Catholic Church and its obsession with sex - Part 2

How did Rome get sex so wrong?

Greek philosophy, particularly Stoicism, had a great influence on the formation of doctrines in the early Church. Stoicism is an ancient Greek philosophy developed by Zeno of Citium around 300 B.C., which teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions. Seneca, a stoic philosopher, who lived in the first century CE, held the following opinion: “sexual pleasure (libido) is a destructive force fixed in the innards; its only justification is reproduction in marriage”. The Church followed this idea and taught that marriage had only one purpose: the child.

Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 CE) reinforced this 

idea justifying it with his invention of the bizarre concept of ‘original sin’. (Please refer to my earlier blogs on Augustine and original sin).

According to him ‘Inter faeces et urinam nascimur, 

we are born betwixt piss and shit’. Augustine thought his out-of- control genitals were diabolical.

The only perfect marriage was sexless, the one 

between the Virgin Mary and her husband Joseph.

Instead of marrying and overcoming the guilt over his illicit affairs and for fathering a son, Augustine infected millions with it. With him began Rome’s great manufacture of sexual sins. 

The sexualization of sin was his invention. A single 

act of disobedience by one imaginary man, Adam, changed the structure of the universe – a most preposterous idea to enter the mind of man. The Church of Rome still clings to it and bases much of its teaching and practices on it.

With his ‘crime of eating an apple’, Adam messed up 

God’s plan. Nature itself was ‘denatured’. It ceased to be what it once was as God intended it to be: benign, deathless, with no sweaty male drudgery or female labor pains.

As the First Man, he represented everyone. His sin 

was everyone’s sin, like a hereditary disease. Augustine developed this crazy idea of inherited sin.

The Genesis myth of Adam’s disobedience was originally introduced by Paul; he needed this idea since his ‘idea of redemption hinged upon the contrast between the sin of Adam and the death and resurrection of Jesus.  For as in Adam all die, so in Christ, all will be made alive’. Up till then the transgression in the Garden of Eden had not been given great significance.

Rome still believes that this Genesis myth, initiated 

by Paul and grotesquely elaborated by Augustine, is a historical reality.

In the first 300 years, the Church followed Jesus to 

the letter. Had they foreseen the radical changes brought about when Constantine became Emperor in the 4^th century, they would have despaired. Christians enlisted as soldiers; bishops became civil servants of the hitherto hated Roman Empire. Popes began as Vicars of Peter who had nothing but an old boat. In time they lived like Emperors, dressed like them and spoke like them, ruled like them, stole their titles, lived in palaces with hundreds of rooms. Through all these changes, they still pretended to represent a Fisherman and a Carpenter. Critics never need to lie about the Catholic Church, only tell the truth.

[I am greatly indebted to Peter De Rosa for most of these ideas.]