Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeneasmackenzie | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about Shakers, but dragging Catholic religious into this is laughable.

> Breaking away from families of origin and remaking them into families of choice were not incidental for ... Catholic men and women, but should be understood as a deeply political act. The alternative structures of ... monastic family life and the intimacies they created without sex built an explicit, nonnormative sexual culture in a society that rigidly presented heterosexual love and family as the only legitimate and legal option.

Catholic religious will be happy to tell you that "heterosexual love and family" is the only moral option.

View on HN

The "nonnormative sexual culture" they are referring to is celibacy. Besides monks and nuns there are also hundreds of lay Catholic organizations that require members to remain celibate.

Early Christianity had indifference bordering on disdain for marriage, and there's no record of a Christian rite for marriage until the 9th century. Celibacy was considered the ideal. Same for the Shakers, which is why they died out.

I think that's because in the early decades Paul had the impression that the messiah was coming back any time now. Who needs children.

If you read his letters in chronological order (not bible order) you can see the wind come out those sails. :)

Not really.[0] This sounds like one of those bizarre confections that occasionally surface among progressive Protestants et al.

[0] https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-permanence-of-matrimony

Catholicism taught that celibacy is ideal until vatican II. Nominally, it still does.

That being said, marriage is still the only appropriate place for sex, and then only heterosexual sex, by church teaching. So both you and the one you replied to are correct.

> Catholic religious will be happy to tell you that “heterosexual love and family” is the only moral option.

The Catholic heirarchy will be happy to tell you that consistently.

Catholic religious are…not the same thing, and substantially more diverse.

(Source: been Catholic approximately my whole life, and known quite a few religious, having spent a long time in a parish run by an order, and some more time regularly attending and volunteering in a retreat center run by a different order.)

> The Catholic heirarchy will be happy to tell you that consistently.

To correct myself, actually, relevant to the instant article, no, even they won't. Because choosing neither heterosexual love nor family in the usual sense (or, for that matter, even the sense that religious communities are a kind of family, as both lay committed celibacy and eremetic life, both private and consecrated, are recognized vocations) is very much an option, even to the heirarchy.

They hierarchy is fairly certain to say romantic love and family are a moral option only within a committed, exclusive, heterosexual context, though.

Can you be specific? I anticipate that the people you are thinking of are heretics. I mean specifically that they deviate from dogmas of the church, not any colloquial definition.

Some Catholic priests and parishes are considerably more "progressive" than others. Every major city has at least one progressive parish, often it can be the Jesuit parish. Catholic teaching is quite strict that the purpose of sex is "bonding and babies." (More formally, sex is "unitive, marital, and procreative.") The progressive priests and bishops don't blatantly contradict this, but they do stress how "welcoming and inclusive" they are to practitioners of sexual acts that are neither unitive, marital, nor procreative, while never choosing to preach any homilies about God creating sex for the purpose of strengthening the bond between husband and wife and to enable the two to "be fruitful and multiply."

This is true in certain places, but far from universal. I'd be quite surprised if you found such progressive priests in Poland, for example. The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise - seems to be enforced very heavily there.

What's with your condescension? It's horrible.

The Catholic position is grounded in natural law theory. The telos of the sexual organs is essentially procreative; deny the procreative end and sex becomes incomprehensible. To use sexual organs in a manner that _intentionally_ works against their end is to intentionally frustrate their end. To intentionally thwart the operation of your faculties and misuse them is immoral and therefore contradicts one's fulfillment and actualization as a human being.

Calling people cattle for living in accordance with the procreative end of sexual intercourse, which is the ultimate end of sexual intercourse, is nasty, if not irrational. Before you do so, I suggest you acquaint yourself[0] with the actual position held and defended by the Catholic Church.

[0] https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/lets-think-a...

This is the naturalistic fallacy.

“The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise - seems to be enforced very heavily there.”

This is a straw man assertion…

> The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise

The church is perfectly fine with promiscuity, artificial insemination, sterilization etc. among cattle or pets.

The same behaviors they tell humans are immoral, because they think humans aren’t just cattle.

They consider them immoral, because humans, like cattle, have no right to decide for themselves.

Maybe Protestant Catholics, but that hasn’t been true since 34 AD :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com