In his The Sources of Christian Ethics, Servais Pinckaers defines Catholic moral theology as “the branch of theology that studies human acts so as to direct them to a loving vision of God seen as our true, complete happiness and our final end. This vision is attained by means of grace, the virtues, and the gifts, in the light of revelation and reason” (Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 8). Sexual ethics is that particular area of moral theology that studies how persons can use their sexual powers in relating to others in a way that draws upon these supernatural gifts to direct themselves and others toward this beatitude.
While much can be known about rightly ordered sexual behavior through the light of human reason and the natural law, this knowledge is grasped more surely and completely in light of revelation since it is “only in the mystery of the incarnate Word [that] the mystery of man takes on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et spes, no. 22). The Catholic theologian thus seeks to understand “the precepts of the natural law” in light of the Church’s “constant doctrine” (cf. Humanae vitae, no. 11). The Church makes a unique contribution to the study of human sexuality through the revelation entrusted to Her by the Lord in Scripture and Sacred Tradition, which makes Her “an expert in humanity” (cf. Paul VI, Address to the United Nations, Oct. 4, 1965).
Catholic sexual ethics grounded in reason and revelation shows both remarkable consistency as well as significant development over time—both during and after the biblical era. However, its central focus is ever the same: the human person, male and female, created in the image and likeness of God and called to a vocation of faithful, fruitful, self-donating love. In Scripture and in the Church’s Tradition, sexual ethics is closely tied to an understanding of marriage, though it encompasses persons inside and outside of this state.
I. The Teaching of Scripture
The Old Testament
In its highly stylized account of the seven days of creation, the book of Genesis locates the creation of man on the sixth day along with the beasts but places the Sabbath worship on the seventh day. Significantly, both male and female are said to be made “in the image of God” (Gn 1:27), a statement without precedent or parallel in the literature of the ancient world. In unpacking the meaning of this idea, the text particularly highlights human rationality and human dominion over creation. That is, human persons share in God’s own royal authority in acting as stewards of creation and priests in relating to God in worship on the seventh day. On the human level, the primary meaning of this relationality is that between male and female, which is the basis of all human community. Genesis itself ties relationality and dominion together in 1:28: “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”{1} The Hebrew term for blessed (ḇāreḵ) designates a thing within creation that becomes a source of life—in this case the union of male and female. After existence itself, fecundity is one of the first gifts given by God to His human creatures in Scripture, enabling them to cooperate with God in His creative activity. Each child who enters the world expresses the “mystery of creation, which is renewed in human generation” (John Paul II, General Audience of March 12, 1980).
The second account of creation (Gn 2:4–3:24) adds to this picture in important ways. The account of the creation of woman in the last part of chapter 2 (especially verses 21–25) is replete with covenantal language and imagery. While the Hebrew word for covenant (bərîṯ) is not used, the “deep sleep” (tardêmāh) God casts on the man (verse 21) and the verbs “to leave” (‘ăzāḇ) and “to cling” (ḏāḇaq) (in verse 24) have covenantal connotations elsewhere in the Old Testament. This is particularly true of the man’s declaration that the woman is his “bone and flesh” in verse 23, which has the form of a covenant oath.{2} All of this serves to frame the allusion to sexual intimacy in the nakedness of the couple in verse 25 as a covenant-ratifying gesture. Biblical covenants typically contain both an oath of fidelity sworn on one’s life before God and a ritual gesture which seals and subsequently recalls the bond that has been established. In the case of the covenant of marriage, which makes man and woman “one flesh” (Gn 2:24), this gesture is sexual union. Thus, to the blessing of fecundity highlighted in chapter 1, the second account of creation adds covenantal fidelity as a fundamental purpose of conjugal love in God’s plan.
The disaster of the Fall in chapter 3 darkens this picture. While, prior to their sin, the nakedness of the couple was without shame (cf. Gn 2:25), among the immediate effects of their rebellion are shame and fear. They can no longer be naked before one another because their sexual drives are disordered, making them vulnerable to exploitation (cf. Gn 3:7). This vulnerability is especially true for the woman, who is told in verse 16 that her husband would “rule over” her. Sexual desire, though part of God’s plan, is easily misdirected into use or the desire to dominate. This is a manifestation of what the later biblical and theological tradition would call “concupiscence”: the disordering of our appetites and passions because of sin.
The subsequent literature of the Old Testament bears witness to these twin values of fecundity and fidelity. Though these goods are always threatened by sin, it is nonetheless possible to discern a gradual deepening of understanding as the divine pedagogy shaped the covenant people of Israel. In regard to fecundity, the very doctrine of creation effects a transformation in the understanding of God’s people. Sexual difference and reproduction belong to the material creation. God is a spiritual being, neither male nor female, who does not reproduce sexually, unlike the portrayals of the pagan gods and goddesses that surrounded Israel. God calls creation into being from nothingness simply by His all-powerful Word.
