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Is there anybody in society who would not argue that the long-term stability of marriages is not a cornerstone of wider societal stability? Do any people seriously enter into a relationship with a hope that it will be temporary and short term? These are the bigger questions that lie behind this exploration of marriage that Tom McMahon is exploring in these series of commentaries. The reality is that throughout history the relationship between the sexes has posed challenges both at the societal level and the personal level. In today's commentary, Tom continues his exploration of attitudes to marriage in the MIddle Ages — as he puts it: "we tip toe thru the wilted tulips of the Middle Ages".

The Black Plague saw a "shut down" on skin...

In Commentary #3 on Marriage I ended with a stretch, having Carrion no longer at the River Styx but now doing preventive guarding of the entrance to the love chamber of female and male. A Carrion bird eats rotten flesh and the Middle Ages distrust of human flesh allows the monster of fear to distort the beauty of human creation and its major support system the art of touch; keep in mind the devastation offered by the Black Plague to human skin. Skin is the largest organ in the human body and is constantly breathing and open to sensitivity. The Middle Ages saw a shut down in skin that only broke free in the 1920's Flapper Age and the 1960's Sexual Revolt.

As an innocent child my only contact with "other women", besides my Mom, were my grade school nuns and what was my impression of their womanhood? Look back over what we saw in the "holy habit", a coverall that hid all skin under heavy muslin cloth, a hand-me-down disguise of beauty from the Middle Ages. And to boot the priests all wore sombre black. Take note of the innocence of a baby's skin, so rich in rosy beauty and attractiveness.

A genuine human love affair benefits from total nudity, a body condition wherein the whole person is revealed as much interiorly as exteriorly. The evolutionary smooth skin of the female is in sharp contrast to the hairy hunter male; Mae West will say in the 1900's "come up and see me sometime". Mae believed in her womanhood and she knew the power of attractiveness.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Arthur's Tomb — The Last Meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere (1854, Watercolour on paper) Img source: Wikipedia commons

I never knew the person of any of my grade school religious teachers; after Vatican Two the convents emptied and women went searching for their personal identity and their God-given sexuality. As watchful sentinel over the portals of human discovery a medieval version of Carrion guarded against human appreciation and awakening, keeping the individual psychologically immature and afraid of exposure, a terrible loss to the People of God. With their corporeal punishments the far-reaching clutches of the moral police of the medieval monastery reached out into the world of heterosexuality (for nearly 1000 years) and demanded cessation of the delicate natural feeling sensitivity that the Maker had provided as reward for propagating the species. The art of love making, with its Gueneveres and Lancelots, was to be mythically found among the troubadours and knights and condemned as an evil for the ordinary. The loving embrace of the far-off God would have to wait until we entered the pearly gates (soul without body). There was such a contradiction in saying God is love while denying any access to human love within the church system. Priests would be wedded to the church and breviary and nuns would become the "brides" of the phantom Christ. The evolutionary process of the sexual revolution of the 1960's tore away the fraudulent façade that covered God's sexual creation. Men like Fr. Thomas Berry would invite us to discover the God of love sleeping in the same bed and hoeing the vegetable garden. When I met John the 23rd on that memorable Ash Wednesday of 1961 I saw the incarnate love of Almighty God. The mystery of the living God was truly in the flesh/skin not only on Jesus but in all creation. Close to a thousand years of monastic captivity is being brought to a close by a well-informed literate generation … this "fresh air" for a later commentary … people outside Romanism are way ahead.

In the 1970's and thereafter, sparked by Vatican Two's honest effort to return the institutional church to the real world many priests led the way in exodus from a clericalism of fear, superstitions, and sexual hang-ups. 27,000 in the United States alone braved the uprooting from their enshrined clerical positions, most of us to marry.

All you want is to screw some woman...

One angry priest said to me "all you want is to screw some woman" and I replied, "yes, of course, with dignity according to God's plan". The great insult Rome has to offer to those of us who were ordained and chose to follow the call of the Holy Spirit into our second redeeming vocation was to reduce us to the lay state … I have humor here, lest I give way to anger over their insulting stupidity. (I never was laicised; I told the bishop I may have lost my call of old but I had not lost my mind. I sense my anger may be seen as being sent back to the lay state. I never left the lay state, the human state, because I was ordained. To demote a cleric to the lay state is arrogant and dishonors the position of all people.) Have hope ye mortals … God is on your/our side! Human sexuality is good and here to stay! My invitation to the pope and bishops: try it; you might like it. If it is of God it will persist (Epistle of Peter). But be careful; it takes guts, maturity, and hard work to survive in the modern marriage state. Seminary training ruins a man for social involvement.

What is the source or matrix from which this medieval pathology originated and continues to fester? I acknowledge I am prejudiced having grown up in a family with my widowed mother lovingly in charge; my Mom continued to love my Dad fifty years after his deat.. Somewhere around the 10th century power fell into the hands of the once Christian thinking monks. I cannot put my finger on the moment that it happened. I see the influence of "The Donation of Constantine", dated 30 March 315 CE, as the corner stone of the struggle for earthly power by the Vatican. This deed or gift from the Emperor to Pope Sylvester plunged the church system into the centuries-long power struggle among old Europe's kings; it reads:

Fresco of the Donation of Constantine in the Church of the Quattro Coronati in Rome. Click image to see full size original.

