The Unhealed Wound: The Church, the Priesthood, and the Question of Sexuality
144
The Unhealed Wound: The Church, the Priesthood, and the Question of Sexuality
144eBook
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Overview
Kennedy, a psychologist, former priest, and a leading Catholic author and scholar, addresses one of the most compelling yet undiscussed issues in the Church: human sexuality. The Unhealed Wound is a penetrating and insightful study of the unresolved conflicts Catholics face regarding both their sexuality and spirituality, deep conflicts which grow more and more serious as they remain unaddressed within the Church.
He astutely yet respectfully takes to task a faith that-despite the reality of erotic love as a natural and human aspect of life itself-condemns birth control, marriage for priests, and sex outside of marriage. The Unhealed Wound also examines the Church's formidable hierarchy, challenging those clerics who uphold papal edicts unthinkingly. Articulately postulating our need not only to understand but celebrate our own sexuality, this book will engender both controversy and heated dialogue among today's scholars, students, and believers of Catholicism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250094797 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/18/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 377 KB |
About the Author
Eugene Kennedy is a psychologist and former priest, and the award-winning author of several books, including The Unhealed Wound: The Church, the Priesthood, and the Question of Sexuality and My Brother Joseph: The Spirit of a Cardinal and the Story of a Friendship. He writes a nationally syndicated column and lives with his wife, Sara Charles, M.D., in Chicago, Illinois.
Read an Excerpt
The Unhealed Wound
The Church and Human Sexuality
By Eugene Kennedy
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Eugene KennedyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-09479-7
CHAPTER 1
OVERTURE: TRISTAN'S WOUND
It is the twenty-second day of the last November before the New Year 2000. A light mist casts a sheen on Manhattan's streets, veils the Metropolitan Opera House, and blurs the lights of limousines and taxis delivering guests hungry to see and hear Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. At the end of its first New York performance 113 years before, according to a newspaper of the era, "before the clapping (and screaming) began, the audience sat hypnotized for minutes 'silent and motionless in their places as though drunk or in a transport.'"
Women "swooned when ... Tristan tore the bandages from his wound" to rise from his delirium and greet life again in the return of Isolde and to die in her arms — as Wagner himself wished to die, in the embrace of his mistress, Mathilde. The epic liebesnacht (the love night) and the liebestod (the love death) were said to "have shattered inhibitions [of women] inculcated by Gilded Age decorum." With its "erotic maelstrom of ... love music," one critic reflects, Wagner's version of the Tristan legend "had changed people's lives."
Do the men and women hurrying toward their places expect their lives to be changed by what, in 1886, the New York Tribune referred to as the "tumultuous lava current" of the opera? It is less by chance than by a summons from the millennial, love-straitened times that Tristan and Isolde are to sing once more of their "love-death" to New Yorkers who know that in the century just ending, a sexual revolution has been won but something about love has also been lost. They almost certainly feel within themselves the poisoned wound of Tristan, the gash that lies at the heart of this legend and a dozen kindred myths.
Do these people, so unremarkably human in their desires beneath their designer labels, long for love that is not given by half? And would they, in the fundament of their beings, surrender the right always to choose, and instead be themselves chosen, even imprisoned, by a grand consuming passion and suffer the intense erotic wound of a great love? Are they less sexually restless than the patrons a century earlier, or are they more anxious to meet their Tristan or their Isolde and be swept away by a transcendent love that makes even death sweet?
Enter Wagner's Tristan and enter a myth for the postmodern world, in which the wound symbolizes the still-unhealed division between God and his universe, heaven and earth, and spirit and flesh — that injury that seeds men and women, as Joseph Campbell says, with "longing, irresolution, loneliness and lust." Does the opera intensify fin de siècle ambivalence about the dangerous glory of love that demands a total surrender of the self to another? Do the audience members bear within themselves their own sexual wounds, hoping to tear away their bandages, as Tristan pulls them from his own wound to be healed by, and perhaps to die of, love?
