally--over the course of years.  Not easily.  And not frequently.

People remain stuck in cultural patterns that deform them.  People remain altogether too willing to relinquish control of their adult lives to mythic figures and mythic forces that they're taught to regard as saviors, figures and forces that inevitably betray those who give the reins of their autonomy into the hands of those saviors.  Whether political, economic, or religious: mythic savior figures in each and every case.

People remain voraciously hungry for fairy tales, too--but for the easiest fairy tales of all, not for the ones that require virtue or a heroic quest of us.  The fairy tales that enthrall us on television (or in legislative halls or churches) are the ones that promise easy virtue to us, automatic reward, if we but fit the norm.  If we conform.  If we do what's expected of us.

As Mr. Ivereigh says, if we become proper boys and girls and approach the altar wearing properly matched topcoats and gowns.   If we keep the wedding cakes crowned with little men beside little women.  If we uphold the central symbols that make everyone in our society comfortable with themselves.  If we do not challenge those symbols in a way that forces people to think about what they take for granted--or about the injustice enshrined in the world we seek so desperately to reinforce by keeping those central symbols in place, the injustice we seek to keep hidden as we madly manipulate those central symbols and claim that they are readings of reality as God ordains it, and not culturally determined choices that can be changed.

And so it goes, as William marries Kate.  And I certainly wish them a happy life together.  They'll need it, on the stage they occupy.

New Scientific Findings Confirm Catholic Magisterial Teachings about Sex? Semen as "Better Gift Than Chocolate" for Women

This is one of the crazy corners of American scientific research about which I'll freely admit I know next to nothing.  I first became aware that this field of research--re: the male-female union-cementing properties of semen--existed, when a proponent of the theology of the body logged onto a Commonweal thread some months ago to argue that new research shows that women crave semen (as it were), since a good dose of semen in their vagina gives them an upper-type experience unparalleled anywhere else in nature.

Really.  I'm not joking.  As crude as this proposal sounds, that's essentially what I read the TOB proponent to say on the Commonweal thread.  (TOB = theology of the body, and is the acronym beloved by the Catholic right as it sagely discusses these inanities in the mystogogical, pseudo-theological language of John Paul the Great.)

And science proves what the Catholic church has been saying for some years now, don't you know, the TOB proponent also argued: contraception that thwarts the injection of the upper-inducing semen into a woman's vagina is not "natural" or real sex.  It doesn't give women the thrill they crave, which nature has designed for them to have when their man does his business with them.

And as soon as I read this load of malarkey on the Commonweal blog site, I knew that quite a few (male heterosexual) Catholics of the TOB school were certain to latch onto this new pseudo-scientific finding and would try to make much of it as "proof" of the validity of TOB.  And of the validity of the Catholic magisterial opposition to homosexuality.  And to artificial contraception.  And to the designs of women who want to escape from male control and male domination and the male injection of that relationship-cementing magical substance they so desperately need to be whole women.

And now that I'm reading about this controversy (first link above) involving Lazar Greenfield, Steven Platek, et al., I'm no more convinced than I was by the summary of this research at the Commonweal site that we're seeing some stunning new scientific breakthrough that has finally vindicated Catholic sexual ethics, via rigid scientific research.  Let me count the ways that I'm dubious--while freely admitting I have done no careful reading at all in this field, and am basing my doubts on the Commonweal thread I mention above, and this article about Greenfield:

1. Research by psychologists confirming a biological thesis that semen acts like an anti-depressant for women?  Really?  What biological mechanisms, pray tell, are being confirmed here?  And how do we define something so nebulous as depression?  And how do we know that it's the semen per se that gives the uplifting experience to college-aged women whose male partners don't use condoms, or some other factors that go beyond the biological--say, the sense of cachet provided by knowing they have a man, and that their man is a real man who eschews condoms?  There are too many uncontrolled variables in this research, as it's described here, for me to be overwhelmed by its conclusion that semen provides that natural lift women are looking for in life.

2. And when Platek et al. also grant that the vagina is also "a very hostile environment for sperm," I wonder why they'd conclude at the same time, on the basis of their observation of the anti-depressant properties (on women) of semen in unprotected sex, that the "numerous semen testimonials from other women who attest to the anti-depressant effects of semen exposure" point to a conclusion that semen is a natural anti-depressant.  Designed for women.  A natural anti-depressant when injected, mind you, into the vagina.  In the only kind of sexual activity the Catholic church endorses as natural.  If the vagina is "hostile" to semen, if it compromises the female immune system, should we be touting the natural anti-depressant virtues of semen in unprotected male-female sex--the "better gift for that day [i.e., St. Valentine's day] than chocolates," in Dr. Greenfield's formulation? 

