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

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This book was a revelation for me. It opened up avenues for research and exploration that I was not yet ready to open on my own.

Did you ever have an intuition that everything was not as simple and rosey as some would have you believe? Did you ever think that there was more to the story than was being revealed? If so, then this book is an excellent resource for you for topics such as misogyny, celibacy, sexuality, family planning and morality.

I am a Roman Catholic and a religious educator, but far from finding the book to be shocking or full of "dirty words," I found it to be an insightful challenge to the church to return again to the central teaching of Jesus and to turn away from its obsession with genitalia and what people do with them. There is more to faith than that. And only by embracing the truth of our past can we grow beyond it.

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.

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-Heinemann surveys the impact of this policy on the church over centuries to come, showing what it took for the parish clergy to live without wives, or what it took to train future priests, if no priest could train his son. And last she shows the history of resistance across Europe, in which love between priests and churchwomen survived despite all attempts at "sundering the commerce between the clergy and women through an eternal anathema".

Finally, this book of protest becomes a testament to the power of love, which proved stronger than all efforts to control it.

-author of Correcting Jesus

Uta Ranke-Heinemann (born 1927) is a German theologian and author, who holds the chair of History of Religion at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She was appointed the first female professor of Catholic Theology in Germany, but was removed from her chair because she taught that Mary's virgin birth should be interpreted symbolically. She has also written Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Dont't Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith.

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"It is not true that Christianity brought self-control and asceticism to a pagan world that delighted in pleasure and the body. Rather, hostility to pleasure and the body are a legacy of Antiquity that has been singularly preserved to this day in Christianity." (Pg. 9)
"However significant Augustine's conversion may have been for theology, it was a disaster for married people." (Pg. 78)
"For Augustine hatred of pleasure was still more important than his emphasis on the procreative purpose of every conjugal act." (Pg. 97)
"Catholic celibacy has pagan roots. The prescriptions of celibate purity derive from the Stone Age of religious consciousness." (Pg. 99)
"Such absurdities are the result of a mistaken sexual morality that after almost two thousand years is still not ready to give up its usurped dominion over the bedrooms of married people." (Pg. 177)
"In contrast to the relative moderation of the Jews, Christians worked up a whole mass of legal technicalities for prohibiting marriages that no religion had been even theoretically capable of contriving and that can be explained only by Catholic hostility to sex and pleasure." (Pg. 217)
"People who have gotten as far away from the realities of human sexuality as the high-ranking celibates of the Catholic Church... are just manufacturing pseudo-problems that then prove too hard to handle." (Pg. 253)
"Whatever one may think of the Protestant doctrine of justification, it was a blessing for sexual morality." (Pg. 258)
"To date the Church's celibates have not given a single positive thought to intercourse prompted by love ... and to the responsible contraception this may require." (Pg. 270)
The Church "merely strives to impose its own moral dictatorship without regard to the welfare of married people, a dictatorship based on pleasure-hating celibate contempt for marriage and a maniacal cult of virginity." (Pg. 285)
"For this exclusively male world, this womanless terrarium in which popes and their educators move ... for this ghetto of the male church, women are still only objects to be ignored in the process whereby the celibates take protective measures for maintaining their chaste little world ... in their infantile flight into a sort of male uterus of a womanless world." (Pg. 324)
"And in fact with the doctrine of the Virgin Birth theologians have stolen Mary's motherhood." (Pg. 342)

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.

This book is incredibly well referenced and insightful. I was amazed by the amount of reference materials that were also included throughout the book. I was also amazed by the information set forth in the book. If you have ever wondered where some of the practices and ideas in the Catholic church originated, this is a very helpful book. It's not just limited to a female audience either - it's also quite helpful in understanding some of the requirements placed on men by the Church. I gave it four stars instead of five because it can be a very difficult read -- not a great book to read after a long day at the office!

Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, for more than two thousand years, has been embroiled in using hegemony in shaping the morality and spirituality of its duped followers. They used fear, repression, paganism, ignorance, mind control and autocratic ideas.

Primitive humans had no idea of evolution to comprehend and consequently ascribed their understanding to artificial deities. In Christianity the mythical tales of Adam and Eve were used to control primitive societies and mold their minds into accepting institutions for control of marriage bedrooms using confessionals and subjugate women to all sorts of harsh requirements. Women were relegated to complete dependence on men.

A religion supposedly inspired by an all knowing divinity is not expected to change with advancement in science and technology. It basis and theology has been concocted by self appointed, and arrogant celibates. It began with Aristotle when science was extremely primitive or non-existing and humans could not understand nature they inhabited. There was no mass learning, information dissemination but hearsay and story telling as the medium. Aristotle was considered at one time infallible oracle whose views, used by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and later Church Fathers still reverberate in the Vatican.

Origin of species began with a primitive life and proceeded slowly for millions of years, (On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection (Dover Thrift Editions) by Charles Darwin (Jun 23, 2006)), and (The "Origin" Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the "Origin of Species" - Hardcover (Sept. 21, 2009)) by David N. Reznick and Michael Ruse, (http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Then-Now-Interpretive-Species/). It underwent several divergences before the modern humans arrived.

The advancement in thought had to linger under duress of the Catholic dogma before humans shook off the shackles of bondage from darkness. The Biblical view of the beginning of life and Darwin's scientific view would seem irreconcilable: in Genesis, the creation of the world, and Adam and then Eve, the first humans, took only six days! Evolution's process of genetic mutation and natural selection - the survival and proliferation of the fittest new species - has taken millions of years!

