Word: heinemann
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...remember the name Luther Blissett. He was the high-scoring striker for England's Watford who was traded to AC Milan for $1 million in 1983. After one disappointing season, he returned to England and obscurity. Now Luther Blissett is back in the headlines as the author of Q (Heinemann; 635 pages), a novel of vast inventiveness, remarkable erudition and highly peculiar origins. First published in Italy in 1999, the book has become a best seller from Austria to Argentina. The British edition appeared earlier this month, and negotiations are now under way for one in the U.S. But Luther...
...ever virgin, meaning that she and Joseph never had sex and that the "brothers" of Jesus mentioned in the Bible were cousins. This idea consolidated the tradition of celibacy for priests and nuns. Protestants reject the belief as antisexual and lacking in biblical support. Liberal Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann of Germany contends that the notion of a celibate clergy demeaned women by robbing Mary of sexuality and normal motherhood. This is, Ranke-Heinemann declares, "a monstrous product of neurotic sexual fantasy." Responds a Vatican official: "The church doesn't have problems with sex. The world does...
...Eunuchs title comes from Jesus' teaching in Matthew 19: 12 about men becoming eunuchs (by which he meant forswearing sex) "for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." Catholicism uses these words as a warrant for requiring priestly celibacy. In Ranke-Heinemann's reading, the saying is linked to the preceding verses in which Jesus directs his disciples not to remarry after divorce. The book asserts that twisted hostility toward sex underlies the church's stand against not only married priests and remarriage for the divorced but also birth control, premarital sex and women clergy...
...blaming celibacy for everything that she dislikes in the church, Ranke- Heinemann follows a path already well trod by Protestants, historians and other feminists. However, she displays a polemical and sarcastic flair ("theology increasingly became the business of bachelors") and merrily marshals rather selective evidence of priestly misogyny through the ages. One 12th century divine urged men to remember that a pretty woman starts as "a foul-smelling drop of semen" and is destined to be "food for worms." Ranke- Heinemann's acerbic wit is less impressive when she turns to the modern era. She cannot, for instance, bring herself...
Still, Ranke-Heinemann is not a litmus-test feminist. Although some feminist cults yearn for paganism to supplant Judaism and Christianity, Ranke-Heinemann contends that Catholicism went wrong when it spurned the healthy outlook of the Jewish Bible and absorbed hostility toward sex from certain pagan groups. On abortion, she notes that ancient Judaism and Christianity joined in opposing the pro-choice stance of paganism. Her fury is aimed only at the official Catholic teaching that it is better to let a pregnant woman die than to perform an abortion...