Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church

This is a book of gloriously passionate and meticulous scholarship. Why, Ranke-Heinemann asks, did the church turn from forbidding priests the right to divorce their wives at the Council of Nicea (in 325), to requiring all priests to dump their families in 1074? Why did this demand arise in the Latin Church, and not in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Coptic Church, or in Judaism? Sometime around the year 1000, the Latin Church hierarchy shifted from trying to end sex in clerical families, to a goal of ending the families period. The question of how to do this was both practical and moral. Because speaking directly on the issue of divorce, Jesus said that if a man and woman really loved each other unconditionally, they would never find reason to end their relationship. Taking these words legalistically, the Western Church had long taught that the only moral justification for divorce was adultery. And if that was their doctrine, how could the clergy justify divorcing their mainly loyal wives en masse? When Christianity became Rome's official religion, most clergymen still believed that having wives was a good thing, and marriage helped prepare a man for religious leadership. As the Jews expected their rabbis to be married, so most Christians expected the same of their priests. If a priest was not married, most adults in the community would assume there was something wrong with him. A bachelor priest seemed immature. Marriage was a school of life, and if a man had not learned its lessons, how could he teach those who had? Ranke-Heinemann traces the movement for enforced celibacy through an ecclesiastical struggle lasting over 700 years. Her presentation of the arguments pro and con is so revealing, that these chapters alone are well worth the price of the book. Then she documents the measures taken to enforce the great divorce - and they were horrific, including punishments of whipping, prison, banishment, or sale on the slave markets for the offending priest's wives. With their backs to the wall, many priests grew violent to defend their families. In the Paris Synod of 1074, Abbot Galter of Saint Martin demanded that the flock must follow its shepherd in celibacy. A mob of outraged priests and bishops beat him, spit on him, and threw him into the street. In the same year Archbishop John of Rouen threatened protesting priests with excommunication, and had to flee for his life under a hail of stones. In furious debate, the celibate party denounced its opponents as fornicators trying to prostitute the church. Married priests hurled accusations that their foes were sodomites, whose obvious preference for homosexuality rendered them hostile to married families. For decades church synods regularly broke into riotous fistfights, with monks and priests actually smashing each other's faces in the church aisles. In 1233, protesters murdered papal legate Conrad of Marburg, who was touring Germany partly to enforce chastity. (p. 109) Beyond this, Ranke-

This books simply unmask the horror,perversion and insanity of Catholic Church.It is important people live the pleasure and freedom as a sin,because companies need them for work.It is important to maintain and consolidate socio-economic domination-see Marx and Freud-and the SEXUAL dimension of the man and of the women is FUNDAMENTAL for this.Church and rich and powerful makes an invisible alliance.Do you want to understand Columbine massacre,american psycophats and so on...? Start on this book,on Freud and on Marx.

What they made of Uta Ranke-Heinemann in the faculty of theology at Heidelberg doesn't bear thinking about. But I would point out to Cardinal O'Connor that the only "dirty words" in this book issue from the mouths and pens of Catholic clerics. If anything I would say that the author is too restrained. She is, after all, recording more than nineteen hundred years of the most maddeningly-illogical, puerile, foul-mouthed, dyspeptic and vicious misogyny being perpetrated in the name of the "universal church". That her anger seeps through so rarely is a great testimony to her control. The facts, as she clearly sees, speak for themselves.

This scholarly but accessible book details the way in which a deep mistrust of pleasure, and therefore women, came to be a defining characteristic of the Christian church. Focusing particularly on Roman Catholicism, Ranke-Heinemann shows that marginalization of women and sexual repression are not inherent in Catholic belief, but have taken center stage over centuries of interpretation by celibate men. Cardinal O'Connor argues that this book is like "scrawling dirty words about the church". As a long-lapsed Catholic girl, I disagree. This view of a forgiving, inclusive church is the only thing that could ever get me to go back to Mass. Publicity like this is exactly what the church needs.

I am neither a theologian nor a Roman Catholic however I enjoyed this tremendous piece of work. Appears to be thoroughly researched. Arguments are well constructed showing the church as a consistantly misogynous organization, and explains many modern western attitudes towards gender and sexuality, the church's (to me) baffling stand on married clergy and female ordination. A good deal of interesting information on the "elaboration" of doctrine from slight scriptural basis and on the changing of scripture, such as the bible, to suit doctrine. Not a light read, but highly recommended. I wish many in the Vatican would read it. The author was? is? formerly a professor of theology at a German University.