When Sex Isn’t About Sex: 3 Things You Need to Know

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The Church’s teachings on sex and love are among most provocative and the least understood things in Catholicism.  What difference does it make what we do in the bedroom?  Does God really care about our sex lives that much?

St John Paul’s Theology of the Body reminds us that the Church’s teachings on love and sex aren’t just about sex, they are ultimately the way that lay people can give their whole selves–soul, mind, and body–to Christ.  Because of the incarnation, Christianity is an embodied spirituality that has to be expressed not just spiritually or mentally, but concretely and physically.  Just like clergy and religious practice celibacy as a way of giving themselves totally and completely to God, living the Catholic vision of love and sex is the way lay Christians can make a total loving response to Jesus giving himself to us body, blood, soul, and divinity. God holds nothing back from us, even taking on a body so that we could feel his love more concretely. How can we hold anything back from Him. God doesn’t just deserve our minds and hearts. He deserves for us to dedicate our bodies to his service. Living the Catholic vision of love isn’t always easy, but it is a privilege that lets us make an embodied response to Christ’s gift of his body to us.

Whether you’re a life-long Catholic or just learning about the faith, there are three things that you may not have known about the Church’s teaching on sex and sexuality!

1. Your Body is A Prayer–Most people tend to think that as long as they pray and go to church, what they do with their bodies doesn’t really matter.  But this belief is a heresy called gnosticism.  Gnosticism is the disembodied spirituality that grew up alongside of Christianity but has always been rejected by the Church since the beginning. God created our bodies. He pronounced them good. He loves our bodies so much that he plans to save not just our souls but our bodies too, that’s what believing in the resurrection of the body means! For the Christian, the body isn’t just something we can choose to do with as we please. It is a prayer, that allows us to be God’s physical presence in the world.  When we use our bodies in ways that God didn’t intend, its like defacing the image of God. Treat your body like the prayer it is. Dedicate yourself to learning how to use your body to love others only in the ways that respect God design of your body and the godly purpose of your body–that is, to bring his free, total, faithful, and fruitful love to the world.

2. Your Body Requires Healing–Most people recognize the value of diet and exercise.  These things are hard, and often, not a lot of fun, but we do them because we recognize that our bodies don’t always tell us what is best for them. Because of sin, our body’s desires are out of whack with reality. If we give our body whatever it says it wants when it says it wants it, we’ll become sluggish and unhealthy.  But if that’s true in the way our body’s express its appetites for food and for rest, isn’t it the same with the way our body expresses its appetite for love?  The desires for food, rest, and love aren’t bad, but sin makes the body want to express those desires in ways that are bad for us and others, and can even make us sick. Like a healthy diet and exercise, practicing Catholic teachings about love and sex bears tremendous benefits.  Maintaining a healthy diet teaches us to eat well.  Maintaining a healthy exercise schedule trains our bodies to move well.  And practicing the Catholic vision of love heals our body so that it can love well.  Our bodies require healing to be as whole and healthy as God created them to be.  Let God give you the healing you need to live and love more abundantly.

3. Your Body is a Gift–We tend to think that what we do with our body is entirely personal. That’s why so many people believe the pro-abortion statement, “My body, my choice.” But the Christian knows that our body is meant to be a gift. We were given our bodies not to do whatever WE want with them, but so that we can work for the good of other people. Each one of us is, literally, God’s gift to the world, and our bodies are the means of communicating that gift. If you wanted to give someone a gift, would you just throw it at them? Or try to shame them into accepting it at some inappropriate time? Or just leave it laying around? Of course not! You’d look for just the right way, just the right time, to give the person you loved your gift in a way that would be really meaningful. Not just once, but EVERY time you gave them a gift. Practicing the Catholic vision of love allows you to pick the right way, the right time, and the right means by which to give the gift of yourself in the most meaningful and beautiful way to the person you love. Your body is a gift. Practice the Catholic vision of love and learn to appreciate it for the gift it is.