Nonetheless, procreation remains a great good—“the one blessing neither lost by sin nor washed away by the flood”—as the Nuptial Blessing has it.{3} The torah given to the people of Israel enables God’s people to understand this good and treat it with the reverence it deserves. As biblical scholar Paul Mankowski observes, the Old Testament offers a “curriculum of fecundity,” enabling God’s people to separate themselves from the practices of the nations that surrounded them. Mankowski explains: “Child sacrifice, a common practice among at least some of the other Canaanites, is an abomination to the Lord. A man’s lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination to the Lord. Incest and bestiality are prohibited absolutely. Onanism is condemned” (Mankowski, “Fertility, Celibacy and the Biblical Vindication of Marriage,” 11).{4}
Yet procreation is not an ultimate good to be pursued at any cost. And it was precisely the appreciation of covenant fidelity that served as a check against its unimpeded pursuit. Polygamy, often pursued to maximize fertility, though not unheard of in Israel’s early history (even among the Patriarchs), is continually subjected to critique and by the time of the books of Samuel and Kings had largely died out among the common people of Israel.{5} Marrying people outside of the covenant was likewise discouraged because it often led to covenantal infidelity in relation to the Lord.{6} Old Testament condemnations of prostitution are usually aimed at cultic prostitution where the people of Israel engaged in ritual sex at shrines of local fertility gods.{7} This parallel between sexual infidelity and idolatry is underscored in other ways. In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, only adultery and idolatry are called “the great sin” (ḥăṭā·’āh ḡəḏōlāh).{8} Both of these sins are egregious rejections of the fidelity at the heart of a covenant, whether that between God and His people or man and woman in marriage. This is why adultery, in addition to being condemned across the Old Testament canon, is used by the prophets as a symbol of Israel’s infidelity in worshipping strange gods.{9} In the legislation of the early Old Testament, a man (even a married one) could have sex with an unmarried woman or a prostitute and technically not be guilty of adultery. Later texts more clearly prohibited men from exercising sexual activity outside of the marriage covenant.{10} Over time, the demands of faithfulness in Israel’s covenant with the one true God imbued its human image in the covenant of marriage with higher expectations for fidelity.
The New Testament
By comparison to the Hebrew Old Testament, the New Testament contains little explicit teaching on sexuality. In part, this is due to the fact that this teaching was largely presupposed.{11} Marriage was understood as a covenant and the appropriate context for virtuous sexual expression between men and women. The sexual sins condemned in Old Testament teaching—adultery, fornication, homosexual activity, prostitution—are likewise condemned when mentioned in the New Testament. Yet this is not the full picture.
On another level, the coming of Christ puts everything in the new and fuller light of the Gospel message. This includes the practice of marriage and sexual expression within it. Thus, while Old Testament legislation allowed divorce as a largely male prerogative (see Dt 24:1–4), Christ, the New Moses, appeals to God’s intention for marriage from the beginning as the basis of its indissolubility (see 1 Cor 7:10–11; Mt 5:31–32, 19:3–9; Mk 10:2–12; Lk 16:18). When the Pharisees cite Mosaic permission for the practice, our Lord responds that this legislation was actually a concession to human hard-heartedness (sklērokardian; Mt 19:8). While the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue prohibited adultery, Christ calls His disciples to have hearts free of the lust that is the basis of such sexual sin (see Mt 5:27–28). For human beings this is an impossibility. But the New Moses, in establishing the New Covenant, removes our hearts of stone and gives us hearts of flesh capable of obedience and overflowing with the power of His own Spirit (cf. Ez 36:25–27). What is impossible for fallen human beings becomes possible through the gift of grace.
In his First Letter to the Church in Corinth, St. Paul articulates some of the implications of the new life of grace that Christians receive through the Holy Spirit in Baptism. To members of the community who believe that the Apostle’s teaching on freedom from law enables them to visit temple prostitutes with impunity (cf. 1 Cor 6:12–16), Paul offers an unequivocal sed contra. Joined to Christ in Baptism, the body of a Christian becomes “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19), and the parts of his or her body are henceforth “members of Christ” (1 Cor 6:15). Sexual sin is therefore unique in that the person guilty of sexual immorality “sins against his own body” (1 Cor 6:18), thus offending this great baptismal dignity. It is for this reason that sexual sins are consistently mentioned among “the works of the flesh” (Gal 5:19–21),{12} or vices that, in Pauline teaching and elsewhere in the New Testament, exclude one from the Kingdom of God (see 1 Cor 6:9–10; Rom 1:29–31; Col 3:5–8; 1 Tm 1:9–10; Rev 21:8; cf. Mt 15:18–20; Mk 7:20–23). This consistent biblical witness to the gravity of sexual sin is one reason for the later tradition’s affirmation that there is no parvity of matter (nulla parvitas materiae) in sexual sin.{13}
Another example of the transformative effect of Christ on the grasp of sexual morality among God’s people is the practice of virginity. Our Lord, like His cousin John, remained unmarried, contrary to the typical practice of Jewish rabbis (and men generally) in His day. He also invited His followers to consider adopting this manner of life: “there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it” (Mt 19:12).{14} The Church has understood the Lord’s words about renouncing marriage “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” to refer to the voluntary embrace of virginity or celibacy as a form of public witness to faith in Christ. The apostle Paul also remained unmarried and encouraged others to imitate him in this since the married are “anxious about the affairs of the world” (1 Cor 7:33) while the unmarried are “anxious about the affairs of the Lord” (1 Cor 7:32, 34).
