Sex Edition: Students, religious officials discuss abstinence on campus

With much ado about relationships this time of year, certain campus and community members… With much ado about relationships this time of year, certain campus and community members retain traditional views on what to do — and what not to do — in dating.

Father Joseph Kibler, a priest at the Pittsburgh Oratory in Oakland, is one of these people, and he had a word for what ought to be at the foundation of a romantic relationship: “Friendship.”

Located on Bayard Street not too far from campus, the oratory and its members serve Catholic university students at Pitt, Carnegie Mellon and Chatham. Students go there for ritual observance, counseling and killer foosball games with priests.

Kibler champions what he likes to call “Catholic wisdom.” Among other things, it’s part of discerning one’s vocation, what we’re called to do in life, or just what college students spend most of their time trying to figure out.

Dating can be a big part of that process, and the Catholic wisdom says to put physical intimacy in the backseat — a personal struggle, as Kibler understands it.

“Chastity is first of all a state of mind before it’s a state of body,” he said. “That’s the first thing to understand.”

College life

Stephen Petrany, a junior majoring in economics and political science, is the student president of Newman Oratory Club — the oratory’s student group at Pitt.

Vincent Sartori, a junior majoring in industrial engineering, is a student leader with FOCUS, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students.

They’ve both have seen how relationships are important to college students and how certain elements of college can distract from an abstinent approach to dating.

“There are definitely pressures in a college setting – partying, drinking, things like that,” Petrany said.

The way women dress on the weekends, Sartori said, doesn’t make it any easier. Kibler quoted a sentiment at

tributed to Pope John Paul II:

“The problem with it is not that it reveals too much but that it reveals too little about the person,” he said. “It provides somebody with the occasion for someone to view you as an object and not as the subject of dignity as a person, as somebody with hopes, dreams and a vocation, specifically a vocation to love, in the profoundest sense.”

Petrany frequents the Bible study Catholic Action held in St. Paul’s Cathedral every Sunday, and Sartori leads a small, gender-separated bible discussion in the Petersen Events Center every Wednesday. There are many such group sessions held by student leaders throughout campus. They discuss relationships sometimes and believe the discussion is of interest to all college students.

In fact, the same kinds of discussions go on among students who focus a little more on the first five books of the Bible.

I Love Chicken

Earlier this winter, Rabbi Asher Cohen stood before two dozen college students and challenged them to try a different approach to romantic relationships. He was conducting the Aish Leaders Program, a two-hour-per-week Jewish studies program offered on college campuses around the country.

Cohen invited Gila Manolson, an Orthodox matchmaker from Jerusalem, to offer the Aish students an approach to dating that is so traditional that it must be considered radical in this day and age.

“Let’s talk about love,” Manolson said. “I love chicken. I do. But when I say that, what am I really saying? I’m saying that I love the way chicken makes me feel when I eat it. I don’t love the chicken. If I loved the chicken, I wouldn’t eat it. I’d build it a house in the back, knit it sweaters in the winter.”

Manolson meant that often, when young people get romantically involved, they’re acting on the “experience principle” — accumulating life experience through dating. She calls it “using people.”

Her solution? Instead of the “hormones-heart-head” approach ¬ as she defines casual dating reverse it.

No physical contact helps, she said, which is why the Jewish practice of shomer negiah — not touching members of the opposite sex — is so important. Physical intimacy makes it hard to see someone clearly, and it influences people to focus on less important things.

“The next time you say, ‘I love you,’ to someone,” Manolson said, “ask yourself whether what you’re really saying is, ‘I love chicken.’”

Prophylactic Prognoses

Father Kibler and the students from the oratory echoed Manolson’s sentiments, albeit with a different vocabulary and different religious orientations. They are all campus and community members who value and maintain a system of romantic self-moderation.

The point-of-view makes sense, Sartori said, even if God isn’t evidence enough for someone. Manolson cited America’s 60 percent divorce rate as evidence that too many marriages lack a meaningful foundation. The National Center for Health Statistics reports that the divorce rates for second marriages is just above 50 percent, but for first marriages it’s closer to 43 percent.

Marriages of people who live together beforehand are nearly doubly likely to end in divorce after 10 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Having sex, Kibler said, can burden people by giving them “disordered desires” or a “darkened intellect” — letting reason and judgment with respect to a relationship become clouded by physical intimacy. And what people don’t fear enough, he said, is that such intimacy can destroy a lasting relationship that could have been.

Chastity, for Petrany, is a safeguard against what Manolson called “using people.”

“If you give of yourself, then the relationship will either work or, if it doesn’t, it won’t have been a failure,” he said. “It wasn’t that you were stealing stuff from each other the entire time.”

Chaste Dating ≠ Smooth Sailing

So does cooling your jets make romance a relaxing ride?

“No, absolutely not,” Petrany said. “Oh, man, no.”

The temptation for physical intimacy is difficult to overcome in any relationship, Petrany said. But even aside from that, chaste relationships are as complicated as any other, for familiar reasons. Getting to know another person, finding out his interests, learning from one another — those are all part of it. Petrany discounts the notion that the Catholic idea of a relationship is simple.

“There’s this notion that girls and guys aren’t allowed to touch each other and then they’re supposed to get married and have fifteen kids, and if they don’t they’re bad Catholics,” he said. “None of that is true.”

“It would be nice to imagine [. . .] that chastity understood simply in terms of abstinence makes for smooth sailing,” Kibler said. “But it doesn’t mean there aren’t bumps in the road.”

Pre-marital sex does not guarantee marital doom, and chastity is not an automatic ticket to marital bliss. But for Petrany, from whatever one refrains, action is as important. Relationships are about self-sacrifice.

“If a Catholic’s going around telling you, ‘Don’t have sex before marriage, everything’ll be butterflies and sunshine’ . . . that’s not true,” he said. “It takes work.”

Sartori, for his part, has some ideas for the kind of work that makes a virtuous Valentine’s Day:

“Take her out for a nice dinner, buy her some roses, watch a movie, give her some hugs and kisses, and then wish her a good night.”