Today’s saint is Gesenius (the French one, not the Roman one who, among other jobs, was a traveling comedian). No, nothing comic about this one. In fact, here is how he is so well remembered and lauded by Butler:

Austere to himself he treated his own body as an enemy, to prevent its rebelling against the spirit.

There you go: a celebrated strand of Christianity where the body is held out as our foe. Kindness to the body is providing aid and succor to the enemy. Always the body is ready to rise up against the Spirit. Hate your body so you can love God more purely. Body pleasure = capital-S Sin.

And so not surprisingly the Church has a long, strong history of coming down especially hard on those horrifying people who would make their own choices regarding their bodies. Yes, you can recite the list as well as I can type it. The message in all those cases of those the Church would condemn: DON’T GO THINKING THAT YOU CAN DO WITH  YOUR BODY WHAT YOU WANT (AND WE DON’T WANT). Pleasure must be punished. A girl who opens her legs has to bear a child if she gets pregnant. Aids is a just punishment. Blah blah blah. Hate hate hate.

When you add the combined weight of 1. personal condemnation, 2. convincing others that your actions threaten their own well-being, and 3. it’s an issue of protecting the vulnerable (which never includes you)–it’s a fairly powerful force for control and misery.

So what kind of foolish God made human beings earthy, and looked and saw ad proclaimed that they were “very good”?

And about Gesenius? He founded monasteries and made sure that “chastity, charity, and all virtues” ruled these sexless prisons, and always worked to make sure that his flock had plenteous “perpetual examples of the perfect evangelical spirit”–apparently forgetting that “evangelical” means “good news.”

By all means, let’s keep him in mind–as an example of what happens when Christianity teaches us as doctrine that our bodies are bad.