Nonetheless, marriage is a “gift from God” (1 Cor 7:7), and the Apostle encourages couples to limit themselves to merely periodic abstinence for the sake of prayer (see 1 Cor 7:5). Contrary to the mores of the day, St. Paul affirms the equality of the couple in regard to their conjugal rights and authority over one another’s bodies (see 1 Cor 7:3–4).{15} Hence periods of abstinence must be undertaken by mutual consent and should be limited so that married persons not be tempted by the Devil (cf. 1 Cor 7:5). Sexual union in marriage thus serves as a remedy for the disorder created by the Fall and sexual temptation (what the later tradition will call a remedium concupiscentiae), enabling couples to help one another avoid sexual sin.
II. Historical Development
The Patristic Witness
The first generations of Christians faced an environment decidedly hostile to the biblical vision of marriage and rightly ordered sexuality. On the one hand, the Church faced the existential threat of various forms of Gnosticism, which denied the goodness of the body, sexual reproduction, and marriage insofar as it legitimated and enabled this reproduction. On the other hand, it faced a dominant social and political order in the Roman imperium that used violence and sex for purposes of entertainment and upheld a rigid double standard for male and female chastity.{16}
In this hostile milieu, the Fathers of the Church emphasized the procreative purpose of marital sex as key to chaste sexual expression. Thus, Justin Martyr asserted: “We Christians either marry with but one thought, to beget children, or if we refuse to marry, we are completely continent” (Apologia prima, 29). This focus on procreation as the chief purpose of marriage served as a moderating force on sexual desire: “The man who has taken a wife in order to have children should also practice continence, not even seeking pleasure from his own wife, whom he ought to love, but with honorable and moderate desire, having but one intention, children” (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 3.7). The Fathers often used language that resonated with the Stoic or Neo-Platonic philosophies influential among the educated elites of the Empire, but the heart of their sexual teaching was essentially biblical and specifically Pauline.{17}
Some of the Fathers noted other good ends of marital sex, such as the promotion of chastity or the goodness of sexual pleasure. In one of his homilies, St. John Chrysostom went so far as to suggest that, since the earth was already peopled, the promotion of chastity was actually even more important than procreation (see In ep. 1 ad Cor hom. 19). St. Chrysostom, Lactantius, and St. John Damascene all held that couples who engaged in intercourse for satisfying sexual desire or to avoid sexual sin outside of marriage (provided that the union was non-contracepted vaginal intercourse) incurred no sin. St. Augustine, however, held that intercourse for this purpose was a venial sin for the spouse making the request.
But Augustine also formulated a framework for understanding marriage and the Church’s sexual teaching within it that has endured over the centuries.{18} For the Doctor of Grace, marriage is a great good (contrary to Gnostic teaching) and is itself comprised of three goods (bona): offspring (proles), fidelity (fides), and the unbreakable bond (sacramentum). These goods provide a framework to evaluate sexual activity in and outside of marriage. In his treatise De bono conjugali he writes:
In marriage, intercourse for the purpose of generation has no fault attached to it, but for the purpose of satisfying concupiscence, provided with a spouse, because of marriage fidelity, it is a venial sin; adultery or fornication, however, is a mortal sin. And so, continence from all intercourse is certainly better than marital intercourse itself which takes place for the begetting of children. (De bono conjugali, 6.6)Elsewhere he adds that extramarital sex (i.e., adultery or fornication) and unnatural sex (i.e., contraceptive sex or non-vaginal forms of intercourse) are gravely sinful.
Though marriage is good and a unique form of human friendship, Augustine does not think that sexual union in marriage expresses or enhances that friendship. That is why continence is better than procreative sex (though the latter is “without fault”). Marital charity and concord flourish without the distraction of sex.
But God forbid that the nuptial bond should be regarded as broken between those who have by mutual consent agreed to observe a perpetual abstinence from the use of carnal concupiscence. Nay, it will be only a firmer one, whereby they have exchanged pledges together, which will have to be kept by a special endearment and concord—not by the voluptuous links of bodies, but by the voluntary affections of souls. (De nuptiis et concupiscentia, 1.12)Unlike the Apostle Paul, Augustine does not urge that the practice of continence in marriage be temporary.
This esteem for marital continence was in keeping with the common patristic teaching on the superiority of virginity to marriage. In a culture preoccupied with death and its constant encroachments and which saw procreation as a familial, civic, and religious duty, the significant number of early Christians who embraced virginity or celibacy was a powerful witness.{19} It was a form of bodily proclamation that, in Jesus Christ, the endless wheel of birth, growth, sickness, death, and decay was no longer the last word in the universe. Instead, eternity had broken into time, and, because of the hope of the resurrection, one did not have to pursue a “this-worldly” immortality through descendants. The superiority of virginity or celibacy as a state did not mean that marriage was bad or that the married were not called to holiness of life. Chrysostom points out that the excellence of virginity for the sake of the Kingdom is founded on the fact that the marriage that is renounced for the sake of this witness is a great good (see In ep. 1 ad Cor hom. 19). Augustine describes the relationship between the two states in life with the image of the sisters Martha and Mary. Marriage, typified in the person of Martha, anxious with the details of hospitality, is good. But virginity, exemplified by Mary who sits at the Lord’s feet to listen to His words, is better. As Pinckaers observes, the Church’s moral teaching and the evangelical counsels were understood by the Fathers to be directed to all Christians in ways that accorded with their ability to live them in their state in life (cf. Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 206–207). There were not two standards of Christian morality or perfection but rather two distinct states of life: virginity and marriage.