3. And my inquiring mind also wants to know: have comparative studies been done to discover whether semen functions as a magical substance with similar uplifting effects for gay men?  Or have studies been done to find out whether men coming into contact with vaginal secretions find themselves curiously elated by a better gift than chocolate?  If not, why not?  Why is this study, and why is this field of research, framed from the outset as a discovery that semen is men's gift to women--the better gift than chocolate?  (And we all know who craves the uplift of chocolate, and who gives chocolate to whom.)

Count me an unbeliever.  I'm just not yet seeing anything in this slice of research--admittedly, a thin slice, since I haven't read more in the field--that convinces me that the Catholic magical-mystical approach to human sexuality promoted by John Paul the Great and beloved of the TOB crowd is anything other than scientific and theological nonsense wrapped up in high-flown rhetoric disguising its long-since outmoded scientific conclusions about gender, sexuality, and male-female roles.  Or that this crude male-skewed scientific "research" is a solid basis on which to build a theological system that justifies male domination, female subordination, and condemnation of those God makes gay and lesbian.

Father John Corapi and the Manly-Man Model of the Priesthood: Survey of Recent Discussion

As I follow the news that another of the manly man hero-priests beloved of the Catholic right, Father John Corapi of EWTN fame, has been put on leave due to allegations of sexual misconduct with adult women (and drug abuse), I’m fascinated by a spin-off conversation now developing on some Catholic websites in the wake of the news about Corapi.  This is a conversation about precisely how and in what specific ways the Catholic church is now benefiting (or not) from its fixation of late on recovering the manly-man model for its priests.

Before I point you to sites at which that important conversation is now taking place, a brief comment about the situation framing the discussion.  Corapi himself broke the news of his having been put on leave with a recent statement at his blog site noting that he’s been charged with “multiple sexual exploits” with several adult women and with “drug addiction.”  Corapi denies the charges, and maintains that Catholic officials are now putting priests against whom non-credible allegations have been made on probation.

I don’t intend to comment on Corapi’s guilt or innocence, or the basis by which any church official may have put him on leave.  It’s not even clear whether Corapi is under scrutiny by a bishop or bishops since, as his blog posting notes, the woman making allegations about him wrote to three bishops, or if it is his religious superiors who have chosen to act.   He belongs to the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity.

It would be inappropriate of me to comment in any way about the guilt or innocence or procedural aspects of Corapi’s case, since I know nothing about the particulars—and he certainly deserves to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty (though I have seen no evidence at all to corroborate the claim that priests are being removed from ministry on the basis of tenuous, non-credible charges).  His case is somewhat different from that of Father Thomas Euteneuer, against whom charges of sexual misconduct with adult women have also been made, in that 1) Euteneuer admitted his guilt in at least one of the several cases about which there has been discussion of credible charges made, and 2) his admission was confirmed both by his former employer, Human Life International, and by the Diocese of Palm Beach, Florida, both of which revealed that they had already known of the charges against Euteneuer when he made them public.  And HLI’s statement about the matter indicated that there were charges in addition to the one to which his admission of guilt specifically responded.

I know little about Corapi except what I’ve seen when I occasionally flick through the offerings of EWTN, and then just as quickly click the television off.  I’ll freely admit I find him unappealing.  I can’t listen to him go on and on about his doctrinal certainties at the EWTN site without feeling queasy.  I had never specifically identified the queasiness as a reaction to the hyper-macho shtick about which there’s now discussion in the wake of the recent news about him.

I had thought of it more as a regional or perhaps even a class reaction: it’s the bullying tone, the shouting, the murdering of the king’s English, and the muddy, nasal, vowel-garbling accent that I find off-putting, as I listen to him.  And, yes, the anti-intellectual certitude with which he offers his reductionist, oh-so-certain understanding of the doctrines about which he preaches.

As I say, I had chalked my visceral reaction up to the fact that I just don’t seem to fit into the normative paradigms of American Catholicism, which emanate from urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest far from home for me.  And so when I read my way through comments about Corapi on some thread at one of the “In All Things” discussions at America in the past year (I'm sorry: I can't remember which thread this was), and read one glowing comment after another about Corapi by Catholic men logging in to praise Corapi’s scintillating theology and even the speaking style and rhetoric I find so repulsive, I just shrugged my shoulders and decided that, once again, the movers and shakers of American Catholicism don’t seem to have much room for me and my kind.

