John Zmirak is a genius. I want to write like him when I grow up.

I can’t speak for everyone with an Irish-American mom — not that they’re used to getting a word in edgewise — but I really did grow up thinking that sexual sins weren’t merely the worst forms of evil but, aside from foul language, the only ones. I’ll never forget my mother sitting with her box of Entenmann’s, happily munching away to a video of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 as some psychopath opened a teenager’s head with a coroner’s saw. When the dying teenager spluttered the F-bomb, mom sighed and wondered aloud, “Now why’d they have to ruin a perfectly nice movie with that kind of filth?” This incident made me wonder how many IRA terrorists walked away from their bombs with clear consciences — then trooped off to confession for impure thoughts.

[snip]

I know that I’m not the only person who feels a little . . . squeamish when speakers wax eloquent about the Theology of the Body. I’m perfectly comfortable with the Church’s traditional discussion of Chastity: that it’s part of the virtue of Temperance, designed to restrain a biological drive within the bounds of reason and charity. Couples owe each other a marital “debt,” which if refused can put one or both parties into the occasion of mortal sin. (And the Church managed to say all this long before the invention of the Internet.) The marital act of love is not “merely” the method for generating new human souls, but also the ordinary means of grace within the sacrament; in other words, sexual intercourse is to being married what saying Mass is to being a priest.

In the stricter (“perfect”) form of Chastity, the clergy and religious are called to a sterner discipline, inspired by Christ’s example to wed themselves not to a single person but to Christ and His Church. Hence their calling is in some sense truly higher — and their falls the more abysmal, in case you don’t read the news.

What makes me squirm in my seat is when Catholic writers try to compensate for sexual attitudes like . . . well, those I grew up with by laying really heavy emphasis on the theological realities of marriage — more emphasis than ordinary human experience will bear. It may well be true, as one Theology of the Body writer likes to emphasize, that in some sense marital intercourse helps both partners to enter into the “inner life of the Holy Trinity.” But is that kind of thinking . . . sexy? I’m single, so readers can correct me here, but the last thing I want to hear about on my wedding night is Trinitarian theology. If the Sorrowful Mysteries make lousy foreplay — sorry, Mom — the Joyful ones won’t do much better.

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