The Scholastic Synthesis
The Augustinian articulation of the goods of marriage provided scholastic theologians with a framework in which to work out both a full-bodied understanding of the sacrament of marriage and a more richly interpersonal account of sexual morality. For St. Thomas, procreation was the chief good or primary end of marriage insofar as it is more essential, but the bonum sacramenti is the most excellent (ST Suppl., q. 49, a. 3). Further, Aquinas sees this good as communicative of grace and not merely as an indissoluble bond.
St. Thomas likewise uses the goods of offspring and fidelity to ground his sexual ethic. He largely accepts the teaching of the Doctor of Grace but at the same time develops it in important ways. Adultery and fornication are gravely sinful, and this is knowable both through Scripture and Tradition and by right reason, which can determine that right use of our sexual powers requires marriage and is ordered to the procreation and education of children. St. Thomas states: “And the end of using genital organs is to beget and educate offspring, and so every use of the aforementioned organs that is not related to begetting and properly educating offspring is as such disordered. And every act of the aforementioned organs outside the sexual union of a man and a woman is obviously unsuitable for begetting offspring” (De malo q. 15, a. 1). Even more gravely disordered are sexual acts which are in themselves non-procreative. Sexual acts such as masturbation, bestiality, contracepted intercourse, or non-vaginal forms of sex are contra naturam, violating human nature’s ordination of sex to the procreation and education of children (ST II–II, q. 154, a. 11).
Like other scholastic theologians, St. Thomas restated some of Augustine’s positions more positively. While Augustine taught that marital sex for the purpose of procreation was “without fault,” Aquinas holds that it is positively virtuous since it is an act of the virtue of religion for spouses to desire to have children whom they can raise to know and love God (see ST Suppl., q. 49, a. 6).{20} Likewise, Augustine taught that a spouse who granted sex to a spouse who requested it to satisfy desire did not sin (versus the venial sin of the one who made the request). St. Thomas, however, taught that the spouse who granted this request again acted virtuously because this is an act of the virtue of justice based on St. Paul’s teaching concerning the mutual debt of marriage (ST Suppl., q. 49, a. 6).{21} Because he holds (with Aristotle) that pleasure is a natural accompaniment and perfection of human action, even the pleasure of these virtuous sexual acts is good and can help form married couples in virtue (cf. ST I–II, q. 34).
Like St. Augustine, St. Thomas holds marriage to be a friendship, in fact “the greatest friendship” [maxima amicitia] possible between human beings (Summa contra gentiles III, ch. 123). But unlike Augustine, Aquinas specifically relates sexual union to this friendship. Commenting on Aristotle’s three senses of friendship, he notes how they apply to marriage and conjugal relations within it:
The Philosopher points out how the friendship [between spouses] is related to the three causes of friendship, saying that it emerges from his discussion that marriage is useful (he means by ‘useful’ that it comprises domestic life). It comprises likewise pleasure, in the act of procreation, just as in the case of the other animals. And when the husband and wife are epieikes, or virtuous, then their friendship will be of the virtuous kind. There is, he means, a particular excellence which is specific to each partner, that is, to the husband, and to the wife; and it is this which makes the friendship a source of joy to them. (In VIII Ethicorum 488, 268–278)The love characterized by desire (amor concupiscentiae) which draws men and women together can, in a virtuous marriage, become part of the love characterized by friendship (amor amicitiae) in which spouses seek the good of the other in all of the ways in which they relate (cf. ST I–II, q. 26, a. 4).
Thus, for the Angelic Doctor as for Fathers such as John Chrysostom, marriage and chastity are not opposed to one another. Married couples can also practice this virtue. Chastity is that part of the cardinal virtue of temperance that moderates—or “chastises”—the appetite for sexual pleasure (ST II–II, q. 151, a. 1). Note that moderation is not elimination. Chastity governs and directs the sexual powers of a person toward true and genuine ends. In the case of consecrated virginity (which Aquinas takes to be the highest expression of chastity), this is toward perpetual continence lived as a form of public witness. In the case of the married, this is toward faithful and procreative sexual expression on the part of persons committed to one another’s temporal and eternal happiness. Adopting virginity does not automatically make one chaste. Indeed, it is possible for married persons to be more chaste than virgins (cf. ST II–II, q. 152, a. 4, ad 2).{22}
From Aristotle, St. Thomas takes the idea that moral virtue is a mean between vicious extremes—in this case insensibility on the one hand and lust on the other. Insensibility is deficiency in pursuing goods which involve physical pleasures, particularly those of taste and touch. Hence if a person rejects “pleasure to the extent of omitting things that are necessary for nature’s preservation,” he acts against nature and is guilty of this vice (see ST II–II, q. 142, a. 1). Lust, on the other hand, is excessive or inordinate desire for sexual pleasure (see ST II–II, q. 153, a. 1). The vehemence of this disordered desire brings with it other spiritually harmful effects. Following Gregory the Great (Moralia in Job 31, 45), Aquinas mentions eight of these “daughters of lust”: “blindness of mind, thoughtlessness, inconstancy, rashness, self-love, hatred of God, love of this world and abhorrence or despair of a future world” (ST II–II, q. 153, a. 5).