Now, though, I’m beginning to wonder: it may well have been the macho shtick to which I was reacting all along, without knowing it.  I’m wondering about this because, as I scan various Catholic blog sites recently for information about the Corapi case, I’ve happened on a fascinating discussion at several sites—a discussion of that manly-man fixation among some American Catholics who believe that the ills of the priesthood in the late 20th century had everything to do with the loss of machismo in the priesthood.  And who prescribe a return to clerical machismo as the way out of the deep crisis in which the church now finds itself.   And Corapi is at the center of this discussion because—I discover—he represents for a strong, mobilized group of followers precisely the kind of priestly machismo we need in order to cure the ills of American Catholicism.

I became aware of this discussion a day or so ago through something Elizabeth Scalia posted at her Anchoress site.   Scalia notes that Max Lindenmann had recently blogged about “types” of priests and why no one type is better than another.  Scalia excerpts a piece of Lindenmann’s commentary that, in fact, mentions a young priest in his (Phoenix) diocese for whom folks are predicting an illustrious future—a priest who sports what Lindenmann calls “the Fr. Corapi Starter Kit,”  an “aggressively shaven dome” and “a goatee fit for an outlaw biker or a king’s musketeer.”  And this young Corapi knock-off strides rather than walks, intones rather than speaks.

Scalia comments (bold-face in the original):  

Now I rather love priests with a bit of Spencer Tracy gruffness to them, but I love the soft-spoken sorts, too. 

Oddly enough, Fr. Mychal Judge was one of the first on the ground to die in the mess of 9/11.

I'm not quite sure why Scalia thinks it was odd that Mychal Judge was one of the first to die on the ground in the 9/11 events.  What she doesn’t say, of course, but what many readers will well know, is this: Mychal Judge was an openly gay priest.  He was, in short, precisely the kind of priest the prescribers of the Corapi manly-man fix are now insisting is at the root of the problem in American Catholicism.  He was the kind of priest they are working very hard to root out of all seminaries, in order to introduce a generation of priests who buy the Fr. Corapi Starter Kit.

Who will cure all that ails us.

And here’s Lindenmann himself on this prescription for the American Catholic church:

If instruction in the seminaries is taking a similar tone, conflating a call to holiness aimed at the soul with an appeal to the male ego (located guess where), then somebody's playing a very dangerous game. Masculine pride is a naturally volatile substance. In a system where masculinity and femininity are rigidly defined and polarized, it becomes machismo, the psychological equivalent of nitroglycerine. It can make men behave in ways that are ridiculous at best, atrocious at worst. Think Mike Dukakis in the tank. No, better, think Tom wedding Katie.

Lindenmann’s reference to “a similar tone” is a reference to the manly-man-as-cure analysis of Todd Aglioro in a Catholic Culture essay entitled “The New Catholic Manliness”—about which more in a moment.  For now, here’s where Lindenmann is going with the “similar tone” remark: he notes that Aglioro’s essay “blames femininity for everything he doesn't like about the Church, from bad catechesis to ‘the worst crimes of the Lavender Mafia.’” And: when Aglioro writes about “manly virtue,” one gets the sense, Lindenmann suggests, that for Aglioro, “manliness is virtue.”

And Lindenmann is skeptical of this analysis.  He’s skeptical for the reasons outlined above: creating rigid, polar-opposite definitions of masculinity and femininity (à la John Paul II's theology of the body)* and making one of these the solution to the problems of the church endows manly men with a dangerous, ego-charging sense of self-worth that easily translates into domination of others.  Of anyone “lower” than themselves.  And, specifically, of anyone feminine—whether women or feminized men—since masculinity is, per the foundational norms of this schema, superior to femininity.

Superiority so cheaply bought—with a shaved head, a bad tan, and a badly dyed goatee, a strut and a shout—doesn’t do anyone very much good, Lindenmann suggests.  Least of all the man who imagines he has reincarnated himself as a demi-god because he’s acquired a cheap starter kit to project the macho image.  Least of all a priest who imagines that a Fr. Corapi Starter Kit equips him for pastoral ministry better than, say, the gospels or the example of Jesus (who humbled himself to adopt a woman’s posture and wash his followers’ feet) does.

And Lindenmann goes further: he notes what a similar mindset—what the Fr. Corapi Starter Kit—has done for those working in the subprime mortgage industry, with which, I gather, he himself has work experience.  Just as Aglioro’s analysis of the new Catholic manliness does, Lindenmann thinks that the subprime industry exalts machismo and denigrates femininity.  It creates the same hard-soft polarity for which Aglioro argues as a prescription for the ills of contemporary American Catholicism.

