Secular Café: Old-style view of the RCC and sex

Secular Café Discuss atheism, religious apologetics, separation of church & state, theology, comparative religion and scripture.

Old-style view of the RCC and sex May 16th 2012, 17:54 Gosh! Why did it change so much? Or alternatively why didn't people see it for what it was? http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...316125097.html Quote: If you had an impure thought (that's a thought about sex, not about cheating your neighbour) and if you "took pleasure" in it, then you had better hope you could get to confession before you were knocked down by a bus, because if you didn't, and you were, you would spend all of eternity in hell. I mention this because, as church sex scandals rumble on, it's increasingly difficult to appreciate just how totally, absolutely and utterly unthinkable it was to Catholics that clergy would engage in sexual misbehaviour or abuse. Similarly it was utterly unthinkable that a cleric who engaged in such behaviour would be protected, moved around or facilitated in any way. Our entire class once had to write an essay on purity because two guys were caught reading the News of the World in the toilets of our Christian Brothers school. That's how concerned the church was about sexual misbehaviour of the sort that got reported in that paper... ...Films were banned, books were banned, dancing suspended at Lent, RTÉ regularly condemned – all because the Catholic Church was dead set against the idea of sex except inside marriage and then only for the procreation of children (that's right, you had to be trying to get pregnant or else no sex, and that included hanky panky). Of course it was all beginning to fall apart thanks to television, showbands, industrialisation, feminism and the church's opposition to artificial contraception. But it still never occurred to us that clerics might engage in sexual activity or that those austere church authorities might cover up for those who did. When a girlfriend told me about clerical students trying to "get off" with her, I scoffed. What a ridiculous idea. I'm not scoffing now. I was propositioned by two Catholic seminarians in the 1960s, so I never had a rosy view of them.

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