Older women want reform, but younger Catholic women are more conservative. They want the rules on sex, contraception and the priesthood to remain as they are.

About the study

The study surveyed 17,200 Catholic women from 104 countries; 1769 came from Australia.

The authors say the generational differences in attitudes could come from life experience, migration, or the more conservative Church which younger people have experienced.

"There has been a push back towards conservatism [in Australian Catholicism]" says one of the authors.

"I think that's been impactful for young adults in the church."

She also notes that women of all ages expressed disappointment, frustration and challenge with the Church.

"[There was] a feeling that some women's voices weren't heard in the church. That was across age."

This comes as Pope Francis leads a discussion about whether women should have a greater role in church governance and ceremonies.

While women being ordained as priests seems out of the question, Francis has not ruled out the diaconate.

Study results

74 percent of Australian Catholic women want reform, while an average of 84 percent of Catholic women internationally want change.

The authors defined conservatism as adherence to Catholic doctrine and the embrace of traditionalism.

The desire for a more traditional approach was driven by younger women, the study found.

While 74 percent of respondents supported reform, only 44 percent were aged 18-40; 87 percent of 56-70 year olds want reform, as do 94 percent of over 70s.

Survey comments show differences in what reform means.

Older women want the Church and its teachings to change.

However, the authors noted "there was a smaller, younger cohort of respondents who rejected any modernisation of the church and understood reform as a return to orthodoxy and tradition, including the traditional Latin mass."

Fewer than a third of under 40s supported inclusion of women at all levels of the Church or the suggestion of female preachers and priests.

Sex, contraception, divorce

Allowing more freedom of choice on sex and contraception was rejected by two in three of those under 40; the 41 to 55s were about half-half, but the 56 pluses backed the idea enthusiastically.

Young Catholic women were less supportive of remarriage after divorce.

Older women talked about being shunned as divorcees, especially if there had been violence in their marriage.

All agree

All women agreed the misuse of power by male clerics was damaging the church.

They also agree leaders must do more to address abuse.

The Church institution was not doing enough to address the cover-up of sexual abuse.

The generational difference

One report author thinks life experience could influence older and younger women's views.

The survey may have attracted more young women who were highly engaged in the Church, rather than those who might be alienated from it, she suggests.

She also noted religious orders attracting young women seem to be those which continue to wear a habit, despite a ruling against them in Vatican II. Numbers are growing.

Source

• Sydney Morning Herald

Since that time, the positions I presented have received both substantial support and significant opposition.

The majority of those criticizing my article focused on its treatment of the exclusion of those who are divorced and remarried and members of the L.G.B.T. communities from the Eucharist.

Criticisms included the assertion that my article challenged an ancient teaching of the church, failed to give due attention to the call to holiness, abandoned any sense of sin in the sexual realm and failed to highlight the essential nature of conversion.

Perhaps most consistently, the criticism stated that exclusion from the Eucharist is essentially a doctrinal rather than a pastoral question.

I seek in this article to wrestle with some of these criticisms so that I might contribute to the ongoing dialogue on this sensitive question—which will no doubt continue to be discussed throughout the synodal process.

Specifically, I seek here to develop more fully than I did in my initial article some important related questions, namely on the nature of conversion in the moral life of the disciple, the call to holiness, the role of sin, the sacrament of penance, the history of the categorical doctrine of exclusion for sexual sins and the relationship between moral doctrine and pastoral theology.

The report of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the synodal dialogues held in our nation last year pointed to the profound sadness of many, if not most of the people of God about the broad exclusion from the Eucharist of so many striving Catholics who are barred from Communion because they are divorced and remarried or L.G.B.T.

In January, I proposed that three foundational principles of Catholic teaching invited a re-examination of the church's practice in this area.

The first is Pope Francis' image of the church as a field hospital, which points to the reality that we are all wounded by sin and all equally in need of God's grace and healing.

The second is the role of conscience in Catholic thought.

For every member of the church, it is conscience to which we have the ultimate responsibility and by which we will be judged.

For that reason, while Catholic teaching has an essential role in moral decision-making, it is conscience that has the privileged place.

As Pope Francis has stated, the church's role is to form consciences, not replace them. Categorical exclusions of the divorced and remarried and L.G.B.T. persons from the Eucharist do not give due respect to the inner conversations of conscience that people have with their God in discerning moral choice in complex circumstances.

Finally, I proposed that the Eucharist is given to us as a profound grace in our conversion to discipleship.

As Pope Francis reminds us, the Eucharist is "not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak."

To bar disciples from that grace blocks one of the principal pathways Christ has given to them to reform their lives and accept the Gospel ever more fully.

