Sex and the Synod

What is the Synod on the Family really about? At First Things, R.R. Reno suggests an answer: "the underlying issue is Catholicism’s relation to the sexual revolution." Reno ranges widely in the article, and while I don’t want to simplify his position, this passage stands out as a useful summary of it:

The Church is the only major institution in the West that has not accepted the sexual revolution. The official resistance provides an important witness, even when combined with widespread accommodation in ­practice. The sexual revolution has a ruthless quality. It ­allows no dissent. The mere suggestion of teaching chastity to fifteen-year-olds in school is enough to unleash furious denunciations. That the Church has not allowed herself to be dictated to and intimidated by the sexual revolution inspires.

Humanae Vitae’s intransigence sustains us in our overall struggle against the dictatorship of relativism. Even among people who transgress, the resistance reassures. We’ve deregulated a great deal of personal life. Who, today, needs permission? Catholicism stands for something, a moral standard that’s inconvenient and countercultural.

I think it’s possible to bracket, if for a moment, whatever particular disagreements I might have with Reno and ponder the above as a style of thinking. Consider the abstract quality of the term “sexual revolution”: It stands in for concrete issues like divorced and remarried Catholics’ ability to take Communion, or the roles women are permitted to have in the church. It removes the human element from all these situations. (Reno briefly mentions divorced Catholics and gay culture, and gestures at "the sexual free-for-all" unleashed by the sexual revolution, but largely avoids particulars, at least in this article.) The sexual revolution is invoked almost as a monolith we must either accept or reject; the effect is to obscure the particular realities Catholics are facing with a shorthand code for moral chaos, perversion, and hedonism. 

This especially matters because it is in the actual lives of those who faced longstanding discrimination that we see the sexual revoluton's complexity—and its necessity.

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