And in Lindenmann’s experience, in doing so, it creates a model of being human that is not only unattractive, but dehumanizing and morally dangerous—hardly a model any community of followers of Jesus should be keen to adopt:

But subprime does, I think, have a lesson for the priesthood. It's this: once you polarize hard and soft, once you internalize those polarities as good and bad, then your whole value structure will become distorted, and your self will follow. Once you start conceiving missions that can only be accomplished with a stiff arm and a strut—that's when you run the risk of becoming someone you don't recognize, and couldn't possibly like.

As I’ve noted, Lindenmann is commenting here on an essay Todd Aglioro published two years ago at the Catholic Culture website, entitled “The New Catholic Manliness.”  Aglioro’s essay is . . . an interesting  (and I'll be honest: often downright hilarious). . . read for all kinds of reasons.  As Lindenmann notes, it develops a neat analysis of diametrically opposed male-female characteristics, and then implicitly ranks these in a hierarchical schema.  And guess which come out on top?  And which set is the solution and which the problem in the contemporary Catholic church?

And it quite specifically prescribes this model for—it calls for its imposition on—seminaries, as a solution to what’s wrong with American Catholicism today.  This is the subtext of Aglioro’s analysis I find particularly fascinating because, when I’ve written about this topic in the past, some readers have suggested that I’m over-stating or even making up my case about how the manly-man paradigm is now driving both the thinking of many Catholics about the priesthood today, and the direction now being taken in seminary formation.

As Aglioro states outright, “Good seminaries are not simply enjoying a serendipitous influx of manlier applicants; they're expressly targeting them.”  Aglioro quotes for corroboration Msgr. Stewart Swetland and Msgr. Steven Rohlfs of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland:

For one, they [seminarians] are carrying themselves differently: "They take pride in their masculine attributes," says Monsignor Swetland. "The last couple generations of priests generally weren't too concerned about taking care of themselves physically," but these days "they work out, they play sports, they want to look and dress and act like men." Also in contrast to their predecessors, they're interested in pursuing "a distinctly masculine spirituality," says Monsignor Rohlfs — in part, he adds with a laugh, because "there's a sense of relief that it's now acceptable to talk that way."  

In contrast to their predecessors: this is analysis—this is a prescription—deliberately pitched against what Aglioro and others in his camp imagine seminarians of the immediate post-Vatican period were like.  Seminarians that those promoting the return to a manly-man priesthood want us to imagine are at the root of the abuse problem in the Catholic church in the U.S.  Gay seminarians, you understand.  The Mychal Judges.  Not the John Corapis or Tom Euteneuers.

And so rooting out those “feminine traits and roles” that used to “plague” seminaries is also rooting out the same-sex relationships that have also plagued seminaries (and—subtext—have led to the abuse crisis during the period in which the Lavender Mafia dominated American church life):

The change [to a macho understanding of priesthood] has begun to bear evident fruits in the interactions among younger clergy and seminarians, thanks to a reemphasis on the classical sense of friendship, which helps guard against same-sex attraction while building a lifelong foundation for priestly fellowship and mutual help. Among such men there is virtually no evidence of the affectation of feminine traits and roles that has plagued many seminaries.

The priests now being churned out by our seminaries are not merely bona fide men free of feminine affectation: they’re orthodox men ready to do battle for the church to whom they’re wed, priests eager to teach “hard or ‘crunchy’ doctrine” in season or out of season.  Lump it or like it, people of God.  Father knows best.  Real men don’t waver or yield.  The new generation of manly-men priests who will save our tottering, unbalanced, hyper-feminized church are priests in the image of John Paul II, a manly-man priest “who by all accounts was the inspiration, motivation, and architect of the whole project.”

For some reason, Aglioro’s article never mentions Benedict.

And so the path is bright before us: if we want to renew the American Catholic church, to lift it out of its current (feminine-produced) malaise, we need to keep cleaning out our seminaries—cleaning them out of “effeminate” candidates and the “ideologues” who preferred such candidates over manly men:

In many seminaries, even those that have cleared their staffs of ideologues, who before would give unabashed preference to effeminate candidates while straining out the masculine ones, there are still future priests with a seriously deficient — or skewed — sense of what it means to be a man. Some of these will become deadbeat spiritual fathers; others will have to battle — or will succumb to — homosexual urges.

And, as I read Scalia and Lindenmann, I'm delighted to discover that even Catholics far more inclined than I am to buy into the restorationist model of John Paul II and Benedict are finally waking up to the downright noxious silliness of all of this gay-baiting analysis.  And to the proposal that a church dominated by priests of the ilk of John Corapi or Tom Euteneuer or Ryan Erickson would be preferable to a church dominated by priests of the ilk of Mychal Judge.

