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Some reflections. I get to the sex part further down....
I could only ever be a practising Catholic or a lapsed Catholic. My Catholicism is too inbred for me to be anything else. This is
not to say I don't think there's any goodness or truth in other religions or other Christian denominations. Indeed, I believe there is much truth and goodness outside of Catholicism.
Again speaking for myself, I believe in the Catholic doctrines of Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement (whatever mysteries those doctrines really mean). I believe that Jesus' suffering and death and resurrection was salvific in some decisive way--that it accomplished some kind of definitive victory over the power of evil. I believe that human beings were created by God to participate in God's eternal life. I believe in Catholic doctrine concerning grace and sacraments, and that the Church, and even its Petrine Office, are of divine institution (in some sense).
I believe there may be angels, but if there are, I don't know what they are.
I believe in purgatory. If hell is a state of eternal and intense torment for conscious beings, then I'm sceptical there is such a state in the sense of it being occupied by any rational creature, though I also regard it as a logically possible state. But I suspect that divine grace eventually touches everyone sufficiently for their freedom to accept salvation and that God wouldn't create persons whom God eternally knows would end up in hell, in that sense of 'hell'. But for some, the purgatorial experience may be astonishingly painful.
I believe in a radical social justice ethic. There is room in the Church for that ethic, despite its long history of reactionary behavior. In practice, I have enormous admiration for its devotion to practical forms of loving service. I also strongly admire the Church's practical tolerance for a great deal of human imperfection. While saints are great, I love the way the Church provides a genuine spiritual home for a vast number of very ordinary highly flawed individuals.
I find the Church wonderfully fascinating--its history, its sins, its
absurdities, its glories, its sense of the human and its sense of the
transcendent.
I don't believe in the official Vatican sexual ethic. I don't agree with the way the Vatican tries to counteract dissent from that ethic. It is this ethic and the manner in which the Vatican seeks to promote it that causes most of the current problems in the Church.
By and large, I think abortion is a bad thing. But I think that
criminalizing even early abortions is a bad idea in most circumstances. By and large I think adultery is a bad thing. But so is forbidding re-marriage for divorced persons.
Where the Church falls down in my experience is with respect to the
endlessly weird and messy realm of human sexuality. For some reason the Church which shows so much tolerance and understanding in other messy areas of human life has a terrible hang-up when it comes to anything to do with sex. Obviously--and this is generally recognized by secular law--some sexual activities are clearly harmful and wrong (especially those that involve coercion, the use of children, etc). And by and large, I think that sex is best placed within a context of committed loving heterosexual unions between consenting adults which also provide a stable loving environment for the rearing of children. But for a variety of reasons and for a variety of people such unions are difficult or even impossible to form and maintain.
The Vatican's official sexual ethic has no room for alternative forms of sexual expression, be they homosexual, premarital, mildly pornographic, masturbatory, uncommitted, fun-seeking, serially monogamous, polygamous, etc. But not all instances of such alternative expressions of sexuality strike me as unduly selfish in all circumstances, and certainly I don't find myself judging them to be all heinously sinful. In many cases they arise out of genuine and
healthy needs for intimacy, even if they fall short of intimacy's
profoundest and most authentic realization. (In other cases, they may be thoroughly selfish and disordered, and even heinously sinful).
Just about everybody experiences sex as a profound need, and the official Vatican sexual ethic in effect promotes an unwarranted degree of guilt and/or alienation in those who meet their sexual needs in ways of which that ethic disapproves.
There is merit in promoting an ethic that warns against sexual selfishness, just as against other forms of selfishness. But a good deal of the behavior forbidden and condemned by the official Vatican sexual ethic may be just a preliminary or inchoate or experimental or just plain fumbling attempt to grapple with the challenge of finding a loving committed interpersonal context for sexual self-expression. A lot of it is a harmless substitute for such a context when the latter cannot be found. To condemn automatically all of it as inherently selfish is unwarranted and misguided, however worthy may be the aim and ideal of unselfishness that perhaps provides the rational core of the Church's sexual ethic.
I unapologetically focus on the issue of sex because it is in my limited but not insignificant experience the area which causes the greatest amount of difficulty for most Catholics or would-be Catholics--especially my unmarried or divorced friends and acquaintances of both sexes who are of a mind to be sexually active, one way or another. That's at the level of persons' lived experience.
At the level of intellectual theology, there result second-order
difficulties mostly around the issue of dissent and authority. But at the heart of the present ecclesiological crisis of authority lies a clash between the official sexual ethic of the Vatican, and the lived sexual lives of ordinary people.
Sociologists might attribute the heightening intensity of this clash to wider social changes. In the past, a majority of human beings lived in small agricultural communities where marriage was early and the opportunities for sexual expression outside of the traditional marital context very limited or socially unfeasible. In much of the world, that situation no longer prevails. Just as the Church eventually had to come to terms with the Industrial and Democratic Revolutions (which it has done, belatedly, though not fully and not without many egregiously reactionary flaws along the way), so too I believe it must adapt to the Sexual Revolution, though not uncritically and not without preserving the kernel of validity in its traditional sexual norms.
Christianity cannot and should not accept a hyper-sexualization of social mores. Nor should it endorse an easy acceptance of sexual selfishness. But it must also understand and sift intelligently the lived sexual experience of human beings. This is what the official Vatican sexual ethic currently prevents it from doing.
I think the Church is going through a flawed and reactionary phase of
response to the Sexual Revolution, just as in earlier epochs it went through reactionary phases with respect to the social changes wrought by the advent of industrialization and mass democracy. But for the good of Catholicism and indeed society at large, it would be best if it succeeded in abandoning this current phase and moved into a new stage of critical dialogue with the modern sexual culture.
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