"We (Constantine) convey to Sylvester, universal pope, both our palace and likewise all provinces and palaces and districts of the city of Rome and Italy and of the regions of the west."

The papacy was in full pursuit of earthly dominance. The dusty crumbled document, preserved for centuries in the papal archives, has been proven to be a fraud. Yet when Pope John Paul the 2nd on his world-wide ventures kissed the airport tarmac of Buenos Ares he was making a statement that this soil (and people) continue to be under the jurisdiction and protection of the Vatican. The Vatican thinks it owns the world and all peoples … in the name of God. I'll go with God owns the world but not the Vatican.

In Commentary #4 I ended with two tunnels through which the process of desexualization got under way, namely the Cult of Mary and the biological state of homosexuality. I call them tunnels because of the dark and mysterious developmental pathways of imaged persons who needed to be separated from ordinary people so as to place Mary's son in the realm of the gods. In commenting on the two statues in Assumption Church, San Leandro (my 1954 first assignment) I opened the doorway to discussion of the maternal power of the woman Mary and her human relationship to Joseph. Some saw me as treading on a sacred cow, those human mysteries accepted from youth without discussion or understanding. Our modern biology demands explanation while questioning the obvious contradiction of a virgin-mother. Either there is acceptance of God far "out there", looking down and micro managing human experiences or there are other plausible interpretations of language and literary styles of expression of long past cultures. A modern people are interested and politely curious … not just Roman Catholics.

A 4th century custom developed around the wife and priest-husband the evening before he was to lead the community in celebrating the Lord's Day with Mass. Women silently kept the wife busy and apart from her husband (at least for Saturday night) … they falling back on the ancient taboo that menstrual blood contaminated the altar-man. Centuries on, monastery cloisters will complete the job and prevent entrance of the female into male sacred territory. The "man of God” will become untouchable and the Council of Trent will seal the priest in the unmovable mask. When I was a deacon, 1953 on summer vacation, I brought a young married couple to tour my seminary, Saint Patrick's, Menlo Park, Ca. All went well especially the magnificent chapel but catastrophe struck as I showed them, from the door, the swimming pool; the rector, an ascetic whom we believed would die with his ears blown off as he held his nose to suppress sneezing, came running in bathing suit to the door violently shouting "Get her out of here! Get her out of here!" The "theology "of 10th century monasticism was in full practice as I was about to enter the roman priesthood. Oh how we rejoiced when John the 23rd opened the institutional windows to let in fresh air. In 1966 I saw the opportunity for my becoming a real mature human being. Some say Vatican Two has died; I suggest that many breath the clean fresh air of freedom and wisdom to which the Council introduced us. A medieval church was pulled, kicking and screaming, into the modern world … and is still kicking and screaming, pissing into the wind.

We stand at the tunnel entrance to homosexuality … ancient and modern…

It was in the 18th century that terminology was created to describe what is now clinically known as homosexuality and lesbianism. I close this commentary with the front cover (left) and text of the back cover (below) of John Boswell's SAME SEX UNIONS IN PRE-MODERN EUROPE. I encourage you to get to know Serge and Bacchus, 7th century saints whose marriage certificate is in the Orthodox museum in Kiev and whose chief witness to the contract is none other than Jesus. Read the back cover to orientate yourself to the reality of a world long ago yet alive with the same conditions that we experience today.

The world of the Roman Empire was a world heavy with homosexuality; this world was closeted behind medieval monastic doors, only to have the closet door opened in the 21st century. One will understand nature more if one comes to this experience with openness and no pre-judgments. How did Jesus historically react to such situations and how does the Jesus of today respond?

(I copy the words of the back cover of Same Sex Unions )

"At a time when structures against homosexuality are the subject of impassioned debate. this ground breaking work of scholarship has generated extraordinary controversy. For in Same Sex Unions in Pre Modern Europe Yale historian John Boswell, one of our most respected authorities on the Middle Ages, produces extensive evidence that at one time the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches not only sanctioned unions between partners of the same sex but sanctified them — in ceremonies that bear striking resemblance to heterosexual marriage ceremonies.

Drawing on a wide range of languages — and examples and legends that range from the 4th century legend of Serge and Bacchus to the ceremonial union of the Byzantine emperors Basil I and Michael III — Boswell boldly reveals how the same tradition that looked askance at all sexuality could also encompass — and at times idealize — loving partnerships between two men or women. Most impressively he produces actual examples of ceremonies in which such love was formally consecrated until modern times. The result is one of those rare works of scholarship that has the power to transform the way we live now –even as it revises our understanding of the past."

The Nation: "Same Sex Unions will unquestionably challenge a number of cherished assumptions about the nature and history of Christianity".

Tom in outpost San Jose, Ca., with an eye on present conditions and wondering if your Doctor/Cardinal Pell will read this commentary? 03/04/2009

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Image Credits: The image used in the headline is adapted from an image available from AllPosters entitled "Tender Passion" available at: www.allposters.com. Clicking on the images in the body of the article will take you to the original source.

[Index of Commentaries by Tom McMahon]