Church’s rigid approach to sex came from same source as those who later fought it
FORNICATION is an unpleasant word with heavy overtones of religious disapproval. Last weekend, the second reading at mass was from St Paul railing against fornication. As people were processing yet another grim report on the consequences of a society warped by sexual oppression, a mass-going friend fretted about the bad timing and wondered if they should drop that reading.
In it, Paul warned the Corinthians, to whom he was writing, “your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit” and “to fornicate is to sin against your own body”.
This was the kind of language deployed in our lifetimes to shame people for their sexual activity and prevent them using contraception.
Anything other than sexual relations within a marriage for the sole purpose of creating children was a sin.
But I defended St Paul to my concerned friend. Context is everything.
In Dominion, an amazing book documenting how Christianity has shaped western thinking, author Tom Holland describes how Paul was writing when Nero was Roman emperor and had declared himself divine.
Slavery was commonplace and it was accepted masters were entitled to use their slaves’ bodies however they desired.
In Latin, the same word, meio, meant both to ejaculate and urinate. Holland says: “In Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did use the side of the road as a toilet.”
In 64AD, Nero threw a great street party in which brothels were populated not just by prostitutes but also aristocratic women. Normally inviolate, Nero declared that even blue-blooded women were forbidden from refusing anyone – slave or free.
It was open season. Sex was an exercise of power.
What Paul was preaching was that everyone, slave and free, had the right to bodily integrity. Paul was persuading Christians not to use other people as Romans did their slaves and women. While his words were used to repress in later times, back then he represented moral progress and enlightenment. It was genuinely revolutionary.
Lest we think we’d moved on from Nero, last weekend Eoghan Harris in the Sunday Independent reminded readers that many of the unfortunate women who ended up in mother and baby homes were the servant girls of farmers who took a Roman approach to life.
Had they listened to Paul, and not used their women servants as the Romans did their slaves, the quantum of misery in the country would have been significantly reduced.
But how times change.
The previous Wednesday (January 13), TG4 aired a wonderful programme produced by Aisling Ní Fhlaitheartha and presented by RTÉ’s Orla O’Donnell. It was about Dr Andrew Rynne and – to use that dislikeable word – fornication.
On this subject Rynne, like St Paul, represented revolution and enlightenment but from quite another angle.
Rynne qualified as a doctor in Ireland and emigrated to Canada. There, as a GP, he was required to perform many kinds of procedures, including vasectomies. On his return to Ireland he began working with the Irish Family Planning Association, performing vasectomies.
Bizarrely, while contraception was banned, vasectomies were not as they were so novel they didn’t feature in legislation.
Rynne wanted to offer sterilisation to women but no hospital would give him permission; thus revealing the bishops couldn’t have managed without doctors rigidly enforcing Catholic teaching.
So Rynne founded his own hospital in Clane which still thrives today.
The joy of this programme was Rynne’s personality: a lively, non-judgmental, witty man. He said that for him it was simple; if someone didn’t want to have children, they shouldn’t have to.
Rynne was offering a new form of bodily integrity – one we now consider just as sacred as the right not to be penetrated against our will. He combined his passion for this principle with a great sense of mischief.
Rightly identifying the Haughey solution of prescribing condoms for married couples only as ridiculous, Rynne reported himself to the gardaí for selling condoms. The subsequent court case exposed the ludicrousness of the law and shortly thereafter Barry Desmond, Labour minister for health, legalised the sale of condoms.
An astonishing part of Rynne’s story was when he was shot by a former patient. The man’s life had fallen apart after his vasectomy. He projected all his troubles on to Rynne and showed up in Clane with a shotgun, and used it. Rynne fled, injured, while a five-hour stand-off took place in the field beside his surgery.
The gardaí persuaded the man to give himself up peacefully. They were so good they even gave him a pint of Guinness to help keep him calm.
Rynne was such a wise soul he later went to visit the man in the Central Mental Hospital and helped him talk it out. Thus he demonstrated another great Christian gift – forgiveness.
Rather than nursing his own victimhood and turning himself into a martyr, he showed the most extraordinary resilience by applying a sense of humour to the drama.
He laughed telling the story. In fact, he laughed all the time. I’ve always despised piety, from priests or campaigners. Rynne’s wonderful humour showed justice can be achieved with a smile.
It’s deeply ironic that Rynne successfully fought the Church’s rigid approach to sex – a legacy of St Paul – yet they had such common cause: one’s right to bodily integrity. They each represented moral progress though that looked very different in such different times.
Paul was preaching that everyone, slave and free, had the right to bodily integrity. Paul was persuading Christians not to use people as Romans did their slaves and women