It was a muddy, gray morning when the Doctor Asinorum and I returned to All Saints Catholic Church to complete our Pre-Cana workshop. Nearly nine hours of “instruction” lay ahead of us, so I was working hard to stay optimistic about the whole thing. As we were walking in, though, I remembered something Carol Hanson had told me the night before. Apparently the Pre-Cana team had encountered a first in preparing for our session: a lesbian couple had applied for admittance. This had sparked a rousing debate among the team, with several members contending that admitting the couple would be a good way to “reexamine certain issues” regarding the Church’s treatment of homosexuals. Very fortunately for us, the Deacon supervising the team had told them unequivocally that accepting homosexual couples into a Catholic Pre-Cana program would be out of the question, so the lesbians were turned away. We couldn’t possibly have sat at a roundtable in a Catholic church, talking to lesbians about their “marriage plans,” so we’re fervently grateful to Deacon George Kozak for keeping his team from such an appalling misstep. And on that happy thought, we plunged into the long day.

The truth is, much of it was just boring, and this would be the best way to characterize the first session, wherein a couple with different last names talked about Family Background or somesuch thing. Whereas many of the presenting couples were aging hippies, these were younger hippies, married ten years and raising one toddler son. The Doctor couldn’t get over the man’s somewhat effeminate, or perhaps metrosexual, persona. The woman was pleasant, but seemed to be very much an A-type personality. They rambled on about themselves and their families for an hour or so, and then turned the time over to another couple for a presentation on Communication Issues. The people who ran this session were perhaps the only non-hippie couple in the mix. I gathered that they had recently moved to the region, so they were less typically Ithaca as the rest of the team. They seemed to be about my parents’ age, and had raised four children. He was a businessman of some sort, and his presentation seemed consistent with that background: organized, direct, and broken down into a number of small, distinct activities. Some of the material might have been a bit elementary for engaged couples (“make eye contact” strikes me as apt advice for business negotiations, and perhaps a bit less so for bickering couples) but there was certainly no harm in them. This couple stayed for the rest of the day, and they seemed to be a decent sort: Novus Catholics, presumably, but orthodox and dedicated so far as I could tell. This was their first time working with this particular Pre-Cana team, so they could hardly be blamed for its other shortcomings.

Thus far the day had been relatively painless, but the next session was (at least from my perspective) truly hilarious. The subject was supposed to be “Moral Values” and the people couple teaching it were most definitely aging hippies. By personality they seemed utterly harmless. She had multiple sclerosis and was unable to walk, and was somehow mentally challenged as well, but this did not seem to have damaged the gentle harmony between husband and wife. He was a gardener and had brought some flowers for us to take and plant in our yards if we wished. So in many ways, they seemed to be sweet and simple souls… but it’s rather a shame that they were selected to give us, in essence, a lecture on moral philosophy!

He started off by summarizing the general purpose of the session: to help us understand how to make decisions in our marriage, in the midst of a diverse array of different influences. We were amused: were we being promised a Catholic theory of practical rationality? And in a sense, we actually were. Catholic couples, we were told, are supposed to make decisions using THE TRIANGLE. This was drawn for us on flip-chart paper. Each corner represented a possible source which we were advised to consult whenever we were faced with a difficult decision. On one corner was “Tradition, and the advice of friends and family”. On another corner was “Customs and Norms of Society.” On a third corner was “Personal Experience.” And, lest we think they’d forgotten, he wrote in the center of the triangle, in large block letters: GOD. Because, after all, God should be the center of everything.

Perhaps realizing that it might sometimes be difficult to juggle these different influences, the man went on to explain that we would need an underlying philosophy to help us sort them out. “See, I’m a consequentialist,” he explained. “I look at the consequences to see whether they’re good, and if they are, I do a thing! And if not, I don’t.” But he hastened to specify that that philosophy was just his personal favorite. We’d want to choose our own.

This whole while I was simply watching the spectacle unfold with a polite and attentive face, while the Doctor scribbled furiously on his note pad. I was quite taken with the general hilarity of this situation, in which my poor fiancé, himself a trained moral philosopher, was forced into being “instructed” in philosophy by this thoroughly confused, thoroughly modernist little man. He couldn’t stay silent forever, though, because we were eventually prodded for input. What were our “values?”

The Doctor explained, in a somewhat strained tone, that the concept of a “value” was itself a modernist (and thoroughly unCatholic) idea. I couldn’t faithfully capture the whole of his brief lecture, but my description of the session thus far should be sufficient to illustrate just how wrongheaded (in a truly pernicious way, though these poor souls obviously could not be accused of any deliberate malice) their presentation really was. They were advising us to go through life juggling weighing the pros and cons of every decision according to the guiding question, “What is important to me?” They wouldn’t presume to tell us the right way to live; rather, they wanted to help us break down the different possibilities, so that we could ponder what sort of life might suit us best. Their closest attempt at Catholicity was to ask, “What were Jesus’ values?” Of course they gave the sorts of soft, fuzzy answers that one would expect out of weak-minded liberals. It seems to me more correct to say: Jesus didn’t have any “values.” He simply lived his life in perfect obedience to the will of the Father.

Of course the couple understood the Doctor’s speech not at all. The only thing they managed to surmise was that he didn’t believe in values, from which they seemed to conclude that he was some sort of nihilist. With every subsequent activity the woman would begin, regretfully, with, “Well, this will be difficult for people who don’t believe in values…” and she’d glace at the Doctor. At one point while her husband was talking, I caught the woman studying my fiancé with a look of such piercing sorrow that I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or comfort her; “this marriage is doomed from the start” was clearly the thought going through her mind. Oh, dear.

