*In summary, Dr Muriel Porter’s polemic is aimed at traditional Christian
sexual morality, which, she says, has severely disadvantaged single people,
homosexuals, Catholic priests who might wish to marry, and Catholic couples
who want to practise contraception (or remarry). The conservative Christian
standard of faithfulness within marriage and chastity outside marriage left
only two options – either to be married or celibate. The Church has been
obsessed ‘with simple certainties and simplistic rules… Its asceticism
has been ‘life-denying’ (p. 137)…

There is no doubt that the Church she refers to here is the Catholic
Church, for it is this Church alone (as far as I know) which teaches
the moral disorder attached to the totality of the above issues:
fornication, the sacrament of matrimony for a _Western_ priest, the
damning evil of contraception, and the damning evil of adultery under
the form of polygamy (i.e., divorce and remarriage).

The two options she mentions pretty much sum up all of Catholic
moral teaching on human sexuality: to be married or celibate, and
as Pope JPII adds in _Veritatis splendor_–to not commit sin even
unto physical martyrdom.

Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote in his appendix to “Trojan Horse in
the City of God:”

Socrates’ immortal dictum: “It is better for man to suffer injustice than to commit it.”

And:

The arch-Christian doctrine that insists that we must die to ourselves in order to be transformed in Christ [Dietrich wrote an entire book on this doctrine]… Grace does not destroy nature; it does not even change it; it transfigures it.

Both quotations taken from “Teilhard de Chardin, a False Prophet,” in
the current issue of “Watchmaker” (vol. 4(2)).

Cardinal Ratzinger writes in the current issue of HPR (vol. XCVII
(nos. 11-12)):

The ministry of the word requires that the priest share in the _kenosis_ of Christ, in his “increasing and decreasing.” The fact that the priest does not speak about himself, but bears the message of another, certainly does not mean that he is not personally involved, but precisely the opposite: it is a giving- away-of-the-self in Christ that takes up the path of his Easter mystery, and leads to a true finding-of-the-self, and communion with him who is the Word of God in person. This Pascal structure of “not-self” that turns out to be the “true self” after all, shows, in the last analysis, that the ministry of the Word reaches beyond all “functions” to penetrate the priest’s very being, and presupposes that the priesthood is a sacrament.

Quotation taken from a lecture given on 24 October 1995 on the
occasion of the 30th anniversary of the promulgation of _Presbyterorum
ordinis_.

* So because ‘the Church has changed its mind often on issues of sexuality’
(p.2) (for example, the Protestant Reformers defended clerical matrimony;
but to devout Catholics, a married priest was – and is – a contradiction in
terms) it’s now time for the church to change its mind again, says Dr. Porter.

She seems a bit narrow in this assessment, for the Eastern Church
retains and continues to ordain many married priests; yet it is every
bit as Catholic as the Western Church.

* Because of the availability of safe and reliable contraception, there are
very few virgins in church weddings anymore. Indeed, the ‘traditional wedding’

This is progress?

* Back before this, the church played little part in marriages in the
first millennium of Western Christianity. Canon law upheld betrothal /
mutual consent as the key basis for a valid marriage, rather than consent
witnessed by a priest. Until the second half of the nineteenth century the
church was not a major player.

Hmm. Consider this:

Can. 9. Likewise let the faithful woman, who has left an adulterous husband and attracts another faithful one, be forbidden to marry; if she should marry, let her not receive communion unless he whom she has left has previously departed this world; unless by chance the exigency of illness should compel the giving. [Canon law of the Council of Illiberi, between 300/306. Denzinger n. 52a]

Can. 33. It is decided that marriage be altogether prohibited to bishops, priests, and deacons, or to all clerics placed in ministry, and that they keep away from their wives and not beget children; whoever does this shall be deprived of the… clerical office. [op. cit. Council. Denzinger n. 52c]

16. If anyone says or believes that human marriages, which are considered licit according to divine law, are accursed, let him be anathema. [In the Creed of the Council of Toledo of the year 447. Denzinger n. 36]

11. If anyone condemns human marriage and has a horror of the procreation of living bodies, as Manichaeus and Priscillian have said, let him be anathema. [From the Council of Braga II, in 561. Denzinger n. 241]

Chap. 3… According to the laws, let the consent alone of those suffice concerning whose union there is question; and if by chance this consent alone be lacking in the marriage, all other things, even when solemnized with intercourse itself, are in vain. [From the responses of Pope St. Nicholas I to the decrees of the Bulgars, November 866. Denzinger n. 334]

I see the heavy hand of the Church regulating sacramental marriage
by means of codes and rules extending way back towards the beginning
of the Church.

Randal L. N. Mandock