13

Papal Ideals, Marital Realities: One View from the Ground1

Cristina L. H. Traina

This work is open to every echo of experience, from whatever quarter it comes, and it is at the same time a standing appeal to all to let experience, their own experience, make itself heard, to its full extent: in all its breadth, and all its depth. When we speak here of depth we have in mind all those things which do not always show themselves directly as part of the content of experience, but are nonetheless a component, a hidden dimension of it, so much so that it is impossible to omit them, if we want to identify fully the contents of experience. If we do omit them, we shall be detracting from and impoverishing experience, and so robbing it of validity, though it is the sole source of information and the basis of all reliable knowledge on whatever subject. Love and Responsibility, with this sort of methodological basis, fears nothing from experience. Experience does not have to be afraid of experience. Truth can only gain from such a confrontation.²

So begins Pope John Paul II’s 1960 treatise on sexuality, the book that lays the theological and philosophical groundwork for all his papal writings on gender and sexual ethics. He seems to have meant this explicit nod to experience as a reassurance of his theories’ objectivity and coherence with everyday life. That experience had a “hidden dimension” whose discernment required special theological and philosophical expertise (if not charismatic authority, here) was for him an obvious and unproblematic caveat. If implicit and explicit experience were in contradiction, he assumed, then there must have been some error in interpreting the latter.

Forty years later, experience is perhaps both the most-cited factor and wildest variable in debates over methods and questions in ethics.³ Far from comforting the reader or foreclosing debates over the natures and ends of things, appeals to experience raise questions about perspective and authority and are widely thought to reveal as much about speakers as about the phenomena they address.⁴

Concern for the credentials of experience certainly dominates Roman Catholic discussions of sexuality. One important critical task has been identifying and ranking the experiential tributaries that flow into an author’s moral judgments. In this volume, for example, James Hanigan and Susan Ross illustrate in different ways how Pope John Paul II grounds his vision of procreative complementarity in the authority of charismatic insight and in an experience formed by Scripture, traditional norms and practices, mariology, and his own deeply held, particular ideals of masculinity and femininity, perhaps unconsciously universalized from the events of his childhood.

But all experience is not equal. A second essential task is criticism of these sources and the relative weight they are given in moral argument. Hanigan sees John Paul II’s central source as Scripture interpreted in light of traditional mores. But Ross joins critics like Peter Hebblethwaite in arguing that this narrow interpretation of experience leaves important personal and cultural assumptions unexamined and dismisses concrete, practical experiences as morally irrelevant. According to Hebblethwaite, John Paul II’s sources are limited and primarily textual, theoretical, or reflective rather than broad and practical or concrete; in his search for “the unchanging essence of things” John Paul II seems to have “a preference for introspection over evidence—or rather the introspection provides the evidence.”⁵ Nowhere is this clearer than in his discussions of sex and sexuality. John Paul II insists that accounts of concrete experience may enter moral argument only after universal norms are established, and then solely to confirm them. For example, “sexology”—scientific knowledge of human sexuality and sexual function—“does not have to furnish arguments from which we can deduce these rules—it is enough if it incidentally confirms rules already known from elsewhere and established by other means”(Love, 276).

In the case of homosexuality this reasoning implies that pessimistic sociological and psychological data on “the gay lifestyle” may provide legitimate outrigger support for established arguments in favor of essential gender complementarity. Thus many Roman Catholic authors cite disease, despair, breakdown of essential gender characteristics, and the decline of the two-parent family as observable, measurable consequences of homosexual (primarily gay) promiscuity.⁶ These arguments typically treat homosexual relationships as mere long-term affairs, despite the fact—as Isiaah Crawford and Brian Zamboni demonstrate in this volume—that the “homosexual lifestyle” of the gay and lesbian bar circuit is no more similar to the stable homosexual household than the straight “swinging singles” scene is to a mutual, cooperative marriage.⁷ Evidence of stability, fidelity, or emotional health is seen as irrelevant to the argument because this sort of success is assumed to occur in spite of the essential gender conflict that compromises the relationship.

When the topic is heterosexual marriage the criteria for admissible data reverse. Measurable benefits experienced by heterosexual married couples provide outrigger support for the assumption in favor of the essential morality of heterosexual marriage. Statistics to the contrary are simply the fruit of poor approximation of the ideal; they are read as evidence of individual weakness rather than as indicators of flaws inherent in the institution, which is assumed to be unproblematic. There is, in other words, a double standard for the use of concrete evidence: it may support but not question ruling assumptions about gender and marriage.

Yet if “experience does not have to be afraid of experience” this double standard is both unnecessary and insidious. Indeed, the particular version of natural law method that underlies moral theology actually demands that, if the Roman Catholic community is responsibly to confirm, revise, or replace current official teachings on any subject, then knowledge must be sought from all quarters.⁸ The net must be cast as widely as possible, and the information it gathers must be interpreted within a number of competing or overlapping frameworks, including some that challenge established assumptions. For instance, as Jon Nilson and Mary Hunt imply in this volume, other readings of the same experiential sources that underlie John Paul II’s theology can produce visions of sexuality, procreativity, and gender quite different from his; and as Bishop Thomas Gumbleton argues, intimate gay and lesbian relationships can reveal and embody divine love just as marriages do. Dialogue that includes these voices is crucial to the evaluation of the version of ontological, procreative gender complementarity that undergirds all contemporary Roman Catholic ecclesiastical teachings on homosexuality.

What significance can a straight, married woman’s experiential reflections have for this volume’s critical reexamination of the sources and norms of Roman Catholic teaching on homosexuality? To extrapolate from straight experience seems presumptuous and irrelevant: gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual (GLBT) theologians speak quite eloquently for themselves, here and elsewhere. But while straight, married voices should not dominate the conversation, to exclude them risks impoverishing it in two important ways. First, it perpetuates the assumption that GLBT sexual experiences necessarily differ radically and essentially from married heterosexual experiences. Second, presuming to know the “hidden dimension” of the ideal of married sexuality already, it misses an opportunity to criticize this ideal in light of the concrete experiences of the married couples whom it in theory governs. Thus one key to authentic dialogue about homosexuality is candid talk about married sexuality’s joys and frustrations, as well as its approximation to or distance from traditional Roman Catholic moral norms as interpreted by John Paul II. Where does the reigning ecclesiastical account of married sexuality—marvelously articulated by Ross and Hanigan—ring true with the concrete experience of particular married people and where is it false? How might questions like these help us to approach discussions of sexuality more constructively? Such conversations do not—because they cannot—arise among members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but they must be carried out.

In what follows I draw inspiration from Mary Pellauer’s more rigorous moral reflections on women’s sexual pleasure, seen through the lens of her own marriage, and on Christine Gudorf’s sexual ethics of mutual pleasure.⁹ I concentrate on procreativity and complementarity, the most prominent Vatican concerns; I remain largely within the paradigm of sexual self-gift; and I work from a sample size of one: my own experience as a married person hewing fairly close to Vatican ideals of sexuality and family structure.¹⁰ The account is therefore neither comprehensive, representative, nor conclusive. But I hope that it inspires a conversation that is both.

UNION ON ALL LEVELS

[Persons have] an inborn need . . . to give [themselves] to another. . . . The need to give oneself to another person has profounder origins than the sexual instinct and is connected above all with the spiritual nature of the human person. . . . It is the need to give oneself, latent in every human person, which finds its outlet in physical and sexual union, in matrimony (Love, 253).

The rough outlines of my sexuality and procreativity are unremarkably orthodox. I saved sexual intercourse for marriage, and I married a man for whom equality and mutuality are indisputable goals in sexuality as in all other dimensions of our lives. This has meant learning to understand and accommodate each other’s different and changing sexual personalities. The effort has been worth it. Sexual affection is part of the “glue” that holds us together, providing refreshment in smooth times and expressing love and reassurance when words fail (or, worse, harm). In periods when we have felt precariously close to coming unglued, we have later realized, more intimate physical connection would have helped us to bridge or accept our emotional distance. We have three children, all of whom were conceived intentionally and easily and whose arrival caused no severe hardship to health or family security. And, while we are avoiding another birth, we are committed to mustering the resources to love and raise another child should we conceive again. By no means has either of us habitually ranked either procreation or our own pleasure above the other goods of intercourse. If we had, we would not still be married.

Not surprisingly, there is resonance between this experience and John Paul II’s descriptions of spousal procreative love. His assertion of the latent need to give oneself physically, in sex, rings true for me (Love, 253). So does his insistence that “[sexual] intercourse is necessary to [married] love” (Love, 233): intercourse not in a reductive sense, but a physical, ecstatic intimacy that is so necessary to a relationship that (for example) a husband has a moral obligation to learn and respond to his wife’s erotic rhythms (Love, 272–74). Likewise familiar is the “general disposition toward parenthood” that, according to John Paul II, characterizes “a true union of persons” even when they are not seeking pregnancy (Love, 229, 233).

This resonance is not merely theoretical or abstract, however. For example, for me intentionally procreative intercourse is an experience unto itself. Other than childbirth, I can think of nothing that compares with the physical, psychological, and spiritual exhilaration of intentionally procreative lovemaking. With pregnancy a hope rather than a worry, there is a giddy, thrilling sense of abandon; I have the psychological freedom to commit all of my energy to sensing, caressing, and responding, to (as Pellauer says) “being here-and-now.”¹¹ Here too the papal model matches my experience; for me, as long as conception seems both likely and wise, intentionally procreative intercourse eliminates anxieties over unwanted pregnancy that have stood in the way of attentive, loving intercourse on other occasions.¹² In this sense procreative sex sometimes achieves the relational or “unitive” goods of love-making better than intercourse that is not aimed at procreation.

This difference is not merely freedom from inhibition. There is a new focus, a shared delight in a common project that really is a “total self-gift” to each other and our hoped-for future child. Our joy in each other and our mutual excitement about the project of conceiving can be nearly overwhelming. The Spirit’s presence is palpable. Physical climax, in the end, plays a minor role. For me, as for many women, procreative intercourse typically does not lead to thrilling orgasmic release; at ovulation, although I feel aroused, my body is so sensitive to touch that intercourse is actually uncomfortable.¹³ Yet the experience as a whole brings a different array of pleasures and goods: “warmth, comfort, intimacy, the experience of belonging in an embrace”—and the prospect of a new child.¹⁴ In spite of all of this, as long as we anticipate no difficulty in conceiving, neither do I replace a focus on mutual erotic pleasure with an instrumental desire to conceive. The intention to conceive is rather a second layer of meaning, an extra dimension: through loving, we may create a child (see Love, 18, 234). Here again my experience echoes John Paul II’s description: our physical connection is only one dimension of our love, which “must possess a fertility of its own in the spiritual, moral, and personal sphere” in order to sustain the productive work of parenthood (Love, 55).

But here the resemblance to papal descriptions of appropriate marital sexuality breaks down. It fails precisely along the two axes upon which the papal argument for traditional sexual norms is constructed: procreativity and complementarity. The ecstatic joys and profound peace of procreativity have characterized our sexual encounters on perhaps ten occasions. Otherwise our sexual relationship, while not antiprocreative in any ideological sense, has been intentionally—often anxiously—non-procreative. And the moments when we have experienced our sexual complementarity as in any way essential to the business of our marriage have been limited to these same ten occasions. Otherwise the fact that I am a woman and my husband is a man fades back into the many other circumstances, personal and social, that more strongly mold the intimate dimensions of our lives together. If these insights—arising out of a faithful, prayerful, procreative marriage—make moral sense, then the two strongest current Roman Catholic objections to homosexual unions ring hollow.

Interpreting these departures from the presumptive norm demands an inductive process that begins with listening to details and circumstances: literally, circum stantia, the facts that stand around an event. Because in Roman Catholic moral theology the circumstances are in every case relevant to the evaluation of the act (in direction and degree), we ignore these at our peril. Circumstances reveal morally significant textures, contingencies, and interdependencies that introspective abstraction can easily elide in its quest for universal insight. Most importantly for us, they forbid a reductionist simplification that erroneously treats sexuality as an issue unto itself, isolated from all other moral commitments.¹⁵ Circumstances on all scales—personal, political, environmental—are relevant here. But because John Paul II’s arguments on sexual affection are personalist rather than social justice arguments, I argue primarily on this intimate level.

NON-PROCREATIVITY

To put it simply, in my experience there is no necessary, exclusive connection between physical openness to procreation and genuine attentiveness to my husband in a particular sexual encounter. Even in loving procreative sex, I may not focus on him; in intentionally non-procreative sex, I generally do; and in sex that even minutely risks pregnancy when it is unwise, unsafe, or both, I welcome neither partner nor child.

Whether this departure from the papal ideal is a result of sin I leave others to judge. But I am sure of three things. First, I do not have the energy to erect a buffer wide enough to protect a focus on mutual self-gift in intercourse open-to-but-not-desiring conception from the many other real and good emotional, economic, and social demands on me. Second, although these other demands can be harmful distractions from selfless sexual intimacy, they are also integral to the selves my husband and I bring to lovemaking in our best moments. A truly personal, mutual, intimate sexual relationship is a connection between our whole persons; a joining of only a few elements of our lives would be exploitative and dishonest. Finally (assuming that “intercourse is necessary to love”), generous, unprotected intercourse does not seem to me to be an absolute good, able to trump all my other obligations. Each of these realizations severely qualifies John Paul’s psychology and his view of the connections between intimacy and procreativity.

1. The desire to have a child is naturally awakened by marriage and marital intercourse, whereas resistance to this desire in the mind and the will is unnatural (Love, 280).

The factors which disturb the regularity of the biological cycle in women are above all of psychological origin. . . . Of the psychological causes, fear of conception, of becoming pregnant, is the commonest. . . . Clinical experience also confirms the thesis that fear of pregnancy also deprives a woman of that “joy in the spontaneous experience of love” which acting in accordance with nature brings (Love, 281).

Although I have desired pregnancy, I have also been terrified of it. After our third child was born, I continued to teach full-time while my husband, who earned less, worked part-time and cared for our children. Our remaining in the town where we had put down roots depended entirely on my working hard enough to retain my position. I was exhausted by sleeplessness, nursing, and the combined responsibilities of work, parenthood, and citizenship in church and community. For the first time I knew that another pregnancy would spell physical and professional disaster for me and economic hardship for my family, not to mention a move down the professional ladder to a strange city and an uncertain, even more difficult future. This was a rational judgment. It stemmed from concern for my family’s needs; it was consistent with my “natural” ends of responsible parenthood and citizenship; and it was based on data on tenure and on my own realistic evaluation of my husband’s and my physical and emotional stamina.

John Paul II is not wrong about the consequences of fear, either: this fear of pregnancy became a visceral fear of sex itself. It knotted my whole body so tightly that I could not even consent to intercourse, far less enjoy it, no matter how many protections were built into it. This too was a rational judgment. My fertility symptoms were in uninterpretable chaos for well over a year, making intercourse an unconscionable risk. Although I was certainly under stress and psychologically “resistant” to further children (plainly not to motherhood!), this entirely normal “disturbance” had biological roots as well: fatigue and the hormonal suppression caused by nursing. These factors prayer, confidence in God, and willingness to accept another pregnancy were unlikely to alter.

If these biological factors are both almost ubiquitous and impossible to overcome even for the comparatively wealthy, we cannot forget the circumstances of women who are not healthy middle-class college professors. Pregnancy is physically dangerous for many otherwise healthy women and for all who are ill or malnourished. Stress caused by insufficient wages, uncertain work, poor nutrition, violence, or displacement actually tends to decouple ovulation from classic fertility symptoms, so that non-contraceptive pregnancy prevention—even with a husband’s cooperation—becomes very difficult.¹⁶ Similarly, if I could be rationally certain that a “total self-gift” resulting in pregnancy would overdraw my family’s emotional and economic reserves, what of women who earn far less, who are far more precariously and less flexibly employed, whose husbands are far less committed to the home? These stresses do not, pace John Paul II, originate in the individual psyche. Their alleviation is not the emotional responsibility of individual women or couples but the economic and political responsibility of society on a national—and sometimes international—scale. And they are unlikely to disappear.

When we add the biological, economic, and political factors together we see that only women who typically have regular menstrual periods, who are not currently post-partum, lactating, or pre-menopausal, and who are not subjected to social, physical, and emotional stresses can rely on periodic abstinence to prevent the births that John Paul II himself argues they can and should prevent (Love, 243). Nevertheless, John Paul II’s prototypical married woman has two options: abstaining from intercourse for long periods or overcoming her “unnatural” resistance to motherhood (Love, 237–39). In John Paul’s mind the ideal is to choose both; they work together for the good of the woman and her family. Yet abstinence, though a woman might desire it, is rarely within her control; John Paul himself, despite his ideal of mutuality, admits that “in the majority of cases it is [the man] who makes the decision” when to conceive (Love, 279). Even if a husband is willing to accept abstinence, alternative paths to sexual delight are forbidden, reducing by one the number of precious resources that enable a couple to maintain their connection in demanding, fragmenting surroundings. And overcoming resistance means accepting as many children as may come, a decision normally antithetical to women’s and children’s health and family welfare, not to mention profession, community, and global flourishing—all goods that the Pope, and modern Vatican documents generally, subordinate to the absolute good of “natural” intercourse. Consequently, if, as John Paul II insists, mutual delight in intercourse is proper only when conception is not impeded and when the possibility of its occurrence is met with relaxed, joyful expectation; and if, as he also insists, intercourse is the only proper structure of marital sexuality; then for the typical couple enmeshed in ordinary responsibilities, opportunities for generous, appropriate marital sexual expression are few in a lifetime. This is not, in my experience, a path to happy marriage and responsible parenthood.

2. When a man and a woman who have marital intercourse decisively preclude the possibility of paternity and maternity, their intentions are thereby diverted from the person and directed to mere enjoyment: “the person as co-creator of love” disappears and there remains only the “partner in erotic experience” (Love, 234).¹⁷

John Paul II never claims that lovemaking must be carried out with procreative intent (Love, 233–36). He argues only that it must involve intercourse and that there can be no interruption of the physical processes of ovulation, ejaculation of sperm, meeting of sperm and ovum, or implantation. Only the act of unprotected intercourse, for him, symbolizes the total self-gift of spouses, who must always pursue mutual ecstasy accepting the possibility that it may result in a new child.

On the contrary, I am able to give myself most fully to my husband in two circumstances: on those rare occasions when pregnancy is a hope, as above, or when it is not a worry. Not surprisingly, I first discovered the latter while pregnant. While I was open to the idea of children —after all, we were expecting one—there was no chance of conceiving another. Once I overcame my first-timer’s fear of “hurting the baby,” I could focus on our mutual pleasure, undistracted by the nagging anxiety that we might have a child at the wrong time. The obligation to be open to conception seemed beside the point.

These new pleasures of worry-free intercourse inspired another realization: during pregnancy especially the Roman Catholic objection to non-coital ejaculation becomes ludicrous.¹⁸ Since conception is impossible, there is no longer any biological reason why sexual pleasure should include intercourse. The same doubt arises whenever surgery, age, or circumstances of birth make a couple infertile.¹⁹ Arousal and orgasm in all of these circumstances—both in and outside intercourse—can express and symbolize self-gift in mutual pleasure without any explicit reference to procreation. These realizations are, to most of the Western world, old news; my point here is that they can arise precisely out of marital, procreative experience, not merely in protest against it.