For more information on the Church’s teaching on sex and sexuality, check out my book, Holy Sex! and discover many more resources—including information about Catholic counseling services—at www.CatholicCounselors.com

Zombie Apocalypse: Spirituality, Sex, and the Lay Vocation

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At the upcoming USCCB Convocation of Catholic Leaders in Orlando, my wife and co-author, Lisa Popcak, will be leading a panel titled, The Family and Sexuality:  Challenges and Opportunities.  One of the first questions the panel will address is, “What is often overlooked when attempting to evangelize people about the Catholic vision of sex and love especially in marriage and family life?”

Our response? The single most overlooked point  in communicating the importance of the Church’s view on sex in marriage is that sex stands at the center of the lay vocation. Attempting to practice a lay spirituality while ignoring sex is like living a zombie spirituality that divorces the body from the soul.  If the Church is serious about the universal call to holiness, she has to get serious about proclaiming and helping people live the Catholic vision of sex and love.  What am I talking about?  I’m glad you asked.

 

Lay People: Spiritual Also-Rans?

Historically speaking, until Vatican II, lay people were all-but officially considered to be “spiritual also-rans” who, if they wanted to be serious about their faith, were welcome to borrow whatever spiritual equipment (e.g., Liturgy of the Hours, Lectio Divina, contemplative prayer, etc.) they could from the spiritual A-Team—clergy and religious.

But it isn’t always easy for lay people to use these tools.  Lisa and I regularly hear from listeners to More2Life who complain, “Since I had kids, I just don’t have time to pray like I used to.”  The problem isn’t that lay people are spiritually lax.  It’s that many of the tools Catholics consider to be our spiritual stock-in-trade were primarily developed for clergy and religious and don’t easily translate to life in the domestic church.

Until Vatican II’s earth-shattering proclamation of the “universal call to holiness” declaring that priests, religious, and lay people alike are capable of real sanctity, no one really considered what an authentically home-grown, lay approach to spirituality would even consist of.

 

Lay Spirituality:  A New Approach

Enter St John Paul the Great. As (effectively) the first post-Vatican II pope, he dedicated his life to laying the foundations of a lay spirituality that fit the demands of the domestic church.  Because lay people’s lives are consumed the minutiae of paying bills and raising families, he made St. Therese of Lisieux a Doctor of the Church. Her “Little Way” of holiness offers a path to sainthood that consists of doing even these little things with great love. Acknowledging how few examples of sanctity the Church offered to lay people, he canonized more lay and married saints than any pope before him.  Considering the challenges lay people face trying to live a holy life in the midst of a troubled world, he promoted devotion to Divine Mercy.  Viewing the rosary as the layperson’s easiest entrée into contemplative prayer, he wrote an apostolic letter on how to pray it properly and added an entire set of mysteries highlighting events every family could relate to; a baptism, a wedding, teaching children life lessons through stories, a father raising up his beloved son, a family meal.

And the crown jewel in this effort? St John Paul’s Theology of the Body, through which, week-after-week, over the course of 129 Wednesday audiences, he promoted a marriage-centric, nuptial view of the pursuit of holiness, the sacraments, salvation history, the Church, and the gospel itself.

 

Sex: The Heart of the Lay Vocation

And what was at the center of the Theology of the Body, this massive reflection on lay spirituality?  Sex.  Why?  Not, as some critics alleged, because St John Paul had a weird obsession with pelvic issues,  but because virtually every waking moment of the lay person’s life is spent seeking a mate, maintaining their relationship with their mate, conceiving children, dealing with struggles related to conceiving children, and raising those children to find good and godly spouses. It all comes down to tasks related, in one way or another to sex and sexuality.

Christianity is an incarnational faith. It begins with conception; with God emptying himself and becoming embodied.  As such, an authentically Christian spiritual life must also be embodied. If celibacy allows priests and religious to dedicate their bodies to work for the good of God’s Kingdom, how could a lay person share in this work? The Theology of the Body answers this question by encouraging lay people to resist the secular world’s reconception of fertility as a disease, and to refuse to engage in sexual practices that treat people as sexual objects, create barriers to the two becoming one flesh, and think of children merely as a burden.

