Prof. Clark on Mahony, Playboy

Archbishop Mahony’s attack on Playboy is not a tactical blunder. It is an opportunity for our new leader to uphold the family as the only valid context for human sexuality, and to challenge our complacency with a widespread “sex is fun” attitude. Sex is fun, but it is much more than that, carrying with it all cases, enormous moral implications. Our culture takes every opportunity to detach sex from its implications, and it is part of the job of an archbishop to say occasionally that we cannot detach these implications.

As a liberal Catholic supporter of Mahony, I too, hope he does not become overly vocal about a host of sexual issues that are better treated lightly in comparison with pressing social issues. Premarital sex, homosexuality, contraception, abortion, divorce--all of these need to be treated with pastoral compassion and not with mordant moralism. But I do not think Mahony is denying this. Rather, he is giving us a context for the discussion of all sexual morality, and it is the family, with all the responsibilities attendant thereto, which is the undetachable context of sex.

The archbishop is not a prude. Prudery comes about with undue emphasis on sexual matters, particularly on the more trivial sexual matters, such as mild pornography. Even light porn has an incendiary effect on passions, and any letting sex out of context is a slippery slope. If it does not slip into sadism, it does slip into the objectifying of the opposite sex into a target for random passion. In particular, the churches ought to give the message to children that sex is for adults, and that adult means something other than a synonym for pornographic. People who beat the drum of purity constantly are bores, but when so many other drumbeats are leading us in the opposite direction, an occasional slap at filth should be allowed.

Clark is right in saying that many in our society see the claims of a cleric against mild porn as hopeless, and as a turnoff that may hurt the archbishop’s effectiveness for larger moral issues. But the archbishop is not just a political strategist. He cannot dodge an issue that will lose him constituents, if he sees that silence will do harm to other constituents. Politics works like that, but moral leadership does not. Meanwhile, it is exhilarating to have a giant like Mahony leading the church in Los Angeles.

ROBERT E. DOUD

Glendale