Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Thomas has an excellent post about the debate of some years ago in which Janet Smith quashed Fr. Charlie Curran in Dallas over the issue of contraception.  He includes the audio of the debate and an article covering the debate, from a (not very) Catholic newspaper which I will not name.

Curran is clearly out matched in articulate presentation as well as logical argumentation.  I won’t summarize the debates or arguments here; I will let you help use up the rest of Thomas’ bandwidth for the month as you listen to it.  Rather, I would like to mention one of Curran’s arguments using the terms he has coined: “physicalism” or “biologism.”

Here what he means as far as contraception is concerned, is that in looking at the telos of the sexual act, he claims the Church reduces the acts moral character to the physical aspects of act itself.  Fr. Benedict Ashley addresses Curran on this point.

Fr. Ashley finds that Curran calls it the “fallacy” of Thomists in trying to ascertain the morality of human acts by determining the teleology of various bodily parts.  Curran claims that this approach succumbs to the Stoic reduction of human morality to the teleology of animal instincts.  Ashley agrees with Curran that one must reject the Stoic reduction but argues that Curran’s complete separation of human morality from the teleology of the human body falls into Platonic dualism (Cf. Benedict Ashley, Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian [Braintree, MA: The Pope John Center, 1985/1995], 369-70).

Platonic dualism or, perhaps, Cartesian dualism but dualism nonetheless.  It is the separation of the person from his body.  It is a materialist presupposition that seems to think that the body and the material world have little to do with the physical world.  If Fr. Charile has paid attention during his philosophy courses he would not fall into this Cartesianism.  He would recognize that the soul is the substantial form of the body, likewise the body expresses the soul.  Thus, the telos of sexuality express something about the soul, in fact, about the entire person.

Curran’s reductionism also fails to recognize the ontological nature of acts for the person.  In other words, a human act (or an act of volition) has a perduring effect on the person for the better or worse.  In a certain sense, the act resides in the soul and becomes part of the person.  Pardoxically, Curran thinks that he is trying to maintain the totality of the good of the marriage by allowing contraception within marriage.  However, he refuses to see that he fragments the human person and isolates him from his actions in the process.

We have posted on Fr. Charlie here previously.  His arrogance is well attested to and it is no small arrogance for someone who has sworn an oath of obedience to teach the gospel under the authority of the Magisterium, to think that he has it right and the Church is wrong.  Curran justifies himself because he finds a few issues like slavery and religious freedom, which can easily be reconciled as development of doctrine, which he thinks show that the Church can be wrong and so they warrant his disobedient arrogance.  Pray for Fr. Charlie that his heart may be softened, that he repent of his sins, and that he spend the rest of the time he has left on this earth trying to repair the great damage he has done to Christ’s Church.

Go over a listen to Dr. Smith expose Fr. Curran’s faulty thinking.