That’s why any lay spirituality that seeks to divorce itself from the sexual character of the lay vocation is little more than a zombie spirituality; a body stumbling around desperately seeking redemption for its basic hungers. Christians, especially lay Christians, can do better. It’s time for Church to give lay people their rightful spiritual inheritance by boldly proclaiming and supporting lay people in living an authentic, embodied, home-grown, nuptial, spiritual life.  And it is time for lay people to claim their sacred right to live the universal call to holiness in the unique ways only lay people can.

When we talk about the Church’s teaching on sexual love, and NFP in particular, we as a Church need to do a better job to help people see that we aren’t just talking about a way to regulate fertility. We’re really talking about the foundations of a lay spirituality where couples join priests and religious in bringing their sexuality to God for the greater glory of his Kingdom and the building of an authentic Civilization of Love.

To learn more about how you can begin to celebrate the Catholic vision of in a way that can invigorate every part of your life–especially your spiritual life–check out Holy Sex! The Catholic Guide to Mind-Blowing, Toe-Curling, Infallible Loving

Hormonal Contraception Affects Future Children’s Health (UPDATED)

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A new study published in the journal, Evolution Psychological Science found that hormonal contraceptives make women prone to choose mates with an immune system to their own.  This study found that children born to these couples are more sickly, more susceptible to common illnesses, and require more trips to the doctor do children of women who were not on the pill when they chose a mate.

According to one of the authors of the study,

One cue for mate suitability is odor, which signals compatibility between potential mates’ immune systems. Specifically, odor indicates the extent of overlapping between potential mates’ immune systems, such that more attractive odor signals less overlap between mates’ immune systems. The larger the dissimilarity between mates’ immune systems, the more threats the immune system can combat…..

Unfortunately, contraceptive pill use interferes with mate selection and reverses the natural preference for mates with dissimilar immune system, such that women prefer the odor of partners with similar immune system over that of partners with dissimilar immune system while on contraceptive pills2. This shift in preferences corresponds to the one occurring across the menstrual cycle. In particular, naturally cycling women experience male preference shift throughout their menstrual cycle that helps them obtain resources relevant to their current fertility status (fertile versus infertile).

…Results have revealed that children to mothers who were on the pill are more infection-prone, require more medical care, suffer from a higher frequency of common sicknesses, and are perceived as generally less healthy than children whose parents met on non-pill circumstances. These findings indicate that a key factor in securing children’s future might be traced to a choice people made years before their children were born: the decision to use a contraceptive pill. 

The aftermath of these numbers is gloomy: The immune system of current-generation children might be more fragile than that of our ancestors, leaving the current and future generations more susceptible to pathogens and more dependent on medical care as its effective line of defense.

Previously on this blog, I have shared the mounting research demonstrating that the Pill leads to a host of medical and behavioral complications, that the Pill use leads to an exponentially higher rate of depression for women in general and teen girls in particular,  and that the Pill is bad for the environment.  Now we find that the Pill is poisoning future generations of children, making them more susceptible to disease, increasing the need for more antibiotic use, which leads to the evolution of more antibiotic resistant superbugs.  The Pill is, literally, killing us.

How much longer will people continue to perpetuate the myth that Hormonal Contraceptives are a safe, healthy means of promoting “reproductive freedom.”  True freedom comes from knowledge.  Natural Family Planning gives women the knowledge they need about their bodies to exercise TRULY healthy, safe, ethical choices about family planning.   NFP is not without its challenges, but at least it isn’t poisoning you, the environment, and your future children’s health.  In fact NFP promotes good health practices by giving women better knowledge about how their bodies work and when they are not working properly.  NFP promotes healthy mate selection by letting women know in advance if a man is too immature or selfish to be a good mate. It strengthens relationships by making couples do the hard work true intimacy requires.  It is good for the environment because it is completely natural.  And it does not jeopardize your future children’s health in any way.