Christianity has ancient pagan roots and is founded on myths, cults of Virgin Mary (Mariology), and Saints. The celibates abhor freedom and remained steadfast to change in free thinking and speech using coercion and politics. Hiding under an autocratic and a pyramidal structure in Rome, they have resisted changes to advancement of civilization.

In her book, (Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church by Uta Ranke-Heineman and Peter Heinegg (Oct 1, 1991)),
Prof. Uta Ranke-Heinemann discuses: inheritance of sexual pessimism from non-Christians, menstrual blood, misinterpretations of testaments, Virgin Birth, marriage, infanticide, abortion, contraception (the pill), rhythm method and on going struggle against it, sexual pessimism and hostility to pleasure, use of celibates to suppress women, sinless sex (coitus reservatus), onanism (coitus interruptus), incest, misogynistic slander, homosexuality, setting standards for missionary position, imposing "dictatorship based on pleasure-hating contempt for marriage and a maniacal cult of virginity".

The book is heavily referenced. It stands as a testament to the wrongs that a false ideology can do to the people who can be duped to follow it using whatever means available. It is as eye opener to many who are oblivious of the facts, but are willing to get informed from the classical work.

Prof. Uta Ranke-Heinemann's work exposes the history of hostility to women and the modus operandi of a bigoted organization that uses duplicity. It promotes hatred for women who they believe are the symbolism of sex and sin, concocted in the mythical Garden of Eden as a basis for its misogyny. The Church propagates abstract lunacy, arrogant thinking, autocratic domineering, calling on an abstract divinity, formulating a way of life which is fearful, capitalizing on ignorance.

Their celibates use confessionals for trading of pervert conversations with the faithful, serving the purpose to dictate regulations. The celibates seem to enjoy description of orgies. The system has become casuistry to report with whispers the sins of the flesh to the confessor and to moralists. Their theology induced scrupulous fears in minds. One wonders whether the early theologians were just tickled by the subject as they wrote their long polemics on sexuality.

On sex and for pleasure Pope Paul II issued an Apostolic Exhortation, describing the official position of the Roman Catholic Church with respect to the meaning and role of marriage and the family, and challenges towards realizing that ideal, ([...]). With regard to the pill, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI thinks that it has placed burden on women by way of evening things out and placing burden on men. He comes to the aid of Pope John Paul II "who has a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde notion of the pill: Depending on whether his wife takes or doesn't take the pill, the husband is now a beast and now an angel"

Mariology, the theological study of Mary, developed by men, is emphasized and imposed on the believers; there is some bright light here as it prevented the Church and the world from becoming totally masculine. But it has developed into a cult.

Papal infallibility is a mind controlling ruse started with Aquinas. The distorted minds of the high officers of the church believed and thought they could do no wrong, and where they thought they had a right, even a duty, to impose their views and ways on all people it dominated. The Vatican with its billions is at work in the poorer underdeveloped world and exercising its false ego and influence as an advisory body working behind the scenes in the UN; on account of its history of misogyny, and hatred of humanity, Vatican deserves no place in the UN.
Like most of the Scholasticism of the time, Aquinas' world view was firmly based on the philosophy of Aristotle, who thought the earth stood at the center of the universe, and had the sun and all the planets revolving around it. Christian scholars of that time often considered Aristotle as infallible who had exhausted the resources of the human mind. This plunged the earth into darkness for centuries with the addition of the abominated Holy Inquisition. Religious enthusiasm should have been its ally, but the Church fought against it, and brutally forced doctrinal orthodoxy on honest doubt and liberal opinion.
The Vatican, a bastion of Catholic bigotry, uses money and political power to suppress public scrutiny of shameful scandals, and protect pedophiles in their midst, ([...]). Therefore, it is, a "non-territorial religious entity" and does not deserve the UN status, ([...]

"Ideology is power but when it becomes a weapon is self-destructive"
..... Pradesh Eknaligoda
Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church

Catholic Christians believe marriage and married sex are radically good, as a profound union of man and woman in love, cooperation in God's act of creation of a new person, and an icon of the unitive love of God for humanity in the Incarnation. Because the relationship of persons in marriage (and the joy and pleasure therein) is willed by God through His creation, and uniquely the earthly image of core Christian beliefs, rejection of Christian beliefs about marriage, and moral conduct related to marriage and sexuality, militates against Christian belief itself.

"Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God"--but loss of faith often follows on the heels of sexual sin; in Scriptural language, the person has chosen to worship an idol rather than God. It ultimately doesn't make logical sense as a Christian, to justify fornication, homosexuality, masturbation, artificial contraception, or abortion. Christians believe in chastity (for married people of course this means conjugal chastity), which no one ever said was easy, but is a virtue, and has been considered such by many different religious and philsohical traditions beside Christianity. One either repents of sin and turns to the mercy of God, or leaves the Church (in spirit, if not in body). Indeed Uta Ranke-Heinemann, who no longer believes in the divinity of Jesus, His virgin birth, Resurrection etc, has clearly departed from the Church and from Christian belief. The relationship between this and her departure from Christian morals does not seem coincidental.

"Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven" is heretical and anti-Christian rather than reformist, though it describes instances of real corruption and evil that do call for reform that is faithful to Christ rather than a departure from His way. As a Catholic lay woman I treasure as a great gift the celibate chastity to which I freely vow myself for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven. The meaning and value of this is dependent on the truth that what is being sacrificed, marriage and its joys, is a truly great GOOD, though a finite one, sacrificed solely in preference for infinte Good.

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.