"Catholic Sexual Morality as Tradition"
Inclusive Catholics welcome
Bill McDonough
Wednesday May 13th, 2004

 

  As one of my St. Kate’s professors, Bill McDonough could cram more knowledge into two hours and three pieces of paper than most. Last Thursday was no different as Bill spoke to a group of inclusive Catholics gathered at St. Thomas the Apostle Church for the third in a series of three conversations. Bill began by asking the group to toss out meanings for tradition in general and Catholic sexual morality. The two lists differed greatly with Catholic sexual morality drawing mostly negative associations. Bill suggested that many of us feel overwhelmed or abandoned by church tradition and began the discussion by talking about tradition in general.

Our age is a tough one for tradition and for tradition in our churches. At all levels of American society, the number of association memberships has fallen dramatically. This downward trend is especially high in church-related groups among a few others. There is evidence that technology trends are individualizing leisure time. For example, Americans spend more time bowling alone than in leagues and more people bowl once a year than vote or attend church regularly. So tradition struggles in society.

Church tradition also struggles. The Galileo trial in the 17th century created a schism between the church and modern science. During the 18th century, the church lost most intellectuals and lost most of the working class in the 19th. In addition to these schisms, the various Christian churches had little dialog or relationship. Vatican II reminded the church to take its role in the world seriously but the church still spent more time in the past decades in internal church fights that were of little interest to anyone outside the institution. Vatican II also defined tradition and perhaps can help navigate a path between overpowered and abandoned.

Vatican II states in The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation that tradition:

Compromises everything that serves to make the people of God live lives in holiness and increase their faith…the traditions that comes from the apostles makes progress in the church, with the help of the Holy Spirit…There is a life-giving presence of this tradition, whose riches are poured out in the practice and life of the believing and praying church.”
Tradition is not about the “things” we pass on but about the act of transmission or the process. In tradition, we learn to dance
Terrence Tilley PhD is professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton. He has written or co-authored 8 books and numerous articles on theology.
the dance of love, of being human. Tradition is the practice of learning to live well in community; like learning to perform a ritual well. Bill quoted Terrence Tilley saying, “To be faithful members of a tradition is to engage in traditio faithfully, the practice of passing to our future our inheritance from the past. We cannot and must not merely repeat the past or even its formulation or rubrics. [We seek] faithful remembering.” As members of the church, we inherit our Catholic tradition and live that tradition. We let the tradition change us as we also change the tradition through our living it. We take in what’s useful, let it change us and pass it on. We enter into a relationship with tradition.

Tradition then, is alive, changing with our cultures and us. Our job and the job of theologians is to continue to understand revelation in the traditions as the traditions change with the culture. We are not smarter than those who lived in the past; we simply live in a different context. It is from this vantage point that Bill discussed two areas of friction in the church today: contraception and same-sex life partnerships. Quoting Tilley, Bill said:

In the Christian view, all that we are and have comes to us from God, and that as his free gifts, tokens of his love for us…A person who does not see that everything that he or she is and has is a gift of the loving God will not flourish properly.
The traditional church teaching on contraception is rooted in seeing life as God’s gift. Tilley says that if “contraception diminishes the sense of life as gift and encourages us to see the world in terms of convenience and manageability, it is incompatible with Christianity.” What he sees is wrong is making too close a logical connection between this and the church’s ban on artificial contraception.

Same-sex partnership falls under the same argument. Bill quoted New York Times reporter, David Brooks:

…every human being has the chance to move from the path of contingency to the path of marital fidelity - except homosexuals…You would think that faced with this marriage crisis, we conservatives would do everything on our power to move as many people as possible from the path of contingency to the path of fidelity…
Laura D'Ambrosio joined St. Joan of Arc in Spring 2003 and delights in the inspiring services, incredible programs and the caring, loving people she has met at St. Joan’s. In addition to her career in business analysis, training and project management, she is a spiritual director, retreat leader and writer about spiritual journeys. When not at a computer, you can find her outside in any weather with her Siberian Husky, reading or traveling to wild, solitary places.
We humans are not animals, we are moral beings with souls, Brooks says, able to make covenants with one another like the one made by Ruth with Naomi.

In conclusion, Bill said those who are out in front of the tradition, like those in gay marriage, might not see their marriage blessed in their lifetimes but it’s really Catholic to live in that tension. Our tradition is alive and growing with us. To know tradition is to participate in something alive, something bigger than us. We teach those who come after us, our children, not the forty things it takes to be Catholic, but the way to live as a person of love in this tradition.

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