As the reader may have guessed by now, my significant departures from the Roman Catholic script on marital sexuality have been first actively preventing, and then foreclosing, pregnancy. I am hardly alone in this.²⁰ All sorts of arguments have been launched for it since 1968, from personalist revisions of moral theology (judge by the procreativity of the marriage as a whole, not the act in isolation) to statistical arguments (God can as easily—perhaps more easily—cause sperm to pass around a diaphragm as cause a child to be conceived other than during ovulation).²¹ But experience provides other arguments as well. For me contraception does not impede self-gift but, like pregnancy, allows it the freedom to proceed unworried by consequences. This does not mean that our lovemaking disregards children, even now. First, they are almost always in the house, and therefore at the fringes of our awareness, potentially waking for breakfast or for comfort from a dream or illness. Second, as our marriage matures I become increasingly aware that love-making involves our whole selves, including and especially our parental selves. Our children have in a certain respect made us, have shaped our minds, spirits, and even bodies. This awareness is always implicit and sometimes explicit in our lovemaking, especially when we remember and celebrate our children’s conceptions.

In addition, a significant share of my role as spouse and parent has been the financial support of my family. The parental identity I bring to lovemaking has in recent years been much more that of “wage-earner” than “potential mother.” My work may be a path to self-fulfillment and a contribution to the common good, but it is has also been a gift to my family, often an indispensable one. The enormity of this economic demand—to say nothing of the emotional resources that work and parenting always require—requires that true sexual self-gift, except in rare circumstances, exclude procreation.²² My sexual self-gift remains fully spousal and parental precisely through contraception rather than in spite of it.

3. The lust of the flesh directs these desires [for personal union] to satisfy the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons (Blessed, 68).

John Paul II implies that our greatest obstacles to ethical sexual relations are lust—viewing partners not as persons but as mere bodies capable of awakening and satisfying our purely physical longings—and lack of self-control; he is convinced that eliminating the possibility of conception merely exacerbates these failings.²³ This may be true for single people, or for cruel or inattentive spouses, but they do not, in my experience, apply to loving marital sexuality. The challenge my husband and I face is not controlling our desire but finding time and energy to make love. Our sexual lives are already disciplined, not only by external factors like schedules but also by internal curbs. We face trade-offs among sex, sleep, recreation, and conversation; often, in need of all four, we settle for one, and quite frequently it isn’t sex. In these cases we make conscious decisions to shunt or avoid awakening desire in order to pursue some other good. Some couples find that natural family planning helps them to develop this sort of discipline, but it clearly is not the only path to this end.²⁴

In addition, John Paul II’s writings seem too easily to equate intense physical desire with the exploitive objectification of lust, which sees the spouse as a convenient and acceptable opportunity for the satisfaction of physical longings that might be met just as well by anyone else. In my experience an input of desire does not necessarily produce an output of mere physical release. Even when my desire for sex with my husband is overpoweringly physical, the connection I gain from making love is still emotional and even spiritual; in fact at this stage in my marriage greater sexual desire for my husband yields, paradoxically, greater generosity toward him: fuller self-gift. From my point of view this fact manifests God’s brilliance: we get more than we ask for.

COMPLEMENTARITY

Of all John Paul II’s arguments for limiting sexual expression to potentially procreative marital sexuality, perhaps the most deep-seated is his doctrine of sexual complementarity. According to this doctrine, sexual difference extends to our very psychological and spiritual cores. Marriage completes men’s and women’s inherent and natural deficiencies, creating out of two partial persons a healthy, dynamic, mutually supportive whole. The procreative physical union of (active) male with (passive) female enacts and symbolizes the overcoming of these ontological differences. This foundational belief permeates John Paul II’s writings:

Knowledge of man passes through masculinity and femininity, which are . . . two ways, as it were, of “being a body” and at the same time a man, which complete each other—two complementary dimensions, as it were, of self-consciousness and self-determination.²⁵

In the mystery of creation . . . man was endowed with a deep unity between what is, humanly and through the body, male in him and what is, equally humanly and through the body, female in him. On all this, right from the beginning, the blessing of fertility descended, linked with human procreation (cf. Gen 1:28).²⁶

Genesis 2:24 . . . proves that in every conjugal union of man and woman, the same original consciousness of the unifying significance of the body in its masculinity and femininity is discovered again. At the same time, the biblical text indicates that each of these unions renews, in a way, the mystery of creation in all its original depth and vital power (Unity, 50).²⁷

The man must reckon with the fact that the woman is in a sense in another world, unlike himself not only in the physiological but also psychological sense (Love, 275).

The symbolic power of this wholeness-in-union is undeniable. Yet of all John Paul II’s claims about marital sexuality, the one that has least resonance for me, even in my heterosexual, married experience, is his insistence that the complementarity out of which marriages are made is primarily and essentially the ontological complementarity of the sexes. This is not to say that reproductive complementarity cannot be a great blessing. As a fertile heterosexual couple, we are able to conceive children through the physical, sacramental, ecstatic union of our bodies. This marvelous privilege should be neither denied nor downplayed.

