Here's a provocative, formidably-researched critique of Catholic 'bachelor theology', addressing issues like sexual morality, contraception, abortion, priestly celibacy and the Virgin Birth, by German Catholicism's first-appointed woman theologian.

Here we can only provide a sample of excerpts, to whet your appetite to read this important book.

Her thesis: Roman Catholic moral theology has tried to provide 'service instructions' for all foreseeable life-situations (p.325) and, generally, failed abysmally. 'All in all, considering the repression, defamation and demonization of women, the whole of church history adds up to one long arbitrary, narrow-minded masculine despotism over the female sex' (p.135).

The notion that sex in marriage was for procreation and avoidance of fornication only - never for pleasure - has ruined the lives of millions. ('More important than constantly thinking about children during sex is constantly not thinking about pleasure' p.248). The 'sexual pessimism' of Augustine, Aquinas and Alphonsus Liguori, perpetuated and refined by other male black-frocked pleasure-hating celibates has 'demonized' sins of the flesh. Indeed, self-styled moral experts have, throughout history, devoted 'substantial portions of their lives to utter nonsense' (p. 177).

The key biblical texts (all exegeted wrongly by the Church):

* 'In sin did my mother conceive me' (Psalm 51:5) supposedly proves that original sin is transmitted in the sexual act. (So Mary's father and mother had to be exceptions - established in 1854 in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception). The idea that marriage is exclusively in the service of procreation goes back to the Stoics, not to Jesus or Paul: 'Hostility to sexual pleasure is a Gnostic-Stoic legacy which as far back as Clement was superimposed on the Christian Gospel' (p.50).

* In the statement 'He who able to receive this, let him receive it' (Matthew 19:12) 'Jesus is not speaking of celibacy at all' but is 'repudiating adultery and divorce' (pp.32-33).

* 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6 prove that compulsory celibacy was not an apostolic doctrine. True, Paul speaks about the greater availability of the unmarried person for the Lord (1 Cor. 7), but in the same epistle (1 Cor. 9:5) 'he mentions his right to take his wife on missionary journeys as the other apostles do' (p.39).

For the Roman Catholic church, the chief sins of humanity are located in the bedroom, not the battlefield. For some theologians, 'certain sexual practices were more reprehensible than killing a human being' (p.149). You can have a 'just war' to kill people, but it's never right to kill the unborn: 'Many mothers owe their death to papal pronouncements [about saving the life of the fetus at any cost] from 1884 to 1951' (p.302). 'The cruel God of Augustine, the persecutor and condemner of the newborn, of those who before their death did not manage to get baptized, is also a persecutor and torturer of mothers' (p.308).

Thomas Aquinas affirmed that the heavenly reward for virgins/celibates amounts to 100%, with 60% for widows and only 30% for married people (p.195). Priestly celibacy is unbiblical and unworkable (see pp. 118-119; cf. David Rice, 'Shattered Vows': if you leave the priesthood to marry, you can't practise ministry; but in all continents bishops know the parish priests who are adulterers... and stay. What gross hypocrisy!).

Finally, some items which might be headed 'What you always wanted to know about the history of the Catholic Church and sex':

* Theodore of Tarsus set the penalty for oral intercourse at up to a lifetime of penance, but for premeditated murder seven years... Egbert, archbishop of York, punished anal intercourse with seven years' penance, murder with four to five years (p. 149).

* Petrus Cantor (d. 1197) 'opined that intercourse with a beautiful woman was a greater sin than with an ugly one, because it gave more delight' (p.159)!

* Thomas Aquinas believed that deviation from the 'missionary position' was worse than intercourse with one's own mother (p.197)

* St Bernadine of Siena (d. 1444) said that if a woman knows that her husband is going to practise coitus interruptus, she must 'resist her husband to the death' (p.271).

* In 1982 two young handicapped persons were not allowed to be married in a Catholic church in Munich, because 'according to Catholic marriage law sexual incapacity is considered a natural legal impediment... from which the Catholic church can provide no relief' (p.253).

And this: * Augustine believed that those born deaf are damned to hell because Paul says 'faith comes by hearing' (Romans 10:17) (p.241)!

Her conclusion, with Karl Rahner: 'The Church in both theory and practice [has] used bad arguments to defend moral maxims based on problematic... 'prejudices'... This dark tragedy... is so burdensome because we are dealing here, in all or very many cases, with questions that penetrated deeply into the concrete lives of human beings, because such false maxims, which were never objectively valid... placed burdens on people... that from the standpoint of the freedom of the Gospel were not legitimate' (p.334).

So what's the key problem? Basically, the notion that humans can be wiser than God and elaborate on the basic revelation of God's will through the prophets, Jesus and the Scriptures. I once wrote a book on this [1] trying to point out that all the Christian creeds and most 'doctrinal statements' have followed the Jewish pharisees in such arrogant hubris. When, in the Catholic Church this is compounded by an Augustinian notion that the sexual act is a necessary evil the outcome, as Rahner says, is tragic.

[1] 'Recent Trends Among Evangelicals', Melbourne: John Mark Ministries, second edition, 1992.