Michele Madigan Somerville, a Park Slope poet/blogger/literary impresario has written a 3-part essay for the Huffington Post about the sexual abuse crisis within the Catholic Church. It is very much worth reading. Here’s an excerpt frm part 3 Homophobia and the War on Eros.

To say that Roman Catholic practice is sensual is an understatement. People with little interest in God travel great distances to sit within Catholic houses of worship so as to be moved by their beauty. It is not unusual for even poor Roman Catholics to worship in architectural masterpieces, in perfumed air, as colored beams descend in streams from leaded windows. At the fore of every Catholic church in the world, one beholds an image of Jesus spread open, nearly naked on a cross. Creamy angels and a God we eat. Could a religion be more carnal, more sensual? Almost every poem St. John of the Cross wrote in praise of God reads like an erotic poem. St. Therese of Lisieux is often characterized in art as being in an orgasmic state. Eros has its place in faith and religion. Tamping it down doesn’t eliminate it. Ignoring it doesn’t neutralize it. Our liturgies and temples are designed to arouse us, to bring the beauty of the created world into focus. But the Magisterium clamps down, ruling by fear when it should be guiding with love.

It is inevitable that the tension between Catholic sensuality and its hierarchy’s commitment to repression should give way to perversion. Why does the Catholic hierarchy devote so much ritual and design to awakening sensuality in us, only to clobber it out of out of us? How do we Catholics square naked cherubs in the Sistine Chapel with learning to bring a copy of the Yellow Pages to the high school dance in case the need to sit on a boy’s lap in the car arises (so to speak)?

Why does a religion so erotically charged condemn healthy sexuality in so many ways when it is entirely possible that sexual longing and ecstasy are the closest human beings ever truly get to experiencing the kind of desire and joy we are taught to feel for God? How did sex become more sinful than holy? And if Christ is love, as we Catholics are taught, why must so many women, gay Catholics, and victims of abuse continue to live as collateral damage in the Church hierarchy’s unholy war on Eros?