It is also not to say that complementarity does not have an essential role in my marriage; it simply does not fall along the stereotypical gender lines that John Paul II suggests are engraved in our sexual natures. My husband may be carpenter and mechanic, but he is also uncannily perceptive, better at the intimate “girl talk” that typically connects women, and much more gifted at arranging colors and objects to create a comfortable living space. I may be cook, but I am also more comfortable debating and making utilitarian conversation, not so good at showing affection, and skilled at dispassionately analyzing and organizing ideas. Our relative skill as nurturers depends upon which of us is currently getting more practice at it. And passivity? We are two headstrong, oldest children; deference never had a chance. The fit and misfit of our personalities have everything to do with the successes and strains in our marriage, but they bear almost no relationship to our biological sexes.

Likewise, our physical complementarity—our anatomical maleness and femaleness—is increasingly insignificant in our love-making. My sense of us as “man” and “woman” in magnetic attraction, strongly and exotically present when we met in our teens, has given way to my sense simply of two people in erotic partnership. Our lovemaking is inspired much more by our knowledge of each other as particular persons—the fit of our whole bodies, our common histories, what pleases us—than by our awareness of each other as male and female. I make love with a particular person, not with a generic man, or even with a specific man. For me, sex and marriage with a different man would likely have been just as like and unlike ours as a long-term union with a woman would have been. Thus what is essential to my marriage is a complementarity grounded not in ontology or anatomy but in personality. This “good fit”—combined with love, friendship, and a desire to please, excite, and comfort—sustains our marriage, in physical love as in the give and take of daily life.

This does not mean that the world agrees. Assumptions about sexual complementarity are built into the core and trivia of our culture. Somehow my husband’s name rises to the top of all deeds and other official documents, no matter where it starts out; teachers and school nurses always call me first—at home and at work—before they try to reach my husband; people try to talk to my husband about football and to me about fashion. But because we are culturally and economically privileged—and married and heterosexual—these assumptions are minor and often amusing irritations rather than threats to our equality and mutuality. For other couples, both heterosexual and homosexual, these cultural assumptions reinforce power differentials that in turn yield real relational and economic imbalances; these cannot be so easily shut out of the relationship, not to mention the bedroom.

TOWARD A REALISTIC ETHIC OF SEXUALITY

In my experience John Paul II is correct: loving, intentionally procreative intercourse has goods—textures, emotions, intentions—particular to it that non-procreative sex lacks. But his critics have been correct as well: sex can be genuinely mutual, loving, just, fun, good, and even holy without having any procreative intent or being referred even remotely to procreation.²⁸ Its goods and pleasures, in turn, may be absent from procreative sex. Neither form of lovemaking—nonprocreative or procreative—is normative. Rather, each is a genuine dimension of sexual expression, each has its own goods and its own times, and each can sustain partners in relationship.

Is this self-deception, a lustful captivation with evil? Sin can and does blind us to our hypocrisies, but according to Roman Catholic moral theology we also possess the tools to examine pleasure of any sort critically: how does it reverberate in the rest of our lives? John Paul II himself holds that true happiness comes from conforming willingly to our ontological “finality”: harmony with God’s intentions for humanity adds to any pleasure (or pain) of the moment growth in virtue and promotion of justice and mercy. Conversely, disharmony with this end brings profound unhappiness that, in its blind pursuit of pleasures for their own sakes, destroys self and others. By this measure, at least, the dual character of sexuality that I have described seems to pass the test of virtue. My husband and I are grateful for both of our “sexual identities”: the procreative, complementary union in which we conceived our children, and the more fungible, fluid, nonprocreative partnership in which we have lived the rest of our lives. And we are as sure that the first is inessential to the second as we are that the second is essential to the first.²⁹ Contraception and fluid gender roles have been indispensable to our individual growth, to the success of our relationship in all its dimensions, to our parenthood, and to our lives in the broader world. Sex has harmed these same goods only when we have communicated badly and so felt rejected or coerced, or when we have risked pregnancy at the wrong time.

With the exception of easy procreativity, how different, really, is this rather orthodox marital connection from the everyday sexual intimacy of gay and lesbian couples? There are, I would wager, more overlaps than differences.³⁰ In both cases energy arises from committed, nonprocreative sexual union, sustaining and deepening the relationship, providing refreshment and stamina for what needs to be done both inside and outside the home. Heterosexual couples could learn much, in fact, from lesbian authors’ explicit focus on the necessity and fruitfulness of struggling simultaneously on two fronts: for just and mutual sexual relationship and for social justice.³¹ Like heterosexual couples, gay and lesbian couples often find that their non-procreative energy eventually becomes generative, inspiring them to share their love with children; some lesbian couples even practice procreative sexuality, incorporating lovemaking into their efforts to conceive.³²

The concrete similarities in the ways we link commitment, sex, and parenting certainly have much to do with culture, class, educational level, and expectations of a monogamous relationship. But I believe that they also have something to do with the fact that, formally married or simply steadfastly committed, we are people, pure and simple. Our partnered covenants are formed within patterns of social, economic, and political commitments and exigencies; within these boundaries, our unions must be nurtured regularly by both divine grace and the ecstatic and comforting union of mind, spirit—and body. Any ethic of sexuality that truly “confronts experience” must begin here.