But in contradistinction to Aristotle, Aquinas accepts Christian revelation’s understanding of grace: that conversion is possible for a person who is mired in a vice such as lust. For Aristotle, the vicious person’s reason is fundamentally corrupted—he is blind to the good and cannot see the evil in his actions. He is stuck with no hope of change.{23} But for St. Thomas, due to God’s help, change and growth toward moral virtue are possible. In ST II–II, Aquinas outlines this progression. With the help of grace, a lustful person can come to see the evil in his or her actions and begin to abhor it. The incontinent person has lustful desires and acts on them but experiences remorse because he sees these as morally wrong. The continent person has lustful desires but restrains them. The chaste person’s sexual desires are rightly ordered according to his or her state in life. He or she desires the right things at the right time and to the right degree. Consistently living chastity and the other moral virtues, according to St. Thomas, is only possible with the help of grace (see ST I–II, q. 109, aa. 2, 3, and 8).
Aquinas thus carries forward the Augustinian framework of the goods of marriage but couples it with a robust and fully articulated theology of marriage as a sacrament. At the same time, he offers a more expansive view of marital friendship that is able to incorporate a couple’s sexual relationship and sexual pleasure in his presentation of conjugal chastity.
Modern Developments
Post-medieval Catholic theology saw little development in the theology of marriage and its goods or ends.{24} Given the widespread impact of nominalism and its attendant voluntarism on Catholic theology, marriage was largely understood in legal terms as a contract which bestows particular rights and duties. The legal lens was useful for framing questions of validity and certain obligations but not for capturing the richly lived reality of married life and sexuality within it. Hence the 1917 Code of Canon Law described marriage as a contract which grants spouses a “right to the body” of the other (ius in corpus) for the purposes of begetting descendants (Canon 1081, no. 2).
Among the ends of marriage, procreation held unquestioned primacy. Once again, the 1917 Code is instructive here. The law is straightforward: “The primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children; the secondary [end] is mutual support and a remedy for concupiscence” (Canon 1013, no. 1).
In spite of a somewhat narrow and law-focused approach to sacramental and moral theology characteristic of the post-Tridentine manuals, Catholic theologians in the modern period did further develop the awareness of some of the interpersonal realities of marital sex to which patristic and scholastic theology pointed, albeit incrementally. Thomas Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534), the great sixteenth-century commentator on St. Thomas, developed the thought of the Angelic Doctor in two ways. First, joining with the opinion of St. John Chrysostom and some of the other Eastern Fathers, Cajetan held that there was no sin involved for a spouse to request intercourse to allay concupiscence. Second, while Thomas taught that the pleasure of virtuous sexual intercourse was good, the Cardinal held that couples could actually seek such pleasure as long as they explicitly intended procreation and marital fidelity (see Commentaria in II–II, q. 153, a. 2). Later moralists such as St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696–1787) taught that this intent need only be an implicit habitual one, that is, that couples should seek to have intercourse as spouses and not do anything to contradict either fidelity or procreation (see Theologiae moralis, bk. 6, tract 6).
While scholastic theologians such as St. Thomas or St. Bonaventure related marital intercourse to the expression of the friendship or love that united the couple, later moralists suggested that sexual expression could actually foster or deepen this love. Thus Thomas Sanchez (1550–1610) held that sexual gestures prior to intercourse (or “foreplay”) could actually foster mutual love between the couple (see De sancto matrimonii sacramento lib. 9, disp. 24). Jean-Paul Gury (1801–1866) applied this idea to intercourse itself (see Compendium theologiae moralis, Tractatus de Matrimonio, ch. 1, nos. 686–687 and ch. 7/8, nos. 801–806).
This focus on the interpersonal dimension of sexual union flowered in the personalist school which emerged in the twentieth century. For example, Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977) was the first married layman to have significant impact on the Church’s sexual teaching. His work was praised by multiple popes and influenced Pope St. John Paul II.{25} In his 1929 work Die Ehe (Marriage), von Hildebrand accepted the framework of the 1917 Code that saw procreation as the primary end of marriage but created a new axiology within it in which love was its primary “meaning.” He regarded love as an ethical requirement for virtuous sexual expression, grounding this position as a development of the Augustinian bonum fidei. Sexual union is an embodied gift of self and a unique expression of the wedded love at the heart of Christian marriage.
It is this thread of growing awareness of and attention to the interpersonal ends of marital intercourse that can be traced from Scripture through the Fathers and Scholastic theologians into the modern period and the Catholic personalism that Pope St. Paul VI captured in the term “unitive significance” (significationem unitatis) of the conjugal act (Humanae vitae, no. 12). But how is this signification related to the act’s “procreative significance,” given its primacy and the “inseparable connection” (inseparabili nexu) between them?
