Love is for Life: Pastoral Letter of the Irish Bishops
PART II Putting Love Into Love
(13.) LOVELESS SEX
(13.1) Pornography
109 Human love is the theme which has inspired the world's greatest
literature, painting and sculpture, music, drama and dance. Some of the
best productions of the newer art forms, cinema and television, have also
been devoted to this endlessly creative theme. Love has brought great beauty
into human experience. Humanity is impoverished when this beauty is brutalised.
Pornography is a form of brutalising of sex, portraying it as separated
from love, from tenderness, from human nobility and dignity. When we compare
the great artists' portrayal of sexuality with the pornographers', we realise
how squalid and dehumanising pornography is.
110. Pornography has grown into a mammoth industry. Its huge profits are
amassed out of the desecration of sexuality and the degradation of persons,
notably the degradation of women. It is sadly the case that, when the greed
for money can be allied with another powerful human passion, such as sex,
the combination generates a mighty destructive force. Such also is the power
and the prestige of money in modern society, that powerful, if not always
public, pressure groups can be mobilised for the diffusion of propaganda
protecting the interests and maximising the profits of the various divisions
of the "sex industry". The godfathers of pornography have succeeded
in presenting it as harmless, playful, perhaps even therapeutic, liberating
and progressive. Innocent shorthand names for it have been popularised.
Critics of pornography have been made objects of ridicule, called prudes
and puritans. Attempts to prevent it are attacked as "censorship "
.
111. A loathsome department of the pornography industry is the production
of specialised pornography for teenagers. The market researchers whose business
it is to keep enlarging the market for this vile trade, are working successfully
to build up a younger and younger readership for pornographic "comics"
and videos. The various branches of the sex industry support each other,
and are often directly linked. The publishers of pornography give much space
in their productions to advertising or promotional features advocating contraceptives
and abortion. The commercial motivation here is obviously strong. The more
people there are who can be made "sexually active", and the younger
they are, the more profits will return to the "sex industry" as
a whole.
112 The context in which young people first encounter or experience sexuality
is crucial for their future development. The ideas and associations formed
in youth can have long-lasting effects. To think of sex as dissociated from
love and from marriage, from fidelity, exclusiveness and permanence, can
be the means of starting a young person on a career of casual and loveless
sex. Pornography assists the trend towards a loveless and violent society.
Not even children are spared by the pornographic industry. There are few
more glaring signs of moral evil than the use of children in the preparation
of pornographic photographs and films. In pornography generally, and specifically
in pornography for children, violence occupies a growing place. So-called
"video nasties" are among the ugliest blots upon our time.
113. Many European Bishops' Conferences have, in recent years, issued statements
denouncing pornography as one of the great plagues of modern society. The
Belgian Bishops spoke of it as a "black tide" of moral pollution
on the shores of their country. Ireland is already seen by the merchants
of pornography as a market with particularly tempting prospects for expansion.
114. It is depressing when ordinary newspapers and magazines compete with
one another in the race for increased sales and profits by trying out how
they can gradually venture closer and closer to the borderline of pornography.
This trend professes to be "adult" and "mature". In
fact, such displays are a form of "voyeurism" and encourage adults
into becoming "peeping Toms". The use of obscene words has for
some become almost a compulsive reflex. Sexual suggestiveness pervades much
of the entertainment scene and has become a commonplace of everyday conversation.
Some perfectly ordinary words have become loaded with sexual innuendo. These
are signs of decadence in a culture. They are well-known phases of immature
moral and psychological development.
115. A new type of explicitly pornographic product with almost unlimited
possibilities for growth is the pronographic video-cassette. We believe
that it is a matter of urgency in Ireland that this new form of commerce
be brought under some appropriate form of legal control. We earnestly
appeal to Christians who work in the fields of publication and printing,
book and periodical marketing, audio-visual equipment, entertainment and
media, to see pornography for the unqualified evil which it is Christians
must not sell pornographic material They must regard resistance to pornography
as their Christian duty. We ask parents to exercise care regarding the reading
or the viewing material permitted in their homes. They should not only endeavour
to forbid wrongful material to their children, but should try to show them
why it is wrong. Above all, they should try to encourage good reading and
viewing material.
116. Critics of pornography are often challenged by the question: "But
what harm does it do?". Sociological and statistical evidence is brought
forward to suggest that pornography has no demonstrable evil consequences.
The response must be that pornography is wrong in itself. It tends to deprave
and corrupt because it is itself corrupt It constitutes an assault on the
dignity of the human person, on the respect due to the human body and the
reverence due to sexuality. Pornography constitutes an assault on the dignity
of the human person, on the respect personhood of women to the level of
sexual objects for men's physical enjoyment. Never in pornographic material,
and all too rarely in modern advertising, are women represented as persons
to whom men might look for intelligent conversation or interesting ideas
or equal companionship. For the pornographer, and too often for the advertiser,
women are assumed to be of interest to males only as desirable sexual bodies,
to be seized and possessed for male sexual pleasure. Women are used as bodies
for selling products. They are treated as being ultimately themselves products
for taking, just like any saleable object. Pornography turns sex into a
consumer product and a perpetual occasion for the creation of new product
needs. Pornography thus uses persons as means- it treats persons as things.
