Book Review/Essay: Uta Ranke-Heinemann, ‘Eunuchs
for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church’
(Penguin, 1990).

Here’s a provocative, formidably-researched critique
of Catholic ‘bachelor theology’, addressing issues like sexual
morality, contraception, abortion, priestly celibacy and the Virgin
Birth, by German Catholicism’s first-appointed woman theologian.

Here we can only provide a sample of excerpts, to
whet your appetite to read this important book.

Her thesis: Roman Catholic moral theology has tried
to provide ‘service instructions’ for all foreseeable life-situations
(p.325) and, generally, failed abysmally. ‘All in all, considering
the repression, defamation and demonization of women, the whole
of church history adds up to one long arbitrary, narrow-minded
masculine despotism over the female sex’ (p.135).

The notion that sex in marriage was for procreation
and avoidance of fornication only – never for pleasure – has ruined
the lives of millions. (‘More important than constantly thinking
about children during sex is constantly not thinking about pleasure’
p.248). The ‘sexual pessimism’ of Augustine, Aquinas and Alphonsus
Liguori, perpetuated and refined by other male black-frocked pleasure-hating
celibates has ‘demonized’ sins of the flesh. Indeed, self-styled
moral experts have, throughout history, devoted ‘substantial portions
of their lives to utter nonsense’ (p. 177).

The key biblical texts (all exegeted wrongly by the
Church):

* ‘In sin did my mother conceive me’ (Psalm 51:5)
supposedly proves that original sin is transmitted in the sexual
act. (So Mary’s father and mother had to be exceptions – established
in 1854 in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception). The idea that
marriage is exclusively in the service of procreation goes back
to the Stoics, not to Jesus or Paul: ‘Hostility to sexual pleasure
is a Gnostic-Stoic legacy which as far back as Clement was superimposed
on the Christian Gospel’ (p.50).

* In the statement ‘He who able to receive this,
let him receive it’ (Matthew 19:12) ‘Jesus is not speaking of
celibacy at all’ but is ‘repudiating adultery and divorce’ (pp.32-33).

* 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6 prove that compulsory
celibacy was not an apostolic doctrine. True, Paul speaks about
the greater availability of the unmarried person for the Lord
(1 Cor. 7), but in the same epistle (1 Cor. 9:5) ‘he mentions
his right to take his wife on missionary journeys as the other
apostles do’ (p.39).

For the Roman Catholic church, the chief sins of
humanity are located in the bedroom, not the battlefield. For
some theologians, ‘certain sexual practices were more reprehensible
than killing a human being’ (p.149). You can have a ‘just war’
to kill people, but it’s never right to kill the unborn: ‘Many
mothers owe their death to papal pronouncements [about saving
the life of the fetus at any cost] from 1884 to 1951’ (p.302).
‘The cruel God of Augustine, the persecutor and condemner of the
newborn, of those who before their death did not manage to get
baptized, is also a persecutor and torturer of mothers’ (p.308).

Thomas Aquinas affirmed that the heavenly reward
for virgins/celibates amounts to 100%, with 60% for widows and
only 30% for married people (p.195). Priestly celibacy is unbiblical
and unworkable (see pp. 118-119; cf. David Rice, ‘Shattered Vows’:
if you leave the priesthood to marry, you can’t practise ministry;
but in all continents bishops know the parish priests who are
adulterers… and stay. What gross hypocrisy!).

Finally, some items which might be headed ‘What you
always wanted to know about the history of the Catholic Church
and sex’:

* Theodore of Tarsus set the penalty for oral intercourse
at up to a lifetime of penance, but for premeditated murder seven
years… Egbert, archbishop of York, punished anal intercourse
with seven years’ penance, murder with four to five years (p.
149).

* Petrus Cantor (d. 1197) ‘opined that intercourse
with a beautiful woman was a greater sin than with an ugly one,
because it gave more delight’ (p.159)!

* Thomas Aquinas believed that deviation from the
‘missionary position’ was worse than intercourse with one’s own
mother (p.197)

* St Bernadine of Siena (d. 1444) said that if a
woman knows that her husband is going to practise coitus interruptus,
she must ‘resist her husband to the death’ (p.271).

* In 1982 two young handicapped persons were not
allowed to be married in a Catholic church in Munich, because
‘according to Catholic marriage law sexual incapacity is considered
a natural legal impediment… from which the Catholic church can
provide no relief’ (p.253).

And this: * Augustine believed that those born deaf
are damned to hell because Paul says ‘faith comes by hearing’
(Romans 10:17) (p.241)!

Her conclusion, with Karl Rahner: ‘The Church in
both theory and practice [has] used bad arguments to defend moral
maxims based on problematic… ‘prejudices’… This dark tragedy…
is so burdensome because we are dealing here, in all or very many
cases, with questions that penetrated deeply into the concrete
lives of human beings, because such false maxims, which were never
objectively valid… placed burdens on people… that from the
standpoint of the freedom of the Gospel were not legitimate’ (p.334).

So what’s the key problem? Basically, the notion
that humans can be wiser than God and elaborate on the basic revelation
of God’s will through the prophets, Jesus and the Scriptures.
I once wrote a book on this [1] trying to point out that all the
Christian creeds and most ‘doctrinal statements’ have followed
the Jewish pharisees in such arrogant hubris. When, in the Catholic
Church this is compounded by an Augustinian notion that the sexual
act is a necessary evil the outcome, as Rahner says, is tragic.

[1] ‘Recent Trends Among Evangelicals’, Melbourne:
John Mark Ministries, second edition, 1992.