III. Unitive and Procreative
The question is complicated further by the disappearance from Church teaching of the language of primary and secondary ends of marriage itself (and not merely the meaning of the conjugal act within it) during and after the Second Vatican Council. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, goes out of its way to avoid this hierarchical language. While speaking of the gift of children, the Council fathers state:
Hence, while not making the other purposes of matrimony of less account, the true practice of conjugal love, and the whole meaning of the family life which results from it, have this aim: that the couple be ready with stout hearts to cooperate with the love of the Creator and the Savior, Who through them will enlarge and enrich His own family day by day. (Gaudium et spes, no. 50, emphasis added)The Council fathers here not only avoid the traditional language of procreation as the primary end of marriage; they call attention to the fact that they are doing so.
This has led to a debate among theologians. Has there been a change or development of the teaching, or (as was argued at the Council) was this simply an effort to avoid technical language in a document whose aims were largely pastoral? Some theologians argue that this teaching has never been repudiated, and the Council cites documents where this hierarchy is explicitly taught. Hence the teaching is unchanged, even if no longer emphasized.{26} It has been repeatedly emphasized by the modern magisterium.{27} Other theologians point out that no major document—including authoritative and technical ones—since the Council has used the hierarchical language—not Humanae vitae, the revised Rite of Marriage for the Latin Rite, Familiaris consortio, the 1983 Code of Canon Law, the 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Evangelium vitae, or Amoris laetitia.{28} At the very least, this would seem to indicate a development of language and emphasis even if not a change in teaching on the part of the Church. But how do we understand this new language?
The question is complicated still more by the fact that some English translations of Humanae vitae no. 11 contain language that states each conjugal act in marriage must remain “open” to the transmission of life. This is a poor translation of the official Latin text, which has per se destinatus (“ordered in itself”). This rendering is based on the original Italian text, which uses the word aperto (“open”).{29} This could create the understanding that couples must actively intend a child in order to have sexual intercourse (contrary to the teaching of Liguori and other modern Catholic moralists) and perhaps even call into question the use of known infertile periods of a woman’s cycle for serious reason to postpone or avoid conception—a practice recommended elsewhere in the encyclical (see no. 24). The official Latin text and the current official English translation on the Vatican website avoid these potential confusions. The encyclical’s teaching is not based on a couple’s subjective intent in engaging in intercourse but on the kind of act that it is, or that toward which it is aimed. In the mind of the Church, virtuous marital intercourse must be simultaneously ordered toward two interdependent and interconnected meanings: the unitive and the procreative.
We might say that the procreative meaning of the conjugal act is more fundamental. It is the condition of possibility for the expression of personal unitive love. Yet it is also true that the interpersonal meaning is more excellent.{30} Love is the vocation and means of fulfillment for every human person (cf. Gaudium et spes, no. 24). But this more excellent meaning is not possible without the more fundamental one. One cannot promote a personalist account of love that dispenses with human nature, the body, and the way in which God created us. Person personifies nature—it does not transcend it.{31} As Michael Waldstein explains, this means that marital intercourse ought to be procreative through being unitive and unitive through being procreative (Waldstein, Glory of the Logos in the Flesh, 57–62). Couples hoping to receive the gift of a child give themselves to each other in a bodily expression of love. Couples seeking to give themselves wholly to one another in a bodily expression of love can only fully do so through an act that is in itself capable of generating new human life. Thus, only non-contracepted vaginal intercourse fully expresses the “one flesh” of the marriage covenant.
In his teaching on marriage and the human person, Pope St. John Paul II deepened the Church’s understanding of this teaching by building on Aquinas’ understanding of human nature and the human person.{32} In his teaching, one can find multiple strands of argument for the inseparability principle taught by Paul VI and thus for the moral difference between natural and contraceptive forms of birth regulation.
According to Pope John Paul II, the body has a natural communicability through its masculinity or femininity, especially in the state of original innocence. East of Eden in our present fallen state, this capacity remains, albeit in a diminished fashion. Certain embodied gestures capture and convey this communication. That is, they articulate a language that expresses the person. Sexual intercourse is an example of this somatic self-communication at a very deep level. It communicates an unconditional and faithful gift of oneself in a way that corresponds to the Latin rite’s liturgical language of the wedding vows (see John Paul II, General Audience of August 22, 1984).{33} The ethical task of the couple in marriage is to “re-read” this language of the body in truth in their life together. This is precisely what couples are called to do in practicing responsible parenthood: “The concept of a morally correct regulation of fertility is nothing other than the rereading of the ‘language of the body’ in truth” (General Audience of September 5, 1984). Contraception, however, overlays this language with an “objectively contradictory language” (Familiaris consortio, no. 32), a language of rejection and refusal. The contracepting couple thus speaks a falsehood with their bodies.
In his philosophical defense of Catholic sexual ethics, Love and Responsibility, then-Bishop Karol Wojtyla taught that a person is the kind of good to whom the only proper response is love. To fall short of the unconditional acceptance of the other in love is to engage in a utilitarian use of the other in some way. When a couple does not give themselves in their totality in conjugal love, they use each other for pleasure. “Their intentions are thereby diverted from the person and directed to mere enjoyment: ‘the person as co-creator of love’ disappears and there remains only the ‘partner in an erotic experience’” (Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 234). The spouse is treated as an object for use rather than as a person worthy of love. This same personalist understanding of love is articulated by John Paul II in his magisterial teaching. Use of contraception “leads . . . to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality” (Familiaris consortio, no. 32).