This could stand as a definition of immorality. Pornography does harm because
it is wrong in itself . It places sex in a context of lovelessness, of exploitation,
of taking without giving, of pleasure without commitment. It associates
sex with violence, cruelty, male domination of women,
117. The struggle against pornography requires that young people be provided
with an appropriate programme of education in human love and relationships,
to enable them to see sexuality in its true nobility and dignity and beauty,
in its human and spiritual wholeness. It also requires that young people
be introduced to an appreciation of what is noble and great in mankind's
literary and artistic tradition, so that they can distinguish pornography
from good literature and art. We must not be content to condemn bad reading
and viewing. We must positively encourage good reading and viewing. Our
country has obstacles to overcome in this regard. Abuse of censorship laws
in the past banned as pornography works of serious literature. Injustice
was thereby done to some of our best writers and artists. Harm was done
to the community's aesthetic appreciation. We can only look back on these
aberrations with embarrassment. But they must not be made an excuse now
for capitulating before pornography. This would be still more certain to
do injustice to serious writers and artists and to harm the community, not
only morally and spiritually but aesthetically as well.
(13.2) Rape
118 The sinfulness of separating sex from love is most clearly seen
in the case of rape. The wrongfulness of rape is recognised universally;
and virtually all are agreed about the reasons for its wrongfulness. Rape
is infamous and is seen to be infamous, precisely because it is a brutal
assault on the dignity of women and because it totally separates sex from
love. Sex is a language which of its nature speaks of love. If instead it
speaks of violence and humiliation, as it does in the case of rape, it becomes
perverse. Rape is wrong also because sex is a loving exchange of self-giving.
This implies partners who respect each other as equal in dignity and who
freely consent to give and to be given to each other, to possess and to
be possessed lovingly by each other. It is characteristic of rape that is
expresses no,,love but sheer physical lust combined with hatred and violence;
it expresses, not respect for the other's feelings, but contempt; not the
desire to give but the will to overpower and to humiliate and to dominate.
119. Rape is the most glaring example of the desecration of the mystery
of sexuality. The increase of rape in modern society can be seen as a signal
which warns of the special vulnerability of women in a society where Christian
standards of sexual morality are breaking down. Meanwhile, a Christian society
must examine itself honestly about the trends in that society which induce
a lowering of reverence for sexuality. A Christian society must ask whether
the frequent association of sex with violence in some media programmes,
as well as in the cinema and the video cassette, may be correlated with
the incidence of rape. Christians must ask whether tolerance of pornography
and of near-pornographic advertising is not a constant invitation to that
male attitude towards women which the rapist expresses in its grossest form.
It has been said, with reason: "Pornography is the theory; rape is
the practice". Christians must be vigilant against the double standards
sometimes applied to the man and to the woman in cases of rape. We must
expunge from our legal conventions and our social attitudes the surviving
traces of male superiority and of the idea that sexual domination is a manifestation
of true masculinity, or that women who are raped must be presumed to be
secretly consenting. All this is only to recall in different words the basic
precept of Christian sexual morality: "put love into sexuality",
"put love-charity into love sexuality"; or, as Pope John Paul
has put it: "put love into love".
120. The format for taking evidence from women who have been raped needs
to be as little hurtful as possible to victims and should be extremely sensitive
to the shock and suffering they have endured. There seems no reason why
rape and sexual assault cases should be held in camera. A corps of police
personnel should be specially trained to deal with cases of rape, and their
training should include some familiarity with the psychological counselling
of rape victims. Women police should be available for the questioning of
women who have been assaulted . A panel of women doctors should be available
for the medical examination for forensic evidence. There should be women
on all rape trial juries. The complainant should have the right to be accompanied
at the questioning and in court by a counseller . Because of the special
stress and suspense of women in such situations, court hearings should take
place as soon as possible after the incident. The present' legal definition
of rape technically limits it to sexual intercourse, thereby excluding other
forms of perverse sexual violation. This should be reviewed. Drink should
not be regarded as an extenuating factor in the case of rape, any more than
in the case of traffic offences. Steps should be taken to secure more consistency
in sentencing. The adversarial procedures for court hearings of rape cases
need also to be reformed, so that rape victims are not made to re-live in
public court the trauma of the rape itself and are not subjected to insensitive
interrogation or hurtful insinuation of consent. Furthermore, in court hearings
in general, ways could surely be found of protecting women from the prurient
public exposure of the most intimate details of their lives. Recent examples
of this have not enhanced public respect either for the judicial process
or for the media. Rape is a most distressing experience for its victims.
The psychological effects are traumatic and can be lasting. Those who provide
counselling and support for rape victims are to be highly commended.
121. Following rape, immediate interventions to remove semen and prevent
fertilisation are morally right. They are part of a woman's legitimate resistance
to the rapist's attack. If, however, fertilisation were nevertheless to
occur and pregnancy result following rape, there is a new and innocent human
life present, whose right to life must be respected. Pills designed to prevent
the implantation of a fertilised ovum and thus effect its expulsion would
really be abortifacient; that is to say, their effect would be the early
termination of a human life, which is in fact early abortion.
Net publishing courtesy of the Newman Center at Caltech
Back to: Table of Contents