I do not mean to argue by this that experience and moral norms should be arrayed as natural adversaries. Rather, I want to suggest that norms limiting sex to marriage may be informed by a doctrine of procreative complementarity that reflects incomplete, immature experience. Partly because of the dominant language of heterosexual romance in our culture, complementary sexual anatomy can indeed play a large, even overpowering role in sparking a relationship, especially when we are young. At fifteen, when I met my husband, I found his masculine charm electrifying. Celibate moral theologians likely have similar vivid memories of their own youthful longings. But, lacking the experience of a sustained, faithful sexual relationship, they may not be able to imagine or discover what I—now at the brink of my forties—could not have imagined at fifteen myself: no matter how important it may have been at the beginning, anatomy’s importance can fade until gender is the least relevant factor in the sustenance of a relationship. If so, the ultimate fruitfulness and durability of any union—heterosexual or homosexual —have nothing to do with gender complementarity or lack thereof. But they have everything to do with faith, friendship, generosity, communal support, the serendipity of personalities, sexual and verbal affection, and the hard work that goes into mutual formation of a working partnership.

NOTES: CHAPTER 13

¹ Special thanks to all who have helped shape this article: Isiaah Crawford, Robert DiVito, Mary Hunt, Patricia Beattie Jung, and Susan Ross; Gloria Albrecht, who generously provided references; and my husband, Bill Hutchison, who is its reason for being.

² Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981; 1st Polish edition 1960) 10. Hereafter Love.

³ In Christian writings, Scripture is equally contentious; see essays in this volume by Mary Rose D’Angelo, Robert DiVito, Patricia Beattie Jung, Bruce Malina, and Leland White.

⁴ See, for example, Sandra G. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking From Women’s Lives (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); a good ecclesiastical example of the latter is John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, Origins 23, no. 18 (October 14, 1993) 299–334.

⁵ Peter Hebblethwaite, “The Mind of John Paul II,” Grail 1 (March 1985) 23.

⁶ See Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” in Jeannine Gramick and Pat Furey, eds., The Vatican and Homosexuality: Reactions to the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” (New York: Crossroad, 1988) 5; for a critical assessment of these arguments see Patricia Beattie Jung and Ralph F. Smith, Heterosexism: An Ethical Challenge (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) 90–103.

⁷ See also Dan Perreten’s 1996–1997 columns in Windy City Times; e.g., Dan Perreten, “Where I’m Coming From,” Windy City Times (February 6, 1997); and Mary Hunt, “Catholic Lesbian Feminist Theology,” in this volume.

⁸ Cristina L.H. Traina, Feminist Ethics and Natural Law: The End of the Anathemas (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999).

⁹ Mary D. Pellauer, “The Moral Significance of Female Orgasm: Toward Sexual Ethics That Celebrates Women’s Sexuality,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (1993) 161–82; Christine E. Gudorf, Body, Sex and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1994). See also Sidney Callahan’s essay in this volume.

¹⁰ I am leaving other dimensions of sex, good and bad, nearly unexplored: comfort, spirituality, relief, excitement, apology, forgiveness, but also anger, boredom, etc. Thanks to Susan A. Ross for this list.

¹¹ Pellauer, “Moral Significance,” 170.

¹² Couples with severe fertility problems tend to find intercourse a chore, or at least a highly ambiguous experience, rather than pure pleasure. See Sheila Kitzinger, Woman’s Experience of Sex: The Facts and Feelings of Female Sexuality at Every Stage of Life (New York: Penguin, 1983) 197.

¹³ Ibid. 61.

¹⁴ Pellauer, “Moral Significance,” 175.

¹⁵ On the ways in which obligations qualify each other see Margaret A. Farley, Personal Commitments: Beginning, Keeping, Changing (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986).

¹⁶ For this reason failure to abstain when a woman is under stress raises the annual failure rate of the ovulation method of periodic abstinence to nearly 100 percent (James Trussell and Laurence Grummer-Strawn, “Contraceptive Failure of the Ovulation Method of Periodic Abstinence,” Family Planning Perspectives 22 [March/April 1990] 70).

¹⁷ See also John Paul II, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount, in John Paul II, The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan, foreword by John S. Grabowski (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1997) 150–2. Hereafter Blessed.

¹⁸ Female orgasm tends either to be ignored or to occupy murky territory; John Paul II clearly values it, but only as part of non-contraceptive marital intercourse. On the invisibility and ambiguity of female orgasm in Christian writings see Pellauer, “Moral Significance,” 178; also Susan A. Ross, “The Bride of Christ and the Body Politic: Body and Gender in Pre-Vatican II Marriage Theology,” Journal of Religion 71 (July 1991) 345–61.