Or even—God help us—that we'd have a church free of the gays because more and more seminarians are choosing to work out, play sports, and dress like real men!  No, sir, don't know a single gay to whom that description might apply.  I find this thesis just about as convincing and reassuring as I found that silly little baseball cap Benedict was sporting last summer to be a convincing sign that he belongs solidly in the crowd of of manly-men priests.

*Readers interested in tracking what I've written on this theme can click on the tag "theology of the body" at the bottom of this Corapi posting, and follow postings with that tag back in time.

Ross Douthat on Monogamy: Moving the Goalposts as Marriage Equality Advances

When I first read Ross Douthat's recent op-ed piece in the New York Times about why monogamy matters, I briefly entertained the idea of blogging about it, and then thought better of the idea.  I can't find it in me, to be honest, to take Douthat seriously as a thinker.


But then I read John Corvino's response to the essay and saw that, like me, he considers it an extension of Douthat's piece last August on the marriage ideal, which explicitly argues against same-sex marriage on the ground of male-female complementarity.  And at that point, I began to think that Douthat's latest musings on the theme of monogamy do demand a response, if only because they are intended to lay a foundation for a plausible sounding "rational" argument against same-sex marriage, which is not susceptible to charges of religious animus and prejudice.  But which ultimately has everything to do with religious animus and prejudice.

And now that I read Andrew Sullivan writing that as a gay Catholic, he's never felt hostility from his fellow Catholics, I'm all the more convinced that Douthat's essay deserves critical attention--because it articulates, in popular language, an increasingly influential (but ill-considered) new Catholic approach to same-sex marriage.  Which is overtly hostile to gays and lesbians.  And has perceivable deleterious effects on the lives of gay and lesbian people in many places.  More on Sullivan's comment in a subsequent posting.

As John Corvino points out, Douthat's latest piece turns on a distinction between premarital sex that is a prelude to monogamous marriage, and premarital sex that is mere promiscuity.  Douthat argues that, while premarital sexual activity is embedded in all cultures, and was even a strong feature of life in the halcyon years of the 1950s so beloved of American social conservatives, the premarital sexual activity of periods like the fifties was truly premarital, in that it envisaged a life of monogamous commitment for the couple engaging in premarital sexual activity.

And that resulted, Douthat maintains, in happiness: happiness for the couple that sowed its wild oats and then settled down to the sober yoke of marriage; happiness for society in general, whose stability depends on the strength of that yoke.  And happiness, above all, for women.  Since women need sexual stability in order to live happy and fulfilled lives.  

And so Corvino is right: with this essay, we're back on the same ground Douthat covered last August, when he maintained that societies fall apart when we don't have the strong yoke of monogamous opposite-sex marriage to tame the tiger of daddy's promiscuity and mommy's sly, cunning shopping around for the ideal male.  Embedded in Douthat's theory of monogamy is a model of male-female complementarity that inevitably (and deliberately) makes marriage all about a man and a woman.

And decidedly not about a man and a man and a woman and a woman.  Since the yoke of monogamous marriage is specifically designed to tame the two gendered tigers of male promiscuity and female hankering after ever more attractive alpha males.

And because this male-female complementarity argument about traditional marriage is becoming a new talking point for American conservatives opposed to same-sex marriage, those concerned to promote marriage equality for same-sex couples need to pay attention to arguments like the one Douthat is sketching in this diptych of essays about monogamy.  These two essays, in short, are not merely about monogamy or defending monogamy.  They're also about laying a philosophical foundation for understanding marriage that excludes same-sex marriage--or that places same-sex marriage on a footing of inferiority when it's compared to opposite-sex marriage.  

Essentially, here's what has happened fairly rapidly in the cultural and religious debate about same-sex marriage in the United States: initially, those opposed to same-sex marriage could fairly glibly argue that we can't, of course, countenance gay marriage without destroying traditional heterosexual marriage, because the latter is all about procreation.  And permitting socially or ecclesially sanctioned non-procreative marriages will radically undermine traditional marriages by calling procreativity into question as the central purpose of marriage.

However, as the arguments in the prop 8 trial in California revealed (and Judge Vaughn Walker's decision in that case, handed down only a few days before Douthat's first essay on monogamy came out, underscored this), this glib argument is increasingly difficult to advance, because it's clearly counter-factual.  No rational, coherent, persuasive argument can be made to exclude same-sex couples from the right of civil marriage when our society (and its faith communities) have long married heterosexual couples incapable of procreation.  Or heterosexual couples who have no intent of procreating.

And so the argument has had to be refined.  The search for a plausible-sounding and quasi-"rational" argument against same-sex marriage has had to continue.  The goalposts have had to be moved.  The goal remains the same: excluding same-sex couples from marriage.  What has shifted, as the goalposts have been shifted in the past several years, is how social conservatives are now choosing to go about attacking gay marriage.

