Body & Soul

There is much that I admire in the encyclical on the environment by Pope Francis, “Laudato Si'”¹, and I will be writing at least one more post on it. But today I want to address a central issue in the encyclical that I think Pope Francis rightly raises but also remains somewhat blind to in his own Church.

A major theme running throughout “Laudato Si'” is the relationship between things physical and things spiritual. Francis argues that because of a developing spiritual malaise among the peoples of the world, we are enabling the degradation of the environment. In turn, the degradation of the environment hinders our spiritual growth and understanding. This process Francis calls “the spiral of self-destruction which currently engulfs us” (P 163). Also, on a larger level:

“Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it. We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” (P 139)

Moreover, the Pope warns us on many occasions about the dangers of abstract thought, which he curiously connects with science. Taking a phrase from a former publication of his own, he emphasizes one idea twice: “realities are more important than ideas” (P110) and “realities are greater than ideas” (P 201).² I find it curious that Francis connects abstract ideas with science, which is surely the most empirical of all our human disciplines (theoretical physics aside), and concrete realities with religion, which is surely one of the most abstract of all human disciplines because it is based upon empirically unprovable doctrine. I will take this curiosity up in my next post, but for now I want to call the Pope out on a smaller but related issue connected to metaphor.

In trying to show that religion respects realities more than science does, Francis discusses the relationship between the human body and spirituality. He does admit that “. . . Christians have not always appropriated and developed the spiritual treasures bestowed by God upon the Church, where the life of the spirit is not dissociated from the body or from nature or from worldly realities, but lived in and with them, in communion with all that surrounds us” (P 216). Certainly many of the early Christians were very ascetic. St. Paul, after all, advised them:
“If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes; let them marry—it is no sin. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So that he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (1 Corinthians 7:36-38, RSV).
The idea here is that a human being can be better oriented toward the spiritual in life if celibate, if not indulging in the pleasures of the body. And it is clear that a more spiritual, less physical life is the “better” choice according to Christianity to this day. This is partly why, presumably, Christian priests (of the Roman Catholic persuasion, anyway) take vows of celibacy.

Francis stresses, however, that Christianity's respect for the physical world is obvious in the sacraments, which use natural objects (water, oil, wine) “to become a means of mediating supernatural life” (P 235)--and even more so in the “fact” that the Son of God took on physical human form. Thus, Francis concludes, “Christianity does not reject matter. Rather, bodiliness is considered in all its value in the liturgical act, whereby the human body is disclosed in its inner nature as a temple of the Holy Spirit and is united with the Lord Jesus, who himself took a body for the world’s salvation” (P 235).³
OK, this is where I'd like to challenge the Pope to apply his thoughts to his own Church. If the Church respects matter—and human physicality in particular, why has human sexuality been so anathema through church history to church leaders? Consider the early experience of St. Bernard of Clairvaux:
“An adolescent, first experiencing physical desire for a young girl, he had been so filled with self-disgust that he had jumped into a freezing cold pond & remained there until his erection subsided. He strongly disapproved of his sister, who had married a rich man; because she enjoyed her wealth, he thought of her as a whore, spawned by Satan to lure her husband from the paths of righteousness, and refused to have anything to do with her. Nor would he allow his monks any contact with their female relatives.⁴

So much for respecting the body God gave him, much less the bodies of others! This is just one very old example, but, as Naomi Klein has recently written, it is not so long since Catholics prayed after communion during Advent, “Teach us to despise the things of the earth and to love the things of heaven.”⁵

 

Not only do priests have to be celibate, but there is also a long history of the projection of sin and sexuality onto women in the Roman Catholic Church, as indeed can be seen in the quote above. We all know the story of Eve. Mary had to be a virgin—that is, sexually innocent, in order to be the mother of Jesus. And then Mary had to be the result of an immaculate conception so that she was not the result of human sexuality herself. We might remember more recently the fourteen-year-old Brazilian girl who had a legal abortion because she was pregnant with twins by her stepfather and the doctors said she would not survive the pregnancy.⁶ The local Roman Catholic archbishop excommunicated the girl's mother and doctors, saying: "They took the life of an innocent. Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored” --as if that fourteen-year-old girl were a whore! There is no evidence that the man who raped his stepdaughter was excommunicated, and wasn't he certainly less innocent than the girl or her mother or her doctors? One might argue that this is an extreme case, but the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, has “gently criticized the encyclical for failing to adequately emphasize the role of women and girls in human development.”⁷
 

All of this strongly contradicts what Francis says in his encyclical about the virtues of the physical world, for instance:

“The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment.” (P 155)

If, as Pope Francis states above, the acceptance of our bodies as God's gift is essential to “any genuine human ecology” and thus also to care of our natural environment, why are those in the Church most trusted with the teaching of the people, i.e., the priests, so determinedly distanced from anything other than an abstract, impersonal understanding of human sexuality (in theory)? Shouldn't the Pope's concern for the interrelations of human body and natural environment demand that priests have a full physical experience of their human bodies?

