ASJ Heralds “Copernican Shift” in Catholic Theology

Catholic morality can only be taught effectively when virginity is moved to the center of our sexual understanding!

With the impending rise of the Apostolate of St. Jerome and our forceful defense of celibacy and virginity, Catholic theology truly begins a paradigm shift of Copernican proportions. Currently, Church theologians center their explanations of human sexuality on marriage and its characteristic act. Marriage, they say, is the fulfillment of human sexuality. But this view is very problematic because it cannot escape the implication that celibates are somehow incomplete. Yet, Jesus would never have recommended a way of life that is incomplete; he came to give life to the full.

Our work then involves shifting Catholics away from this false view which hamstrings the Church and has no root in the Scriptures or Tradition. The Copernican shift we propose moves celibacy and virginity from outliers in the Catholic universe right to the center of our understanding and teaching about sexuality. For by rooting Catholic sexual theology in our understanding of celibacy and virginity, we make it far easier to explain the Church’s teaching on sex.

For example, today when teenagers ask why they can’t fornicate, the Church’s M.O. is to show them what fornication lacks with respect to monogamous marriage. But ASJ insists this is backwards. In our approach we tell them what they’re throwing away by losing virginity. This way, they are not only dissuaded from sin, but are also left asking whether they should even marry in the first place. Then we’d be getting somewhere. For at this point youth would be more open to considering celibacy and all the fruitful paths in the Church that unmarried persons, more “anxious for the things of the Lord,” are free to pursue. Otherwise, we get the present situation in which youth have marriage, eros, and sex preached up to the point that it appears to them that no sane person would forgo it. Our theology kills two birds with one stone; it simultaneously solves the vocations crunch and the fornication epidemic with one concise explanation. It only needs to be preached!


VIRGINITY TO THE CENTER! By moving virginity and celibacy to the center of the Church’s life and theology, we more effectively explain the observations of the celestial phenomena that are the immutable, ancient Catholic teachings concerning sexual morality. Otherwise, we toil ineffectively with a erroneous worldview.

Or take the thorny issue of birth control. Currently, well-meaning catechists start with an understanding of marriage as a base for their anti-contraception arguments. They look for the “meaning of sex” and try to argue that contraception is bad because it fundamentally opposes the meaning of sex, or the meaning of the body. The result is an incredibly complicated, counter-intuitive argument that basically says that sex is so good you shouldn’t do it. This silly reasoning causes our stance against birth control to draw as much mockery as disobedience. The better method is to view virginity as a basis for our understanding of marriage. Once we see celibacy and virginity as the epitome of human sexuality, we see that marriage must always be open to fruitfulness because the celibacy that marriage should strive to emulate is always fruitful. The paragon of fruitfulness was a Virgin who produced through her virginity more good than all the copulating couples in the world ever will. Because virginity (exemplified in Mary) bore a child that was called the Son of God, then married couples must also be open to children that, after baptism, will be called sons of God. Of course marriage is only in order if Christians can’t truly emulate virginity by exercising the self-control of which St. Paul speaks. But here we see clearly that when the proper order is restored to the theological universe, the sweet yoke of Catholic sexual morality falls logically into place like tumblers. This concise elegance is characteristic of any superior theory, scientific or religious.

Thus our analogy with the Copernican solar system is fitting. The geocentric view of things actually worked pretty well. The position of the stars, moon, and planets could be predicted accurately enough to enable maritime navigation. But the downfall of this worldview was its complexity. From the geocentric perspective, planets moved in incredibly complicated contours about the earth, continually reversing their motion and following patterns noticed only over decades or centuries. Entire volumes were therefore needed to characterize these motions and give the position of heavenly bodies at a desired time.

Furthermore, corrections were continually needed to bring theory in line with observation. But with the advent of heliocentric theory, these volumes could be replaced with a much simpler description of an equation for an ellipse. Now entire volumes could be replaced with concise equations. There is a perfect analogy between the faulty, overcomplicated view of sexual morality and the virginity-based view that we propose. The current sexo-centric theologies suffer from the same hyper-complexity that doomed the geocentric model. Often, these complexities and arcane subtleties are needed to get around contradictions between the logical conclusions of the theology and observed human experience. Arguments that use marriage and sex as a basis for defending Church teaching simply have to be complicated. For this is no easy way to resolve the inevitable conflict between this initial error and Church teaching that clearly places celibacy above marriage. Sexo-centric arguments to defend Catholic sexual morals must become incredibly erudite and torturous, hinging on minute distinctions. They rely little on Scripture and a lot on ancient philosophers, dogmatic interpretations of the Summa, modern psychologists, and contemporary theologians.

But once an explanation reaches a certain level of complexity, as it has in the case of the marriage-centered theologies pervading today’s Church, it loses its power to influence the masses. And since God wants the masses to know, understand, and follow Him, we can be sure that such contorted reasoning is on the wrong path. If it takes a master’s degree to grasp Church teaching on birth control, then we need a better explanation, a more effective teaching tool that is simpler, truer, and even more powerful. ASJ provides this in our New Sexual Theology. This powerful theology explains even the most difficult sexual teachings with the elegance characteristic of any superior scientific theory. And all it takes to grasp it is a change in perspective and a basis in Holy Scripture.

More from the analogy. In the Copernican view of the solar system, the planets move in well-defined ellipses with the sun located at a central point of the ellipse called the focus. In the ASJ view the motions of marriage are best understood once it is seen that they must focus on celibacy. As the sun is at the focus of the earth’s path, so celibacy and virginity must be the focus of those who take the path of marriage. When we say this, we mean that marriage must revolve around celibacy, not vice versa. Many confused souls go so far as to imply that celibates should focus on married people as a guide for understanding how to live their celibacy. This is evil. Married people, rather, should focus around the example of celibates who show them the type of love that God desires for their less blessed unions. Nor do marriage and celibacy form, as some would suggest, a type of theological binary star system, that is, a pair of stars that orbit a common gravitational midpoint in some complementary cosmic dance. There is a clear order here: celibates and virgins are the models for couples. Virginity illuminates marriage, not the other way around.

But when ASJ sings the praises of virginity and celibacy, we don’t hurt married couples, rather we help them. But the same cannot be said for the crazy theologians that do absolutely nothing to edify celibates when they talk up the importance of the marital embrace.

Like the astronomers of old who thought that the earth sustained the sun, so today mistaken Catholics (again with considerable influence in the Vatican) are teaching that virginity and celibacy somehow derive their goodness from marriage. But the converse is true. Marriage derives its goodness by emulating, as best it can, the purity and dignity of celibacy and virginity. Our analogy begins to limp only because historically speaking the geocentric held sway and gave way to the heliocentric. But the truth about virginity was known all along. The Scriptures, Fathers, and countless saints proclaim what the Catholic Church still retains as her official teachings even if she doesn’t proclaim it proudly and loudly like ASJ does.

 This article appeared in the May 31, 2006 issue of The Loyal Lion.