A Church Dilemma? A Self-Created Dilemma Maybe

The Lavrin article we read this week, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico: A Church Dilemma”, details the Catholic Churches rules and methods for enforcing a prescribed sexuality.  The Church made rules for who one could have sex with, how one could perform that sex, and the crux of the first two, who one could marry.  Sex was for married people, and married people were people who weren’t too closely related and whose parents didn’t object.  The sex these married people had was pretty muc limited to procreative sex.  In other words, the boring stuff.  The Church uses the confessional and its discipline as the main tool to enforce these rules.

As Lavrin says, “There was always a gap between religious canons and the actual behavior of the people.”(48)  Lavrin uses Church records to prove this explicitly.  It makes me wonder then, why make rules no one can/will follow?  Especially rules around something like sex, something so much more tied to really basic drives than say silver mining or something like that.  The Church tried to create tight definitions around sex and gender that people persistently broke through.  It seems like the solution would be to make rules that people agree upon, and that they can follow.  The Church apparently didn’t think so, maybe because god gave them infallibility. It made both masturbation and non-marital sex a sin.  People are going to do one or other, and yet they are both a sin.  Makes absolutely no sense.  It made being queer a sin, and yet us queers kept on sinning.  Makes no sense.  The Church apparently had little to no understanding of humanity, despite being composed entirely of humanity.