For all of these reasons, I proposed that divorced and remarried or L.G.B.T. Catholics who are ardently seeking the grace of God in their lives should not be categorically barred from the Eucharist.

In the weeks since my article was published, some readers have objected that the church cannot accept such a notion of inclusion because the exclusion of remarried women and men or L.G.B.T. persons from the Eucharist flows from the moral tradition in the church that all sexual sins are grave matter.

This means that all sexual sins are so gravely evil that they constitute objectively an action that can sever a believer's relationship with God.

I have attempted to face this objection head-on by drawing attention to both the history and the unique reasoning of the principle that all sexual sins are objectively mortal sins.

For most of the history of the church, various gradations of objective wrong in the evaluation of sexual sins were present in the life of the church.

But in the 17th century, with the inclusion in Catholic teaching of the declaration that for all sexual sins there is no parvity of matter (i.e., no circumstances can mitigate the grave evil of a sexual sin), we relegated the sins of sexuality to an ambit in which no other broad type of sin is so absolutely categorized.

In principle, all sexual sins are objective mortal sins within the Catholic moral tradition.

This means that all sins that violate the sixth and the ninth commandments are categorically objective mortal sins.

There is no such comprehensive classification of mortal sin for any of the other commandments.

In understanding the application of this principle to the reception of Communion, it is vital to recognize that it is the level of objective sinfulness that forms the foundation for the present categorical exclusion of sexually active divorced and remarried or L.G.B.T. Catholics from the Eucharist.

So, it is precisely this change in Catholic doctrine—made in the 17th century—that is the foundation for categorically barring L.G.B.T. and divorced/remarried Catholics from the Eucharist.

• Does the tradition that all sexual sins are objectively mortal make sense within the universe of Catholic moral teaching?
• It is automatically an objective mortal sin for a husband and wife to engage in a single act of sexual intercourse utilizing artificial contraception. This means the level of evil present in such an act is objectively sufficient to sever one's relationship with God.
• It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to physically or psychologically abuse your spouse.
• It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to exploit your employees.
• It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to discriminate against a person because of her gender or ethnicity or religion.
• It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to abandon your children.

The moral tradition that all sexual sins are grave matter springs from an abstract, deductivist and truncated notion of the Christian moral life that yields a definition of sin jarringly inconsistent with the larger universe of Catholic moral teaching.

This is because it proceeds from the intellect alone.

The great French philosopher Henri Bergson pointed to the inadequacy of any such approach to the richness of Catholic faith: "We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living.

Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use…. Intuition, on the contrary, is moulded on the very form of life."

The call to holiness requires both a conceptual and an intuitive approach leading to an understanding of what discipleship in Jesus Christ means.

Discipleship means striving to deepen our faith and our relationship to God, to enflesh the Beatitudes, to build up the kingdom in God's grace, to be the good Samaritan.

The call to holiness is all-encompassing in our lives, embracing our efforts to come closer to God, our sexual lives, our familial lives and our societal lives.

It also entails recognising sin where it lurks in our lives and seeking to root it out.

And it means recognizing that each of us in our lives commits profound sins of omission or commission.

At such moments we should seek the grace of the sacrament of penance. But such failures should not be the basis for categorical ongoing exclusion from the Eucharist.

It is important to note that the criticisms of my article did not seek to demonstrate that the tradition classifying all sexual sins as objective mortal sin is in fact correct, or that it yields a moral teaching that is consonant with the wider universe of Catholic moral teaching.

Instead, critics focused upon the repeated assertion that the exclusion of divorced/remarried and L.G.B.T. Catholics from the Eucharist is a doctrinal, not a pastoral question.

I would answer that Pope Francis is precisely calling us to appreciate the vital interplay between the pastoral and doctrinal aspects of church teaching on questions just such as these. Continue reading

In his 'First Things' magazine article, conservative prelate and canon lawyer Thomas Paprocki (pictured) cites an unnamed cardinal's views on how the Church should minister to LGBTQ people and divorced and remarried Catholics.

While he doesn't name Cardinal Robert McElroy, Paprocki quotes directly from a 24 January article the cardinal wrote for America magazine.

In it, McElroy called for a Church that favours "radical inclusion" of everyone, regardless of circumstances and conformance with Church doctrine.

To back his views, Paprocki's essay cites several passages in the Code of Canon Law and draws on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and St Pope John Paul II's Ad Tuendam Fidem ("To Protect the Faith").

Pointing to these, he said anyone who denies "settled Catholic teaching" on issues like homosexuality and "embraces heresy" is automatically excommunicated from the Church.

The pope has the authority and the obligation to remove a heretical cardinal from office, or dismiss outright from the clerical state, Paprocki wrote.

Referencing McElroy's critique of "a theology of eucharistic coherence that multiplies barriers to the grace and gift of the eucharist," Paprocki claimed: "Unfortunately, it is not uncommon today to hear Catholic leaders affirm unorthodox views that, not too long ago, would have been espoused only by heretics."

Although McElroy and Paprocki were both available for comment, in a 28 February interview Paprocki said he did not intend to single out a particular cardinal for criticism. Rather, he "intended the discussion to be more rhetorical.

"I think the reason I did this is because this debate has become so public at this point that it seems to have passed beyond the point of just some private conversations between bishops."

The bishop's explanation struck some observers as disingenuous.

Jesuit Fr Tom Reese, a journalist who has covered the US bishops for decades, says Paprocki's essay reflects deep divisions in the US Catholic hierarchy, plus a level of public animosity, open disagreement and strident rhetoric among bishops.

Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI would not have tolerated it, he says.

"On the other hand, there wouldn't have been this kind of discussion under John Paul II because the Vatican would have shut it down.

"Francis has opened the Church up for discussion again and [conservative bishops] just don't like it. They're trying to shut it down by using this kind of inflammatory rhetoric, even against cardinals," Reese said.

Cathleen Kaveny, a law and theology professor, says Paprocki "should know better as a canon lawyer" than to accuse someone of heresy - which is a formal charge.

Paprocki is running together statements and teachings of different levels of authority in the Church and claiming any disagreement amounts to heresy. "And that's just false," Kaveny says.

"The underlying question ... is whether development in church doctrine can take place.

"I would recommend people read John Henry Newman on that, and look at the history of the church's teaching on usury while they're at it."

Source

• NCR Online

These pleasures have unjustly fallen victim to "overzealousness" on the part of the Church in the past which is "a wrong interpretation of the Christian message," he says in a newly-published book of interviews with Carlo Petrini, an Italian culinary writer.

Francis explains: "Pleasure arrives directly from God, it is neither Catholic, nor Christian, nor anything else, it is simply divine."

"The pleasure of eating is there to keep you healthy by eating, just like sexual pleasure is there to make love more beautiful and guarantee the perpetuation of the species."

Opposing views "have caused enormous harm, which can still be felt strongly today in some cases," he says.

"The most intense joys in life arise when we are able to elicit joy in others, as a foretaste of heaven," Francis wrote in "Amoris Laetitia," his 2016 apostolic exhortation.

Francis explains the 1987 Danish film called "Babette's Feast" reflects his message on pleasure.

The 19th century story focuses on a lottery-winning chef who invites a group of ultra-puritan Protestant worshippers to a sumptuous banquet.

The film is "a hymn to Christian charity, to love," the pope said.

Petrini, the founder of the global "slow food" movement created in the 1980s in opposition to "fast food", has entitled the new book "TerraFutura, conversations with Pope Francis on integral ecology".

The title reflects the focus of the interview series, which looks at the pope's vision of environmentalism with a social face, outlined in his 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si".

In his critique of the new book, writer and Catholic critic Peter Williams says:

In calling the human, simple, moral pleasure we get from enjoying food and sex divine, "the Holy Father is rightly pointing out that pleasure comes from God."

Source

• France24
• New York Post
• Huffpost
• Image: YouTube

As a teenager in the early aughts, I believed that life was found by identifying my desires and rushing toward their satisfaction.

I played this out in academics and especially in sexuality. My life beat to the pulse of Ariana Grande's chant, "I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it."

The right response to desire was indulgence.

Unbeknownst to me as a nonChristian, the purity movement was running in parallel.

Those who experienced that movement from the inside have spent recent months breaking down its excesses and missteps.

Their conclusion (and mine) is that repression and avoidance are unbiblical responses to desire, no more Christian, perhaps, than my teenage, atheistic abandonment to it.

In the midst of these reoccurring public square discussions, the tension between libertinism on one side and repression on the other leaves most of us yearning for the reasonable via media, the middle way between failed extremes.

In that space, is there a scripturally sound theology of desire?

Yes. I want to suggest that Christian asceticism, ancient though it is, offers a way forward.

It uniquely treats God as the end, not the means, of desire.

It also circumvents the shortcomings of repression and avoidance.

Here, I'm not talking about biblically wise avoidance.

It is stupid and unsafe to put ourselves in places where we know we will be strongly tempted to lust or sin.

Temptation, while not sin, is not safe for us; Jesus commands us to pray that we would be kept from it. Similarly, Paul's admonition to "flee sexual immorality" (1 Cor. 6:18) can't mean any less than this.

Instead, I want to point out that repression and avoidance have a Christian name but a pagan lifestyle.

Both are tactical responses that center around willpower.

A person practicing repression might attempt to ignore desire in a "pretend-it-isn't-there" way. Or he might avoid most contact with people he finds attractive.

Others are unwilling to acknowledge their sexual feelings at all (especially if one happens to be female or same-sex attracted), because that acknowledgment might bring shame from one's community.

First, both of these tactics try to wrest reward from God through bribery. If you are sexually pure, goes the thinking, then God will reward you with a sexy, best-friend spouse.

This so-called "sexual prosperity gospel" is unbiblical and untrue.

Not only that, it's devastating to young men and women who work diligently to be faithful only to come up empty-handed.

Like the uncured invalid at a faith healing, they're left to wonder if the problem is with them.

Second, repression and avoidance strategies are often motivated by a desire to conform to social expectation.

But if pleasing pastors, friends, or parents becomes our primary source of motivation for sexual purity, we are deceived.

Just because the end product aligns with God's commands doesn't mean we are practicing Christian virtues.

This leads to a third indictment of repression and avoidance. Continue reading

It is said that Alexander VI, the most debauched of the Borgia pontiffs, elected in 1492, even had an affair with one of his daughters.

Another pope contracted syphilis during his reign — a "disease very fond of priests, especially rich priests," as the saying went in Renaissance times.

That was Julius II, known as "Il terrible."

A third pope, Pius IX, added Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" and John Stuart Mill's book on the free market economy to the Vatican's List of Prohibited Books during his long reign in the 19th century.

He also formalized the doctrine of papal infallibility.

Get a grip on sex

What these Holy Fathers had in common was not just that they were badly flawed men putting forth badly flawed ideas: At the root of their moral failings is Catholicism's centuries-old inability to come to grips with sex.

I say this as a somewhat lapsed, but certainly listening, Catholic educated by fine Jesuit minds and encouraged by the open-mindedness of Pope Francis.

Where's Jesus?

The big issue behind the budding civil war in a faith of 1.3 billion people — a rift that could plunge the church back into a medieval mind-set on sexuality — is the same old thing.

And most of the church's backward teachings, dictated by nominally celibate and hypocritical men, have no connection to the words of Jesus.

If you're going to strike at a pope, to paraphrase the line about taking down a king, you must kill him.

Right-wing Catholics, those who think allowing gay members of the faith to worship with dignity is an affront to God, have just taken their best shot at Francis.

The attempted coup was disguised as an exposé by a conscience-stricken cleric, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.

He claims that the pope must resign because he knew about the sexual abuse of young seminarians by a disgraced cardinal and did not defrock the predator.

It's a fair point, and one that demands a full response from Francis.

But if you read Viganò's full 11-page letter, you see what's really driving him and his ultraconservative cabal — an abhorrence of gay Catholics and a desire to return to the Dark Ages.

"The homosexual networks present in the church must be eradicated," Viganò wrote.

Homosexuality is disordered

Those close to Francis, Vigano claimed, "belong to the homosexual current in favor of subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality."

For theological authority, he cited the infamous 1986 letter to bishops condemning homosexuality as "a moral disorder."

That instructive was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, designed to do to heretics what the Inquisition once did, without the stake-burning.

The bishop's letter cites Old Testament sanctions against "sodomites" and a New Testament interpretation from St. Paul, who admitted he was not speaking with direct authority from the divine.

St. Augustine, who loved sex and had plenty of it before he hated it, set the church template in the fifth century, saying, "Marriage is only one degree less sinful than fornication." Continue reading

• Image: Seattle PI

No, answered Kasey Edwards, mother of two daughters aged 8 and 3: As anyone who has ever been a teenager could attest, if a teenager really wants to have sex then they will, regardless of their parents' policy.

After my blood pressure had come down I penned her this open letter:

Dear Ms Edwards,

Reading your piece on the question of when you'll let your daughters have sex left me feeling, as a mother of a daughter, well… blah.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but your approach to your daughters and sex can only be described as defeatist. Here's why.

1. You suggest that removing any parental policy around sex is the solution. If your daughters have no way to defy you, then technically, they cannot undermine you. I admit, that is logical.

With a disobedience rate of 0.00%, you could argue you have proof of a happy family home and a healthy mother-daughter relationship. I think a few parents would find your philosophy a little obtuse though.

2. ‘Who am I to stop them?'

If my daughters are making an authentic and informed decision, if they are having sex because they genuinely want to and feel ready, then who am I to stop them?

You are their mother. I think that does set you apart from everyone else in this world.

Which means when they need guidance about sex (and they do), the responsibility to provide it falls primarily on their father and you. Instead, you forfeit this task, and consider that a virtue.

3. When did advising your children to delay sex become synonymous with being judgmental?

If my daughters know that their father and I will be non-judgmental and supportive of their decisions about sex, then I expect this will lead to more open conversations about contraception, STDs and consent.

They will never have to sneak around, keep secrets, or use their sexuality as a source of rebellion.

If you can have open conversations about contraception and consent, you can also have open conversations about the safest path of all through adolescence: no sex, just good friendships, with love and marriage something to look forward to. Continue reading

• Veronika Winkels is a freelance writer who lives in Melbourne and is married with two young children.

The theme for the October 2018 conference is "Young people, faith, and vocational discernment".

To involve young people in planning and preparation for the conference, the Secretariat General of the Synod of Bishops held an international seminar earlier this month focusing on the condition of youth in the world.

Twenty-one young people from across the globe attended the event, along with experts and pastoral workers.

The Vatican says the seminar reflected on several themes in relation to youth: identity, otherness, planning, technology, transcendence.

The young advisors were able to impart their own culture and experience to the Vatican planning teams.

The Vatican says young people from different geographical, socio-cultural and religious contexts contributed actively to the study days, also introducing and concluding the event with their own life experiences and reflections.

The Seminar was open to all those interested in the theme. Some 50 guests also took part.

Source

• La Croix
• National Catholic Reporter
• Vatican Radio
• Vatican Radio

This was a large review, combining peer-reviewed data from more than 55,000 young people from around the world. Cochrane reviews are internationally recognized as the highest standard in evidence-based health care resources.

Some of its conclusions were startling and probably for many, unexpected.

The studies in the Cochrane review were all randomised controlled trials from Europe, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Most were of high quality and had follow-ups at between 18 months and seven years.

The sex education programmes they investigated included peer and teacher-led education and "innovative uses" of drama and group work.

What did the Cochrane Review find?

One finding of the review was that providing a small cash payment, or giving away a free school uniform, can encourage students to remain at school, especially in places where there are financial barriers to attending.

Such incentives to stay at school reduced pregnancy rates by around a quarter and also reduced sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in both girls and boys.

However, the more surprising, and no doubt controversial, finding (to many) will be the admission that the mainstay of the current approach to sex education is not working.

School-based sexual and reproductive health programmes are widely accepted and implemented as an approach to reducing high-risk sexual behaviour among adolescents.

But the Cochrane review found that sex education programmes do not reduce pregnancy and STIs among the young. In fact, they have no effect on adolescent pregnancy and STI rates.

"As they are currently designed, sex education programmes alone probably have no effect on the number of young people infected with HIV, other STIs or the number of pregnancies," said lead author of the review, Dr Mason-Jones. Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet article by Philippa Taylor, head of public policy for the Christian Medical Fellowship in the UK.
• Image: Wiki Sex Education

What Allison now knows is that it's natural for boys to want to look at sexual imagery. In fact, the average age for first exposure to online pornography in the UK is 11. For slightly older boys, it's completely normal - of 3,000 boys aged 13-18 surveyed, 81% said they looked at it.

Allison - who with Deana Puccio has written a book dealing with this and other issues for parents in the digital age - says that there are two major consequences. First, this suggests that conversations about sexual behaviour have to happen much sooner, and within the family.

Second, the conversation is now much more important because of the proliferation of online pornography, which boys are looking at on their mobile phones.

There is a risk to this generation, say Allison and Deana, that online pornography could damage the sexual sensitivities of boys and their future relationships. Girls, who are far less likely to be interested in pornography at this stage in their lives, are at risk too, from their partners and future partners who could mistake the fiction of online pornography for the "norms" of satisfying sex.

This has far-reaching consequences, and it's something most parents don't know enough about. But if you go online and look at what today's young people are viewing, it's a world away from the type of pornography a generation who grew up in the 70s and 80s might be familiar with. We're not even talking about hardcore images; it's the relatively tame videos that focus, obsessively, on male pleasure, particularly oral sex. The vast majority of women have surgically enhanced breasts and female pubic hair is almost entirely absent. By normalising such things, pornography could be conditioning boys to have unrealistic expectations of the women with whom they will have sex. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian, article by Joanna Moorhead who writes for the Guardian, mostly about parenting and family life. She has four children.
• Image: The Telegraph

She was there, at the Free University of Berlin, studying sociology and gung-ho with the anti-authoritarianism of the era.

There has been a revolution in her own life since then and she now devotes her public work to raising consciousness about the cultural devastation being wrought by the ongoing sexual revolution.

In the following Q&A she talks about her book on the subject, an English edition of which was published last December.

Q. In your book, The Global Sexual Revolution - Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom, you report and warn about the destruction of freedom and culture through the global sexual revolution. Why is this so?

A. As sex goes, so goes the family. As the family goes, so goes society. Sexual norms have a decisive influence on the whole cultural edifice. The anthropolgist J.D. Unwin, an Oxford scholar of the 1930s, showed in his book Sex and Culture that high culture can only exist with strict sexual norms.

Christian European culture rests on the ideal of monogamy. We are now in a cultural revolution that overthrows sexual morality. The severe consequences are obvious: The destruction of the family and the demographic crisis. But the powers of this world continue to force the sexual revolution on every nation.

Q. Does moral deregulation lead to sexual liberation?

A. To throw off any moral restraint to sexual activity is wrapped in the temptation of "sexual liberation". Everybody knows from experience that the urges and drives of the body need to be controlled, be it sex or food or drink, otherwise they will control us. Therefore temperance is one of the cardinal virtues.

The explosion of pornography through the internet creates millions of sexually addicted people, tragically more and more youth are among them. Marriage and families break up if husband and wife are driven into unfaithfulness by their sexual desires, because they have not learnt to make them a servant of the expression of love. Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet
• Image: Active News

Middle daughter, knowing there had been two miscarriages, corrected little sister. "No! They had sex five times."

Eldest daughter reacted. "Stop talking about sex! It's yuck! It's gross!"

Dad held on to the steering wheel, eyes on the road, while Mum turned in her seat. She explained to her daughters, "Sex is a bit like broccoli. It may seem yuck when you are young, but when you grow up you might enjoy it."

This story created some food for reflection. We all know 'broccoli' is not on the Vatican menu, and its absence can create speculation ranging from 'yuck' to the notion that married couples are addicted to it.

Many years ago, I was at a parish gathering where the seventh sacrament was being discussed. One man said in a weary voice, "Priests think married couples spend all their time in bed." There was a wave of laughter mixed with good-natured groaning. I was a new Catholic, and it was a while before I saw the gap between the ideal and the reality. The bridge over that space was often laughter.

I'm sure, however, that none of us would want Church teaching on marriage to change. Certainly the rigidity of applied ideals needs to be softened. Pope Francis has done a lot towards this. The Holy Father's book Amoris Laetitia is warm, compassionate and begs for understanding of family life that is irregular. But while the book is wholly supportive of parents, it does not give them a voice. All the quotes come from celibate men.

Most Catholic women accept this is the way the Church works. Like Mary, women tend to flow around masculine structures, filling the gaps in a fluid way. They have a lateral outreach, and relationship is the woman's gift to the Church.

Women are also aware that the Church is in a tight corner regarding the legality of gay marriage. How can we hold on to a cherished tradition and at the same time recognise the validity of the loving commitment of a same-sex Catholic couple?

I believe any new situation calls for a return to the Gospels and to Jesus who never turned anyone away.

Surely the way forward will be a service of blessing for Catholic couples who've had a civil wedding for whatever reason.

In the Church we bless all manner of things: boats, houses, schools, religious artefacts, icons, animals, each other. Do we dare to refuse a blessing to people of faith who are living the spiritual fertility of love?

As a postscript, I admit to being one those people who want to see 'broccoli' back on the Vatican menu. That will address a number of concerns and make us all more real.

God bless 'broccoli'.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Archbishop Peter Akwasi Sarpong, who is Archbishop emeritus of Kumasi archdiocese in Ghana, was responding to people accusing priests of having sex.

"Of course it is against their vows and it is inimical to the growth of the Church," the archbishop said, adding that there are ecclesiastical consequences.

But a priest having sex when he shouldn't is a sin of weakness, Archbishop Sarpong said.

The archbishop gave examples of worse sins - stealing money, oppression and politicians killing people when attaining power.

He admitted that the priest-sex issue has gained prominence because of priests engaging in sex to the detriment of others.

Continue reading

What, if anything, does premarital sex have to do with marital stability?

This research brief shows that the relationship between divorce and the number of sexual partners women have prior to marriage is complex.

I explore this relationship using data from the three most recent waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) collected in 2002, 2006-2010, and 2011-2013. For women marrying since the start of the new millennium:

• Women with 10 or more partners were the most likely to divorce, but this only became true in recent years;
• Women with 3-9 partners were less likely to divorce than women with 2 partners; and,
• Women with 0-1 partners were the least likely to divorce.

Earlier research found that having multiple sex partners prior to marriage could lead to less happy marriages, and often increased the odds of divorce. But sexual attitudes and behaviors continue to change in America, and some of the strongest predictors of divorce in years gone by no longer matter as much as they once did.

In my 2005 book Understanding the Divorce Cycle, I showed that the transmission of divorce between generations became weaker as divorce grew more common. Could the same thing have happened with sexual behavior? Somewhat surprisingly, the answer appears to be no.

Even more noteworthy has been the decline in the proportion of women who get married having had only one sex partner (in most cases, their future husbands). Forty-three percent of women had just one premarital sex partner in the 1970s. By the aughts, this was down to 21 percent.