They're now choosing to do so by advancing the argument that it's not so much the procreation thing that's at the center of marriage as a social institution stabilizing society.  It's the male-female thing.  It's the complementarity of males and females.  Without which you simply cannot have a real marriage.  And to endanger which by letting people of the same sex marry would expose society itself to serious danger.

Setting it on a slippery slope of promiscuity, since, without the shining, univocal ideal of monogamous male-female marriage standing before them, men might get the idea that promiscuity is the end-all and be-all of their lives.  And women might keep eternally shopping around for the higher-status alpha male.

And here's my take on the goal-post changing: this is what inevitably happens when the real intent of movements of social conservatism is not, as these movements characteristically claim, to keep society from falling apart under the pressure of anarchic movements for social change.  This is what inevitably happens when the real intent of movements of social conservatism is simply to keep justice at bay as long as possible--justice for an excluded, demeaned minority group.

With each advance that African Americans made towards full equality and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, the goalposts shifted.  They moved a step further into the distance.  Every forward movement in the struggle for civil rights resulted in a consequent movement of the goalposts--a movement back, to make justice that much more unattainable.

Brown v. Board of Education mandated the desegregation of American schools with all deliberate speed, and school districts throughout the South announced that integration could not take place immediately (or ever) because social chaos would ensue if the changes mandated by Brown occurred hastily.  School districts like the one in which I attended school in south Arkansas put up one barrier after another to desegregation in the late 1950s and late 1960s.  One goalpost-shifting argument after another was proposed to explain why our speed at obeying the court mandate had to be at snail's pace--and why desegregation could not be accomplished for years to come.  Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stopped the insincere arguments and the goalpost-changing . . . .

To change metaphors: in his classic study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn notes that scientific paradigms shift when so much new information has been amassed to call an existing paradigm into question, that one cannot incorporate all the new information into the old paradigm without exploding the paradigm.  Kuhn points out that when we have to begin adding explanation to explanation to account for new pieces of information, while seeking to keep in place a paradigm threatened by the new pieces of information, we might do well to begin thinking about the steep price we're paying for keeping the status quo intact.  And about the implausibility of the paradigm we're defending with ever more labyrinthine and complexified explanations, when simpler, more elegant explanations for how things behave are at hand.

In American society today, vis-a-vis same-sex marriage, the paradigm shift is well underway.  And as that shift continues, what will inevitably become crystal clear, as social conservatives and some people of faith resist this paradigm shift with new, ever more complex, goal-deferring arguments designed to keep justice at bay, is this: driving the resistance to same-sex marriage among American social conservatives and people of faith allied to them never has been an overarching desire to defend traditional marriage.  Driving this movement, which is willing to bend over backwards at each new juncture in the march towards equality for gay and lesbian citizens to invent ever more abstruse arguments for the superiority of opposite-sex marriage, has been sheer prejudice.  The intent to keep a stigmatized minority group in its place . . . .

A Gloss on Catholic Theology of the Body as Bogus Science Propping Up Bad Theology

A gloss on what I've just posted about the ludicrous science now being used to prop up bad theology, as proponents of the theology of the body now assert that the superiority of male-female sex is proven by the response of the vagina to semen: 

I want to make the theological point crystal clear.  That is, I want to make crystal clear my point that this particular rendition of the theology of the body is bad theology clothed in preposterous science.  Here's why: it actually moves Catholic ethical thinking backwards in the area of sexual teaching, while claiming it is doing so in response to good science.  It retrieves ethical conclusions long since discarded by the Catholic tradition itself, at its best, while it also claims to be offering an entirely new, scientifically astute reading of sexual ethics:

To wit:

1. The claim that science demonstrates that the vagina is simply waiting around eager to receive male ejaculate continues the now-rejected understanding of male-female complementarity in the scholastic theology of the manual tradition, in which women are simply passive receptacles of what really counts in sexual intercourse--that is, the semen.

2. The theory that Gregory Popcak is promoting on the Commonweal thread to which I linked previously steps back in time to Aquinas, with Aquinas's conclusion (following Aristotle) that males provide the essential stuff of life in intercourse, and all that women provide is the incubator, the waiting receptacle.

3. And so, as should be apparent, this backwards-looking and scientifically unsound understanding of human sexuality also reinforces male domination.  Men carry life itself (the "little man," the homunculus that resides in the semen), and women incubate life for their men.  (But we now know from sound science that it's quite the opposite, and that the role women play in procreation surpasses that of males in importance).

