The Church's Third Rail

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 1/6/05)

Is sex the third rail of Catholic homiletics and catechesis—just touch the subject and you're dead? Considering the lengths to which some preachers and religion teachers seem to go to avoid the topic, you have to suppose that's how they think of it. If so, they're wrong.

In today's sex-saturated society, after all, nobody else steers clear of sex. The routine presence of scandalous sexual content in popular media has reached epic proportions, and lately—a sign of the times—we've been treated to a movie biography lionizing the shady sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Why should people designated to preach and teach on behalf of the Church be the only ones who avoid talking about sex?

There are some honorable exceptions. These include bishops who, recognizing a need they have a duty to meet, speak out bravely in defense of the Catholic view of sexuality. To mention two: Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark, who published a notable pastoral letter on the matter a while back, and now Bishop Joseph F. Martino of Scranton, whose pastoral on chastity appropriately made its appearance on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, Dec. 8.

In singling out these two, I don't mean to slight other bishops who've done the same thing. It's just that the Myers and Martino letters struck me as particularly good— candidly realistic and pastorally sensitive on a topic about which it's admittedly difficult to strike just the right note.

Bishop Martino faces up to an obvious question right at the start: "Why write a pastoral letter on this subject now?" Plainly, the sex abuse scandal has made people skeptical when the Church talks about something like chastity. "But that," the bishop insists, "makes it more necessary, not less, to speak the truth about sexual morality. Sin and confusion cry out for honest, truthful speaking."

There also are those who say that talking to kids about a subject like chastity is a waste of time. "Everybody's doing it; it's like sex in high school" was a casual one-liner cheerfully quoted by The New York Times in a story about steroid abuse in sports.

But cynical humor misses the point: not more but fewer teenagers are having premarital sex. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of those who'd ever done so was 38 percent among females aged 15 to 17 in 1995 and 30 percent in 2002. Among boys in the same age group, it was 55 percent in 1995 and 46 percent in 2002. The main reason given by young people for not having sex was that it was "against their religion or morals."

Even so, the campaigners against abstinence-only education in sexuality are very much on the warpath, ideologically persuaded as they are that education in 'safe sex' rather than abstinence is the only approach. Bishop Martino's pastoral letter calls this "destructive miseducation" and notes that it is reinforced by TV, movies, music videos, and youth magazines.

"Chastity has never been easy, and today it's harder than ever because of the many inducements to be unchaste and the widespread ignorance of the Christian tradition and the teaching of the Church," the bishop says. "Many people would like to do the right thing—if only they knew what the right thing was."

The statistics on premarital sex among teenagers suggest that the bishop of Scranton is right. Maybe that's the encouragement more homilists and religion teachers need to speak up. People will listen if you are brave enough to speak the truth—but you have to speak it.

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