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The Church and The Second Sex
By Mary Daly
187 pp. New York, Harper and Row, 1968. $4.95.

Sexuality and Moral Responsibility
By Robert P. O'Neill and Michael A. Donovan
154 pp. Washington, Corpus Books, 1968. $4.95.

Beyond Birth Control, The Christian Experience of Sex
By Sidney Cornelia Callahan
248 pp. New York, Sheed and Ward, 1968. $4.95.

It may come as no surprise to knowledgeable readers of the National Catholic Reporter, but Roman Catholics have discovered sex! It all seems to have happened about eight years ago when Good Pope John opened a window in the Vatican which turned out to be the lid to Pandora's box. The flood of sexual discussion that emerged first flowed around the obvious problem areas: birth control, celibacy, divorce. Fortunately the discussion has ceased to rest on the surface and has begun to probe the underlying assumptions about women, marriage, and sexuality and to reach for a positive reconstruction of the whole tradition. These three books are fair, not unduly profound, examples of the popular discussion.

Mary Daly's discussion of traditional Catholic attitudes toward women, The Church and the Second Sex, is perhaps the most important of the three. Built on solid historical study, but written in a breezy, readable

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style, Dr. Daly (currently teaching theology at Jesuit Boston College) surveys this tradition and finds it not only wanting but distinctly perverse, mutilating to man as well as woman. Defining woman as a "defective male," viewing her through the suspicious eyes of an ascetic, flesh-despising morality, traditional Catholicism sanctioned a deep and pervasive misogynism. The exaggerated maleness of the images of God, Christ, the priesthood, and the sacraments; the sub-personal treatment of the man-woman relationship; the repressive, woman-hating training of the clergy; the inability to lend positive guidance to modern developments in any area related to marriage, sexuality, or the development of women; the continued third-class citizenship of women in the church are the expressions of this pervasive prejudice. Needless to say, Dr. Daly opposes all this with firm strokes of her pen, but she puts more faith in secular social change than in the church to effect the ultimate changes not only in society but in the church itself.

Robert O'Neill and Michael Donovan are a psychologist and university chaplain who have teamed up to create what Gregory Baum, in his foreword, describes as a "bridge between traditional moral theology and the social sciences." The book is, overall, rather light, but contains some interesting points. The opening chapters aim at a critique of the traditional notion of moral culpability of children. Utilizing modern psychological studies of child development which show the levels of maturation of reasoning powers and grasp of concepts such as community, reciprocity, and the future, the authors argue that the individual cannot be held morally culpable until adolescence. The traditional view which placed the "age of reason" and therefore of moral culpability at the age of seven is discovered to be an unexamined borrowing from Roman law which viewed the child as a miniature adult and held him criminally culpable in the same way as an adult by the age of seven. Liable to capital punishment by his seventh year in the code of Justinian, the child became liable to "mortal sin" in ecclesiastical law at the same age!

Having discredited this view psychologically and historically, the authors pass on to the more fundamental question of the meaningfulness of such a concept as "mortal sin." While retaining the idea itself, they argue that sin must be seen in terms of process rather than isolated "acts." Mortal sin is the total turning of the self away from his "end" in God. Such a reversal of the self cannot be the result of any single act however serious, but must be the culmination of a progressive orientation of the self. The idea of "mortal sin" is theologically a hypothetical vanishing point when the self has lost its authentic nature and become oriented completely contrary to its true goal. Who can say whether such a point

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is actually ever reached? Would that not be equivalent to a total loss of human nature, a dehumanization so complete that no spark of authenticity remains? Such an idea stands for an extreme situation in the theological vocabulary, equivalent to "hell." The Catholic pastoral dilemma over this concept comes from the almost monstrous disproportion between the extremity of this idea in its theological setting and the commonality of its use in the framework of penitential jurisprudence. What really could have been meant when it was solemnly declared that a seven year old child could be guilty of mortal sin (meriting eternal damnation) for eating a hamburger on Friday "with full consent of his will"? In seventeenth-century England a child could be hanged for stealing a goose, and canon law seems to have remained on about the same level of enlightenment.

The authors would like to abolish the whole idea of moral culpability of children, including any application of the church's penitential system to them. In the remainder of the book, they discuss various areas of sexual maturation that have been the subject of tedious obsession in traditional moral theology: sexual fantasies, masturbation, and pre-marital sexuality. In all these areas they take a common sensical, process approach. Neither sexual fantasies nor masturbation are evil in themselves. They belong to the natural processes of sexual development and are healthy if they are tied in with that development. They become unhealthy only when they become expressions of a pathological escape from sexual maturation. Pre-marital sexuality is a more difficult question. The authors insist on the pervasiveness of sexuality throughout man's psyche as a part of the totality of man's affective nature. Sexuality cannot be limited to genital sexuality, but has many levels and expressions and is an aspect of all inter-personal relationships. It is, therefore, unhealthy to make a total distinction between the married and the unmarried person, or to force the ethic of a celibate upon unmarried persons who are developing personal relations with an ultimate intent of marriage. Such a sharp distinction between the unmarried and the married ethic will scarcely enable a person to make a healthy transition from one to the other and is based on a false notion of sexual "appetite." Nevertheless the authors wish to reserve coital intercourse to the married state as a representation of a total personal commitment that can only be responsibly expressed in the permanent partnership. Not insignificantly, the authors spend no time on contraception. They appear to take for granted that the traditional arguments against it can no longer be sustained. Even more, the existence of contraceptives render invalid the traditional arguments against pre-marital intercourse as an "injustice" to the unborn child. Although their own argument may

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not convince, they declare that mere taboo will no longer suffice, and there is no reason why young people should observe it unless it can be made morally convincing to them.

Sidney Callahan's volume, Beyond Birth Control, is an effort to reconstruct the whole tradition on marriage, sexuality, and woman in an entirely new, positive framework. Although it reflects wide reading, it is, in many ways, a highly personal document. Mrs. Callahan's main themes are balance and wholeness. On every aspect of these problems of marriage and male-female relationships she prefers the "both-and" to the "either-or": both femininity and full humanity; both wife and mother and active engagement in the intellectual and social "world." Men and women should be both "heart" and "head." As a fairly prolific authoress as well as a mother of six children, Mrs. Callahan is herself doing fairly well at this abundance of all good things.

Perhaps Mrs. Callahan's most unusual proposal is found in her effort to link the ultimate Christian perspective on sexuality to the glorified body of the new creation. Far from being an a-sexual state of existence, she confidently asserts that that blessed state will be a total cosmic orgasm of all humanity with each other, freed from the limitations of time, space, and psychological fragmentation. Mrs. Callahan has some rare and wonderful precursors in this eschatological view of sex. The Adamite and Libertine sects in the Middle Ages and Reformation periods saw the Christian doctrine of the resurrection and the new creation as suggestive of such a total sexual community of all with all, and the idea has not been wanting of exponents since that time, for example, the American perfectionist community of Oneida. These groups, however, went a step farther than Mrs. Callahan appears willing to go and decided that, since the new creation has already been inaugurated by Christ in the church, why wait until heaven to begin.

Rosemary Reuther
Howard University
Washington, D. C.