"The Easiest Route to Heaven: Love, Sex, and the Cross"
by Erika Bachiochi - November 30, 2006
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
Like most "reverts," I was not initially interested in coming back to the Catholic Church. I was a committed pro-choice feminist, intellectually anti-Christian, and had every available misconception about Catholicism. All Catholicism had in its favor, as far as I was concerned, was its alleged institutional concern for the poor. I had acted out the textbook behaviors of young girls who experience the divorce of their parents during my teens, and so guilty pride had caused me to turn a deaf ear to the Church's views on sexuality. But unhealed wounds from my youth drove me to my knees as I neared college. And so, despite my intellectual protestations, I was being drawn into the reality of a personal God who had the power and the will to respond to my need for peace and healing.
The intellectual environment at college allowed me to flirt with the truth claims of Christianity in a way I never had before—and by my junior year, I was sneaking away from my "sexually liberated" feminist cohorts to debate my new Christian friends. The local parish priest came around at times, and as Providence would have it, he was a bit of an intellectual himself. Curious as to what such a smart man could see in Catholicism, I finally asked him on one occasion: "Why are you Catholic?" He answered, without missing a beat: "Because the Catholic Church is the easiest route to heaven." At this response I was especially puzzled, because I had thought living according to Catholic teaching sounded quite hard—and terribly unappealing.
I would come to learn that by this Father John meant that God the Father, in His great love and affection for His children, established the Church on earth to show us the best means to attain intimate union with Him. What I had assumed were restrictions on freedom, especially in sexual matters, were actually signposts along the way that marked off dangerous territory, that guided our desires away from those things that are always seductively appealing, but are fleeting, distracting—and damaging—so that we could be free to seek the only thing that truly fulfills our desires: union with God.
When my priest-friend said that the Catholic Church is the easiest route to heaven, he certainly did not mean that a life lived in accordance with Catholic teaching would be free from suffering. Indeed, I have come to discover over the years that Church teaching, on sex and marriage especially, recognizes the profound reality that Jesus taught us by His death and resurrection: True love always comes by way of the cross.
The Demands of Happiness
Being chaste until and within marriage, committing day in and day out to the self-giving and self-denial that lifelong marriage and childrearing require of us, being open to God's gift of new life in a generous and responsible way, and in this day and age, even carrying to term an unexpected child—these are difficult tasks, and our fallen nature rebels against them. The world recognizes this natural rebellion, our desire to express human love in sexual intimacy, to seek pleasure and run from pain, to fulfill our own needs and desires while giving ill-attention to the needs and desires of others—in a word, to live our lives for ourselves. Mistaking these desires for human nature—rather than fallen human nature—the world's response is to laugh at Church teaching, to make a mockery of the Church and her seemingly archaic rules on sex and marriage, because they are so difficult, because they require so much of us.