If this is the theme of this titanic psychodrama, Tristan is but one of the great mythical figures who, like all of us, bear a wound that needs healing. Wounds are found everywhere in ancient legends, in those of Sir Gawain and that of the Fisher King, who found ease only in his boat on the water, and in the spell-casting castrate Clinschor, who was himself wounded as he wounded the king. The Grail King in the Parzival of von Eschenbach waits for someone to speak the words of healing for a wound so severe that he can neither sit nor stand nor lie down with comfort. The wounds are almost always the same — these great male figures are wounded sexually, by spears thrust through their genitals, and await healing that comes, as we shall see, not from magic or miracles but from responses so simple in their human sympathy or so powerful in their human love that they astound us still.
CHAPTER 2UNHEALED WOUNDS
It was an ordinary pastoral call by a young priest on an old lady. At eighty-five, Florence sat straight as a judge and watched the world through Wedgwood-blue eyes that had missed very little of what life gave and took away. Florence was a twenty-year widow after a forty-year marriage and had children and grandchildren unto the third generation. But she could not pronounce the word sex. She managed sec hesitantly as she blushed and looked away.
On such routine visits with people whose names were never in the papers, I first sensed the throbbing, faint as a tremor far away, of an unhealed wound.
Tim was seventy-two, a retired history professor turned into Mr. Chips not by the untimely death of a young wife but by the bachelor's existence in which he sought cramped shelter from the torrent of sexual fantasies that had flooded his imagination since childhood. More than sixty years later, he still cringed as he described the shame heaped on him in his first confessions.
Frank was a few years older, a retired priest-professor who had achieved acclaim as wide as his life was narrow and proper, and for a long time he did not appear to be aware of the wound never healed and never attended to within him. Only long after the battles for commanded chastity had been adjourned had he realized that he had not won them but instead had fought a strategic retreat. Now, awkwardly for him and for all who knew him, his need for closeness surfaced, a touching longing for simple human affection, for all that had been ruled out to keep himself reined in. With half-formed adolescent grace, he would embrace a waitress just a tick too long or hold on, truly for dear life, to women as he greeted them or bade them good night, a good boy who had spent his life on a man's errands, like an orphan finding his true birth record and realizing how little he had known and how late he had loved.
Tom was fifty, a handsome and successful priest on everybody's short list to become a bishop someday. He was looking past me, beyond me, as I walked by him standing in a doorway one night in a West Coast city. He was wearing gold chains over a black turtleneck sweater, his eyes hungry, deprived, searching like those of a thousand men in a thousand urban doorways for a sexual partner. His haunted look has never left me and I knew then as I know better now that he was wounded, too, and that explains the aura of sadness that trailed him until he disappeared from the priesthood, from his bright prospects, too, into a sexual underworld without a forwarding address.
Other faces rise in a long, dazed parade, laypeople and priests, religious men and women, laying down sacks after a long portage; what was is in them anyway? Men and women indicting themselves for their sexual longings, banishing them, themselves, too, into dry and lonely deserts: the hardworking, rosy-cheeked priest whose falling tears sank into the black wool of his cassock as he sobbed of how the need built up in him until, in disguise, he would buy tickets at a big-city ballroom to dance for hours with strangers and, full of remorse, ride in the empty midnight hours the near empty subway home; the pale morning light on the face of a different priest, stunned by death that surprised him in seaman's clothes in a waterfront bar — the woman with him had left, the bartender said.
And I remember the greatly admired bishop who had remained a pastor and heard confessions every week. He had been warned not to raise questions about birth control at bishops' meetings if he wanted to save his ecclesiastical career. His own archbishop had told him, "You'll never become a cardinal that way."
EVERYDAY STIGMATA, EVERYDAY WORLD
In the Gospels, we read often of the multitudes that followed Jesus in search of healing for bleeding, heartbreak, or possession by unclean spirits. Are these crowds of ordinary people struggling to lead good lives all around us any different, really, from those who spread across the hillside listening to Jesus say, "Happy the sorrowing, they shall be comforted"?
Listen to the anguished whispers through the confessional screen of the discouraged bringing their guilt, as lepers brought their sores to Jesus, longing to be cleansed of feelings more often human than sinful; the couples trying to hold love and family together, flailing on the limping carousel of life to keep in touch and keep away from each other during her fertile times; beyond them and beyond counting, good people thinking themselves bad, healthy people thinking themselves sick, ordinary human beings with more than enough other troubles, uncomfortable with their own humanity.
