I've long thought we should ban all variations of the word "moral" from public discourse, not because I believe the public arena is no place for morality, but because I detect that a misleading resonance of this concept, derived from our experience of Catholic teaching and tradition, causes such discussions to short-circuit into misunderstanding, writes John Waters.
By some trick of the culture, the word "moral" is read instantly as code for a proscription, a fun- or freedom-inhibiting injunction to avoid something pleasurable because it is "sinful". It doesn't help that such concepts are invariably articulated by elderly men, creating an immediate and pre-empting dichotomy between a full embracing of reality in all its tumult, and a fearful retreat from life on the basis that its full enjoyment represents a danger to the soul.
This syndrome cropped up in the recent statement of the Irish bishops concerning the report of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Child Protection. Responding to the proposal to reduce the age of consent to 16, the bishops expressed their "deep concern" at "the lack of any reference to the moral issues involved". The statement went on: "The question of child protection should not blind the public to the broader issues, such as the increase in teenage sexual activity and its consequences in terms of danger not only to their physical and psychological health, but also, and in particular, to their moral well-being." Most striking here is the explicit separation between the "physical and psychological health" of teenagers and their moral welfare. In conventional discourse, the physical and psychological welfare of teenagers are matters of a profoundly moral complexion.
Protecting children from sexual abuse is a moral issue (I don't suggest the bishops implied otherwise) but there are many others bound up in the complex legal and cultural folds of this controversy. For example, protecting teenage boys from disproportionate penalties based on doublethink and hypocrisy is an important moral issue, since, over the years, many young men have had their lives destroyed by charges of statutory rape levelled in the context of consensual sexual activity.
Idiosyncratic notions of morality have served to obscure rather than expose this grievous immorality. A key element of the problem is that the word "moral", when used by someone speaking from what purports to be a Catholic perspective, suggests itself as alluding exclusively to "sinful" aspects of sexual behaviour, with the implication that such "sinfulness" has to do with rules whose authority is external to the context of the alleged "sinner", seemingly concerned with setting limits on the "freedom" of the individual for purposes which the belief system of our secular culture now renders unclear. In reality, Catholic teaching on sexuality is concerned with the effects of non-marital sex on the psycho-spiritual integrity of the human person and elaborates the concept of "sin" as something we commit predominantly against ourselves.
At the core of its thinking is a concept of freedom quite removed from the understanding of our present pubic culture. This distinction might be defined as the difference between the freedom to indulge and the freedom from indulgence, secular culture believing that the human body is capable of "liberation", whereas the church teaches that the body cannot be thought of separately from the total human person.
The objection of Catholicism to non-nuptial sexual activity arises because, since each of us is made in the image of Christ, the exploitation of another human will always have extreme and ineluctable consequences. In this definition, there is no separation between the moral dimension and the physical/psychological welfare of the individual. In John Paul II's Gospel of the Body, there is a profound sense of revelation concerning the erroneous models of sexual freedom we have come to take for granted. Similarly, Benedict XVI's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, in which he rebutted any notion of a Catholic awkwardness concerning human sexuality, while emphasising the church's objection to the trivialisation of eros.
This idea, indeed, was touched on in the above mentioned statement of the Irish bishops, when they noted, "For Christians, sex is anything but trivial". But this reference was too subtle and fleeting to unseat the conventional apprehension of the church's voice, which once again was heard to articulate some abstract and arcane objection to sexuality and could therefore be factored out of the calculation concerning what our modern society should do next. Beyond the semantics, the church is actually right. But the welfare of children will not be secured by proscriptions or laws that limit what they have been taught to see as freedoms they are simply too young for. We stand a chance of convincing - and therefore liberating them only if we can communicate that what is posited as a freedom is actually a form of enslavement that will damage them in body, mind and soul. "Moral", in other words, means what is good for us. This is what the church, expert in humanity, tells us, but it is a message that, reduced and over-simplified by generations of conflict in the public arena, is heard only by those who no longer need to hear it.