c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Pope John XXIII once explained that he convened Vatican Council II in 1962 to open some windows and let fresh air into a Church long closed off from the world.

Through his first encyclical, “God Is Love,” Pope Benedict XVI does virtually the same thing in 2006. Writing about the mystery of God’s love for us and our love for each other, he describes eros as a healthy component of human experience. He thereby opens a long-sealed window in official Catholicism in which anything concerning sex has been left in the dark.

By letting sunlight and fresh air in he has also done more than all the resolutions, apologies or even the sex abuse lawsuits have done to heal the wounds that Catholics have suffered in general because of distorted teachings on sexuality.

Unlike many church leaders who seem to blush and stammer when they speak of anything sexual, Benedict addresses the subject like a pastor who has heard the confessions of the whole world and never given a harsh penance to anybody.

The long-term rejection of the basic healthiness of eros and human sexuality led to an official embarrassment with these elements that had to be smuggled into human experience and made acceptable only for the purpose of continuing the human race.

This view also divided human personality into good and bad parts _ the soul and the body, the spirit and the flesh _ and made life an unending border war between them. This corruption of the fundamental Christian outlook made human beings into an insoluble mystery to themselves, making them feel guilty for being healthy human beings with sexual feelings.

That tragic misreading of human nature contributed to an imbalance in certain Catholic environments that caused great suffering for many ordinary Catholics as they tried to understand their sexuality after it had been made to seem out of synchronization with the pursuit of holiness.

Many good people experienced difficulty maturing in Catholic cultures that emphasized the negative nature of sexuality. We will one day understand better how they became victims of attitudes that compromised their growth and led them to choose lives of celibacy and complete chastity that they did not understand, with pressures they could not sustain.

The sex abuse crisis is not caused, as some now say, solely by homosexuals. It is rather the bitter outcome of an era in which the healthy nature of sexuality was compromised by mistaken notions about human personality. People did not enter the priesthood or religious life to become sexual abusers; they found themselves confounded by sexuality they did not understand and to which they gave stumbling and tragic expression.

The pope observes that “it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature. Only then is love _ eros _ able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur.”

In the healthy way Pope Benedict XVI discusses eros, sexuality and human love he makes it possible for these sexual wounds to heal in the only way that they ever do _ from the inside.

MO/RB END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Eugene Cullen Kennedy, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.