c. 2004 Religion News Service

ROME _ A provocative new book written by two Italian Catholics in good standing argues that it is a mistake to consider the church “sexophobic.” After all, the book says, “God invented sex.”

Despite its racy title, “It’s a Sin Not to Do It: Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex and the Church Has (Almost) Never Dared to Tell You,” the book takes a scholarly approach to the topic, drawing on the Bible, documents of the Vatican, the Second Vatican Council and the writing of churchmen, including Pope John Paul II.

Published in Italian by Edizioni Piemme, the 254-page book concludes with an interview with Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, the 90-year-old archbishop emeritus of Ravenna-Cervia, who is a respected commentator on the Italian church.

“The problem is to offer a healthy taste for life,” the cardinal says. “Then sex too regains its true place.”

Talking about the book by telephone, co-author Roberto Beretta said, “People think that the church is afraid of sexuality. We have tried to show that instead this is not so.” He said the misconception arises from a failure to properly understand theology and Christian philosophy.

Beretta writes about culture for the Milan-based L’Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Conference of Bishops. His collaborator, Elisabetta Broli, is a journalist and student of theology.

The authors, who describe themselves as “liberal Catholics,” say they did not ask for Vatican approval and have received no indication of disapproval. “The Vatican simply doesn’t enter into it,” Beretta said. Stating that “God invented sex,” the book notes that the first words that God said to Adam and Eve in the first chapter of Genesis were, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth …”

Original sin _ Adam and Eve disobeying God’s command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil _ has nothing to do with sex even though its first effect was to make the couple aware of their nakedness, the book says. Original sin, it says, “is not a sin tied to the sexual sphere but to faith.”

The book notes that Jesus is descended from King David, an adulterer, and Jesus consorted with prostitutes. It interprets a passage in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew as Jesus praising a homosexual centurion.

It describes the Old Testament Song of Solomon as “eight super-erotic chapters.”

In fact, Beretta and Broli contend, the church makes sex “obligatory” because “if it is not consummated, matrimony does not exist for the church but is only a legal contract, which can be broken.” In other words, failure to consummate a marriage is grounds for annulment.

The celibacy imposed on priests by the Lateran Council of 1139 “is of a practical and spiritual nature,” they assert. “It does not derive at all from contempt or the lesser dignity of matrimony and not even from an abstract idea of major purity.”

The book quotes Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the hard-line prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, writing on the thesis that “the love of God resembles that between spouses.”

It offers the pope commenting to his flock on “love and responsibility” when he was still Archbishop Karol Wojtyla of Krakow in Poland. Wojtyla tells men that they must “learn how to make love” and offers them some practical advice.

“From the point of view of the love of the person and of altruism,” Wojtyla writes, “it is necessary to demand that in the sexual act the man is not the only one to reach the culminating point of sexual excitement and that this is produced with the participation of the woman and not at her expense.”

DH/PH END RNS