The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality Book

The pain of the unhealed wound in human sexuality is felt everywhere. It is not inflicted by Jesus, who wants us to be whole and free of sin's burden, but by Church leaders who control people by manipulating their sexual feelings. They make good people feel bad for being human and sexual at the same time.The cries come from the simple and the sophisticated, in questions asked in the confessional and in those sent to Dr. Sooth in GQ. Vatican II, attempting to restore the unity of human personality, did more to heal the wound than the Sexual Revolution that was its agonized groan of pain. Some wounded cry out, some act out, but all to many hide their conflicts or weep alone.The Unhealed Wound accuses the all to fallible Institutional Church, and those who wish to overturn Vatican II, of betraying the Church as a Mystery by keeping the wound open in order to maintain control over human beings.Exercising such power over sexuality is in itself gratifying and explains why so many church leaders insist that Armageddon must be fought about issues in which their control of sexuality is preserved-birth control, priestly celibacy, and an implacable resistance to ordaining women. Tragically, the institution simultaneously reveals its own unattended wound in the sexual conflicts of its unhealed clergy.These church leaders re-enact the mythic theme of the western Knight who, seeking the Grail, slew the eastern Knight who symbolized nature, inflicting a wound that will not heal until someone asks simply, "What is it that ails you?" This is the question Pope John XXIII asked the suffering world in Vatican II and is here placed again to church leaders who must ask it of and heal themselves before they can heal the world.AUTHORBIO: Eugene Kennedy is a former priest and psychologist, and the award-winning author of several books and a column for the Religious News Service, distributed by the New York Times syndicate. He lives with his wife in Chicago, Illinois, and Naples, Florida.