The truth will set you free.  The sooner the world acknowledges the truth of Catholic teaching that rejects artificial means of contraception in favor of Natural Family Planning and Fertility Awareness Methods, the sooner we will all be free to live healthier, happier lives. To discover how you can experience the joy and freedom that comes from living the Catholic vision of love, check out Holy Sex!  The Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-blowing, Infallible Loving.

(Note: the original article neglected proper citations. That has been corrected.  I regret the error and thank my conscientious readers for bringing it to my attention.)

Does My Husband Have a Right to Sex?

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On her Facebook page, Rose Sweet, who has a wonderful ministry to divorced Catholics, posted the troubling story of a woman whose husband was cheating on her.  The couple’s pastor counseled the wife that her decision to place a moratorium on her sexual relationship with her husband as long as he was cheating on him actually placed an undue burden on her cheating husband and was driving him away further in part, because sex is a “right” of marriage.

A little clarification might be in order. Yes, according to the Church, sex is a “right” of marriage. But the Church defines “right” a little differently than the world does.

To say that sex is a “right” of marriage means that marriage is the right place for people to have sex. It does not mean you have a license to demand sex no matter what.

Marriage is the normative–that is, “right”–place for sexual love to be expressed between a man and a woman. Assuming a healthy, loving respectful relationship, this is true. It is also true, as St. John Paul observed that a couple who does not love, respect and cherish each other could very well commit the sin of adultery even in marriage by using each other as objects rather than loving each other as persons.

Assuming you have a healthy, loving, cherishing relationship, marriage is the right place for sexual love to be shared. If you don’t have that kind of marriage, then you have a right to stop having sex and start learning how to actually love each other.

Older texts on moral theology and canon law tend to use words like “right” and “marital debt” when discussing sex.  These words are technical terms and taking them at face value can lead to a lot of problems.

Properly understood, referring to sex as a debt that husbands and wives owe to each other means that, in a loving marriage, loving spouses do not have a right to withhold sex from each other.  As St Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 7:5

The husband should fulfill his duty toward his wife, and likewise the wife toward her husband. A wife does not have authority over her own body, but rather her husband, and similarly a husband does not have authority over his own body, but rather his wife. Do not deprive each other, except perhaps by mutual consent for a time, to be free for prayer, but then return to one another….

All of this means that marriage is the right place for sexual love to be expressed–assuming the couple is living their marriage as the Church defines it. Namely, as an “intimate partnership.” (c.f., Gaudium et Spes).

But there is a deeper debt the married couple owes to each other that precedes sexual union. They owe each other the love, respect, cherishing that characterized their dating relationship—the relationship that continues to serve as the foundation for their marriage. Sex, if you will, is the house that sits on this foundation of love, respect, and cherishing. If the “foundation” (love, respect, and cherishing)  is bad, the “house” (sex)  is unsafe to live in. Why? Because if love, respect, and cherishing are absent, sex stops being sex and becomes mere lust and using. Marriage is no place for lust and use.

No one has a right to abuse someone else. No one owes someone else the “debt” of using them.

To discover more about how you can live the Catholic vision of love and sex in ways that are healthy and fulfilling, check out Holy Sex: The Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving.

The Common Pill That Negatively Effects Women’s Wellbeing

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In the secular world, birth control is essentially represented as a worry-free form of contraception. However, new research suggests that this may not be the case.

Dr Niklas Zethraeus, a scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, stated, “Despite the fact that an estimated 100 million women around the world use contraceptive pills we know surprisingly little today about the pill’s effect on women’s health.” This fact prompted the study of 340 healthy women between the ages of 18 and 25, divided equally into two groups: a group who took a combination of ethinylestradiol and levonorgestre and a control group who received a placebo.

The results of this study indicated that the women who took a combination of ethinylestradiol and levonorgestre (a common combination for contraception pills) reported lower mood, self-control, and energy. While there was not a significant difference in risk of depression when compared to the control group, the remaining negative side effects were undeniable. Moreover, after three months, women taking the pill reported a general lower quality of life.

