Daniel C. Maguire is Professor of Moral Theological Ethics at Marquette University and the president of the Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health, and Ethics. He has written several books including Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions. With both wit and passion, Maguire lays out a blueprint for a progressive Catholicism that he hopes will supercede orthodox Catholicism's obsession with "pelvic issues" — contraception, abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research. Despite the long history of demeaning sexuality within the Catholic tradition, Maguire envisions a new wedding of sexuality and spirituality. He notes: "Sex wrapped in mutual caring is exalting; it blends body and spirit in orgasmic unity. It affirms our beauty as persons."
In the second chapter, Maguire takes a hard look at male domination in religions. Some of the terrible spin-offs of this long reign of power have been a propensity to violence, the hierarchical instinct, pernicious abstractionism, a bias for consequentialist, bottom-line thinking, and hatred of women. Maguire also takes the Catholic Church to task for its slow response to racism, its just-war theory, and its mixed messages in the face of affluenza. In an imaginative piece of reporting, the author spells out some of the things that could be done in America by diverting millions from the military budget to other purposes such as education and health care. He concludes with a survey of the sad state of the environment.
Maguire calls the Catholic Church back to its social justice tradition based on love and compassion. In closing, he offers a fresh path for progressives to follow:
"Let's face it. Calvinists never produced a liqueur like the Benedictine monks did, much less a Christian Brothers brandy. Nor do their rituals contain a benedicto cervesiae, a holy blessing of beer.
"Maybe a 'b' word is at the heart of the renewable strengths of the Catholic traditions. The word is beauty. A passion for it is at the root of Catholic cathedral-building compulsion and liturgical pomp as well as its earthiness and sensuousness, all the way from the heights of rituals down to the blessing of beer. Our spirits need sensual richness and beauty like our lungs need oxygen. Catholic earthy hungers need stoking. It is these exuberant, imagination-driving hungers — not contorted dogmas and authoritarian potentates — that would be the best Catholic gift to a world that has lost its capacity to look around and say 'Wow!' "
