The pastoral response to ubiquitous sexual sin

This being the Year of Mercy, let’s be pastoral, by which I mean think practically about how to help sinners.

I went to a Catholic elementary school, and although an inattentive and impious student, I did pick up the distinction between mortal and venial sins.  I understood that the former send you straight to hell if you don’t go to Confession before you die.  However, the benefit of this knowledge was vitiated by another impression I had–that mortal sins are very rare.  Somehow, my friends and I all got it into our heads that there are only a couple mortal sins:  murder and adultery, we thought, and we weren’t even sure about the second one.  The Catholic attitude toward the Last Things seemed strange to me.  On the one hand, we were told that the way to heaven is very narrow and difficult.  On the other hand, the list of mortal sins in our heads made it seem laughably easy.  I concluded that going straight to heaven is hard, but nearly everybody makes it to Purgatory.  It wasn’t until my late twenties that I accepted that I myself was in a state of mortal sin.

If surveys are to be believed, most Catholics are.  Many are guilty of sins against the Church:  skipping Mass, heresy, supporting anticlerical parties.  The vast majority are guilty of mortal sexual sins.  Consider that the following are all mortal sins and all quite pervasive:

1. contraception
2. unnatural sex
3. pornography viewing
4. masturbation
5. premarital sex

(Regarding #2, anybody who’s been married in the Church in recent decades has heard what I call “the oral sex talk” about how you can do whatever you want as long as the semen ends up in the right place.  I refer to violations of this stricture, which might be interpreted as forms of contraception.)

I’m no better than the majority; I’ve been guilty of most of these for portions of my adult life.  On the other hand, I’ve also on more than one occasion succeeded in staying celibate for years at a time while waiting for my wife to be ready to have another baby.  So I have experience both as a Catholic wallowing in sexual sin and as a Catholic struggling with some success to remain chaste.

Even apart from the ideological problem of people refusing to believe their sexual sins are really sins, sex will continue to be a major pastoral challenge for the Church and her members.  The reason, ultimately, is low child mortality rates, the greatest blessing of the modern era.  The human male sex drive evolved in circumstances when few offspring survived to adulthood so lots of children were needed just to maintain the population.  Today, nearly all our children survive, so without strenuous self-control most couples would quickly have more of them than they can afford or handle.  On the larger scale, a large birth rate would be unsustainable in the long run for environmental and other reasons.  Lastly, modern medicine allows people to marry and breed who in previous generations would have been too defective, and they often can’t handle as many children.  Facing the same situation two centuries ago, the Reverend Malthus decided that England faced a choice between “misery” and “vice”.  The misery he had in mind was crushing poverty (which, as a Christian, he correctly preferred to vice); we 21st century Catholics are lucky to face the comparatively minor misery of continual sexual frustration.  Even if children were not an issue, women still have much lower libidos than men (especially with the antidepressants so many of them are taking).  Sometimes people imagine that Christian sexual morality is harsh for bachelors, priests, and gays but allows nearly unchecked carnal bliss for married couples.  This is not true.  If, like me, you had trouble being chaste before marriage, you will, like me, have trouble being chaste after marriage.

Do I sound like a Kasperite, demanding that the Church be “realistic” and accept that these sins aren’t going away and should therefore be accommodated?  Actually, I want the Church to have a medieval attitude, which was realistic, never imagining that sins were going to disappear after a year-long “awareness raising” campaign, but committed to the unending struggle.  Remember, our patristic and medieval predecessors thought heaven difficult and perdition likely, so they realized that most people commit mortal sins or are at least strongly tempted to them.

The first thing we sinners need is to be told very clearly that our sins are mortal, that our souls are in peril, and that we must abstain from the Eucharist until we repent and reform.  I know Churchmen worry about angering people, but this really is something we need.  Anyway, my sense is that only the contraceptors are defiant; porn viewers and masturbators are nearly always disgusted with their habit.  If a priest can give them the kick they need to break it, they will be grateful.  Even engaged couples “jumping the gun” often, I think, wish they had the strength to wait for the wedding night.  I myself am utterly convinced by natural law arguments of the truth and beauty of Catholic sexual ethics.  Even without the Church, I would know that the things I’m tempted to do are degrading, but without her voice telling me that God forbids it on penalty of hellfire, I’m pretty sure I’d just say to myself “Fine, I’ll be degraded.  Continence is just too hard.”

Those who are pure may not understand why it is that most people give in to sexual temptation, even those who know better.  I mean, of course you know what the basic attraction is, but how does this particular desire overpower what should be a strong contrary will?  In my experience, it’s not that the urge at any particular moment is so overpoweringly strong as that the will to resist can sometimes be very weak.  Arousal itself is less dangerous than despair.  There’s the despair of a continent life sometimes seeming so grey and lifeless.  There’s the despair of imagining one’s current temptation compounded over a lifetime, growing and growing the longer one holds out, and thinking to oneself “I’ll never be able to do it.  I just can’t live like this forever!”  Sometimes, one gets jealous, thinking about that mythical “average couple” that gets to have sex multiple times a week.  If one has already given into sin, the demotivation is even worse.  You’d like to stop sleeping with your girlfriend or looking at porn, but you don’t know if you have the strength.  Even if you do want to stop, it’s hard to take the actual step.  The next time you get aroused, you think to yourself “I guess it doesn’t really matter if I give it up today or tomorrow.  Why not once more?  After all, I can’t get any deeper into this sin than I already am.”  And this is hard to argue against, especially when you’re tempted, but then you realize that you’re trapped.  It won’t really matter the next time either, or the time after that…  If only you had some definite break, so that past sins don’t count and the very next one could seem all-important.

This is where the Church can help, in fact where only the Church can help.  She can provide the motivation we need to continue the struggle.  First, we are invited to see chastity as being something other than a purely negative thing.  It is an opportunity to grow in holiness, which while in mortal sin one can’t even properly start.  Thus, even if a sinner were to succeed in the “scorched ass Catholic” strategy of sinning until an old age and then going to Confession to avoid hell, the sinner would nevertheless be the one who really missed out, not the chaste man who sacrificed his fun.

Second, the sacrament of Confession gives us a real chance to break with past sins.  The Church teaches us to believe that after coming out of the confessional one’s sexual sin counter is now reset to zero.  You really do have something precious to lose from even one future infraction.  True, your soul still bears some effects from those past sins (and it may take a very long time in Purgatory to remove these), but they no longer master you.  You are invited to share the Church’s faith in your own Christ-won freedom.

Souls are in danger, so the Church really must start thinking about sexual sin comprehensively, not just about the ones that are in the news.  Our opposition to each individual sin will be more comprehensible in the context of an overall ethos.  It might seem less unfair if it were clear how much burden and censure are on everyone, not just particular classes of perverts.  Finally, it’s not necessarily true that the Church can endear herself to people best by flattering them.  Some of us are much more attached to the Church because of our weaknesses than because of our strengths.