Eunuchs for the Kingdom of HeavenWomen, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church By Uta Ranke-Heinemann Reviewed by Theresa Welsh ABOUT CELIBACY~~ The Catholic Church is alone among religious organizations in demanding celibacy of its clergy. As someone who grew up Catholic, attending 12 years of Catholic education, I wavered between thinking the reason for it was because it let these representatives of the Church concentrate on God and that the reason was simply so the Church would not have to financially support spouses and children. But according to the author, it had more to do with the Church's hatred of pleasure, particularly pleasure associated with sex, and with their general distaste for the female gender. In this book, Ranke-Heinemann, a German professor of Catholic theology, shows us that celibacy as the spiritual ideal is an ancient idea, found among the Roman Stoics and adopted by Jewish minority sects like the Essenes and Gnostics. But it was never mainstream with Jews, who, on the contrary, thought everyone should be married and emphasized family life. She presents evidence that Jesus' disciples, even Peter ("the first Pope") were married and their wives were with them as they traveled with Jesus. Modern scholarship, through the documents discovered in the 1940s (Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hamadi finds) as well as other apocryphal gospels, has made it more likely that Jesus treated women as equals and valued them as disciples. The author does not mention the possibility that Jesus himself may have been married, but it certainly has come up in popular books ("Holy Blood, Holy Grail" & "The DaVinci Code" among others) from recent decades. Lets don't associate Jesus with this hatred of women found in the Catholic Church. CONTRACEPTION, ABORTION ~~ I always thought that the Church's opposition to something as reasonable as contraception and as sometimes medically necessary as abortion must be a bit of modern madness, but the incredible scholarship and carefully researched details of church history in this book trace its origins back to its hatred and suspicion of pleasure, a throwback to the Pagan asceticism of the Stoics, that had crept into the church and became total after its first thousand years, the point at which celibacy was made mandatory for priests. Celibacy was always a thorny issue, and was involved in both the split between the Church in Rome and Eastern Orthodox Church as well as the Protestant Reformation. These dissident branches of Christianity have never promoted celibacy and there is no Biblical justification for it. Other Christian sects do not find anything wrong with contraception. Contraception is wrong, said the Church Fathers, primarily because it lets people enjoy sex without worry about pregnancy ("the bliss without the burden"). Only in modern times have there been reliable methods of birth control, so the arguments against it have been more urgent and strident since mid-twentieth century. PURPOSE OF SEX ~~ The Catholic Church's actual position is that sexual intercourse should only happen in marriage and only for the purpose of procreation. With each intercourse, there must be the possibility of pregnancy. Some popes and church theologians have maintained that each act of contraception is "murder," since it precludes a life from forming. Many in authority have maintained that even those "valid" acts of intercourse are still sinful, but only a venial (not mortal) sin. Sex for enjoyment is always wrong; sex has no purpose beyond procreation. Intercourse, when permitted, must happen with the man on top and all other forms are wrong. Masturbation and homosexuality are mortally sinful. WHEN DOES THE SOUL ENTER THE BODY? ~~ But what was interesting was learning that the Church was not always totally against abortion. In earlier times, it was thought that actual life, in the form of a soul, was not present in a fetus until 40 days for a male and 80 days for a female, so aborting a fetus was ok up to 80 days into the pregnancy (since they had no way of knowing if the fetus was male or female). That changed with the pronouncement that life begins at conception, and the modern war on contraception began. MAKING BABIES FOR WAR ~~ Speaking of war, the author shows that French bishops, in the period from World War I to Word War II, claimed that they lacked enough young men for war because of contraception, and a German bishop decried "the threatening drop in the German birth rate..." that might leave them without the manpower to maintain an army of conquest. Married people must make babies so they can be soldiers was the reasoning, yet these champions of Christianity made no outcry against war itself, which cost so many lives. Catholic bishops in Germany during the 1940s were quick to support Adolph Hitler, declaring that, under Hitler, "Christianity was being promoted, the level of morality raised and the struggle against bolshevism and atheism carried on with energy and success." The bishops also thought "defective" people should be sent to concentration camps to keep them from procreating and making more defective people. The concentration camps were preferable to simply sterilizing them, as Hitler proposed, because sterilization would have let them enjoy sexual pleasure without any chance of procreation and that would be a mortal sin. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HATES WOMEN ~~ The real meat of this book is the author's obvious anger at the Church's treatment of women, the very thing that led me to quit going to church. The author's outrage seems to build as she writes the words of this book, discussing the absurdity of poor Heloise and Abelard, in love but forced apart, and the terrible consequences during hundreds of years of Dark Ages when the Church was the most powerful institution on earth and could dictate behavior in bedrooms under threat of excommunication. The whole of Middle Ages was a time of obsession over sex, how sinful this or that might be. The Church held powerful sway over people, threatening heretics with torture, telling people with certain disabilities that they could not marry, proclaiming that women were not fit to raise children alone, thus must remain in miserable marriages, etc. Women must always be subject to men. Women could play no meaningful role in the life of the Catholic Church, nor were they consulted on Church policy regarding pregnancy and motherhood. There were the twisted arguments about cases of a pregnancy in trouble and if a doctor had to choose between saving one or the other. The Church declared the mother must die for the sake of saving the child and even saying a fetus should be taken from the mother's belly to be baptized before death, since the Church had come up with the idea that unbaptized babies would lose eternal life. Always, the health of women was not a consideration, nor were they to be consulted in such cases as to what should be done. THE PERFECT WOMAN? ~~ But there was one woman these women-hating men of the Church placed on high and that is Mary, the mother of Jesus. However, she is elevated only because the Church has made her into less of a woman. First, she had to be conceived without Original Sin -- Original Sin is implicated in the hatred for sexual feelings which produce babies, but which could not be allowed to have produced Mary. Then, Mary must be a virgin, who never defiled herself with sexual intercourse and who, despite giving birth to baby Jesus, always had an intact hymen! (Yes, these old men who despised sex dared to make claims about Mary's hymen!!!). The church continues to deny that Mary and Joseph had other children, despite the fact that the Bible says they did. CAN THE CHURCH CHANGE? ~~ The author does not spare recent popes (John XXXIII, Paul IV, John Paul II) in this book written in 1988. None of them did anything to soften the Church's position on birth control or abortion or on marriage for priests. As I write this, the current pope is Francis, who admittedly, is a breath of fresh air in many ways, but it doesn't seem likely he will change any of the medieval stupidities that have driven people away from Catholicism. He is, in many ways, backed into a theological corner, with so many years of tradition and Canon Law backing up the ban on contraception and abortion and affirming celibacy. The main architects of this pleasure-hating, woman-hating theology are Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Alphonsus Ligouri, all saints in the Church. The priest pedophile scandals were a bit of a wake-up call, but there seems to be no real movement away from priestly celibacy, and the Church still says married couples commit sin when they use contraception. FIRED FROM HER JOB FOR WRITING THIS BOOK ~~ The author's scornful words in this book cost her the job she held at a Catholic university (She was fired, after Church officials read this book). I conclude this review with a quote from the book that tells you how the author came to feel about the Church. "Catholic theology has lost much of its prestige. With its contrived elaborations, it stands today, practically speaking, facing the ash-heap. It is a folly that poses as religion, and invokes the name of God but has distorted the consciences of countless people. It has burdened them with hairsplitting nonsense and tried to train them to be moral acrobats instead of trying to make them more human and kinder to their fellow men and women... Its theology is no theology and its morality is no morality." Buy Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church See also my review of Constantines's Sword (history of Catholic/Jewish relations) |
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