The Cruel Magisterium
Every time I criticize the Roman Catholic Church's teachings on sex, women, and the body, I get a few notes from people who indicate that these same teachings have strengthened their marriages and allowed them to be "free." Free from what is never clearly stated, and I'm not callous enough to demand that my correspondents explain themselves in detail over what is a very personal matter and none of my (or anyone else's) business.
But I will stick to my condemnations of what I call the "Cruel Magisterium," and from time to time I will explain why in this space.
Let's start with the story of a friend of mine, whom I'll call Mark. He was small, studious, and geeky like the rest of us, with a quick grin and a passion (like me) for electronics and astronomy. When we were 13, Mark was a few months into puberty and hit the corner of a chain link fence with his bike. He went down hard and got tangled up in the mechanism in a bizarre way that included a nasty groin injury that literally ripped the skin of his scrotum. He bounced back pretty well, but a year later, while several of us were camped out in a tent in my backyard, he told us the rest of the story.
Six weeks or so after the stitches were removed and he was pretty much healed, Mark had to go back to the local Catholic hospital for a lookover that included a sperm count. The attending physician performed a procedure on him called a "scrotal massage" to get a sperm sample. As Mark put it, "He squeezed my balls until the stuff came out." The procedure, which took a fair amount of time, was so hideously painful (think about it!) that Mark screamed, to which the doctor simply replied, "Be quiet."
Now, there is an absolutely painless way to get a sperm sample from a 13-year-old boy:
- You tell him what you want.
- You give him something to put it in.
- You close the door.
Alas, the Cruel Magisterium allows no exceptions whatsoever to its prohibition on masturbation, which is always a mortal sin. The Roman Catholic Church, however, considered it perfectly acceptable to cause intense pain to a scared little boy, even though that pain was completely unnecessary in a medical context.
That was 1967. I've often wondered what Catholic hospitals do today when they need a sperm sample from a boy or an unmarried man. (Married couples with fertility problems gather sperm samples using perforated condoms.) I doubt they could get away with such a barbarous procedure anymore, and were I Mark's father I would have sued the physician and the hospital for child abuse. I suspect they now send such cases to secular clinics and just look the other way.
There are only two possible responses to this incident:
- You can condemn the teaching that required a Catholic hospital to needlessly hurt a small boy until he screamed. Or,
- You can endorse the teaching and the cruelty that it demands.
Sorry, folks, but there really isn't any other way out. When a church demands that cruelty be done, especially to children, it surrenders its moral authority completely. If you doubt it, reflect periodically on what poor Mark went through, then imagine that it was your own child.
I chose the door.