Underlying the two previous arguments is an anthropological conviction. The fertility withheld by couples who contracept is not merely biological. It belongs to the order of existence, i.e., to human nature. Wojtyla notes that because of the widespread influence of empiricism in the modern world, people assume that anything that can be studied biologically is merely physical. However, human fertility is an expression of human nature, capable of cooperating with the Creator in procreating new human life. As such, it is ontological and spiritual and not merely biological (see Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 52–57). The logic of contraception points to the opposite conclusion. In this view, fertility can be suppressed mechanically, chemically, or through some other means since it is mere biology to be modified at will. It is for this reason that Familiaris consortio asserts that recourse to contraception versus recourse to infertile periods of a woman’s cycle “involves two irreconcilable concepts of the human person” (no. 32). One sees fertility as integral to the person and rooted in human nature, and the other sees it as mere biological facticity or even as a kind of disease of the body to be controlled.
It is worth noting further differences here in regard to these acts and their impact on the moral agents who undertake them. The couple who uses a method of natural family planning either engages in intercourse or not, depending on their knowledge of their shared fertility at that point and whether they are seeking to have a child or postpone pregnancy. They engage in one morally relevant action. The couple who uses contraception engages in two morally relevant acts. They choose to have intercourse and then before, during, or after intercourse they choose to negate or cancel the fertility of that act. It is that second act that is morally disordered for all of the reasons articulated by Pope John Paul II. In it, the language of the body is not spoken truthfully as a word of self-donating love. Persons cannot express love apart from their nature and its ends. It is exactly in this sense that contraceptive sex is contra naturam.
Human acts shape the person who is their author such that they serve to help the person grow in virtue or vice. Sexual acts contrary to the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act dispose a person to lust and its attendant vices. However, the practice of periodic continence in marriage for the purpose of family planning or for other reasons is part of the “apprenticeship in self-mastery” that enables couples to grow in conjugal chastity (cf. CCC no. 2339). Thus, methods of natural family planning are not just “methods” of avoiding or achieving pregnancy; they are moral practices that form couples in virtue. John Paul II comments: “Although the ‘periodic’ character of continence in this case is applied to the so-called ‘natural rhythms’ (HV 16), still continence itself is a definite and permanent attitude, it is a virtue, and thus the whole mode of behavior guided by it becomes virtuous in character” (General Audience of August 29, 1984).
Finally, for John Paul II, the inseparable connection between the unitive and procreative meanings of conjugal love taught by Humanae vitae is knowable on the basis of both human reason and divine revelation. This can be seen in individual texts such as Genesis 4:1, which links spousal self-gift and potential parenthood: “Now Adam knew (yāḏa’) Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.’” John Paul II observes that the Hebrew used here is no mere euphemism. It describes a philosophical truth. In sexual self-gift, husband and wife come to know themselves and each other both as spouses and as potential parents (see General Audience of March 12, 1980). If either of these meanings is negated, the truth of this reciprocal giving is vitiated. Further, this same conclusion emerges from the biblical anthropology that he outlines in the Theology of the Body catechesis and is defended in the Church’s tradition. Even if the formulation of the norm in Humanae vitae is not found in exactly the same way in Scripture, it is held consistently in the Tradition and “is in accordance with the sum total of revealed doctrine contained in biblical sources” (General Audience of July 18, 1984). As such, the teaching cannot be negated or fundamentally revised.{34}
IV. Conjugal Chastity and Love
Conjugal chastity directs a couple’s sexual relationship to the twin meanings of life and love, of procreation and union. Chastity is thus at the service of marriage, ordering the mutual attraction of man and woman, their desire for interpersonal union, and sexual pleasure according to the Creator’s design. It enables reason and will, directed by prudence, to govern the passions so that spouses are genuinely free interiorly and in their relationships.{35} Chastity thus enables persons to possess themselves so that they can give themselves as a gift to others. This is why Wojtyla states:
Only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love. For chastity frees their association, including marital intercourse, from that tendency to use a person . . . and by so freeing it introduces into their life together and their sexual relationship a special disposition to ‘loving kindness.’ (Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 171) As we have seen, it is possible for spouses to “use” each other as objects of sexual pleasure. This can be done through contracepted sex, through incomplete sexual acts, or by objectifying the other in various ways. But it is also possible for spouses to use each other by seeing the other as nothing more than a means for procreation (see Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 58–59, 233). This could be done, for example, through a narrow and legalistic insistence on the ius in corpus of the 1917 Code of Canon Law. The spouse thus becomes just a means to obtain the good of children, not a person to be loved unconditionally.
Spouses could also use each other by seeing the other simply as a means to satisfy sexual desire and exaggerating their “rights” over the body of the other. While it is true that couples give themselves to each other in totality, including their bodies, in the consent of marriage, this does not establish an unlimited right to intercourse to be demanded at will. St. Thomas, following St. Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 7, held that spouses have a right to the body of the other but placed limits on it. A request for intercourse could be refused in cases of illness or potential bodily harm, as an act of charity when it might be dangerous for the requestor, when the couple has agreed to abstain on a holy day, when the requestor is intoxicated or otherwise deprived of right reason, or when the request is for some form of unnatural sex (see ST Suppl., q. 64). A spouse guilty of adultery, who violated the good of fides, loses his or her conjugal rights altogether (ST Suppl., q. 62, a. 1). A husband who is “too ardent a lover” in demanding the conjugal debt from his wife or employing force is guilty of a species of lust akin to adultery (ST II–II, q. 154, a. 2, ad 2).
