Madam, - John Cleary (December 28th) asserts that the Catholic Church has "a deep-rooted and centuries-long suspicion of male sexuality". He raises an interesting point, but his assertion is not borne out by reference to Scripture.
It is clear from the reading of Genesis 3:16 favoured by both the Catholic Douai-Rheims Bible and the Protestant King James Bible that the consequences of original sin were, and always have been: problems with fecundity, childbirth, and carnal concupiscence; problems with the environment and earning a living; decay and death.
Until original sin, mankind enjoyed a pre-pubertal sexual innocence. To judge by the one human being we know of who is free from original sin, the Blessed Virgin Mary, human procreation before original sin seems to have been virginal, that is, not involving an active role on the part of either the male or the female. Whatever precisely is meant by eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, carnal concupiscence is seen as a major consequence of it, if not the major one.
Christ came to redeem us so that we could be reborn by water and the Holy Spirit, apparently the original way of procreation, and not by the will of the flesh or of man.
Yet obviously, by relying on human generation down as far as the parents of the Blessed Virgin, the Lord pre-redeemed human procreation, even carnal concupiscence, and Catholics believe that by his attendance at the Wedding Feast at Cana, Christ recognized human marriage as a sacrament.
The world doesn't see it that way. The world promotes unbridled carnal concupiscence as sexual liberation. The Church sees that as enslavement. The Church values human procreation and carnal concupiscence as redeemed by the Lord. The world doesn't. The world looks on priestly and religious celibacy as a form of depravity. The Church sees in priestly and religious celibacy the way things were meant to be originally, and the way they'll be in Heaven.
The world is forever messing with human procreation, and trying to get in on God's act - lately, for example, through assisted human reproduction, and the destruction of embryonic stem cells. - Yours, etc,