For more information on how you can celebrate a healthier, more intimate and graceful approach to sex, marriage. and family planning, check out Holy Sex! and tune in to More2Life, Monday-Friday 10am E/9am C, on EWTN Global Catholic Radio – SiriusXM 139

When the Gate is Shut–A Faithful Response to Vaginismus

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Aleteia posted a deeply heartfelt article about a Catholic woman’s struggle with vaginismus, a disorder in which the muscles of the vagina involuntarily spasm or become rigid which makes intercourse either painful or, in extreme cases, impossible.

I don’t know anything about the author of the blog referenced in the article, except to say that, having read her posts, I can say that  she is a tremendously brave and honest woman who has, with her devoted husband, found ways to allow God’s grace and love to create something beautiful even in the midst of their profound suffering.  I find their courage through adversity to be inspiring and I am grateful for her and her husband’s witness.

How Common Is It?

I wish to be upfront that I am not writing this article as a response to her particular situation. As I say, I know nothing about her circumstances and I don’t presume to be able to offer answers that would address her particular concerns. I invite you to join me in praying that she and her husband will find the grace to continue their struggle in faith and, ultimately, find the healing they seek.

I do, however, want to chime in on the conversation because the issue is both not uncommon (occurring in about 2 of 1000 women in the general population and up to 5% of women who struggle with anxiety or depression) and tremendously sensitive.  For Catholic women, in particular, it can be difficult to find treatment options that are both effective and faithful.  Many Catholic women who suffer from this problem never seek professional help out of either embarrassment or concern that they will be asked to engage in treatment approaches that are inconsistent with their moral values.

Why Does It Happen?

The most common causes are sexual trauma, postpartum trauma, or poor sexual formation, but it can also be caused by issues related to OCD/scrupulosity, alexithymia (a difficulty with identifying or expressing emption), poor interoception (a kind of conscious alienation from one’s bodily senses), avoidant attachment (which can make physical affection of any kind feel overwhelming and intrusive), or other factors.

Can It Be Treated?

Research suggests that self-help approaches to vaginismus (involving self-help reading and dilation/relaxation exercises and other approaches found on the internet) have about a 10% success rate for treating this condition.  With proper treatment, research finds that over 95% of women can experience a full recovery from their symptoms.    For the remaining small percentage of women for whom standard treatment approaches are ineffective, virtually all can be successfully treated through a course of counseling, physical therapy, and the therapeutic use of Botox by a plastic surgeon.  In sum, the recovery rate for vaginismus is virtually 100% once the appropriate course of treatment has been identified.

What is the Process?

There is no cookie cutter approach to treating vaginismus, but effective treatment tends to follow 8 basic steps.

  1. A proper medical evaluation (gynecological/urological) to rule our potential medical/structural problems.
  2. A proper psychological history and review of the various psychological and physical therapy interventions.
  3. Evaluation/Education regarding the nature of sexual pain anatomy.
  4. Mindfulness based approaches to help the client gain conscious control over the automatic spasmodic vaginal response.
  5. Couple-based techniques designed to eliminate phobic responses to (non-sexual) physical intimacy
  6. Communication exercises that prepare the couple for full sexual intimacy
  7. Sexual counseling that help the couple find the least painful positions for successful intercourse
  8. Sexual communication exercises that help the couple overcome any remaining pain and experience the restoration of a fully satisfying sexual relationship.

Because no two women are the same, there are many variations these 8 steps can take.  It is because of the varied nature of treatment that self-help approaches often fail to produce the desired results.  For Catholic women, it can be important to work with a faithful professional who can help them apply these 8 steps in a manner that is respectful of their moral values.

Finding Faithful Help

The Catholic Psychotherapy Association can be a useful place to turn for local assistance in dealing with this sensitive issue.  For those who struggle to find a local provider, or for whom local resources are not adequate for one reason or another, Karin Roach, MSW, LISW-S, a Pastoral Counselor who specializes in women’s issues through the Pastoral Solutions Institute’s Catholic Tele-Counseling Practice can help guide clients down the path to healing.  For more information on living the fullness of the Catholic vision of love, check out Holy Sex!  The Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving.