Prologue

Our earlier book, The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic

Anthropology, was highly acclaimed by its academic critics and was selected
by the Catholic Press Association as the best theological book of 2009. That
book, however, was written primarily for our fellow theologians, and that,
countless readers told us, made it a difficult read for those who were not
theologically trained. That complaint, allied to a fairly common request for a
Catholic book on sexual morality that “people in the pews” and “my
students” can understand, is the origin of this book. It is offered to the
general educated Catholic population in the hope that it will be more
readable and therefore more enlightening on common questions about
sexual morality as they arise for Catholics in the contemporary world.
Twenty-first-century sexual science, perhaps especially the critiques offered
by feminist scholars, have made clear to us that ancient assumptions about
sexuality and sexual intercourse are not entirely accurate. The advice of
Pythagoras, to “keep to the winter for sexual pleasures, in summer abstain;
sexual pleasures are less harmful in autumn and spring, but they are always
harmful and not conducive to health,” will surely make twenty-first-century
adults smile, but the pain and disaster daily experienced in the sexual area,
especially by the young, indicates that we have more to do than smile. 1 We
must understand more about our sexuality and the principles that direct it
morally and make it truly human than did Holden Caulfield, J. D. Salinger’s
tortured protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye. It is to facilitate that dual
understanding that this book is offered.
Two magisterial principles capture the essence of the Catholic moral,
sexual tradition. The first principle received its modern articulation in Pope
Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae (HV): “Each and every marriage act must
remain open to the transmission of life.” 2 The second was enunciated by the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF): “Any human genital act
whatsoever may be placed only within the framework of marriage.” 3 In the
Catholic tradition, moral sexual activity is institutionalized within the
confines of marriage and procreation, and sexual morality is marital
morality.
These two principles do not have the same theoretical underpinning. The
first is founded in what is called “nature” or natural order: the structure of
sexual acts reveals to the attentive and rational person the form that each
and every sexual act must take to be in accord with “nature” and the will of
nature’s Creator. The second is founded in human reason: attention to and
understanding, evaluation, and rational judgment of the various aspects of
an issue reveal to attentive, rational, and responsible human beings what
right sexual conduct ought to be. These two different ways of arriving at
moral principles have a long history in the Catholic moral tradition. Thomas
Aquinas argued, for example, that there are two ways in which a sexual act
is rendered unbecoming. “First, through being contrary to right reason….
Secondly, because, in addition, it is contrary to the natural order of the
sexual act as becoming to the human race.”4
In his influential 1951 speech to Italian midwives, Pope Pius XII argued
from the same two sources. On the one hand, he did not condemn the
prevention of procreation in a marriage; on the other hand, he condemned
artificial prevention of procreation in marital intercourse.5 In the first case,
right reason dictates how a married life should be lived; in the second, the
“nature” of the sexual act dictates how it should be performed within
marriage. These two ways of arriving at moral principle and judgment on
sexual ethical questions are evident throughout Catholic tradition and will
recur regularly throughout this book. They reflect a tension within that
tradition between methodological developments in approaches to ethics
and anthropological developments in understanding the sexual person, and
the norms that are formulated and justified in light of those developments.
This tension and its implications for a living and evolving Catholic tradition,
and theologians within that tradition, are well illustrated in Bernard
Lonergan’s concept of conversion.
Lonergan introduced the important notion of conversion in his
groundbreaking Insight, and further developed it in his important Method in
Theology.6 Conversion is a process that involves “a radical about-face in
which one repudiates characteristic features of one’s previous horizon or
perspective”; it may be threefold.7 Intellectual conversion abandons “the
myth that fully human knowing is to be conceived on an analogy with
seeing” (that is, that knowing is simply looking) and replaces it with the
affirmation that one knows only when one comes to understand correctly. 8
Moral conversion is “a shift in the criterion of one’s decisions and choices
from satisfaction to values.”9 Religious conversion is simply “falling in love
with God.”10 Lonergan’s initial analysis of conversion occurred within the
analysis of the development of the human knower in general, and
reoccurred within the analysis of the theologian-knower in particular.
Conversion, it is important to note, is not a development in what the
theologian says but “a fundamental and momentous change in the human
reality that a theologian is.”11 Conversion changes what the theologian is; it
is a radical development of personal foundations and perspectives. 12 From
different foundations and perspectives, unconverted and converted
theologians will interpret the Catholic tradition, and the methodological and
anthropological developments of that tradition, in different ways and will
draw radically different conclusions from it. Dialogue between theologians
will recur throughout this book, with no implied judgment as to which
theologian is converted and which is not.
The conversion that we explore in this book is primarily intellectual
conversion that stimulates and leads to moral and religious conversion. In
examining the tradition of Catholic sexual teaching, we note a conversion in
that tradition that is reflected in a disconnect. The disconnect is between
many of the Magisterium’s absolute proscriptive sexual norms and the
methodological and anthropological developments explicitly recognized and
endorsed in Catholic tradition, especially since the Second Vatican Council.
The conversion is marked by these methodological and anthropological
developments, which invite a reconsideration of norms and their
justification. Methodological developments include a fundamental shift from
a primarily classicist worldview to a primarily historically conscious
worldview. A classicist worldview asserts that reality is static, necessary,
fixed, and universal. The method utilized, anthropology formulated, and
norms taught in this worldview are timeless, universal, and immutable, and
the acts condemned by those norms are always so condemned. A
historically conscious worldview fundamentally challenges this view of
reality. In a historically conscious worldview, reality is dynamic, evolving,
changing, and particular. The method utilized, anthropology formulated, and
norms taught in this worldview are contingent, particular, and changeable,
and the acts condemned by those norms are morally evaluated in light of
evolving human knowledge and
understanding.
The shift from a classicist to a historically conscious worldview is
reflected, for example, in the Magisterium’s endorsement of the
historicalcritical method for interpreting scripture articulated in Divino
afflante spiritu and Dei verbum, which requires that scriptural texts be read
in the “literary forms” of the writer’s “time and culture.” 13 While this
method is clearly established and marks an explicit shift in the Catholic
tradition in how scripture is to be read, interpreted, and applied to ethical
issues, magisterial teaching continues to proof-text scripture to justify
absolute norms condemning certain sexual acts. Proof-texting happens
when a biblical text is cited to justify a doctrinal or ethical conclusion that is
already held and reached on the basis of some reason other than the
accurate interpretation of the biblical text.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, cites Genesis 19:1–
29, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, as a scriptural foundation for the
absolute prohibition of homosexual acts.14 Most biblical scholars, however,
relying upon the Vatican II–approved historical-critical method, as we shall
see in chapter 5, assert that the central meaning of this passage is about
hospitality or homosexual rape and has little relevance to the discussion of
the sexual activity of gays and lesbians of a homosexual orientation in
stable, monogamous, committed, just, and loving relationships. While the
Magisterium espouses the historical-critical method for interpreting
scripture and advocates utilizing other methodological resources such as the
sciences to formulate its teaching, it fails to fully consider and integrate the
normative implications of those methodological developments into that
teaching, especially with regard to many of its absolute sexual norms. 15 It
continues to cite certain scriptural passages to condemn sexual acts, while
its own method indicates these passages are peripheral, if not irrelevant, to
the acts it is condemning. The historical-critical method does not support
this classicist approach to justifying norms.
A similar disconnect exists between sexual anthropological developments
in the Catholic tradition and the formulation and justification of absolute
sexual norms. Gaudium et spes (GS) marks a radical evolution in Catholic
sexual teaching and, by implication, the sexual anthropology reflected in
that teaching, by eliminating the language of the hierarchy of the ends of
marriage. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, procreation was advanced as
the primary end of marriage, and union between spouses was advanced as
its secondary end. In Gaudium et spes, hierarchical language for the two
ends of marriage is rejected, and “the nature of the human person and his
acts” is posited as the foundational principle for harmonizing the ends of
marriage.16 This marked a fundamental shift and development in Catholic
sexual teaching and anthropology, but there is little evidence that the
Magisterium has fully incorporated this shift into its sexual anthropology or
into its formulation and justification of sexual norms. As we will
demonstrate throughout this book, the emphasis in that teaching continues
to be on the “nature” of the act rather than on the meaning of the act for
the human person.
This book has two objectives, one explicit and one implicit. The explicit
objective is to explore the normative implications for sexual ethics of the
methodological and anthropological developments in Catholic tradition.
Given the importance of history in the process of conversion, we begin by
providing a historical overview (chapter 1) of the Christian understanding of
human sexuality, which spans from Genesis to Vatican II. This historical
overview provides a context and foundation for our own anthropology,
which draws insights from tradition and utilizes methodological resources in
that tradition to formulate a foundational sexual ethical principle (chapter
2). The following chapters apply that principle to marriage and
contraception (chapter 3), premarital sex (chapter 4), homosexuality
(chapter 5), and reproductive technologies (chapter 6).
 The implicit objective of this book is to stimulate dialogue about sexual
morality between Catholic laity, theologians, and hierarchy. John Paul II
teaches that dialogue is rooted in the nature and dignity of the human
person. It “is an indispensable step along the path towards human
selfrealization, the self-realization of each individual and of every human
community.”17 We agree that every dialogue involves the subjectivity of
each person in the dialogue. Each must, therefore, attend carefully to the
data emerging in the dialogue, must marshal the data as fully as possible,
come to understand it, formulate that understanding in mutually
understandable concepts, and eventually pass judgment on the truth or
falsity of his or her understanding. It is only after this rational judgment is
passed that any true knowledge is achieved in the dialogue. After the
passing of judgment, there is the final step of considering possible courses
of action, evaluating them, making a decision about which course of action
to follow, and then translating that decision into action. In all of this, the
participants in the dialogue must be equal partners, with none being
privileged over any others, for it is only on the basis of this equality that any
individual in the dialogue may reach intellectual and, perhaps, also moral
conversion.
We are wide open to dialogue in this book. We have to be, given the
theological positions we embrace in it and in our theological lives. We are
like two men at a third-story window getting only a restricted third-story
perspective on the landscape outside the window, and we have to be open
to the complementation of perspectives provided by women and men at
sixth-, ninth-, and twenty-first-story windows. In theological parlance,
therefore, we situate this book in the category of quaestio disputata, the
disputed question, so beloved of the medieval Scholastics. The Scholastic
master had three tasks: lectio, or commentary on the Bible; disputatio, or
teaching by objection and response to a theme; and praedicatio, or
proclamation of the theological word. 18 Peter Cantor speaks for all of them
when he argues that “it is after the lectio of scripture and after the
examination of the doubtful points thanks to the disputatio, and not before,
that we must preach.”19 It is important for the reader to be aware that this
book seeks to be lectio, accurate interpretation of biblical and doctrinal
texts, and disputatio, elucidation of themes by objection and response,
before it is praedicatio, pastoral proclamation of the theological word.
We freely confess that it is not for theologians alone to formulate the
theological or moral doctrine and practice of their church. That task is for
the whole communion-church. The task of the theologian in the church is a
different and critical one. In the words of the CDF’s International
Theological Commission, it is the task of “interpreting the documents of the
past and present Magisterium, of putting them in the context of the whole
of revealed truth, and of finding a better understanding of them by the use
of hermeneutics,” that is, interpretive tools that rely on scripture, tradition,
reason and the sciences, and human experience. 20 The theologian “is
charged with developing the tradition beyond its current state so that it can
meet new questions, needs, and circumstances.” 21 It is that difficult and
frequently dangerous theologian’s task of “maintaining the balance between
‘immobilism’ and ‘eccentricity’” we seek to fulfill, positively and not
destructively, in this book.22 Since we believe that genuine and respectful
dialogue about sexual morality, and indeed about all that is involved in the
life of Christian discipleship, is sorely needed to clarify Christian truth today,
we intend this book to be part of a genuine dialogue.
There is a broad division of moral theologians in the contemporary
Catholic tradition. “Traditionalist” is the general label given to moral
theologians who support and defend absolute magisterial norms prohibiting
certain types of sexual acts such as premarital sex, artificial birth control,
artificial reproductive technologies, masturbation, and homosexual acts.
The traditionalist school is contrasted with the revisionist school.
“Revisionist” is the general label given to moral theologians who question
many of these absolute norms and propose alternative norms. These two
groups disagree on many specific sexual norms because they disagree, more
fundamentally, on the methodology and sexual anthropology that either
supports these norms or questions their legitimacy and credibility. Our
dialogue partners in the book, as you will discover as you proceed, are
theologians who argue from different starting points and reach different
conclusions about sexual morality than we do. Our intent is neither to prove
ourselves right nor to prove them wrong. Convinced of the central role that
love, desire, and fertility play in a human life, and therefore also in a life of
Christian discipleship, we seek only to suggest a sexual anthropology that
might lead to the enhancement and flourishing of human sexual
relationships.23 What we suggest is to be read as submitted to the
experience, attention, intelligence, reasonableness, and response of our
fellow believers in the communion-church. Since we do not dare suggest, in
a pilgrim Church, that the Spirit of God has breathed the final word about
either the communion-church or the sexuality of its members, we invite our
dialogue partners to be as critical in their reading as we are in our writing. 24
Both our critiques and theirs, however, should be such that they are not
destructive of the communion instituted by Christ and constituted by the
Spirit of Christ, who, as the Spirit of God, is also the Spirit of “righteousness
and peace and joy” (Rom. 14:17).

“NATURE” DEFINED
Since there will be much talk of “nature” in this and following chapters, we
must first confront a difficulty with any argument from “nature.” We cannot
draw conclusions from what just is to what morally ought to be, from the
biological structure of sexual intercourse, for example, to moral obligation,
for even after determining what just is, we still have to determine whether it
is right or wrong. To draw an immediate conclusion from what is to what
morally ought to be is a logical fallacy; a “naturalistic fallacy” Moore calls it;
a “theological fallacy” Frankena calls it. 25 All we can understand from
“nature” is the naked fact of a reality—sexuality and sexual intercourse, for
instance—nothing else. “Nature” reveals to our attention, understanding,
judgment, and decision only its naked fact, not our moral obligation.
Everything beyond “nature’s” fact is the result of interpretation by attentive,
rational, and responsible human beings.26
In reality, we have no access to the pure, unembellished experience of
“nature;” we experience “nature” only as interpreted by rational, social
beings.27 When we derive moral obligations from “nature,” we are actually
deriving them from our interpretation and evaluation of “nature.” It is, of
course, inevitable that different groups of equally rational human beings
may derive different interpretations of “nature” and moral obligation
deriving from “nature,” and that any given interpretation may be wrong.
That is a fact that has been demonstrated time and again in history,
including Catholic history.28 It is also something taken for granted in the
social scientific enterprise known as the sociology of knowledge. One of the
founders of this discipline, Alfred Schutz, presents its widely taken-
forgranted principle: “It is the meaning of our experiences and not the
ontological structure of the objects that constitutes reality.” 29 “The potter,
and not the pot,” Alfred North Whitehead adds metaphorically, “is
responsible for the shape of the pot.”30 The uninterpreted experience of
“nature,” as of every other factual reality, is restricted to its mere fact and is
void of meaning, a quality that does not inhere in “nature” but is assigned to
it by rational beings in interpretive acts. The decisive criterion for the
meaning of any human action, including any moral action, for instance,
sexual intercourse, is the project of the actor. 31 Meaning is what is or was
meant by the actor, who is always to be understood not as an
Enlightenment radical individual but as an Aristotelian-Thomistic radically
social being. Since “nature” is not pure, uninterpreted nature, since it is, as
philosophers and sociologists say, socially constructed, throughout this book
we speak of it always within quotation marks, that is, as “nature.”

PERSPECTIVISM VERSUS RELATIVISM

To many people, such an approach to reality and truth raises the specter of
relativism. With Lonergan, however, we prefer to speak of perspectivism
rather than relativism. “Where relativism has lost hope about the
attainment of truth, perspectivism stresses the complexity of what the
historian is writing about and, as well, the specific difference of historical
from mathematical, scientific and philosophic knowledge.” 32 While
relativism concludes to the falsity of a judgment, perspectivism concludes to
its partial truth. According to Lonergan, perspectivism in human knowledge
arises from three factors. First, human knowers are finite, the information
available to them is incomplete, and they do not attend to or master all the
data available to them. Second, the knowers are selective, given their past
socialization, personal experience, and range of data offered to them. Third,
knowers are individually different, and we can expect them to make
different selections of data. The theologian-knower trained in the
philosophy of Plato, for instance, Augustine, will attend to different data,
achieve different understanding, make different judgments, and act on
different decisions than the theologian-knower trained in the philosophy of
Aristotle, for instance, Aquinas. They produce different theologies, both of
which will be necessarily partial and incomplete explanations of a very
complex reality. They are like two viewers at first-story and fifteenth-story
windows of a skyscraper; each gets a different, but no less partial, view of
the total panorama that unfolds outside the building.
Every judgment of truth, including, perhaps especially, every judgment of
theological truth, is a limited judgment and commitment based on limited
data and understanding.33 “So far from resting on knowledge of the
universe, [a judgment] is to the effect that, no matter what the rest of the
universe may prove to be, at least this is so.”34 It is precisely the necessarily
limited nature of human, sociohistorical sensations, understandings,
judgments, and knowledge that leads to perspectivism, which is not, to
repeat, as a source of falsity but as a source of partial truth. Though he said
it on the basis of God’s incomprehensibility, Augustine’s restating of earlier
Greek theologians is apropos and accurate here: “Si comprehendis non est
Deus”—if you have understood, what you have understood is not God. 35
Aquinas agrees: “Now we cannot know what God is, but only what God is
not; we must, therefore, consider the ways in which God does not exist
rather than the ways in which God does.”36

“NATURE,” KNOWLEDGE, AND NORMS

This epistemological overview of object and objective knowledge has
profound implications for how we understand “nature” and the norms and
principles we derive from that understanding. First, depending on the
meaning derived from the dialectic of interdependence among object,
individual, and society, “nature” includes a variety of meanings and partial
truths. These meanings must be judged morally, as Gaudium et spes
correctly notes, in light of the objective criterion of the human person who
is a relational, incarnated, enculturated, historical subject. 37 These
epistemological considerations caution against positing a one-size-fits-all
morality deduced directly from “nature,” and they have implications for the
norms we formulate to guide sexual persons.
Second, Fuchs allies our foregoing discussion of “nature” to moral norms
in the following manner. He asks what is meant by the objectivity of moral
norms and gives two answers. First, a negative answer: “Objectivity does not
derive from formal revelation, tradition, or the authentic documents of the
magisterium.” Second, a positive answer: “If the norms of moral rightness
derive from a process of knowledge, evaluation and judgment [and with
Lonergan he assumes they do], then it must be admitted that they are
determined not only by the elements of the world-object but also by
elements of the judging subject that necessarily enter into this process.” 38
The human subject cannot make a genuinely moral judgment without
careful hermeneutics, that is, without attention to, and understanding,
judgment, and affirmation of, both the world and himself or herself in the
world. “It is only in this way that a norm is truly objective— whether it is
discerned by society or by a single person.” 39 This concept of objectivity is
different from the one that calls a norm “objective” if it is generally accepted
in a society, for example, the church, or is proposed by a social authority, for
example, the Magisterium. It is, however, the only concept of objectivity
that takes account of the true “nature” of not only physical acts but also the
rational subject who performs the acts.
We agree with the majority of Catholic moral theologians that an
absolute ethical principle exists and that such an absolute principle dispels
all possible confusion. We agree also, however, with the Catholic moral
theologian Dietmar Mieth that the only absolute principle is that “good is to
be done and evil left undone,” and that every other ethical judgment
requires concrete, empirical judgment. 40 Fuchs also agrees: “There is no
discrepancy of theories and opinions within Catholic moral theology about
the one ethical absolutum; the translation of the ethical absolutum into the
[concrete] material plurality of human reality is, however, a different
matter.”41 The hermeneutic for that translation is controlled, as it is always
in the Catholic moral tradition, by human reason seeking to be attentive,
intelligent, rational, and responsible in the actual sociohistorical situation. 42
It cannot be otherwise for free persons who live in a world that is both
physical and human and that is subject to historicity.
With regard to these matters, the Second Vatican Council taught that lay
persons are not to imagine that their pastors “are always such experts that
to every problem which arises, however complicated, they can readily give a
concrete solution, or even that such is their mission.” The clear
acknowledgment is that they are not. The Council goes on to advise
laypersons, “enlightened by Christian wisdom and giving close attention to
the teaching authority of the Church,” to take on their own distinctive role. 43
That distinctive role, it teaches with regard to the moral norms of married
life, is to reach “objective” judgments based on the “nature” not only of the
acts but also of the human person, “ex personae eiusdem actuum natura.”44
Acknowledging the evident plurality of objective moral judgments in the
modern world, the Council enjoins “the entire People of God, especially
pastors and theologians, to hear, distinguish, and interpret the many voices
of our age, and to judge them in the light of the divine word. In this way,
revealed truth can always be more deeply penetrated, better understood,
and set forth to greater advantage.” 45 These magisterial teachings suggest to
us that the concept of objectivity we have proposed lies well within the
Catholic tradition. That it does is already underscored by our prior
consideration of historicity.

CONSCIENCE

Earlier we spoke of the need for human moral agents to rationally reflect on
what they believe they ought to do, to marshal as fully as possible the
evidence for or against their belief, to pass judgment on its truth or falsity,
and finally to translate that judgment into a decision for action. That final,
practical judgment that this is what I ought to do in this situation is what the
Catholic tradition universally calls conscience, the “most secret core and
sanctuary of a man,” where “he is alone with God.” 46 Conscience is, as the
Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “a judgment of reason by which
the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act,” that is,
recognizes what he or she ought to do here and now in this situation. 47
Conscience, Richard Gula writes, is “me coming to a decision.” 48 Timothy
O’Connell’s division of conscience into conscience/1, conscience/2, and
conscience/3 has become classic.49 These three “consciences” are not three
different realities but three tasks that articulate fully the one reality of
conscience.
Conscience/1 is the human’s intrinsic capacity to know what is good and
to do it; without this intrinsic capacity judgments and decisions of
conscience would not be possible. Conscience/2 is accurate marshaling and
understanding of the evidence or data and right moral reasoning with
respect to it. Conscience/3, conscience in the proper sense, is the practical
judgment and decision that this is what I ought to do in this particular
situation. In and through that decision, I am and become the person I freely
choose to be and become. Once a decision is made to act in this way rather
than that way, what we call evaluative conscience takes over, evaluates the
decision and its impact on human flourishing, and completes the process of
conscience/2 formation by integrating into it the knowledge and
understanding gained from the decision. Once conscience/3 has made its
judgment of truth and decision to act, the Catholic tradition universally
teaches, it is always to be obeyed. Other teachers and authorities, the
Church’s Magisterium, for instance, may assist conscience/2 in marshaling
and understanding the evidence, but once conscience/3 has made its
judgment and decision, the individual person stands “alone with God” in
carrying it out.
Nobody, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, is to “be forced to
act contrary to his conscience,” and nobody is to “be prevented from acting
according to his conscience, especially in religious matters.50 Pope Benedict
XVI, when he was theologian Joseph Ratzinger, articulated in the strongest
terms what was and continues to be the universal and consistent Catholic
teaching about conscience. “Over the Pope as the expression of the binding
claim of ecclesiastical authority there still stands one’s own conscience,
which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the
requirement of ecclesiastical authority.”51
Even if the practical judgment of conscience/3 is erroneous, because
conscience/2 has either not marshaled the data fully or not understood it
correctly or not drawn logical conclusions from it, the judgment and decision
of conscience/3 is still morally binding. Every prudent effort should be made
to marshal and consider the evidence fully, to draw logical conclusions from
it, and to make an honest, faithful judgment and decision with respect to
what is moral for me to do in this particular situation. It is always possible,
however, for the judgment of conscience to be in error, but even if it is in
error, the Catholic tradition universally teaches, it is to be followed, and to
act against it is immoral. It is precisely to help Catholics marshal all the
evidence about human sexuality and make honest, faithful, and true
judgments of conscience about moral sexual behavior that the analyses in
this book are offered.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. What is the difference between a classicist worldview and ahistorically

conscious worldview? What difference, do you think, do the two
worldviews make to the articulation and understanding of Catholic
sexuality?
2. Why is honest and open dialogue so critical for the attainment of
thetruth about Catholic sexuality? Who should be involved in such
dialogue in the Church, and how should it be conducted?
3. What do you understand by nature and our presentation of it as
“nature”? What is the role of human reason in reading the meanings of
nature?
4. How do you understand perspectivism? How is it different from
relativism? What correction does perspectivism offer to your
understanding of magisterial teaching?
5. What do you understand by conscience? What is the obligation to
reach, and how should one reach, a well-formed conscience?
 6. What other questions arise for you from reading this prologue?

CHAPTER 1
Sexual Morality in the Catholic Tradition
A Brief History

Human sexual activity and the sexual ethics that seeks to order it are both
sociohistorical realities and are, therefore, subject to historicity. Before we
embark on a presentation of contemporary Catholic sexual anthropology
and ethics, therefore, it behooves us to look at their past history. We will do
that in two stages. First, and briefly, we will consider the pre-Christian
history that helped to shape Western understanding of human sexuality,
sexual activity, and sexual ethics. Second, and more extensively, we will
consider their understanding in specifically Catholic history. Before
embarking on the history, however, we must first say a word about
historicity.

HISTORICITY

Bernard Lonergan lays out “the theoretical premises from which there
follows the historicity of human thought and action.” They are as follows:
“(1) that human concepts, theories, affirmations, courses of action are
expressions of human understanding…. (2) That human understanding
develops over time and, as it develops, human concepts, theories,
affirmations, courses of action change…. (3) That such change is cumulative,
and (4) that the cumulative changes in one place or time are not to be
expected to coincide with those in another.” 1 From these premises flows the
conclusion that the articulations of the moral values, norms, and actions of
one sociohistorical era are not necessarily those of another era or, indeed,
of different groups in the same era. The world—both world free of every
human intervention and the human world fashioned by socially constructed
meanings and values—is in a permanent state of change and evolution. It is
essentially for this reason that Joseph Fuchs argues, correctly in our
judgment, that anyone who wishes to make a moral judgment about any
human action in the present on the basis of its givenness in the past has at
least two facts to keep in mind.
First, the past simply did not know the entire reality of the human person
from its emergence to its full development in the future or its individual
elements from the mysterious powers of the physical universe to the
possibilities of human sexuality considered physiologically,
psychologically, and sociohistorically. “If one wishes to make an objective
moral judgment today,” Fuchs points out, “then one cannot take what
Augustine or the philosophers of the Middle Ages knew about sexuality as
the exclusive basis of a moral reflection.” 2 Second, “we never simply ‘have’
nature or that which is given in nature.” We know “nature,” rather,
“always as something that has already been interpreted in some way.” 3 The
understanding, interpretation, and judgment of rational persons about
“nature” and what it demands, never simply the pure givenness of “nature”
alone, is what constitutes natural law. In the Catholic moral tradition,
argument is never from “nature” alone or reason alone, but always from
“nature” interpreted by reason. For the human person subject to historicity,
moral decision making and action is always the outcome of a process of
interpretation controlled by reason. It is never the outcome of the mere fact
of “nature.”
Lonergan was convinced that something new was happening in history in
the twentieth century and that, since a living theology ought to be part of
what is taking place in history, Christians were living in a new theological age
that required a new theological approach. That new approach, he
prophesied correctly, would be necessarily historical and empirical.
Lonergan’s distinction between a classicist and an empirical notion of
culture has itself become classical. “The classicist notion of culture was
normative … there was but one culture that was both universal and
permanent”; the empirical notion of culture is “the set of meanings and
values that informs a way of life.”4 Classicist culture is static; empirical
culture is dynamic. Theology, which is necessarily part of culture, mirrors
this distinction.
 In its classicist mode, moral theology is a static, permanent achievement
that anyone can learn; in its empirical mode, it is a dynamic, ongoing
process requiring a free person who is committed and trained. The classicist
understanding, Fuchs writes, conceives of the human person as “a series of
created, static, and thus definitively ordered temporal facts”; the empirical
understanding conceives of the person as a subject in process of
“selfrealization in accordance with a project that develops in God-given
autonomy, that is, along a path of human reason and insight.” 5 Classicist
theology sees moral norms coming from the Magisterium as once and for all
definitive; sexual norms enunciated in the fifth or sixteenth centuries
continue to apply absolutely in the twenty-first century. Empirical theology
sees the moral norms of the past not as facts for uncritical acceptance but as
partial insights providing bases for critical understanding, evaluation, and
decision in the present sociohistorical situation. What Augustine and his
medieval successors knew about sexuality cannot be the exclusive basis for
a moral judgment about sexuality today.
The Catholic Magisterium has two approaches to making moral
judgments. In sexual ethics it follows the classicist approach enshrined, for
instance, in the writings of Pope John Paul II; in social ethics it follows the
historical approach validated by the Second Vatican Council. The Catechism
of the Catholic Church teaches that “the Church’s social teaching proposes
principles for reflection; it provides criteria for judgment; it gives guidelines
for action.”6 This trinity of principles for reflection, criteria for judgment, and
guidelines for action came into Catholic social teaching via Paul VI’s
Octogesima adveniens in 1971.7 It was repeated in the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith’s (CDF) important Instruction on Christian Freedom and
Liberation in 1986,8 and underscored again a year later in John Paul II’s
Sollicitudo rei socialis. This sociomoral teaching introduces a model of
personal responsibility that increasingly emphasizes the responsibility of
each person. John Paul accentuates this point of view by teaching that, in its
social doctrine, the Church seeks “to guide people to respond, with the
support of rational reflection and of the human sciences, to their vocation as
responsible builders of earthly society.”9 The relationship of Magisterium
and individual believer advanced in this teaching merits close attention. The
Church guides.10 Responsible persons, drawing on this guidance, their own
intellectual abilities, and the findings of the human sciences, respond
responsibly.
The notion of responsibility introduces an important personal and
important dimension of human freedom and autonomy to the unnuanced
notion of response.11 In social reality, the Magisterium does not pretend to
pronounce on every last detail or to impose final decisions; it understands
itself as informing and guiding believers, and leaving the final judgment and
application to their faithful and responsible conscience. 12 Sociomoral
principles are guidelines for reflection, judgment, and action, not
unchanging moral imperatives demanding uncritical obedience to God,
“nature,” or Church. John Paul adds what the Catholic moral tradition has
always taken for granted. On the one hand, the Church’s social teaching is
“constant.” On the other hand, “it is ever new, because it is subject to the
necessary and opportune adaptations suggested by the changes in historical
conditions and by the unceasing flow of the events which are the setting of
the life of people and society.” 13 Principles remain constant. Criteria for
judgments and guidelines for actions might well change after reflection on
changed sociohistorical conditions and the data of the social sciences.
In social morality, then, the Catholic Church offers principles for
reflection, criteria for judgment, and guidelines for action. In sexual
morality, however, it offers propositions from past tradition, not as
principles and guidelines for reflection, judgment, and action but as laws
and absolute norms to be universally and uncritically obeyed. How this can
be is, at least, debatable. Since social and sexual morality pertain to the
same person, this double and conflicting approach seems illogical. In fact,
because the whole personality is more intimately involved in the sexual
domain, should it not “be more than any other the place where all is
referred to the informed conscience.”14 The choice between the two moral
approaches is neither self-evident nor free from risk, but it is a choice that
must be made to find the best theological and pastoral approach to the
experience of contemporary women and men.
SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL ETHICS IN ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME

Though generalizations about ancient Greece and Rome are fraught with
difficulties, both because their histories were in general written by elite
males to the detriment of women’s sexual histories and because we know
today more about Athens and Rome than about any other Greek or Roman
city, we can safely say that in both societies sexuality was generally
accepted as a natural part of life and that attitudes toward sex were
permissive, especially for men.15 In both societies, marriage was
monogamous and regarded as the foundation of social life, but sexual
activity was not restricted to marriage. Judith Hallett demonstrates that, at
least among elite men and women, erotic intercourse could be sought with
partners other than spouses.16 And concubinage, male and female
prostitution, and male intercourse with slaves were also permitted and
common. The ancient aphorism attributed to Demosthenes is famous:
“Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care
of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful
guardians of our households.”17 Divorce was readily available in Greece and
the later Roman Empire, with both societies legislating for the economic
situation of divorced women. Abortion and infanticide were commonly
accepted forms of birth control. Marriage was not about love, which is not
to say that marital love was never present between spouses. Men were
expected to marry to produce an heir, but for them the greatest love was to
be had in relationship, sexual or otherwise, with other men, for between
men there was an equality that a man could never attain with a woman.
Both Greece and Rome were male-dominated societies in which women
were regarded as inferior to men, indeed as belonging to men, first to their
fathers and then to their husbands. Male homosexual activity was accepted
in both as a function of a patriarchal ethos, and female homosexual activity
was regarded as adultery, because wives were the property of their
husbands.18 The approved male homosexual activity was not because some
men had an intrinsic homosexual orientation, which was unknown at the
time, but because men were considered more beautiful than women, and a
man might reasonably be attracted to the more beautiful. It is misleading,
however, to speak of sexual relations between men; relations were most
often between adult men and boys. Those relations were to cease when the
boy reached a certain age, not because homosexual relations per se were
problematic, but because adult male passivity was problematic.19 We will
encounter this same problematic later when we consider the biblical texts
proscribing male homosexuality.
Greek and Roman attitudes toward sexuality were fashioned in large part
by their great philosophers. The Greek dualism between body and soul, with
the body being the inferior component, led to a distrust of physical sex and
the categorization of sexual pleasure. Both Plato and Aristotle judged sexual
pleasure to be a lower pleasure shared with other animals. 20 Plato urged its
transcendence for the sake of higher pleasures of good, beauty, and truth;
Aristotle urged its moderation. It was not, however, Plato or Aristotle who
had the greatest influence on the Christian approach to sexuality. It was the
Stoics. We deal with these in some detail in the next section; here we make
only two summary statements. The Stoic Musonius Rufus, in his Reliquiae,
and Seneca, in his Fragments, considered sexual desire and activity to be
irrational and liable to excess. They sought, therefore, to rationally order it
by situating it in a larger context of human meaning, and they did this by
asking about its telos, its purpose or end. That end, they judged, was the
procreation of children, and therefore sexual activity was moral only when it
was engaged in for the sake of procreation. The later Stoics went further.
Not only was sexual activity for procreation, but also it was to be limited to
marriage; there could be no moral sex outside of marriage. Stoic
philosophers both “conjugalized” and “procreationalized” sexual relations.

SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL ETHICS IN THE CATHOLIC TRADITION

In 1968, in Humanae vitae, Pope Paul VI asserted that in marriage “each and
every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.” 21 In 1976
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith asserted that, to be moral,
“any human genital act whatsoever may be placed only within the
framework of marriage.”22 In traditional Catholic sexual morality, therefore,
every sexually moral act takes place only within the institution of marriage,
and within marriage each and every such act must be open to procreation.
Traditional Catholic sexual morality is essentially marital morality; sexuality
is carefully confined in marriage, and every intentional genital act outside of
marriage is seriously sinful.23
The consonance of that teaching with Stoic philosophy is clear. It would
be wholly inaccurate, however, to assume that Greek philosophy is the only
root of Catholic sexual morality. Catholicism’s first instinct is to consult not
ancient Greek philosophers but its ancient sacred text, the Bible, believed to
be the word of God. As Catholic theologians, it is also our first instinct, and
so we begin our analysis of the development of traditional Catholic sexual
morality with an exploration of first the Old and then the New Testament.
Following the lead of the Second Vatican Council, we then follow the biblical
tradition through its subsequent history, in which, under the grace of the
Spirit of God, “there is a growth in insight into the realities and words that
are being passed on.”24

READING SACRED SCRIPTURE

The Pontifical Biblical Commission’s 1994 document The Interpretation of

the Bible in the Church insists, “Holy scripture, inasmuch as it is ‘the Word of
God in human language,’ has been composed by human authors in all its
various parts and in all the sources that lie behind them. Because of this, its
proper understanding not only admits the use of [the historical-critical]
method but actually requires it.”25 It acknowledges the historicity of the
biblical texts, insisting that “religious texts are bound in reciprocal
relationship to the societies in which they originate…. Consequently, the
scientific study of the Bible requires as exact a knowledge as possible of the
social conditions distinctive of the various milieus in which the traditions
recorded in the Bible took shape.” 26 The very nature of the biblical texts
requires the use of a historical methodology for their correct interpretation.
Of particular relevance to this book is the Commission’s applications of its
principles for biblical exegesis to moral theology. Though the Bible is God’s
word to the church, “this does not mean that God has given the historical
conditioning of the message a value which is absolute. It is open both to
interpretation and being brought up to date”; it follows, therefore, that it is
not sufficient for moral judgment that the scripture “should indicate a
certain moral position [e.g., the practice of polygamy, slavery, or divorce, or
the “prohibition” of homosexual acts] for this position to continue to have
validity. One has to undertake a process of discernment. This will review the
issue in the light of the progress in moral understanding and sensitivity that
has occurred over the years.”27 And so Fuchs writes that what Augustine,
Jerome, Aquinas, and Trent said about sexuality cannot exclusively control
what moral theologians say today.
Scriptural and traditional doctrinal formulations are the result of
reflexive, critical, human construal and have to be, therefore, as historically
conditioned as its construers themselves. 28 It cannot be otherwise. If God is
to be really revealed to historical women and men, there is no alternative
but for the revelation to be mediated in their sociohistorical symbols. If the
foundational revelation is to be expressed in human language, oral or
written, as it is in scriptural, doctrinal, and theological formulations, there is
no alternative but for the expression to be in a language that is historically
mediated. There is no transhistorical, transcultural language valid for all
times and for all peoples. Since the scriptural rule of faith and the
theological writings derived from it are historically and culturally
conditioned, they will require translation, interpretation, and enculturation
to truly disclose God in every different historical and cultural situation. Since
the translators, interpreters, and enculturators may stand in different
sociohistorical contexts, their interpretations of the classic tradition will
almost certainly be pluriform, which will lead to debate. That debate will be
resolved only by theologians in respectful dialogue.
Discovering what scripture says about sexual morality, therefore, is never
as straightforward as simply reading the text. The reader must get behind
the text to understand how the Church and its theologians construe
scripture and what authority they assign to it. We begin our analysis with
the Catholic teaching of how the four Gospels came to be and how they are
to be interpreted. They came to be in a four-stage process: a first generation
of followers construed their experience of the life, death, and resurrection
of Jesus of Nazareth as religious and revelatory of God; further construals
grew up around that experience; those traditions were preserved in written
form in the third generation.29 And certain of those writings were ultimately
canonized as authoritative Church scripture. 30 How theologians understand
this four-stage process determines how they construe scripture and its
authority in theology.
The Second Vatican Council embraced this four-stage scheme with
respect to the writing of the four Gospels and issued instruction on how the
scriptures of both testaments are to be read. “Those who search out the
intentions of the sacred writers,” it teaches, “must, among other things have
regard for ‘literary forms.’ For truth is proposed and expressed in a variety
of ways, depending on whether a text is history of one kind or another, or
whether its form is that of prophecy, poetry, or some other type of speech.
The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended
to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances as he used
contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own
time and culture.”31 It is never enough simply to read the text to find out
what it says about sexual morality. Its original sociohistorical context must
first be clarified, and then the text can be translated, interpreted, and
enculturated in a contemporary context. An example of how sexual morality
and sociohistorical context are connected appears from an analysis of
patriarchy.
The dominant characteristic of patriarchy is that it describes women in
relation to men, and in ways that serve and further men’s interests.
Patriarchy is the “social order in which women are declared to be the
possessions of, first, fathers and, later, husbands.” 32 It is “the systematic
social closure of women from the public sphere by legal, political, and
economic arrangements which operate in favor of men.” 33 Patriarchal
assumptions abound in both testaments, and the New Testament uses them
to enforce women’s subordination to men (1 Cor. 11:7–12; Col. 3:18), to
silence them in church, and to suggest the way for women to atone for their
collective guilt in causing men to sin is to bear men children (1 Tim. 2:12–
15). Genesis 2–3 is the mythical justification for all patriarchy in the Bible. In
this account, the earlier creation account, woman is created as an
afterthought from man and for man. She is to be “a helper fit for him” (Gen.
2:20). A quite different perspective is given in the later account in Genesis 1,
where both male and female are created together “in [God’s] own image”
and together are declared to be ‘adam, humankind (Gen. 1:27). This
presumed equality between male and female as human vanishes in Genesis
3, where the woman is blamed for the man’s sin (Gen. 3:12) and condemned
to be under the man’s rule (Gen. 3:16).
If we accept the Bible as a source for moral judgments about sexual
morality, the Catholic tradition requires that we first examine the cultural
assumptions that underpin what is said about sexual morality. If what is said
is inseparably linked to the underpinning judgment that the proper
relationship between a man and a woman is a patriarchal relationship with
the man as superior, then a careful process of separating what is true but
culturally limited and what is transculturally true must be undertaken. For
Christians, the criterion for such a refining process is provided by the New
Testament and Jesus’s behavior toward women, the woman with the issue
of blood (Mark 5:25–34), the sinful woman in the house of the Pharisee
(Luke 7:36–50), and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4:8–30).
Jesus deals with and speaks to none of these women in a demeaning or
patriarchal way. It was but a small further step to Paul’s egalitarian
judgment that for Christians in the fictive family of Jesus (“whoever does the
will of God is my brother, my sister, my mother” (Mark 3:35), “there is
neither male nor female, for you are all one person in Christ” (Gal. 3:28).

OLD TESTAMENT TEACHING

Old Testament teaching on sexuality and marriage must be situated in the

context of the ancient Near Eastern cultures with which the biblical peoples
had such intimate links. Underlying the themes of sexuality and marriage in
the cultures surrounding Israel are the archetypal figures of the god-father
and the goddess-mother, the sources of universal life in the divine, the
human, and the natural realms. Myths celebrated the marriage, the sexual
intercourse, and the fertility of this divine pair, simultaneously divinizing
sexuality and legitimating the marriage, the intercourse, and the fertility of
every earthly pair. Rituals acted out the myths, establishing a concrete link
between the divine and the earthly worlds, enabling men and women to
share in both the divine action and the efficacy of that action. This is
especially true of sexual rituals, which bless sexual intercourse and ensure
that the unfailing divine fertility is shared by a man’s plants and animals and
wives, all important elements in his struggle for survival in those primitive
cultures.
The Hebrew view of sexuality and marriage makes a radical break with
this polytheistic perspective.34 Sexuality is not divinized. There is no god–
goddess couple, only Yahweh who is unique (Deut. 6:4). In the later Priestly
account, God creates merely by uttering a creative word (Gen. 1) and, in the
earlier Yahwist account, by shaping creation as a potter (Gen. 2–3). At the
apex of Yahweh’s creation stands ‘adam, man and woman together: “male
and female he created them and he blessed them and named them ‘adam”
(Gen. 5:2). The fact that Yahweh names male and female together ‘adam,
that is, earthlings or humankind, founds the equality of man and woman as
human beings. They are “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen.
2:23), and because they are equal they can marry and become “one body”
(Gen. 2:24). In marriage, equal man and woman take on the unequal
gendered roles of husband and wife, which gives a foundation for biblical
patriarchy.35
Equal man and woman, and their separate sexualities, do not derive from
a divine pair whom they are to imitate. They are called into being by the
creative action of the sovereign God. “It was not the sacred rites that
surrounded marriage that made it a holy thing. The great rite which
sanctified marriage was God’s act of creation itself.” 36 It was God alone,
unaided by any partner, who not only created ‘adam with sexuality and for
marriage but also blessed him and her, making them fundamentally good.
That a man and a woman become one body in marriage has often been
restricted in the Western tradition to only one facet of marriage, namely,
the act of uniting bodies in sexual intercourse. That facet is undoubtedly
included in becoming one body but it is far from all there is, for body in
Hebrew implies the entire person. “One personality would translate it
better, for ‘flesh’ in the Jewish idiom means ‘real human life.’” 37 In the
debate on sexuality and marriage at the Second Vatican Council, biblical
scholar Cardinal Alfrink pointed out that “the Hebrew verb dabaq, in Greek
kollao, does suggest physical, bodily, sexual union, but it suggests above all
spiritual union which exists in conjugal love.” 38 In marriage a man and a
woman unite in an interpersonal union, not just a sexual or genital one. In
such a union they become one coupled social person and one life, so
complementing one another that they become again, as in the beginning,
‘adam, one social person.
The older Yahwist creation account in Genesis 2–3 situates sexuality in a
relational context. “It is not good that the male should be alone,” God
judges, “I will make a helper fit for him” (2:18). The importance of the helper
to the one helped may be gleaned from the fact that twice in the Psalms
(30:10 and 54:4) God is presented as such a helper of humans. The equality
of the partners in this helping relationship is underscored. Male and female
are “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (2:23), they have the same
strengths and the same weaknesses, and the myth asserts that it is precisely
because of their equality and, therefore, potential intimacy that male and
female may marry. Significantly, they are presented as being totally
comfortable with each other’s sexuality, for they “were both naked and not
ashamed” (1:25), a comfort that is celebrated frankly in that great Jewish
love song, the Song of Songs.
About four hundred years later, the Priestly tradition has God bless
‘adam, male and female, and enjoin them to “be fruitful and multiply, and
fill the earth and subdue it” (1:28). Male and female, their sexuality, and
their fertility are blessed by God; ever afterward there can be no doubt that
sexuality is good. The Priestly myth situates sexuality in a procreative
context, that is, a context of cooperation with the Creator in both the
creation of children and caring providence for them. Raymond Collins notes
that “procreation was valued in Israel insofar as large Israelite families were
considered to be the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham.” 39 From
the beginning of the biblical tradition, therefore, sexuality as created by God
is linked to two perspectives, to the relationship of mutual help between
male and female and to their procreative activity together. These two
perspectives are the ones we found also in the Greco-Roman, Stoic
tradition. They will have convoluted histories in the postbiblical, Catholic
tradition.
Central to the Hebrews’ notion of their special relationship with God was
the idea of the covenant. Yahweh is the God of Israel; Israel is the people of
Yahweh. Together Yahweh and Israel form a union of salvation, a union of
grace, a union, one could say, of one body. It was probably only a matter of
time until the people began to image this covenant relationship in terms
drawn from marriage, and the first to speak of marriage as image of the
covenant was the prophet Hosea. He preached about the covenant
relationship of Yahweh and Israel within the biographical context of his own
marriage to his wife, Gomer. Hosea found in marriage, either in his own
marriage or in marriage in general, an image in which to represent the
steadfastness of Yahweh’s covenantal love for the people of Israel. On a
superficial level, the marriage of Hosea and Gomer is like any other
marriage. But on a deeper level, it serves as prophetic symbol, revealing and
celebrating in representation the covenant relationship between Yahweh
and Israel. Yahweh’s covenant fidelity becomes a characteristic to be
imitated, a challenge to be accepted, first, in every Jewish marriage and,
later, in every Christian one.
Another Old Testament book, the Song of Songs, is intimately related to
any biblical analysis of sexuality. The Song has always been an
embarrassment for interpreters, posing the difficulty of deciding whether it
is a celebration of divine or human love. For centuries, under the shadow of
the negative presuppositions about sexuality that developed in the
postbiblical Church, Christian commentators opted for a spiritualized
meaning. The Song, they prudishly explained, was about the love of Yahweh
for Israel, even the love of God for the individual soul. This argument ignores
the historical fact that the Song was included in the Hebrew canon before
there was any suggestion of an allegorical interpretation, which in itself
provides “a powerful argument for believing that Israel’s faith did not see its
profane nature as an impediment to its acceptance as ‘biblical literature.’” 40
Embodied men and women need no elaborate literary or philosophical
argument; they need only listen to the extraordinarily explicit words and
imagery of sexual love to know what the poetry means.
“I am sick with love,” the woman exclaims (2:5; 5:8). “Come to me,” she
cries out in desire for her lover, “like a gazelle, like a young stag upon the
mountains where spices grow” (2:17; 8:14). When he comes and gazes upon
her nakedness, he is moved to poetry. “Your rounded thighs are like jewels
… your vulva is a rounded bowl that never lacks wine. 41 Your belly is a heap
of wheat encircled with lilies. Your two breasts are like fawns, twins of a
gazelle…. You are stately as a palm tree and your breasts are like its clusters.
I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches” (7:1–8). Her
response is direct and far from coy. “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for
me. Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the fields…. There I will give you
my love” (7:10–13). No woman or man who has ever been sick with love and
desire can doubt the origin of the language or its intent. Karl Barth, who
argued that the Song was a “second Magna Carta” that develops the
relationship view hinted at in Genesis 2, notes the equality between the
man and the woman in the Song. 42 “It is to be noted that in this second text
we hear a voice which is lacking in the first. This is the voice of the woman,
to whom the man looks and moves with no less pain and joy than she to
him, and who finds him with no less freedom … than she is found. Implicitly,
of course, this voice is heard in Genesis as well. But now it finds expression
in words. And what words!”43
Such explicitly erotic language has always raised doubt about the claim
that the Song is about divine love, and today a consensus has emerged
among scholars that its clear and literal meaning is the one enshrined in any
human love song.44 The Song may be an allegory about divine love, but only
secondarily; it may be about spiritual love, but only derivatively. It is
primarily about human, erotic love, love that makes every lover “sick with
love” (2:5). This love is celebrated as image of the love of the creator God
who loves women and men as the two lovers love each other. It is
celebrated as good, to honor both the Giver and the gift, and also the lovers
who use the gift to make both human and, in representation, divine love.
Sexuality is no more divinized in the Song than anywhere else in the Old
Testament; it may provide the basis for spiritual analogy, but the basis
remains a secular, profane, and good reality. Barth notes an item of
importance, namely, the woman speaks as openly as the man, and just as
often. “There is no male dominance, no female subordination, and no
stereotyping of either sex.”45 Nor is there any mention of marriage or
procreation to justify sexuality. The Song is a far cry from Plato’s and
Aristotle’s downgrading of sexual desire and pleasure; it is a celebration of
human love and of the sexual desire of the lovers. Christian history will
seriously patriarchalize the equal sexual relationship between male and
female, will institutionalize it within the confines of marriage and
procreation, and will follow Plato and Aristotle in their suspicion of sexual

pleasure.

NEW TESTAMENT TEACHING

Sexuality, as we have seen, plays a relatively small role in the Old

Testament. Lisa Cahill judges it “striking” that it also “plays a relatively small
role in the New Testament at all. Only twice does Jesus direct his concern
toward it [John 8:1–11 and Matt. 5:31–32], and in both cases he protects
women from the customs of his day and culture.” 46 The New Testament
provides no more of a systematic code of sexual ethics or even an approach
to a sexual ethics than does the Old Testament. The most extensive New
Testament teaching about sexuality is in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians,
apparently in response to a question the Corinthians had asked: “Is it better
for a man not to touch a woman?” (7:1). Paul’s answer, under the mistaken
apprehension that the last days have arrived (7:31), is a mixed message. He
prefers celibacy over marriage in the situation of the last days, but “because
of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife
and each woman her own husband” (7:2). It is “better to marry than to be
aflame with passion” (7:9). Marriage is good, even for Christians, he seems
to say, against the ascetical Encratites and Gnostics, who urged celibacy on
all Christians, even if only as a safeguard against sexual sins (7:5–9).
Much more telling, however, than his grudging affirmation of marriage
and sex in the circumstances of his time is Paul’s counter-cultural assertion
of equality between husband and wife in marriage. “The husband should
give to the wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.
For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does;
likewise, the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does”
(7:3–4). Theodore Mackin accurately comments.

A modern Christian may wince at finding the apostle writing of sexual

intercourse as an obligation, or even a debt, owed by spouses to one
another, and writing of husbands’ and wives’ marital relationship as
containing authority over one another’s bodies. But Paul’s
contemporaries—at least those bred in the tradition of Torah and of its
rabbinic interpreters—would have winced for another reason. This was
Paul’s assertion of equality between husbands and wives, and equality
exactly on the juridical ground of authority and obligations owed. 47
When a Christian man and a Christian woman marry, first-century Paul
suggests, the covenant they make with each other is a covenant of equal
and intimate partnership, and it embraces their human sexual activity
within it. It is a suggestion that the Second Vatican Council will pursue
twenty centuries later.48

Hosea’s conception of marriage as a prophetic symbol of the mutually

faithful covenant relationship is continued in the New Testament, with a
change of characters, from Yahweh–Israel to Christ–church. Rather than
presenting marriage in the then-classical Jewish way as a symbol of the
covenant union between Yahweh and Israel, the writer of the letter to the
Ephesians presents it as an image of the relationship between the Christ and
the new Israel, his church.49 This presentation is of central importance to the
development of a Christian view of marriage and sexuality and,
unfortunately, has been used to sustain such a diminished Christian view
that we have to consider it here in some detail.
The passage in which the writer offers his view of marriage (5:21–33) is
situated within a larger context (5:21–6:9), which sets forth a list of
household duties that exist within a family in his historical time and place.
This list is addressed to wives (5:22), husbands (5:25), children (6:1), fathers
(6:4), slaves (6:5), and masters (6:9). All that concerns us here is what is said
to wives and husbands. There are two similar lists in the New Testament,
one in the letter to the Colossians (3:18–4:1), the other in the first letter of
Peter (2:13–3:7), but the Ephesians’ list opens with a singular injunction.
“Because you fear [or stand in awe of] Christ give way to one another” or, in
the weaker translation of the Revised Standard Version, “be subject to one
another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21). This injunction, commentators
agree, is an essential element of what follows. Mutual giving way is required
of all Christians, even of husbands and wives as they seek holiness together
in marriage, and even in spite of traditional patriarchal relationships that
permitted husbands to lord it over their wives.
As Christians have all been admonished to give way to one another, there
is no surprise in the instruction that a Christian wife is to give way to her
husband, “as to the Lord” (5:22). There is a surprise, however, at least for
the ingrained male attitude that sees the husband as lord and master of his
wife and appeals to Ephesians 5:22–23 to ground and sustain that
unChristian attitude, that a husband is to give way to his wife. That follows
from the general instruction that Christians are to give way to one another.
It follows also from the specific instruction given to husbands. That
instruction is not that “the husband is the head of the wife,” the way the
text is frequently cited, but rather that “in the same way that the Messiah is
the head of the church the husband is the head of the wife.” A Christian
husband’s headship over his wife is to be modeled upon and model of
Christ’s headship over the Church, and the way Christ exercises authority is
never in doubt: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to
give his life as a ransom [redemption] for many” (Mark 10:45).
 Diakonia, service, is the Christ way of exercising authority; it was as a
servant that “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (5:25). A
Christian husband, therefore, is instructed to be head over his wife by
serving, giving way to, and giving himself up for her. Marital authority
modeled on that of Christ does not mean control, giving orders, making
unreasonable demands, reducing another person to the status of servant or,
worse, of slave to one’s every whim. It means loving service. The Christian
husband-head, as Markus Barth puts it so beautifully, becomes “the first
servant of his wife.”50 It is such a husband, and only such a one, that a wife is
to hold in awe (v. 33b) as all Christians fear or hold in awe Christ (v. 21b).
There is no reversal of Paul’s judgment of equality between spouses in
marriage, but rather a confirmation of it from another perspective, that of
mutual and equal service, in every part of their life, including the sexual. A
husband is further instructed to love his wife, for “he who loves his wife
loves himself” (v. 28b; cp. v. 33a). This love is essential to marriage, and the
marriage it founds reveals a profound mystery about Christ and Church. The
mystery, most scholars agree, is embedded in the text of Genesis 2:24 cited
in 5:31. As the Anchor Bible translation seeks to show, “this [passage] has an
eminent secret meaning,” which is that it refers to Christ and Christ’s
Church.

THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH

The doctrine about sexuality and marriage in both Old and New Testaments
was a Jewish doctrine, developed in the originating Jewish culture of the
Christian movement. The developing Christian Church soon moved out of
that Jewish culture into a Greco-Roman one in which Greek and Latin
Fathers of the Church shaped the biblical doctrine about marriage and
sexuality within their own cultural contexts and established the Catholic
approach to sexuality we noted at the outset, namely, sexual morality as
marital morality. To understand fully the Christian tradition about sexuality
and marriage that came down to our day, we must seek to understand not
only their teaching but also the historical situation in which it developed. As
we have already discovered for the Bible, there was no systematic and full
treatment of either sexuality or marriage as a social and Christian
institution. The Fathers’ teaching was almost exclusively a defense of
marriage and marital sexuality against certain errors that threatened both
its Christian value and its future. The majority of these errors had Gnostic
sources, and it will be to our benefit to consider, however briefly, the
Gnosticism from which they came.
Gnosticism, a Hellenistic religious philosophy characterized by the
doctrine that salvation is achieved through a special knowledge (gnosis),
antedated Christianity and exercised a great influence on many Christian
communities in the Mediterranean Basin. Christian Gnostics looked upon
themselves as the only faithful interpreters of the Jesus movement. They
preached a dualistic and pessimistic view of the world, a view in which good
and evil are equally real. Both of these views affected their attitude toward
sexuality and marriage and therefore the Fathers’ expositions on them in
response. Because matter, and therefore sexuality and marriage with their
very material bodily intercourse and bodily outcome, was essentially evil,
Gnostics believed, it could not have been created by a good God. That
meant they had to revise the classic Jewish approach to creation, a task that
was accomplished by Marcion, who taught there had to be two gods, one
who created evil, the other who created good. The god who created evil is
Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament; the god who created good is the
Father of Jesus, who alone reveals him. The Old Testament, therefore,
should be rejected, along with all its doctrines and its laws. Among these
doctrines is the one that men, women, sexuality, and marriage were created
good by God; among such laws are those that legislate the relationships of
men and women and their mutual sexual activity. Such attitudes generated,
on the one hand, a negative, ascetic approach to sexuality and marriage and,
on the other hand, a licentious, permissive approach, known as
antinomianism. The second- and third-century Fathers had to defend
marriage against attacks on both these fronts.
By the middle of the second century of the Christian era, Alexandria had
become established as the intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world. We
would expect to find powerful Gnostics there, and our expectation is verified
via the writings of Clement, the bishop of Alexandria. He tells us of the two
kinds of Gnostics we have noted, namely, the ascetics who abstained from
marriage and sexual intercourse because they believed them to be evil, and
the antinomians who believed they are saved by their special gnosis, no
matter what, and are therefore above any law regarding sexuality and
marriage.51 Clement declares the opinions of the Gnostics “impious” and
responds with a simple argument.
There is only one God, and that God is good; sexuality and marriage were
created by the one God and, therefore, are good from their origin. Irenaeus
of Lyons employs this same argument in his extensive refutation of the
Gnostics. He accuses Gnostics of frustrating the ancient plan of God and of
finding fault with him “who made both male and female for the begetting of
men.”52 Marriage is primarily for procreation, and also for a wife to bring
help to her husband in the funding of his household, particularly in his
sickness and old age.53 The early Greek Christian understanding of the
nature of sexuality resembles that of the Stoic philosophers, represented in
a statement from the Christian African, Lactantius: “Just as God gave us
eyes, not that we might look upon and desire pleasure, but that we might
see those actions that pertain to the necessity of life, so also we have
received the genital part of the body for no other purpose than the
begetting of offspring.”54 By its very nature, therefore, sexual intercourse is
for the procreation of children, and any intercourse for purposes other than
procreation is a violation of nature and therefore immoral. From this
established position Christian Fathers would argue that Gnostics, or anyone
else, engaging in sexual intercourse for any purpose other that procreation,
love-making, for instance, or pleasure, were in violation of nature. It is an
argument Latin Church Fathers continue to make into the twenty-first
century.
The Latin Father Tertullian argued that abstinence from sexual activity is
the surest way to the grace of God. Commenting on Paul’s “It is better to
marry than to burn with passion” (1 Cor. 7:9), Tertullian adds that “it is
better neither to marry nor to burn with passion.” 55 Virgins, he goes on,
have “full holiness,” because “continence is more glorious” than marriage. 56
Tertullian seems to have been the first to make this evaluation of virginity as
holier than marriage, but in the fourth century that theological judgment
was concretized in a new ascetic practice, the rejection of marriage and the
embracing of virginity as a way to live a Christlike, holy life. It was not that
the Fathers of the time were opposed to marriage; they were not. It was
rather that they expressed their preference for virginity. John Chrysostom
can say, “I believe that virginity is a long way better than marriage, not
because marriage is evil, for to those who would use it correctly [for
procreation] it is the doorway to continence.”57 Basil also affirms the
goodness of sexual intercourse in marriage that is “entered into according to
the sacred scriptures and legitimately,” that is, for procreation, but he also
excoriates marital intercourse sought for pleasure.58
Marriage is good, especially when sought for procreation; it has to be
good, since God created it. But virginity is better. This ambiguity about the
goodness of sexuality and marriage, introduced early into the Catholic
tradition, perdures to the present time. Writing an Apostolic Exhortation On
the Family, John Paul II, citing Chrysostom as above, removes any ambiguity
about the Church’s position. “[T]he Church throughout her history has
always defended the superiority of this charism [virginity] to that of
marriage, by reason of the wholly singular link which it has with the
Kingdom of God.”59 When it comes to a comparison of sexual intercourse
and marriage with virginity, one could say that John Paul has removed the
Greek ambiguity.

AUGUSTINE

When we reach Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo, we reach the

systematic insight into sexual morality and marriage that was to mold and
control the doctrine of the Catholic Church down to our own day. His
influence is always present in Catholic talk about marriage. Since
Augustine’s influence on the doctrine of marriage is beyond doubt, we must
look closely at it. His teaching too must be viewed in its historical context, a
context that is again largely a defense against attack. As the Alexandrians
defended sexuality and marriage against the attacks of the Gnostics, so did
Augustine defend them against the attacks of the Manichees, who at root
were Gnostics, and Pelagians. We need to say a word, therefore, about
these two.
The Manichees took their name from Mani, born in Babylonia about the
year 216 CE. Manichaeism is a dualistic system, the dual opposites being, as
always, good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. Sexuality is
listed among the evil, dark, and material realities. Sexuality and marriage, as
material, are evil in themselves and therefore to be avoided. Against this
approach Augustine repeated the argument of Clement and Irenaeus:
sexuality and marriage, created by God, must be essentially good.
Pelagianism derived its name from a Briton, Pelagius, who lived in Rome
around the year 380. The Pelagian debate centered around the extent of
‘adam’s original fall from grace. Augustine taught that the original sin
seriously impaired human nature, so that after the Fall men and women
could not do without grace what they had been able to do without it before
the Fall. Pelagius, on the contrary, taught that the Fall left human nature
unimpaired, so that men and women could do after the Fall what they had
been capable of doing prior to the Fall without any help from grace. Against
the Pelagians Augustine taught that the results of the Fall make it very
difficult to avoid sin in sexual intercourse, even in marriage.
Augustine’s basic statement about sexuality and marriage is ubiquitous,
firm, and clear. Contrary to those Manichee heretics who hold that sexuality
is evil and who condemn and prohibit marriage and sexual intercourse, he
states that sexuality and marriage were created good by a good God and
cannot lose that intrinsic goodness.60 He specifies the good of marriage as
threefold and insists that even after the Fall the marriages of Christians still
contain this threefold good: fidelity, offspring, sacrament. 61 In this triple
good Augustine intends the mutual fidelity of the spouses, the procreation
of children, and indissolubility. Procreation has priority because “from this
derives the propagation of the human race in which a living community is a
great good.”62 Alongside the tradition of the threefold good of marriage,
Augustine advances another good, that of friendship between the sexes. In
The Good of Marriage, after asserting that marriage is good, he gives an
interesting explication of why it is good. “It does not seem to me to be good
only because of the procreation of children, but also because of the natural
companionship between the sexes. Otherwise, we could not speak of
marriage in the case of old people, especially if they had either lost their
children or had begotten none at all.” 63 In this opinion, Augustine has
falsified in advance the claim of those modern commentators who say that
only in modern times have sexual intercourse and marriage been seen in the
context of the relationship of spouses. But the source of what appears
problematic in Augustine’s teaching about marriage seems always to derive
from what he says against the Pelagians. To this, therefore, we now turn.
The basic position can be stated unequivocally, and there can be no
doubt about it: sexual intercourse between a husband and a wife is created
good by God. It can, as can any good, be used sinfully, but when it is used
sinfully, it is not the good itself that is sinful but its disordered use.
Augustine explains carefully: “Evil does not follow because marriages are
good, but because in the good things of marriage there is also a use that is
evil.”64 Sexual intercourse is good in itself, but there are uses that can render
it evil. The condition under which it is good is the classic Stoic condition we
have already seen in the Alexandrians, namely, when it is for the begetting
of a child. Any other use, even between the spouses in marriage, is at least
venially sinful. “Conjugal sexual intercourse for the sake of offspring is not
sinful. But sexual intercourse, even with one’s spouse, to satisfy
concupiscence [disordered desire] is a venial sin.” 65 It is not the sexual
appetite that is sinful; it is good. It is disordered and unreasonable sexual
desire that is sinful, not sexual intercourse per se. “Whatever, therefore,
spouses do together that is immodest, shameful, filthy, is the vice of men,
not the fault of marriage.”66 And what is “immodest, shameful, and filthy” is
the disordered desire for sexual pleasure.
Pope Gregory the Great shared Augustine’s judgment that, because of
the presence of concupiscence, even genital pleasure between spouses in
the act of procreation is sinful. He went further and banned from the church
those who had just had pleasurable intercourse. “The custom of the Romans
from antiquity,” he explained, “has always been, after sexual intercourse
with one’s spouse, both to cleanse oneself by washing and to abstain
reverently from entering the church for a time. In saying this we do not
intend to say that sexual intercourse is sinful. But because every lawful
sexual intercourse between spouses cannot take place without bodily
pleasure, they are to refrain from entering the holy place. For such pleasure
cannot be without sin.”67 Again, it is clear that it is sexual pleasure that is
sinful, and it is not difficult to see how such a doctrine could produce a
strong ambivalence toward sexuality and marriage. That ambivalence
weighed heavily in subsequent history on the theory and practice of
Christian marriage.
In summary, though the relational and procreational meanings of sexual
activity we found in Genesis remain, they have been seriously prioritized.
Though the judgment remains that sexuality and sexual activity are good
because they were created good by the good God, their goodness is
threatened by the pleasure associated with sexual intercourse and by the
concupiscence engendered by sin. This might be the place, however, to
introduce a linguistic caveat. Medieval Latin had no words for the modern
concepts of “sex” and “sexuality.” Pierre Payer, therefore, correctly states,
“In the strictest sense there are no discussions of sex in the Middle Ages.”
He goes on to point out that Michel Foucault’s claim that “the relatively late
date for the invention of sex and sexuality is … of paramount significance.
The concept of sex and sexuality as an integral dimension of human persons,
as an object of concern, discourse, truth, and knowledge, did not emerge
until well after the Middle Ages.”68 This caveat has significance for all that
has gone before and all that comes after in this book.
THE PENITENTIALS

Many of the attitudes and teachings of the Fathers with respect to sexuality
and marriage can be found in the manuals known as Penitentials, which
flourished in ecclesiastical use from about the sixth to the twelfth century
CE. The Penitentials were designed to help confessors in their pastoral
dealings with penitents in confession, providing lists of sins and
corresponding penances. They were, however, more than just lists of sins
and penances. They were also manuals of moral education for the
confessor; and what the confessor learned, of course, his penitents also
learned. Penitentials took the abstract moral principles of the Church and
particularized them at the level of practice, in this case the practice of the
new confession introduced by the Celtic monks in the sixth century. They
are sure guides for us as we explore the moral teaching of the Church at the
time of their publication with respect to sexuality and marriage.
The general rule for sexual behavior in the Penitentials is the ancient
Stoic one and the one we have found in the Christian tradition from Clement
onward: sexual intercourse is permitted only between a man and a woman
who are married and, even then, only for procreation. Every other sexual act
is proscribed, and, therefore, nonprocreative intercourse is prohibited. Both
oral and anal sex are also prohibited, most frequently between male
homosexuals but also between heterosexuals. The AngloSaxon canons of
Theodore (ca. 690) prescribe, “Whoever emits semen into the mouth shall
do penance for seven years; this is the worst of evils.” 69 And, “If a man
should practice anal intercourse he must do penance as one who offends
with animals,” that is, for ten years. 70 Masturbation falls into the category of
nonprocreative sexual behavior and is therefore prohibited. The Celtic
Penitential of Columban (ca. 600) prescribes, “If anyone practices
masturbation or sins with a beast, he shall do penance for two years if he is
not in [clerical] orders; but if he is in orders or has a monastic vow, he shall
do penance for three years unless his [tender] age protects him.” 71
Theodore also proscribes male homosexuality with severe penances: “A
male who commits fornication with a male shall do penance for ten years.”
The “man who commits this sexual offense once shall do penance for four
years; if he has been in the habit of it, as Basil says, fifteen years.” 72 There is
some mitigation, however, for what may be seen as experimentation: if a
boy engages in homosexual intercourse, the penance is two years for the
first offense and four years if he repeats it. Adultery is prohibited but the
penances, except for higher ecclesiastics, are relatively short. Finnian
decrees, “If any layman defile his neighbor’s wife or virgin daughter, he shall
do penance for an entire year on an allowance of bread and water and he
shall not have intercourse with his own wife.” 73 Sexual intercourse between
a husband and a wife is not always a good thing. Cummean prescribes that
“he who is in a state of matrimony ought to be continent during the three
forty-day periods [prior to Christmas, prior to Easter, and after Pentecost]
and on Saturday and Sunday, night and day, and in the two appointed week
days [Wednesday and Friday], and after conception, and during the entire
menstrual period.”74 A quick calculation reveals that few days remain
available for intercourse.75
An obvious summary and conclusion emerges from this medieval
analysis: a strong Catholic negativity toward sexuality, even between a
husband and a wife in marriage. Richard Gula’s judgment is accurate. The
Penitentials helped shape “a moral perspective which focused on individual
acts, on regarding the moral life as a matter of avoiding sin, and on turning
moral reflection into an analysis of sin in its many forms.” 76 The actcentered
morality of the Penitentials, and their ambivalence toward sexuality and
marriage, was perpetuated in the manuals of moral theology published in
the wake of the reforms of clerical education mandated by the Council of
Trent.77

SCHOLASTIC DOCTRINE

Augustine’s teaching controlled the approach to sexuality and marriage in

the Catholic Church until the thirteenth century, when the Scholastic
theologians made some significant alterations to it. The Scholastic sexual
ethic remained an ethic for marriage, and Aquinas took over Augustine’s
three goods of marriage and transformed them into three ends of marriage.
“Marriage,” Aquinas argues, “has as its principal end the procreation and
education of offspring … and so offspring are said to be a good of marriage.”
It has also “a secondary end in man alone, the sharing of tasks which are
necessary in life, and from this point of view husband and wife owe each
other faithfulness, which is one of the goods of marriage.” There is another
end in believers, “the meaning of Christ and Church, and so a good of
marriage is called sacrament. The first end is found in marriage insofar as
man is animal, the second insofar as he is man, the third insofar as he is
believer.”78 The terminology, primary end–secondary end, came to dominate
discussion of the ends of marriage in Roman Catholic manuals for the next
seven hundred years, but we should note that it is a curious argument, for it
makes the claim that the primary end of specifically human marriage is
dictated not by man’s specifically human nature but by his generically
animal nature. It was precisely this curious argument that would be
challenged in the twentieth century, leading to a more personal approach to
the morality of both sexual activity and marriage.
Some ambivalence toward sexual desire, activity, and pleasure remains.
As in Plato and Aristotle, they are “occupations with lower affairs which
distract the soul and make it unworthy of being joined actually to God,” 79 but
they are not sinful at all times and in all circumstances. Indeed, within the
ends of marriage they are meritorious, and Aquinas asserts explicitly that to
forgo the pleasure and thwart the end would be sinful. 80 That is a far cry
from Augustine and Gregory. It is also a move toward both the liberation of
marriage, legitimate sexual intercourse, and sexual pleasure from any taint
of sin and their recognition as a sign and a cause of grace, that is, as a
sacrament.
The early Scholastics did not doubt that marriage was a sign of grace but,
because of their negative evaluation of sexual activity, they seriously
doubted that it could ever be a cause of grace. They hesitated, therefore, to
include it among the sacraments of the Church, which were defined as both
sign and cause of grace. The Dominicans Albert the Great and Thomas
Aquinas had no such hesitations, and they firmly established marriage
among the sacraments of the church. In his commentary on Lombard, Albert
characterizes as “very probable” the opinion that holds that marriage
“confers grace for doing good, not just any good but that good specifically
that a married person should do.” 81 In his commentary on Lombard, Aquinas
goes further, characterizing as “most probable” the opinion that “marriage,
insofar as it is contracted in faith in Christ, confers grace to do those things
which are required in marriage.”82 In his Contra gentiles, he is even more
positive, stating bluntly that “it is to be believed that through this sacrament
[marriage] grace is given to the married.” 83 By the time he achieves his
mature thought in the Summa Theologiae, he lists marriage among the
seven sacraments with no demur whatsoever about its graceconferring
qualities, and by the Reformation his opinion was held universally by
theologians. A further scholastic teaching about marriage that was to
become central to marriage discussions in the twentieth century should be
noted here, namely, the personal relationship and equality between
husband and wife. Aquinas understood, at least inchoately, that the
relationship between men and women should be one of friendship and that
sexual intercourse enhances that friendship as well as being a means to
procreation;84 Bonaventure calls the friendship between spouses the
sacrament of the relationship between God and the soul.85

THE MODERN PERIOD

When Cardinal Gasparri first codified Catholic law in the 1917 Code of Canon
Law, the section on marriage developed three prominent notions: marriage
is a contract; the object of the contract is the permanent and exclusive right
of each spouse to the body of the other for sexual intercourse leading to
procreation; and the primacy of procreation over every other end of
marriage. None of these notions was traditional in magisterial teachings;
they were all novel opinions in Gasparri’s work and therefore in the Code
that he dominated. With respect to the notion of marriage as contract, even
Gasparri himself acknowledged that marriage was never considered a
contract in either Roman or European law. 86 With respect to the right to the
use of the other’s body for procreative intercourse, David Fellhauer
demonstrates that there is no magisterial source “which presents the
juridical essence of marriage as the ius in corpus (right to the body) for
procreation or which identifies the object of consent in similar terms.” 87
With respect to the ends of marriage, Urban Navarette points out that, in
the documents of the Magisterium and in the corpus of canon law itself,
“we find hardly anything about the ends of marriage precisely as goals until
the formulation of Canon 1013, 1.” 88 He further notes that a preliminary
version of Canon 1013 indicated no hierarchy of ends and concludes that
the 1917 Code of Canon Law is the first official document of the Catholic
Church to embrace the terminology primary end–secondary end.
In December 1930, in response to the Anglican Lambeth Conference’s
approval of artificial contraception as a moral action in certain situations,
Pope Pius XI published an important encyclical on marriage, Casti connubii.
In it, predictably, he insisted on everything in Gasparri’s Code, but,
unpredictably, he did more. He retrieved and gave a prominent place to a
long-ignored item from the Catechism of the Council of Trent, marriage as a
union of conjugal love and intimacy. By emphasizing the essential place of
mutual love in a marriage, Pius placed the Catholic view of marriage on the
track to a more personal definition. Marital love, Pius teaches, does not
consist “in pleasing words only, but in the deep attachment of the heart
[will] which is expressed in action, since love is proved by deeds.” 89 So
important is the mutual love and interior formation of the spouses, he
continues, that “it can, in a very real sense, as the Roman Catechism
teaches, be said to be the chief reason and purpose of marriage, if marriage
be looked at not in the restricted sense as instituted for the proper
conception and education of the child, but more widely as the blending of
life as a whole and the mutual interchange and sharing thereof.” 90 In these
wise words, Pius directs us to see that there is more to marriage than can be
contained in the cold, legal categories of the Code of Canon Law. European
thinkers were poised to point in the same direction, most influentially two
Germans, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Heribert Doms.

VON HILDEBRAND AND DOMS

In the opening paragraph of his work Marriage, written in 1939, Dietrich von
Hildebrand states the problem precisely. The modern age, he suggests, is
guilty of a terrible antipersonalism, “a progressive blindness toward the
nature and dignity of the spiritual person.” This antipersonalism expresses
itself in all kinds of materialism, the most dangerous of which is biological
materialism, which considers man as a more highly developed animal.
“Human life is considered exclusively from a biological point of view and
biological principles are the measure by which all human activities are
judged.”91 The Catholic legal approach to marriage, with its insistence on
rights over bodies and their physiological functions, is wide open to the
charge of biological materialism. So too is the centuries-old Stoic-
cumChristian doctrine that argues from physiological structure to human
“nature” and to “natural” ends. So too is Aquinas’s position that founds the
primary end of human marriage in the biological structure of men and
women. In contrast to this biological approach, von Hildebrand introduced a
radical innovation in thinking about marriage, claiming Pius XI and Casti
connubii in support of his central thesis that marriage is for the building up
of loving communion between the spouses. Conjugal love, he claims, is the
primary meaning and ultimate end of marriage.92
In marriage, von Hildebrand argued, the spouses enter an interpersonal
relationship, in which they confront one another as I and Thou, as Ego and
Other, and “give birth to a mysterious fusion of their souls.” 93 This fusion of
their innermost personal beings, not merely the fusion of their physical
bodies, is what the oft-quoted “one body” of Genesis intends. It is this
interpersonal fusion that is the primary meaning of the spouses’ mutual love
and of their sexual intercourse, which is the symbol of that love, and
intercourse achieves its end when it expresses and leads to interpersonal
union. “Every marriage in which conjugal love is thus realized bears spiritual
fruit, becomes fruitful—even though there are no children.”94 Heribert Doms
agreed with von Hildebrand in that what is natural or unnatural for human
animals is not to be decided on the basis of what is natural or unnatural for
nonhuman animals. Human sexuality is essentially the capacity and the
desire to fuse, not merely one’s body but one’s very self, with an other
person. Sexuality drives a human to make a gift of herself or himself (not
just of her or his body) to an other, in order to create a communion of
persons and of lives that fulfills them both.
The primary end of sexual intercourse in this perspective is the loving
communion between the spouses, a communion that is both signified and
enhanced, or “made,” in the intercourse. Popular language is correct: in
their sexual intercourse spouses “make love.” This primary end is achieved
in every act of intercourse in which the spouses actually enter into intimate
communion. Even in childless marriages, marriage and intercourse achieve
their primary end in the marital communion of the spouses, their two-
inoneness as Doms would have it. He summarizes his case in a clear
statement. “The immediate purpose of marriage is the realization of its
meaning, the conjugal two-in-oneness…. This two-in-oneness of husband
and wife is a living reality, and the immediate object of the marriage
ceremony and their legal union.” The union of the spouses tends naturally to
the birth and nurture of new persons, their children, who focus the
fulfillment of their parents, both as individuals and as a two-in-oneness.
“Society is more interested in the child than in the natural fulfillment of the
parents, and it is this which gives the child primacy among the natural
results of marriage.”95 Since Doms wrote, social scientific data demonstrate
that the well-being of the child is a function of the well-being of its parents,
suggesting that the relationship between the spouses is the primary natural
result of marriage, since all other relationships in the family depend on it. 96
The Catholic Church’s immediate reaction to these new ideas, as has
been so often the case in theological history, was a blanket condemnation,
which made no effort to sift truth from error. In 1944, the Holy Office
condemned “the opinion of some more recent authors, who either deny
that the primary end of marriage is the generation and nurture of children,
or teach that the secondary ends are not essentially subordinate to the
primary end, but are equally primary and independent.” 97 In 1951, as the
opinions of von Hildebrand and Doms persisted and attracted more
adherents, Pope Pius XII felt obliged to intervene again. The truth is, he
taught, that “marriage, as a natural institution in virtue of the will of the
Creator, does not have as a primary and intimate end the personal
perfection of the spouses, but the procreation and nurture of new life. The
other ends, inasmuch as they are intended by nature, are not on the same
level as the primary end, and still less are they superior to it, but they are
essentially subordinate to it.”98 This approach was seriously altered by the
Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et spes.
SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL

The direction of the debate on marriage at the Second Vatican Council may
be summed up in the words of Cardinal Alfrink: “Conjugal love,” he argued,
“is an element of marriage itself and not just a result of marriage…. Conjugal
love belongs to marriage, at least if marriage be not considered as merely a
juridical contract.”99 Much of the debate was opposed to the juridical way of
looking at marriage and marital love as exemplified by Gasparri and the
Code. Alfrink, a biblical scholar, pointed out that “the Hebrew verb dabaq, in
Greek kollao, does suggest physical, bodily, sexual union, but it suggests
above all spiritual union which exists in conjugal love. Sacred scripture itself
insinuates this when it compares conjugal union to the union between
parents and children which is spiritual and presupposes love.” 100 This, he
continued, is the way modern women and men think, more spiritually, more
humanly, and indeed more biblically and theologically. Cardinal Dopfner
agreed. “It is not enough to propose conjugal love as a virtue, or as an
extraneous subjective end of marriage, and to exclude it from the very
structure of marriage itself.”101 The battle lines were already clearly drawn in
the Preparatory Commission: either Gasparri’s juridical approach to
marriage or a renewed interpersonal approach in which conjugal love is of
the essence of marriage. The latter approach began to win in the
Commission and won, finally, in the Council itself.102
Gaudium et spes, into which a section on marriage was inserted in its
preliminary stage, describes marriage as a “communion of love,” an
“intimate partnership of conjugal life and love.” 103 The position of the
majority of the Council Fathers could not be clearer. In the face of strident
demands to relegate the conjugal love of the spouses to its customary
secondary place in marriage, they declared conjugal love to be of the very
essence of marriage, a clear rejection of an exclusively juridical approach.
There was another explicit rejection of Gasparri. Marriage, the Council
declares, is founded in a “conjugal covenant of irrevocable personal
consent.”104 Gasparri’s word contract is replaced by the biblical word
covenant, which has the same legal outcomes as contract but also situates
marriage in a biblical-theological and interpersonal context, rather than in
an exclusively legal one. The Council declares that the spouses “mutually gift
and accept one another,” rejecting the material biological notion that they
gift merely the right to the use of one another’s bodies. 105 In their mutual
personal covenanting and gifting, a man and a woman create an
interpersonal communion of love that is permanent and is to last for the
whole of life.
The Council also teaches that “by its very nature the institution of
marriage and married love is ordered to the procreation and education of
children, and it is in them that it finds its crowning glory.” 106 We have added
emphasis to this citation to underscore the teaching not only of the Council
but also of the entire Catholic tradition prior to Paul VI’s Humanae vitae,
namely, that marriage, not each and every marriage act as Paul VI taught, is
to be open to the procreation of children. 107 Once procreation has been
mentioned, one would expect a recitation of the hierarchical ends of
marriage, but, again despite insistent voices to the contrary, the Council
Fathers rejected the primary end–secondary end dichotomy. To make sure
that its rejection was understood, the Preparatory Commission was careful
to explain that the text just cited “does not suggest [a hierarchy of ends] in
any way.”108 Marriage and sexual love “are by their very nature ordained to
the generation and education of children,” but that “does not make the
other ends of marriage of less account,” and marriage “is not instituted
solely for procreation.”109 The intense debate that took place both in the
Preparatory Commission and in the Council itself makes it impossible to
claim that the refusal to speak of a hierarchy of ends in marriage was the
result of oversight or, as some traditionalists argue, a mere avoidance of the
primary–secondary terminology, leaving the concept in place. 110 It was the
result of a deliberated, intentional, and explicit choice of the Catholic Church
meeting in Council.
Any doubt was definitively removed in 1983 by the appearance of the
revised Code of Canon Law, frequently called the last Council document.
“The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish
between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature
ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education
of offspring” (Can 1055, 1). Notice three things: first, it is the matrimonial
covenant and not each and every act of intercourse that is ordered toward
procreation; second, there is no specification of either of these ends being
primary or secondary; third, as in Gaudium et spes, the good of the spouses
or conjugal love is discussed before procreation and education of children or
the fruitfulness of marriage. The Catholic Church changed its canon law to
be in line with its renewed theology of marriage, moving beyond the narrow
legal essence to embrace in the very essence of marriage the mutual love
and communion of the spouses. Toward the end of the twentieth century,
the Church had come a long way from the negative approach to sexuality
and marriage bequeathed to it in a long tradition going back to the struggles
of the Fathers against dualistic Gnostics, and Manicheans. It would be naive,
and a complete ignorance of past conciliar history, to assume that the
debate ended with the Council.

PAPAL BIRTH CONTROL COMMISSION

Two theoretical models are available in the modern Catholic tradition for
thinking about marriage, and each offers insight into the morality of sexual
activity. One is an ancient one, a model of marriage as a procreative
institution and of sexual intercourse within marriage as a primarily
procreative action; the other is a modern model of marriage as an
interpersonal union and of sexual intercourse within marriage as a primarily
unitive action.111 The model of marriage as procreative institution was thrust
onto center stage in the 1960s in a great debate about artificial
contraception.
At the instigation of Cardinal Suenens, archbishop of Malines, Belgium,
whose ultimate intent was that an adequate document on Christian
marriage be brought before the Second Vatican Council for debate, Pope
John XXIII established a commission to study the issue of birth control. The
commission was confirmed and enlarged by Pope Paul VI until it ultimately
had seventy-one members, not all of whom attended its meetings or
voted.112 The final Episcopal vote took place in answer to three questions. In
answer to the question “Is contraception intrinsically evil?” nine bishops
voted no, three voted yes, and three abstained. In answer to the question
“Is contraception, as defined by the Majority Report, in basic continuity with
tradition and the declarations of the Magisterium?” nine bishops voted yes,
five voted no, and one abstained. In answer to the question, “Should the
Magisterium speak on this question as soon as possible?” fourteen
answered yes, and one answered no. 113 A preliminary vote of the
theologians who were advisors to the Commission, in response to the
question “Is artificial contraception an intrinsically evil violation of the
natural law?” had resulted in a count of fifteen no and four yes answers. 114
Both a majority report and a minority report were then submitted to Paul VI,
who, professing himself unconvinced by the arguments of the majority, and
probably also sharing the concern of the minority report that the Church
could not repudiate its long-standing teaching on contraception without
undergoing a serious blow to its overall moral authority, approved the
minority report in his encyclical letter Humanae vitae.115 The difference
between the two groups is easily categorized.
The minority report, which became the controverted part of the
encyclical, argued that “each and every marriage act must remain open to
the transmission of life.”116 As we have already noted, Paul VI was the first to
state the Church’s teaching in this way. The tradition had always been that it
is marriage itself, and not each and every act of intercourse in marriage,
that is to be open to procreation, and that is what the majority report
argued. It asserted that “human intervention in the process of the marriage
act for reasons drawn from the end of marriage itself should not always be
excluded, provided that the criteria of morality are always safeguarded.” 117
The difference in the two positions was precisely the difference created by
adherence to two different models of marriage, the minority report being
based on the traditional procreative institution model, the majority report
being based on the emerging interpersonal union model that had its origins
in the 1930s and was embraced by the Council. Richard McCormick
commented in 1968 that “the documents of the Papal
Commission represent a rather full summary of two points of view…. The
majority report, particularly the analysis in its ‘rebuttal,’ strikes this reader
as much the more satisfactory statement.” 118 That judgment continues to be
the judgment of the majority of Catholic theologians and the vast majority
of Catholic couples, because they adhere to the same interpersonal model
on which the majority report was based—so much so that in 2006 Margaret
Farley can offer the judgment, “In much of Catholic moral theology and
ethics, the procreative norm as the sole or primary justification of sexual
intercourse is gone.”119 More than four decades after Humanae vitae,
despite a concerted minority effort to make adherence to Humanae vitae a
test case of genuine Catholicity, the debate between the procreative and
interpersonal models perdures in the Church and is far from resolved, as we
will see in the chapters that follow.
A summary of the approach to marriage and sexual activity in the modern
period of Catholic theology and teaching is easy to present. The modern
period represents yet one more development in Catholic theology and, to a
lesser extent, in magisterial teaching. The major development in the Catholic
theological approach to marriage is the recovery of the two purposes of
marriage and sexual intercourse articulated in Genesis, the relational and
procreational, and a rearranging of their relative priorities. Since Clement,
Augustine, and Aquinas, the procreational became established in Catholic
teaching as the primary purpose of marriage and the relational became
relegated to a secondary purpose. Beginning with Pius XI’s Casti connubii
and culminating in the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et spes, these two
purposes of marriage have been equalized, so that neither is prior to the
other. Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae tried to change the terms of the debate
over marriage and sexual intercourse by teaching for the first time in
Catholic history that “each and every marriage act must remain open to the
transmission of life,”120 but that judgment is controverted by the vast
majority of Catholic believers, and, “in much of Catholic theology and ethics,
the procreative norm as the sole or primary justification of sexual
intercourse is gone.”121 With the reestablishing of the relational purpose for
marriage and sexual intercourse, the judgment about the morality of any
sexual act is now made by Catholic ethicists not on the basis of the act alone
but on the basis of the place of the act within its relational context. We shall
see as we proceed what difference that development makes to moral
judgments.
CONCLUSION

This chapter does two things. First, it documents the origins and correctness
of the claim we make at its beginning, namely, that traditional Catholic
sexual morality is essentially marital morality. That morality is encoded in
two magisterial statements: “Each and every act [of sexual intercourse]
must remain open to the transmission of life;” and “any human genital act
whatsoever may be placed only within the framework of marriage.” 122 We
trace the origins of those two claims from the ancient Stoic philosophy,
through the early, medieval, and modern Catholic tradition, down to the
present day when they are being reevaluated. That reevaluation, which has
taken place in both theological and magisterial circles, is the second thing
we document. It was provoked by the historical-critical approach, approved
by the Magisterium, and applied first to the sacred scriptures and then to
the teaching of the Magisterium itself.
Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Divino afflante spiritu, approved the
historical-critical approach to the study of the Bible and instructed Catholic
exegetes that their prime concern was “to arrive at a deeper and fuller
knowledge of the mind of [the author].” 123 In 1994, the CDF’s Pontifical
Biblical Commission made the same claim about the importance of the
literal meaning of the biblical text and related it to the exigencies of a
double hermeneutic. “The Bible itself and the history of its interpretation
point to the need for a hermeneutics…. On the one hand, all events reported
in the Bible are interpreted events. On the other, all exegesis of the
accounts of these events necessarily involves the exegete’s own
subjectivity.”124 Meaning is always sociohistorically constructed, and if an
interpreter is to arrive at the meaning intended by an author, then he or she
has to be aware of the objective sociohistorical situation of both the ancient
writer and the contemporary interpreter. This means in the concrete, for
our present concern, that the Bible is not a moral manual to be followed
slavishly without careful consideration of the situation of the text and of the
situation of the human subject seeking to arrive at a moral judgment on the
basis of the text. If this is true of the biblical text, the meanings of which
found the Christian religion in general, it is even more true of the patristic,
medieval, and modern texts of the later ecclesiastical tradition. Textual
historicity demands not unquestioning obedience but careful attention,
understanding, judgment, and decision.
As the Bible is not a manual of morality, neither is it a manual of sexual
morality. It is concerned not with sexuality as such, but with living a life
according to the will of God. Neither biblical Hebrew and Greek nor
medieval Latin had words for the modern concepts of sexuality and sex.
There are allusions to sexual acts, some of them frank and explicit but none
of them constituting laws to be followed without question. All of them, to
repeat, suffer the limitations introduced by their sociohistorical context;
some of them also suffer from a seriously inaccurate understanding of
human “nature” and a deficient sexual anthropology. This latter is
particularly true of what the Bible and the early Fathers of the Church
understand about human biology and, for example, about “spilling the male
seed.”125 This seriously colors what the tradition has to say about human
sexuality in general and about male homosexual activity in particular. It has
almost nothing to say about female homosexual activity, but we withhold
detailed discussion of this until a later chapter.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. What do you understand by historicity? What are its theoretical

foundations? What important difference does it make to your
understanding of any formulation of truth, including theological, moral
truth?
2. How do you understand the statement that “Catholic sexual morality
isessentially marital morality?” How did the Catholic Church come to
such a theoretical position?
3. How important is it for you to learn that sexual questions play
arelatively small role in both the Old and the New Testaments? Does
that fact make any difference to the formation of your own conscience
on issues relating to sexuality? What other sources are available in the
Catholic tradition to form your conscience on this issue?
4. What did the Catholic Church learn about sexual morality from theearly
Stoic philosophers, from St. Augustine, and from St. Thomas Aquinas?
Why does Joseph Fuchs argue that “one cannot take what Augustine or
the philosophers of the Middle Ages knew about sexuality as the
exclusive basis of a moral reflection?” Can you name one very
important fact about male and female sexuality that neither Augustine
nor Aquinas knew? What are the moral implications of this fact for how
we think about sexual persons?
5. What developments happened in the modern age within
Catholicteaching about sexual behavior, culminating especially in the
teaching of the Second Vatican Council?
6. What other questions arise for you from reading this chapter?