4. On the basis of his Aristotelian reading of nature (which was necessarily limited by lack of scientific knowledge at the time he wrote, as was Aristotle's), Aquinas concluded that it is less morally serious for a man to rape a woman than to masturbate or engage in homosexual activity.  The former act at least puts the all-important semen where it belongs . . . .  This is precisely where Popcak's theory of the semen as the glue that cements marriage by landing in the vagina also heads.

5. This is bad theology propped up by defective science because it does not really intend to pay serious attention to scientific findings at all.  It has its mind made up before it cracks a science textbook.  It merely looks for any scientific research it can latch onto to prove its preconceived notion that only male-female sex is natural, and that male domination of females is natural.

6. At its best, traditional Catholic theology does more than pay lip-service to science, because it believes that faith and reason must function in tandem, and that the two are not antithetical to each other.

7.  The reading of nature that contemporary theology-of-the-body natural law thinkers are promoting is highly selective and deliberately blind to many of the most salient facts available to us from the side of dispassionate scientific observation of nature, as we formulate a sexual ethic.  For instance, its attempt to dismiss same-sex activity as unnatural flies in the face of abundant evidence for homosexual behavior as precisely natural throughout the animal kingdom.

8. There is another level of disingenuousness in the "scientific" arguments now being used by theology-of-the-body thinkers to defend traditional positions, as well.  The resistance to same-sex marriage has been fueled for a long time by the argument that marriage is all about procreation, and same-sex marriage is impermissible and unnatural because it thwarts the procreative purpose of marriage.

The proposal that semen is a glue cementing male-female unions inside the receptive vagina seeks to keep alive the conclusions of the procreative argument vs. same-sex marriage, while also claiming that the unitive function of marriage is rooted in nature--in a biology of male-female complementarity that excludes same-sex intimacy from authentic unitive behavior. 

9. And so this argument kicks male-dominant heterosexism up a notch in Catholic moral thinking, by denying all evidence for the solidity, depth, and fruitfulness of any and all gay unions, and elevating any and all heterosexual unions, no matter how shallow they may be, to the level of the ideal--the ideal in which the eager and waiting vagina receives the donation of the male semen that cements the heterosexual union.

10. This way of thinking about human sexuality is crudely biologistic, reductionistic, and even--it has to be said--crudely adolescent, in a male adolescent fantasizing sort of way.  This crude, heterosexist adolescent male way of thinking about human sexuality is entirely tone-deaf to what is most important of all in evaluating human sexual behavior--the relational dimension, the relationships within which sexual activity occurs.

The Catholic church can and should do far better, if it wants to keep thinking and morally sensitive people on board at this point in history, and if it wants to avoid re-branding itself as a club for immature heterosexual males and immature women who enjoy being dominated by men.

Catholic Theology of the Body: Bogus Science Propping Up Bad Theology

And dear God again: I noted yesterday the extremely shaky "scientific" foundation that the newly elected president of the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference, Timothy Dolan, wants to cite for Catholic officials' opposition to same-sex marriage: a one man, one woman model of marriage is hardwired in human DNA, doncha know.

And now this: this analysis pops up in an interesting Commonweal blog thread in which Lisa Fullam argues that a church really committed to preserving and strengthening marriage should, in a society in which a growing number of folks reject marriage altogether, honor and protect loving, faithful, same-sex marriages.

In response, a member of the John Paul II theology-of-the-body crowd, with its magical-mystical theory of male-female complementarity (and perennial male domination of females), and its pretense to decipher the codes of nature for the rest of us while ignoring scads of evidence for the naturalness of same-sex behavior in the animal kingdom, Gregory Popcak, informs us it's all about the semen.

Really.  That old Catholic male-clerical preoccupation with penises, what they do, where they go, but above all, when and where they ejaculate, is now being dressed up in new scientific clothing.  "Science" informs us that it's all about semen and where it lands, since--I'm not making this up--semen ejaculated into a vagina cements a bond between a man and a woman that semen ejaculated anyplace else just can't cement.

It's all about a penis, what it does, where it ends up, where it ejaculates, and a receptive female container designed to receive that penis and its ejaculate.  So the church naturally (I use that word with full intent) marries infertile male-female couples, but not same-sex couples, since the unitive function of marriage is still served in the former case through the union-cementing function of semen ejaculated in the eager and waiting female apparatus.  But that union-cementing function is lacking when two women have sex (no semen, no union), and when two men have sex (semen aplenty, but no eager and waiting female apparatus to log in the donation and increase the bank account of marital unity).

Really.  This is where the Catholic church is willing to go today, in its defense of the "sanctity" of "traditional" marriage.  This is where the Catholic church is willing to go today with its claims to have discovered even deeper dimensions of the DNA-encoded one man, one woman model of marriage.  Bogus natural law propped up by ludicrous science posturing as religious conviction and profound, serious moral insight . . . .

