In the fomented debate about the installation at the state run University of a machine dispensing products offensive to the religious sentiments of the Constitutionally recognised confession, some reflections on a recent book Due in Carne – Chiesa e sessualita` nella storia (Rome – Bari, Laterza, 2009) would perhaps not be amiss. According to the authors of this study, Lucetta Scaraffa and Margherita Pelaja, the key passage of Paul VI famous Encyclical Huamae Vitae is that we are “Not to be the arbiters of the source of life, but rather the ministers of the design established by the Creator” (p.282).

These authors identify the tension existing as “The entry of the Divine into the relationship between men and women, the development of the sexual relationship which derived from that of the human body, indissolubly linked to the Spirit of the Incarnation. (p.281).

Unlike Islam which produces a family model centered on the man and the male child, Christianity throughout its 2,000 year history has given regard to the woman and to the offspring – as well as to those who choose not to contract marriage.

As the founder of the Community of Sant’ Egidio, Andrea Riccardi remarked in a comment on this book: “In the furrows of history the woman and the unmarried person appear as protagonists, as if to contest the fact that the place for sexuality is the terrain of only one dominus, the male, who exercises his sexuality as master. The value of the woman’s consensus in choosing herself a husband, affirmed by Canon Law experts, is an act of great freedom... Fidelity is the same for the man and the woman – indissolubility makes marriage something superior.”

Finally, “In a world which is losing… the awareness of limits, of nature, of frailty, (these authors) suggest ‘that these may constitute a value in a face of the omnipotence of the person and the abyss it is creating.”

Joseph G. Bonett

Ghajnsielem