What can a celibate priest counsel on sex?

Kathy Shaidle writes today:

No, Father: it's 'Sex As YOU Don't Know It'

I hate it when Catholic priests write about sex.

No, he does NOT know about sex just because he's "counselled married couples," anymore than Tom Wolfe "knows" how to fly the Challenger because he's interviewed a lot of astronauts.

Reader discretion advised if you follow the link. It's to a post about a Polish priest who has written a book about sex and "married love" that sounds to me like he's been listening to far too many men complaining about how their wives aren't interested in wearing sexy lingerie and turning themselves into pretzels to provide interesting sexual positions so as to put a little more zest into their sex lives and women complaining that their husband never bothers to "satisfy them."

I dunno. I do think it is rather unseemly for a priest to be offering this kind of advice and, frankly, that he is even allowing himself to dwell on thoughts like this for more than a flashing, unbidden momentary temptation, strikes me as immodest and unchaste. But I think a celibate, heterosexual, fatherly priest has a great deal to teach both a husband and a wife about the nature of sacrificial love out of which a properly ordered, meaningful, loving and chaste married sexual life flows.

For quite some time, in evangelical circles some have argued that whatever happens on the marriage bed is sacred. And that includes oral sex. I remember getting into a strange argument with an evangelical pastor about this matter when I mentioned at a small prayer gathering that as I was beginning to understand how important it was not to divorce procreation from marriage, I was also coming to see the importance from a natural law standpoint of not divorcing sex from procreation and what Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae called the "unitive significance" of the marriage act.

Paul VI wrote:

11. The sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, "noble and worthy.'' (11) It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile. For its natural adaptation to the expression and strengthening of the union of husband and wife is not thereby suppressed. The fact is, as experience shows, that new life is not the result of each and every act of sexual intercourse. God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws. The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. (12)

Union and Procreation

12. This particular doctrine, often expounded by the magisterium of the Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.

The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman.

What I was coming to see was that if Christians or anyone pro-traditional marriage argued that "anything goes" in the bedroom, then we were undercutting our arguments against homosexual marriage. Because if, as gay erstwhile Catholic blogger Andrew Sullivan famously wrote: "We are all sodomists now" , then really, what arguments other than prejudice can we possibly have against gays marrying?

The pastor became quite dogmatic about the "anything goes" thing to the point where it was pointless to say anything else. I was up against a brick wall, like I have found with people who defend abortion.

What I have come to see is that chastity is tough, whether one is single, a priest or religious who has taken a vow of celibacy, or married. Just because one is married does not give one a pass to "anything goes."

I have also come to see that holy chastity whatever one's state in life is impossible without the help of the Holy Spirit. And I also recognize that often we will fail to live up to our ideals in the level of sacrificial love we hope to give in all aspects of our lives, but that does not mean we revise down the requirements of holiness.

In a conversation with some friends yesterday, we spoke about the sacrificial love that family life requires and the ways the demands of children force one to grow and to become less selfish and more loving in the sense of caring for the good of another person.

The conversation reminded of some things an Opus Dei priest said to a small group of us in Rome last September about family and married love, because in my Anglican Catholic faith, we have married priests and often a family at the heart of the parish. He said that the life of a priest can be very pleasurable and that it would be easy to become quite content and satisfied with the lifestyle. He said the example of the kinds of sacrifices of love that must be made within the family provide a good example for those who have been called to celibacy to remember to also make those sacrifices as priests, to be with those who are less popular, the more needy and the less lovely in ways that demand a dying to selfishness.

But the selfless giving and love of a chaste priest is also something that married couples --especially men---need to look at and take as an example. Because a celibate priest sacrifices his sexual love for the sake of His Bride, the Church, the love that he offers does not use the other as an object--that is if the priest is living this out properly. A wife yearns to be loved by her husband for who she is, to be honored and cherished. She hopes her husband might exercise self-sacrifice and willingness to put his sexual desires under discipline for her sake, and not to have him expect her to dance around in some stupid bustier and garter belt, kama sutra-ing around the house for his use and pleasure. Or on the other hand, for a wife to turn her husband into an object or a performer for her gratification and to be self-sacrificing in understanding that it's not all about her either.

There is something extremely beautiful about an obviously heterosexual man who could easily have experienced the goods of a beautiful wife and many loving children who sacrifices that good for the sake of the Church. And the Church, in her earthly institutional form often seems a critical, nagging, rebellious, unthankful and unattractive spouse for these men at times, I imagine. Yet for those men who are able to cultivate serenity and express the love of Christ because they see the image of God in the disguises of the sinners in their midst, well, that love transforms lives.

That kind of priest I would think might have a great deal to say about human sexuality, but it would never devolve to positions or techniques. Instead it would focus on Jesus and a call to holiness and to loving the way Christ loves us. Most wives would be so grateful to have their husbands love them that way. Christ's love puts everything in its proper place and always puts the dignity of the whole human person at the forefront.