Is it any wonder that increasing numbers of morally sensitive, thinking people are walking away from a church that promotes such toxic nonsense about semen and vaginas and the superiority of heterosexual anything, when people have eyes to see that gay human beings also love and bond deeply, and that their marriages work as well as if not better than those cemented by semen in eager and receptive vaginas?

Fresh Sperm: Bishop Eddie Long and John Paul II's Theology of the Body

One of the supposedly earth-shaking insights of the Catholic theology of the body developed by the late pope John Paul II is its insistence that male-female complementarity is the central thread on which Judaeo-Christian beliefs hold together.  The theology of the body insists that everything in scripture and tradition should be read through the optic of the crude biological facticity of gender, of maleness and femaleness.

And because it employs a literalistic framework for reading scripture and tradition, the theology of the body tortures the central symbols of religious traditions to make them fit its mindless literalism. And so we end up with arguments that priests must be male because the church is female, and priests are married to the bride of Christ through ordination.

And here's where these arguments are headed; here's where the mindless literalism, with its fixation on biological gender as the most significant fact about Judaeo-Christian faith ends up, when taken to its logical, absurd extremes.

This is Bishop Eddie Long of Atlanta preaching about the "fresh sperm" that he and other (male) preachers inject into the church's "womb" through their preaching:

"The word of God is potent. The word of God is His sperm," Long thunders. "The job of the preacher is to bring fresh sperm and when he speaks it, the womb -- the church -- is to take it in and say, 'Sho' you're right.'"

And this is absolutely no different at all from what John Paul II teaches in his theology of the body, and what those (like Maggie Gallagher and Robert P. George) now trying to impose the theology of the body on our entire culture through the political process, are arguing.

It all comes down to fresh sperm.  And male preachers and priests supplying it.  And the supple, receptive--but above all, passive--womb of women to receive it.  And the womb of the female church, with its its passive, receptive stance to the mighty men supplying it with fresh sperm.

Carl Paladino and the Catholic Preferential Option for the Heterosexual Male: The Real Moral Message of Catholicism for the World

This is increasingly the face of Catholic teaching about sexual morality.  This is the iconic standard for everyone to which the Catholic church points with its teaching that every person born heterosexual is automatically "ordered" aright by the happenstance of his or her birth and therefore automatically normative, while every gay or lesbian person is ipso facto disordered and abnormal.


This is where Catholic teaching about sexual morality has ended up, with the theology of the body and its distortion of the Christian tradition, its reduction of scripture and tradition to the crude and decidedly untraditional formula of male-female complementarity--which seeks to stamp male dominance of the female with a stamp of divine approval, and to enshrine it as the core value of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

In practice, Catholic teaching about sexual morality has come to mean Carl Paladino, with his child  born out of wedlock and smutty racist emails; it has come to mean Newt Gingrich, with his three wives and various affairs.  It has come to mean Carl Paladino and Newt Gingrich talking about the sanctity of marriage and the superiority of every heterosexual person ever born to every homosexual person ever born.

In practice, Catholic teaching about sexual morality is a preferential option for the heterosexual male--for any and all heterosexual males, no matter how little their moral lives actually conform in any other respect to any standard of morality that makes sense to anyone with half a brain and a soupçon of ethical sensitivity.   The ultimate message that Catholic magisterial teaching about sexuality offers to the world as redemptive truth and evidence of God's loving plan for humankind: anyone with a penis, who professes to use his penis according to divine "order," has higher human worth and loftier moral status, more right to bray and posture as God's emissary on earth, than anyone without a penis.

And than any gay or lesbian person in the world.

What a place for an intellectually challenging religious tradition, with a wealth of admirable teaching on a wide range of moral issues, to end up.

Related articles

• Newt Gingrich Backs Carl Paladino's "Battle Cry" (mediaite.com)
• New Paladino Emails Surface [VERY NSFW] UPDATED (observer.com)
• The Vatican and Women: Casting the First Stone (time.com)
• Carl Paladino apologises for being perenially misquoted (guardian.co.uk)
• Michele Somerville: Homophobia in the Church: What Catholics Are Doing About It, and What Still Needs to Be Done (huffingtonpost.com)
• US Catholic Bishops Slam Catholic Professor-Theologians over Book on Sexuality (lifesitenews.com)
• Vatican: Ordaining Female Priests on Par with Pedophilia (time.com)
• The Distorted Rules Of "Manhood" [Gender Roles] (jezebel.com)
• Pope visit: Most Catholics 'oppose church teaching on sex' (telegraph.co.uk)