Neither of these two trends changed much after the first decade of the twenty-first century. Following in the wake of the sexual revolution, the 1970s have been characterized as a decade of carnal exploration. But this doesn't seem to have been the case for the vast majority of women who ultimately tied the knot in that decade: almost two-thirds of them had at most one sex partner prior to getting married.

Even in the 1980s, slightly over half of women had a maximum of one sex partner before walking down the aisle. Things looked very different at the start of the new millennium. Continue reading

Sources

• Family Studies, from an article by Nicholas H. Wolfinger.
• Image: Relate Institute

That's the counsel the advice columnist for the liberal English newspaper The Guardian gives to a woman who doesn't know whether to move in with a boyfriend who won't even say that he loves her.

Save "duty sex" for later, Mariella Frostrup continues.

"The desire for a fellow human being is about as real an expression of human nature as you can get. There is little sense, at the start of a relationship, in compromising on something so fundamental to harmonious cohabitation. A pragmatic approach to a long-term relationship may be sensible, but only when that sense of compromise toward a greater goal is evenly distributed and shared rather than dictated by one partner."

Kicking off with unrealistic lust leaves young women anxious about moving in with men who don't want to marry them, but the good of sexual indulgence is not to be questioned. Otherwise Frostrup, like all her peers, believes in "compromise." It's the one marital virtue she recognizes.

Which makes sense since she has, as far as I an tell, no clear idea of marriage, other than as a more intense and legal version of living together that some people choose because it makes them happy at the time. If you have no ideal to aim for, no form to fit, no rules to live by, you can only compromise when you disagree.

A marriage becomes a ship with two captains who enjoy sailing together, at least for now. When they disagree about the course to take they chart a course halfway between the ones they each want. It's good enough if all you want to do is sail together and don't want to get anywhere. If they can't compromise on their course, one or the other can abandon ship. Continue reading

• David Mills, former executive editor of First Things, is a senior editor of The Stream, editorial director for Ethika Politika, and columnist for several Catholic publications.

The statistics on this score are absolutely startling. Most young men commence their pornography use at the age of eleven; there are approximately 107 million monthly visitors to adult websites in this country; twelve million hours a day are spent watching porn globally on the adult-video site Pornhub; 40% of boys in Great Britain say that they regularly consume pornography—and on and on.

All of this wanton viewing of live-action pornography has produced, many are arguing, an army of young men who are incapable of normal and satisfying sexual activity with real human beings. Many twenty-somethings are testifying that when they have the opportunity for sexual relations with their wives or girlfriends, they cannot perform.

And in the overwhelming majority of cases, this is not a physiological issue, which is proved by the fact that they can still become aroused easily by images on a computer screen. The sad truth is that for these young men, sexual stimulation is associated not with flesh and blood human beings, but with flickering pictures of physically perfect people in virtual reality.

Moreover, since they start so young, they have been compelled, as they get older, to turn to ever more bizarre and violent pornography in order to get the thrill that they desire. And this in turn makes them incapable of finding conventional, non-exotic sex even vaguely interesting. Continue reading

• Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and founder of Word on Fire ministry.

1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: "XY" and "XX" are genetic markers of health - not genetic markers of a disorder.The norm for human design is to be conceived either male or female.

Human sexuality is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species. This principle is self-evident.

The exceedingly rare disorders of sexual differentiation (DSDs), including but not limited to testicular feminization and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, are all medically identifiable deviations from the sexual binary norm, and are rightly recognized as disorders of human design.

Individuals with DSDs do not constitute a third sex.

2. No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one.

No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child's subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward.

People who identify as "feeling like the opposite sex" or "somewhere in between" do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.

3. A person's belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.

These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V).

The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved. Continue reading

Sources

• American College of Pediatricians
• Image: YourNewsWire.com

Newly released figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 23 young women under the age of 18 out of every 1,000 became pregnant in 2014, compared with 47 out of 1,000 in 1998. The estimated number of teenage pregnancies fell from 24,306 in 2013 to 22,653 in 2014.

So teenagers appear to be having less unprotected sex. But why?

The impact of technology
One theory put forward to explain the drop is that teenagers are spending more time in their bedrooms on social media and less time meeting up, getting drunk and doing things they may later come to regret.

Prof David Paton, an economist at Nottingham University Business School, told the Telegraph: "It does potentially fit in terms of timing. People [appear to be] spending time at home - rather than sitting at bus stops with a bottle of vodka they are doing it remotely with their friends ... Nobody really knows why we've got this sudden change around about 2007 to 2008."

