Nietzche - Morality and The Church

I once read Nietzche in Adoration on a Saturday afternoon for 2 or 3 hours. I wouldn't do that now (understanding Adoration as I do...), but of all the places to read Nietzche I happened upon a good one. I have fallen on less fertile soil these days (the Red Cardigan Society was denied, multiple times, it's request for Eucharistic Adoration at the Newman Center. We are searching elsewhere.) But I got a bit of a handle on Nietzche back then, and it's paying off now, as I read him in my English class: Nietzche gets the first principles wrong, and everything else right.

He claims that morality inhibits men from the proper exercise of their passions. In modern times you might find somebody who claims that morality which prohibits kids (by nature of being unmarried...) from having sex doesn't allow them to become fully developed. And if that is your view of morality, then you get a miserable Church which has come up with a bunch of rules in order to have power over it's followers. The logic is impecible.

But what if you change the first principle. What if you change the definition of morality. Let's take Aristotle instead: he'd say that morality guides men to happiness, since happiness is attained by being virtuous. Morality becomes life, because happiness is the greatest good of life. So what does the Church look like then? It becomes a loving institution which, in the self-forgeting interest of its followers provides them with a path (in the form of "rules") to happiness. They become the interperators of nature - of how happiness is achieved!

It's a debate between definitions when you are talking about Nietzche.