¹⁹ Non-fertile intercourse is redeemed by its unitive quality, which in turn depends upon openness to conception. John Paul II’s rejection of the “biologic” of non-coital sex in nonfertile circumstances follows Paul VI, although the former stresses the need for psychological and intentional openness to conception more than the latter. See Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Boston: The Daughters of St. Paul, 1968) pars. 12–16; and John Paul II, Love, 235–36, 240– 41.

²⁰ In 1988, 75 percent of all married, white, non-Hispanic American women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four practiced some form of birth control; of these, only 4 percent used periodic abstinence methods, but 43 percent relied on male or female sterilization. See Calvin Goldscheider and William D. Mosher, “Patterns of Contraceptive Use in the United States: The Importance of Religious Factors,” Studies in Family Planning 22 (March/April 1991) 104.

²¹ E.g., Richard A. McCormick, The Critical Calling: Reflections on Moral Dilemmas Since Vatican Council II (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1989) 19.

²² A parent who works only in the home may expend as much or more energy in support of the family as a wage-earning parent; this identity and responsibility can just as easily make further births ill-advised, population considerations notwithstanding.

²³ John Paul II, Life According to the Spirit: St. Paul’s Teaching on the Human Body, in John Paul II, The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan, foreword by John S. Grabowski (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1997) 216. Hereafter Life.

²⁴ For some accounts and arguments in favor of agreed abstinence see John F. Kippley, Birth Control and Christian Discipleship, 2nd edition (Cincinnati: The Couple to Couple League International Inc., 1994); John and Sheila Kippley, The Art of Natural Family Planning, 3rd edition (Cincinnati: The Couple to Couple League, 1994); and, from a feminist perspective, Sondra Zeidenstein, “The Naked Truth,” Ms. vol. 9, no. 5 (August/September 1999) 55–59. In a Christian Family movement survey conducted to inform Pat and Patty Crowley’s work on the Papal Birth Control commission, 64 percent of couples who used periodic continence found it helpful in some way to their marriages, but 78 percent said that it had (in many cases also) wounded their relationships. Failure rates were high (Robert McClory, Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission, and How Humanae Vitae Changed the Life of Patty Crowley and the Future of the Church [New York: Crossroad, 1995] 86–95).

²⁵ This is a considerably stronger claim than even that of Humanae vitae, which he approvingly quotes: “a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer regarding her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection” (Humanae vitae, 17, italics added; quoted in John Paul II, Life, 216).

²⁶ John Paul II, Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catechesis on the Book of Genesis, in John Paul II, The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan, foreword by John S. Grabowski (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1997) 47. Hereafter Unity.

²⁷ For the connection between John Paul II’s theological anthropology and his trinitarian theology see especially Unity, 46–7.

²⁸ See, e.g., Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989); eadem, Staying Power: Reflections on Gender, Justice, and Compassion (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1995) 112–20; Margaret Farley, “An Ethic for Same-Sex Relations,” in Robert Nugent, ed., A Challenge to Love: Gay and Lesbian Catholics in the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1983) 93–106; Mary Hunt, “Lovingly Lesbian: Toward a Feminist Theology of Friendship,” in ibid., 135–55; eadem, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (New York: Crossroad, 1991); Beverly Wildung Harrison, Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion (Boston: Beacon, 1983) 39; see also Jung and Smith, Heterosexism, 167–86.

²⁹ This is not to deny that during rough periods children are a powerful incentive for working out differences; we and they stand to lose much more from marital failure than a childless couple might.

³⁰ The same seems to be true for parenting. See Sandra Pollock and Jeanne Vaughan, eds., Politics of the Heart: A Lesbian Parenting Anthology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1987), and April Martin, The Lesbian and Gay Parenting Handbook: Creating and Raising Our Families (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). These texts focus more attention than heterosexual parenting literature on the struggles of bringing a child into the family (with the exception of heterosexual infertility literature), but their handling of the joys and frustrations of parenting is similar—if frequently less breezy and more honest. For an un-romantic look at the division and performance of pedestrian domestic labor by gay and lesbian couples see Christopher Carrington, No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Plainly there are still important differences between us and gay or lesbian couples: we are married, according to civil and ecclesiastical law; we are male and female; we have conceived our children by ourselves through sexual intercourse. No one must discount the barriers that nonconformity to these cultural standards still creates for homosexual couples in adoption and conception, childrearing, medical benefits, and legal rights.

³¹ See especially the works of Hunt and Heyward, above; also Carter Heyward, Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality, and Liberation (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984).

³² See Martin, Lesbian and Gay Parenting, 64–65; also Mary Hunt, personal communication. For a humorous twist see Sophie Cabot Black, “The Boys,” in Jill Bialosky and Helen Schulman, eds., Wanting a Child: Twenty-two Writers on Their Difficult But Mostly Successful Quests for Parenthood in a High-Tech Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998) 33–34.