These are not the damned but the saved, gathered at the Last Judgment, surprised that God finds them worthier than they find themselves; these masses overlapping St. Peter's Square and the city and the world beyond are amazed to find that they are garmented in white and that their wounds of being human and sexual are healed at last.
True confessions, all, but few if any sinners to judge here, no purgatory for any of them, either; how could there be eternal penalties for these souls already tortured enough in time? And more sorrow than scandal in these lives that, seen in perspective, are as good and worthy as any. What each suffered was too deep for tears, each from the same unhealed wound branded into them for being human and sexual at the same time.
This is the stigmata suffered by many Catholics, the hidden counterpoint wounds more painful perhaps than the bleeding marks of crucifixion said to be granted to great and famous saints. What wounds are these if not the everyday lacerations of a great multitude of ordinary people, inflicted not by Jesus but often by officials of His Church, as convinced as Salem judges of their righteousness and claiming to speak in His name?
The great uncelebrated good people of the world nurse their own wounds against the background of a culture that, often in bizarre and pathetic ways, is trying to close the wounds in its own sexuality as well. One could pry from the vast curdled coverage of President Bill Clinton's unresolved sexual conflicts one poignant footnote to his own intimate confusion that may in miniature stand for those of the nation. Monica Lewinsky told of Clinton's once keeping a calendar of the days when he was able to control his impulses, the days "when he was good." You can hear America's rueful singing in that phrase, as you can hear it in Marilyn Monroe's childishly sexualized rendition of "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy as, in the same season, fate rose up around them, as it did also for Ernest Hemingway, each gone down to death with unhealed sexual wounds.
You can read the country's touching stories beneath its noisy bravado and affected sophistication with matters sexual. The covers of Cosmo and GQ are the shallow veneer on a national uneasiness that remains uncomforted thirty years into the social revolution that promised enlightenment about being sexual and being human at the same time. Neither the world's wound nor, within it, the Church's own related wound has yet been closed. Indiscriminately savoring lust damages people as much as does the reflexive censuring of every erotic impulse.
Bitter on the tongue is the message of the Church, garbled by its dividing nature and spirit, because, deep in its memory and alive still in the Gospel, are healthy appreciations of and attitudes toward both sexuality and sin. This purity of understanding informs the Catholic Church's primary calling to confirm rather than condemn our humanity, including our pervasive sexuality. Distracted from or forgetting it, the Church misses entirely the meaning of its central teaching that God took on our flesh in Jesus, sparing Himself none of our experiences, save sin, in order to heal our wounds and make us whole.
Jesus' teachings should not send fear into our souls, for he was always comfortable with sinners and readily forgave those whose sins seemed to be sexual. I say "seemed" because, as we look more closely, if the sin is robust enough to be real, the failure, as in adultery, lies in the breach of fidelity and the self-absorption that murders love and may kill an innocent spouse.
No, the sexual problematic for Catholicism is a function of its acting as an Institution does rather than as a Church should, so that its bureaucratic attentions infect what its pastoral possibilities would otherwise heal. This bureaucracy is a shadow Church that reflects less the glory of God than the cunning of the world, less a sense of eternity than of drowning in time. As an institution, its chief goal is to perpetuate itself — for it is threatened more by time than by eternity.
This shadow Church keeps itself together as an Institution by investing its power in keeping its members in a frightened and dependent state. Wise in the world's ways and friendly with the Mammon of Iniquity, the Institution knows that if it can control sexuality, it can maintain its mastery over human beings. This emphasis on power diminishes its true authority to help ordinary men and women put away childish things and grow up even by small steps, the way we learn to walk and talk — the way, imperfect but tolerant of failings, we become human.
CHAPTER 3WOUNDED, EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE
Pope John Paul II bears a wound that rises from his own view that Nature and Spirit are enemy camps arrayed against each other in a partitioned country, in a faux barbed-wire peace that barely restrains one from slaughtering the other. In the clerical ascetic imagination, their relationship is ever hostile. Father Scupoli titled his classic account of the soul's purification The Spiritual Combat. Throughout this divided tradition, the body is said to "war" against the soul, and Nature is to be "subdued" if not "conquered." Unhealed wounds are the fruit of the kind of chronic guerrilla warfare between Nature and Grace, much as Balkan states battle for reasons older than their claims to the same land, reasons not even the oldest of their old can remember anymore.
