Sexing the Church: Gender, Power, and Ethics in Contemporary Catholicism. Aline H. Kalbian. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005; x +169 pages; ISBN 0-253-21750-4; $19.95US (paper).
Aline H. Kalbian's book Sexing the Church is a comprehensive exploration of the documents of the modern Catholic Church regarding marriage, sexuality and gender roles. The organizing structure of this exploration is around the importance of order, both in the senses of pattern and of command, to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Kalbian asserts that the Catholic understanding of moral life, particularly when related to sexuality, is that of maintaining the order of God's creation. Thus, marriage, for example, is not a human social invention but a mirror of God's relationship with his people/the Church. The Church hierarchy is invested in maintaining this order of creation through the insistence on the gender roles of husbands and wives - roles which revolve around the Church's presumption of the distinct nature of male and female participation in procreation and marital unity. Interestingly, Kalbian explains, the Church's portrayal as female and the bride of Christ complicates the very understanding of Church authority when placed beside the insistence on the masculinity of authority within the marital relationship. Ultimately, though, Kalbian sees the feminization of the Church, in the context of the

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maleness of Church leaders, as theoretically interesting while practically irrelevant to the real lives of Catholic women.
Sexing the Church is essential reading for those invested in understanding the Catholic Church's stance on marriage, sexuality, reproduction and gender roles. Kalbian provides an in depth study of the primary sources and pulls out the underlying imperatives facing the Church in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, throughout most of the book, one is left wondering about the assumed heterosexuality of sexuality. For example, sexual pleasure is consistently collapsed into sexual intercourse. That she leaves the issue of same-sex marriage to her concluding chapter (addressing it alongside a consideration of the sexual abuse of children by priests), leaves the reader wondering if Kalbian sees this as a marginal issue. Additionally, Kalbian's intentions are somewhat opaque. She claims that she wants to uncover the logic in the documents she is examining, but to what end? She neither supports nor challenges the order maintained by the Catholic Church. The reader is left with a valuable resource of information with little theorizing. For some this may be an asset. For this reviewer, the lack of positioning left the account dry and unengaging.
Chris Klassen Wilfrid Laurier University