Clare Murphy, director of external affairs at the abortion provider British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas), added: "The plummeting level of teenage drinking, for example, may be reducing the likelihood of unprotected sex, and teenagers are also increasingly socialising online, limiting the opportunities for sexual activity."

Teenage drinking levels
The drop in teenage pregnancies is accompanied by evidence of decreases in drinking and drug-taking in the UK, particularly among those aged 16 to 24.

The proportion of young adults who reported that they did not drink alcohol at all increased by more than 40% between 2005 and 2013.

The rise of social media
Ofcom said last year that 16-24-year-olds spent more than 27 hours a week on the internet - almost three times the amount it was in 2005. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian, the beginning of an article by Nadia Khomami, a news reporter at the Guardian.
• Image: Mail Online

St Peter Damian understood this battle and is a strategist and tactician on what we should do, why we should do it, and the cost if we don't.

St Peter Damian's insightful work has the intimidating title of ‘The Book of Gomorrah' and was penned in the 11th century in Italy. Damian fought against sex abuse in the Church in his day and this work echoes the outrage felt in our societies today.

The tone doesn't suit modern ears attuned to the language of diversity but his arguments are compellingly Christian and formed around the scriptures and the Church Fathers in judgement, mercy and hope. To dismiss him as ‘homophobic' would be to miss his essential insights. It might need an R16 label!

It is a page turner and bluntly describes sexual vice but sends the right message. For victims and survivors who need to hear the language of accountability Damian offers it.

He is an apologist for the love of God and neighbour and is incensed by corrupt priests who attack God and destroy their neighbour. The cause of the problem of sex abuse in the Church as the inordinate love of pleasure for oneself rather than the love and fear of God.

St Peter Damian is clear that superiors should not show excessive mercy and certain that those who hide the sins of others are as guilty themselves by perpetuating evil. Damian says, "Such impious piety, without a doubt, does not reduce the wound, but administers a stimulus for its enlargement…rather grants the liberty of perpetrating it".

There is no tolerance for cover-ups here! He is certain that the Church should never admit those of homosexual persuasion to holy orders. Neither does he blame sex abuse on the influence of a corrupt society. The problem is the essential failing of individuals in the Church.

It was hard to read that the service of a corrupt priest is the ruin of the people and that God does not wish to receive sacrifice from him (Damian is not testing the validity of the Mass but the impiety with which such corrupt priests offer it).

Damian says it is the spiritual fatherhood of the priest which makes these abuses most abhorrent; he compares reprobate priests who commit evils with their spiritual children as comparable to a father's incest with his carnal sons and daughters.

Damian then exhorts those who have fallen to have confidence in the Lord's mercy which never despises penance. The penance mentioned was exceedingly rigorous and varied according to the level of abuse.

Damian held that those priests who had abused children even in a minor way could never be trusted; he said they should always be in the presence of two spiritual brothers. How correct he was here!

St Peter Damian recommends to priests, for the sake of the love of God and Christian charity the contemplation of the virtue of chastity. This is his battle plan.

In this he seems to be a proponent of virtue ethics which subsumes and transcends the law. The Christian life is a high calling morally and spiritually for all. For priests in particular it is because they offer the sacred mysteries for the Church.

• Lynda Stack graduated as a distance student with a BTh from Good Shepherd College. She is now studying for a Masters at the JPII Institute in Melbourne. Lynda is married. She and her husband have two adult children who are living overseas.

Tim Minchin's "musical attack" on Cardinal Pell has been a lightning rod for debate on social media.

Against a background of negative commentary, it is easy to lose sight of positive changes that are taking place across churches and the broader community.

Positive changes that are taking place across churches and the broader community are being overshadowed by the social media campaign against Cardinal George Pell.

On the same day last week that support for an "anti-Pell campaign" was building, the NSW Ombudsman's office tabled a report in Parliament that told a different story - a story of church openness, not a "cover-up".

The report, Strengthening the oversight of workplace child abuse allegations, comes after all of NSW's Catholic and Anglican archbishops and bishops jointly called on the NSW Parliament at the end of last year to enact legislation that would open their churches' work with children to further external scrutiny.

These church leaders are asking Parliament to put measures in place to ensure that all allegations of sexual or other abuse of children made against their clergy, employees and volunteers must be reported to and oversighted by the Ombudsman.

For the past 16 years my office has administered a "reportable conduct scheme" that is unique in Australia. Thousands of agencies that provide services to children must notify the Ombudsman of child abuse allegations made against their employees and volunteers.

Each year we handle about 1400 notifications, many involving criminal allegations. Presently, 134 of our open cases concern individuals who have been charged with criminal offences against children. Most charges involve child sexual abuse. Continue reading

• John McMillan is the acting NSW Ombudsman. The item above was published in The Sydney Morning Herald.