Such wars, as in the tinder of the Mideast, Northern Ireland, or the subcontinent, are often struck into flame by the flint of religious differences and often rage for generations, not to achieve victory but to keep the wound from healing. Such conflicts are functions not of religious faith pure and simple but of religious institutions that waste unknowing youth in battles for their vision of human destiny, thereby clothing them in the vesture of myth.
But the bloody tale and its underlying truth of estrangement remains the same everywhere, whether it is Saint Michael battling with Lucifer, Saint Thomas Aquinas hurling an inkpot at the Devil, or, one of many, the missionary in a rainy season at the end of the world pitted against the prostitute in Somerset Maugham's Rain, Nature and Grace forever raising their lances and charging at each other. The result is often, as it is said, a lost or ruined generation. Nature is destroyed again as, in these sexual sacrifices, generativity is killed in action. For what is taken away, as the war poets tell us, if not the potency of those who will never again feel the sun, know love, or give new life?
Read the headstones at Verdun or in any war cemetery for any side, and find how few were the years granted to these "glorious dead," as they are called. And the Guardian of the Spirit survives as a wounded victor, a Grail King whose potency is also stilled, numbed, diminished, and often steeped in conflict. Inspect the lists of those who have died or been wounded in the battles — supposedly for virtue, or somebody's idea of holiness, into which ecclesiastical generals have committed generations of youth to vindicate their divided image of the human person. There is no burial ground for sexual suffering, no place where it can easily be interred. Sexual suffering must be borne, as every unhealed wound is, by men and women who live with and cannot bury their pain.
CENTURY'S BEGINNING
Listen to the laments from the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, each a plangent cry about sexual woundedness, each about a priest, one real, one fictionalized, but both reflecting aspects of this mythic theme. Indeed, priests are symbolic figures in our examination of the Church and the unhealed wound of human sexuality. For as functionaries of the Institution, they are defined as mediators; so, too, they constitute a medium in which we may read the myth that opens for us an excavation site about the celibate bearer of ecclesiastical sexuality, of the healthy and unhealthy elements of that sexuality, and of the pervasive role that it has played in the emanations of the power and the glory of the Institutional Church.
Our first story is not set in the teeming urban Catholicism of the North that welcomed and prized priests and bishops, but in the Deep South and its patchwork of what were termed "priestless counties." Early in the twentieth century, priests were regarded as barely above blacks in humanity. Not only did they exemplify a foreign religion, they were, like the blacks, a mystery and a threat as well. Like the black man, the priest was the object of a vexing if uncatalogued mythology of sexual possibilities.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Unhealed Wound by Eugene Kennedy. Copyright © 2001 Eugene Kennedy. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
PART ONE: THE MYTH OF THE UNHEALED WOUND,
{1} OVERTURE : TRISTAN'S WOUND,
{2} UNHEALED WOUNDS,
{3} WOUNDED, EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE,
{4} THE MYTH OF THE GRAIL KING ANFORTAS,
{5} JOHN PAUL II, WOUNDED HEALER,
{6} OUR MYTH, OUR EXPERIENCE, OUR STORY,
PART TWO: BRICK AND MORTAR: THE CHURCH AS INSTITUTION,
{7} MYTHS OF INSTITUTIONAL CATHOLICISM: BRICK AND MORTAR,
{8} ROMANTICIZED DISCIPLINE: WOMEN DO THE SUFFERING,
{9} ASEXUALITY IN ACTION: THE CURIAL STYLE,
{10} THE VARIETIES OF ECCLESIASTICAL CONTROL,
PART THREE: HEALING THE WOUND: THE CHURCH AS MYSTERY,
{11} THE GIFT OF RECEPTION IN CATHOLIC EXPERIENCE,
{12} MAIMED FOR THE KINGDOM,
{13} DEFENDING AND PURSUING CELIBACY,
{14} WHAT WOUNDS ARE THESE?,
{15} WHAT IS IT THAT AILS YOU?,
Notes,
About the Author,
Copyright,