The end of this ridiculous presentation was better than the beginning; instead of being actively heretical, it was merely irrelevant. For thirty or forty minutes the hippie couple explained to us how they had implemented their moral values into their own lives. Being hippies, their values had mostly to do with saving the environment and living close to the land, so we heard all about their lives as homesteaders, including a long explanation of why they don’t like to drive (it pollutes the air, and usually it’s not really necessary anyway!) and extended descriptions of their gardening practices and home repairs. I can’t really think how this narrative helped to prepare us for marriage, but I have nothing against people gardening and staying at home a lot, if that’s the sort of life that suits them. The remainder of the session passed in peaceful tranquility.

I can’t remember the topic of our session after lunch; whatever it was, the presenter (whose wife was unfortunately sick that day) mainly used the time to tell us sad stories about his difficult childhood and life. I won’t relate any of them here, since they were quite personal in nature, but I finished that session feeling rather like we’d been props in a kind of therapy session. After a short break I was somewhat glad to see the return of our old friends, Bob and Carol Hanson (in fact, they had been present throughout, but this was the first session today that they had run); whatever their faults, at least I knew that I could expect their stories and explanations to have some kind of a point. The topic was “Intimacy and Sexuality.” We did the “intimacy” segment first, and there was nothing objectionable in that; it was basically just a chance to reflect with your future spouse about what sorts of things you enjoy doing together. But of course I was curious to see what kinds of heresy we would hear when we got to the “sexuality” segment.

This segment began with a reading of the Church’s Teaching on Sexuality from the Unitas workbooks that had been distributed to us at the beginning of the session. (The Doctor noted with amusement that the authors were listed on the front as JOANN HEANEY-HUNTER, PH.D. and LOUIS H. PRIMAVERA, PH.D. What do you think: should the contributors of this Society, as we get our doctoral degrees, start posting under the titles DOCTOR ASINORUM, PH.D or AMBROSIUS, PH.D?) Anyhow, here are two of the statements we were given regarding the Church’s teachings on sexuality:

 We believe that every occasion of sexual intercourse has two equal purposes – the love and support of the couple, and the possibility of new life. The Second Vatican Council changed past Church teaching which said that procreation was the main purpose of sexual intercourse. However, it also stated that love and life cannot be separated.

 In the past, the Church taught that sexual intercourse was primarily for procreation. Any other reason was secondary. Today, the Church recognizes our sexual natures and activities as being gifts from God. Like any other gift, however, it has the potential to be abused. The Church believes strongly that sexual intercourse should be part of a committed marriage and should be life-giving to both parties.

What’s most immediately eye-popping, of course, is the blithe little bit about how Vatican II (which, as we all know, wasn’t a teaching council) changed past Church teaching. But more importantly: how could anyone (and we should remember that a good percentage of the couples who come through these programs are probably contentedly co-habitating for months or years before marriage, using contraceptives, and all the rest of it) possibly gain a better understanding of Catholic sexual ethics from these summaries? Sexual intercourse has two equal purposes? That way of putting things is crying out to be misunderstood, and the vague statement at the end that “love and life cannot be separated” will not do much to clear things up. Your average lukewarm Catholic will look at that statement and happily conclude, “Well, at least I’m fulfilling one of the good ends of sex, so that’s probably good enough.” What they will not understand – which Archbishop Sheen explains in a very lovely way in his (highly recommended) Three to Get Married — is that love, if it refuses to be fruitful, will itself wither. A love that does not wish to flower into new life will remain selfish, withdrawn, and thus radically incomplete. God has ordained that, when two people give themselves unstintingly to one another, their gift will naturally overflow into a gift to the world: a child. Picking out the parts of the package that we like best isn’t just immoral; it’s actually impossible, as contracepting couples often discover when the honeymoon phase of marriage is over.

I have to say for the record that this idea has been misunderstood in a number of different ways. I have heard an FSSP priest explain that God made sex pleasurable as a kind of “lure” to entice us into undertaking the arduous task of parenthood, which we might otherwise choose to forego. That is also, if I may say so, a radically defective way of understanding the matter (not to mention somewhat degrading to good Catholic parents.) Would that we heard more often Dietrich von Hildebrand’s lovely formulation of the Catholic teaching: “Procreation is the proper end of sexual intercourse; love is the meaning.” There is nothing about “equality” in this explanation. Each good might be understood as a different part of the same lovely tapestry.

I don’t think we got much of this across in the session, but we tried. I won’t say much more about the sexuality session, because most of it was Q and A directed at Bob and Carol Hanson, and it would be inappropriate for me to print their personal stories in such a public sphere. I will say, though, that one couple asked a question about whether the Church condones any forms of artificial contraception. It took considerable pressure on our part to get the Hansons to admit that she views them all as gravely sinful.

We ended the day with another session from the A-type personality woman and the metrosexual man. This time we were talking about “spirituality in marriage” and the Doctor and I talked a lot in that one, expounding on the benefits of praying the Rosary, observing liturgical seasons, taking Catholic pilgrimages and so forth, while the other couples sat in stony silence. Finally, at the end of what seemed an almost eternal day, we went through our closing ceremony… which involved a little singing and a little group reading from a makeshift quasi-liturgy that, so far as I know, may have been written by the Pre-Cana team themselves. The Doctor refused to participate in the reading from the beginning; I stopped once we got to the prayer, “We give thanks to thee, Father and Mother, who gave us the great gift of sexuality…” Each couple was called forward to receive a candle (we were told to keep it until some distant anniversary, though the Doctor threw it away the next day) and – the really exciting thing! – our certificate testifying as to our completion of the Pre-Cana program.

I didn’t see where they sold the “I survived Pre-Cana” t-shirts, but if somebody knows, be sure to pass the word.