Tempest in a Cappuccino Cup?

A papal comment on "adultery " between spouses raises a ruckus

You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery." But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

--Matthew 5:27-28

When Baptist Jimmy Carter admitted to Playboy magazine that he had violated Christ's commandment against lust in the heart a time or two, it produced one of the sillier sideshows of the 1976 presidential campaign. Now John Paul II, in a public comment that drew on the very same New Testament text, has stirred an equally unholy row.

It started at the Pope's regular weekly audience in St. Peter's Square. In his sermon to a crowd of about 10,000, John Paul stated that if a man looked lustfully even "at the woman who is his wife, he could likewise commit adultery 'in his heart.' "

Mental adultery with one's own wife? The remark caused no visible reaction among his listeners. But the apparently paradoxical idea of married adultery roused the Italian press and public considerably. Soon the "lust" affair all but overshadowed news from the international Synod of Bishops at the Vatican, which, by coincidence, this month was discussing family and marital problems.

Fumed Vittorio Gorresio, a respected columnist for the Turin daily La Stampa: "Along comes Pope John Paul and tells us that we cannot even desire our own wives." To Gorresio, "Wojtyla" was "attempting to deny the claims of sex even within marriage." In Milan's usually staid Corriere della Sera, Giorgio Manganelli sought to have the lust laugh. Life is so hard for the adulterer, he wrote sarcastically: an endless round of cover-ups, tricks, juggling of the daily calendar, and the need to buy "useless and expensive presents" for two women at once. Now the Pope has removed all these woes because "you can have infidelity in your own house." Meanwhile, Italian feminists, ever ready to assail the Vatican, accused John Paul of male chauvinism because he spoke only of men lusting after women and not the reverse.

In one sense the whole episode was a tempest in a cappuccino cup stirred by an example taken out of context. But the fuss reflected secular fears that the Pope might be returning to a view once held by many Catholic theologians that sexual pleasure even in marriage is deeply suspect. That is far from the case. In sermons and writings John Paul has dealt extensively with marriage, and often places a remarkably unpontifical emphasis on matters of the flesh. The book of Genesis, the Pontiff once declared, shows "the pure value of the body and of sex" in God's eyes.

John Paul has been talking about sex at most of his Wednesday audiences for more than a year. The troublesome phrase, in fact, was part of a discourse about the dignity of women and the need to distinguish, even in marriage, between sexual love and mere lust that makes sex objects of men and women alike.

In context, the Pope's ill-fated discourse only repeated a point of Christian teaching that has lately become a routine feminist complaint: a husband has no right to approach his wife simply to "use" her and make her "the object of the satisfaction of his own sexual 'need.' "

John Paul's mistake was his figurative application of the term adultery to such improper motives. Yet the Pontiff could have stayed out of trouble just by obeying his own words. Last April 16 he told an audience in Rome that it is impossible to speak of adultery between husband and wife.

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