On sexual guilt and Irish Catholics

Funny and most interesting piece by John Zmirak over at Inside Catholic. (h/t The Corner). He writes:

I can't speak for everyone with an Irish-American mom -- not that they're used to getting a word in edgewise -- but I really did grow up thinking that sexual sins weren't merely the worst forms of evil but, aside from foul language, the only ones. I'll never forget my mother sitting with her box of Entenmann's, happily munching away to a video of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 as some psychopath opened a teenager's head with a coroner's saw. When the dying teenager spluttered the F-bomb, mom sighed and wondered aloud, "Now why'd they have to ruin a perfectly nice movie with that kind of filth?" This incident made me wonder how many IRA terrorists walked away from their bombs with clear consciences -- then trooped off to confession for impure thoughts.

He also includes some interesting thoughts about married vs. celibate priests.

We have married priests in the Anglican Catholic Church. We even have married bishops.

But covering the Roman Catholic Church has given me an appreciation for the charism of priestly celibacy. It is a beautiful thing when an obviously heterosexual man gives up the good of marriage and a family to marry the Church, especially when he can express love in a fatherly, chaste way, comfortable in his skin and not all dried up through self-mortification.

He adds:

What makes me squirm in my seat is when Catholic writers try to compensate for sexual attitudes like . . . well, those I grew up with by laying really heavy emphasis on the theological realities of marriage -- more emphasis than ordinary human experience will bear. It may well be true, as one Theology of the Body writer likes to emphasize, that in some sense marital intercourse helps both partners to enter into the "inner life of the Holy Trinity." But is that kind of thinking . . . sexy? I'm single, so readers can correct me here, but the last thing I want to hear about on my wedding night is Trinitarian theology. If the Sorrowful Mysteries make lousy foreplay -- sorry, Mom -- the Joyful ones won't do much better.

I dunno. I wish there could be a happy medium found somehow between those who think that suddenly upon marriage "anything goes" on the marriage bed and taking theological thinking to such extremes that the mundane reality of marital life is a shock.

Maybe if we think of human dignity and not reducing our partner (or anyone else) to an object might be a better starting point than lofty thinking about the Trinity. Because thinking about God isn't the same has knowing Him.

The restraint (but not the killing) of Eros, so that it is not allowed to become use of another person, can then become a ladder to the self-sacrificing love of Christ. And lo and behold, there you are experiencing a taste of the love inside the Trinity, and that taste will make you endeavor all the more to be pure at heart.

I imagine just being in the presence of John Paul II awakened people to that love. You can philosophize and theologize all you want, but it is the experience of the love of God that makes all the difference.

Thus, I'm uncomfortable with all sorts of rules and regulations about what you can and can't do. But I think you will find that if you experience the love of God and you begin to try to love as He loves there are a whole range of things you will find objectify or use other people and you will try not to do them.