Moreover, I wish Francis would consider the extreme damage that one abstract idea, celibacy, has done to many real human bodies. Certainly the great majority of human beings cannot (and do not want to) successfully deny their sexual instincts, including priests who have taken vows of celibacy. And when natural sexual desires are prohibited, they very often become more twisted than they would be in a freer sexual atmosphere. There is much talk of a “gay lobby” at the Vatican; even the Pope has mentioned it.⁸ I do not consider homosexuality to be a sexual perversion at all, but the Church does. So, how many young Catholic males, afraid that their church and their society would condemn their budding homosexuality, turned to the Church for help and a compensatory status, by becoming priests and taking the vow of celibacy? And how many of those men have not been able to remain celibate but, unwilling to give up their lives in the Church, have expressed their sexual desires secretly, in unapproved ways, often with children, who can be bullied into not telling? Or how many young Catholic males have embraced the celibate priesthood as a way of protecting themselves from the female “whores” around them? Not all, of course, but certainly more than a few! The Church's conception of human sexuality is extremely twisted, and it has led to some really horrible outcomes, both in the lives of the priests who cannot remain celibate or cannot accept female sexuality and in the lives of their victims.

I greatly admire Francis both as a man attuned to the modern world and as a thinker. But he is just as blinkered about the nature of women as anyone else in the Vatican, at least in part because he has presumably never known a woman intimately. He has talked about women having a role in the Church, just not any role that might challenge the roles of the males in the Church. Again, he chooses abstract rules about the role of women in the Church over the reality of what real women might achieve. And this when opening up the priesthood to married men and women (married or not) would open up the church to the realities of the physical world that Francis so wants us to attend to—and rescue the Roman Catholic priesthood from its falling numbers at the same time!

So, I have to conclude that as much as I agree with the Pope's argument on the environment, and specifically with his insistence that “realities are more important than ideas” (stressing the image over the idea in metaphor), I cannot see that the Pope's or the Church's actions live up to his words. I accept the Pope's call to live a simpler life more friendly to the environment. But I also call on the Pope to make the changes necessary in his Church (particularly dealing with human sexuality) that are necessary to enable the relationship he wants people to have with their environment.

One other point. Like so many others, Pope Francis fears that the unconscious mind leads us to behave selfishly: “Our freedom fades when it is handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence” (P 105). I disagree greatly with this characterization of the unconscious mind, but I will just ask the Pope to consider that conscious abstract ideas also decidedly lead to selfishness and violence. Racism is one such. Misogyny is another. Celibacy has become one also. The Roman Catholic Church is largely not racist, but it is still heavily misogynistic in many of its teachings and blind about the dangers of required celibacy. I ask the Pope to consider his own words in the context of his Church: “realities are more important than ideas.”

1http://www.news.va/en/news/laudato-si-the-integral-text-of-pope-francis-encyc

Each quote from this document will be followed by the paragraph number of its location in the document.

2Both quotes have the same footnote reference, so I don't know if the two quotes appear together in the work referred to or if Francis is quoting loosely, and thus not accurately at least one of these times.

Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (24 November 2013), 231: AAS 105 (2013), 1123.

3Here Francis is quoting his predecessor Pope John Paul II.

Apostolic Letter Orientale Lumen (2 May 1995), 11: AAS 87 (1995), 757. 

4Quoted from Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life (NY: Ballantine, 1999), 44. This information seems to be taken from Galfredas Claras Vallensis, Vita Tertia: Fragments of a Life of Bernard of Clairvaux, in J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Latinae (Paris, 1844-1864).

5Quoted in Naomi Klein, “A Radical Vatican?” The New Yorker online, 10 July 2015.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-visit-to-the-vatican

6http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1883598,00.html

7Quoted in Naomi Klein, “A Radical Vatican?” The New Yorker online, 10 July 2015.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-visit-to-the-vatican

8See, for instance: 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/world/europe/pope-is-quoted-as-acknowledging-a-vatican-gay-lobby.html