But when viewed not just through the lens of legal rights but through that of the friendship and love that ought to animate marriage, the unchaste nature of coercion or violence in the conjugal relationship becomes clearer. Such actions violate the heart of the bonum fidei and the couple’s sexual relationship as a lived expression of mutual love. Chaste sexual expression in marriage must be characterized by tenderness and reverence for the other as a person possessed of a God-given dignity (see Pope Francis, Amoris laetitia, nos. 151–152). Hence, just as conjugal chastity excludes intentionally non-procreative sexual acts, it equally rules out acts that are objectively anti-unitive in nature. These would include not only sexual violence or coercion,{36} but also sadistic or masochistic sexual practices, use of pornography, or practices that prioritize the pursuit of pleasure over the expression of tenderness and love.{37} In terms of the choice of specific sexual gestures prior to and preparatory for intercourse, there is room for some prudential judgment by couples in determining what best communicates love.{38} One person may find a particular practice appealing while another finds it demeaning or disturbing.{39} As Aquinas himself notes, paraphrasing Aristotle, “that which is received is received according to the mode of the recipient” (cf. ST I, q. 75, a. 5).{40} Couples must therefore communicate to make sure that specific sexual gestures can be received as expressions of their mutual love. If not, they should be avoided.
V. Sexual Ethics in a Technological Age
Unmarried persons, whether single or consecrated virgins or vowed celibates, also need chastity to relate well to others. Chastity enables one to encounter those around him or her as integral persons with an intrinsic and God-given dignity. This is true whether these persons are strangers, acquaintances, close friends, or family. Since human beings are called to treat others with justice and love, chastity enables and perfects the practice of these interpersonal virtues. At a minimum, this means that unmarried persons are called to practice continence by refraining from genital sex in their relationships. One can observe this minimum without possessing the full interior freedom of chastity, but one cannot be chaste in the absence of this baseline. Thus, continence is necessary though not fully sufficient for chastity lived outside of the state of marriage.
It must be admitted that the expansion of technology in the world around us has made the acquisition and exercise of chastity more arduous. Ubiquitous screens and devices that connect to the internet offer endless distractions that make the pursuit of virtue or the development of a prayer life to sustain it more difficult.{41} Traditional media, social media, and devices that connect to the internet bombard individuals with images and ideas directly opposed to chastity. This is especially evident in the case of pornography.
The spread of information technology has put pornographic content just a few clicks away. This content, whether print, audio, or visual, is destructive. As the Catechism states:
Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. (CCC no. 2354) The act of consuming pornography is gravely evil in its object. It perverts the moral perception of those involved in it, causing them to objectify themselves and others.{42} It destroys marriages because it shuts down the capacity for healthy and chaste intimacy between couples.{43} Along with lustful fantasy and masturbation,{44} it forms one of the basic building blocks of what some now call sexual addiction.{45} It does grave harm to communities since it scandalizes and harms the young or others accidentally exposed to it and is frequently associated with other evils such as human trafficking. The ubiquitous nature of pornography has had a corrupting effect on other forms of media and entertainment, leading to a coarsened and “pornified” culture.
Other emerging technologies can compound the “fantasy world” of which the Catechism speaks, further dissociating sexual activity from its true beauty and ends. These include Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), and robotics. AI can be used to generate various kinds of pornography, including pornography depicting sexual assault and violence. Insofar as it enables consumers to “customize” the material, it can exacerbate the addictive effect of pornography, enabling people to amplify and cater to their most disordered impulses. AI platforms can also provide seemingly personal “companions” that can simulate interpersonal relationships and provide romantic and sexual attention to users. VR can be used to create immersive visual experiences for users that better simulate real-world experience than does two-dimensional visual media. Coupled with haptic devices such as sex toys, gloves, or even bodysuits, so-called “teledildonics” can generate sensations of physical touch or sexual stimulation controlled by a computer or a user at a remote location. Finally, robots created as sexual objects or “sexbots” are AI-powered humanoid robots with exaggerated sexual characteristics that serve as outlets for solitary masturbatory sexual activity. Instead of seeking union with a spouse in an expression of fruitful and faithful love, individuals seek sexual pleasure with objects in a fantasy world largely of their own construction—objects which have no needs, make no demands, and cannot give consent.{46}
VI. Sex and Identity
Among the harms wrought by the ongoing effects of the Sexual Revolution is the destabilization of people’s sense of personal identity. This Revolution attacked and continues to attack communities through which people gained a sense of who they are—particularly families and faith communities. Families and broader society have been fractured through the carnage of relationships wrought by widespread use of contraception and abortion, infidelity, and divorce. Churches have been weakened either by compromising biblical and traditional sexual teaching or by becoming internally divided as some members accept the cultural ideology while others resist it. In such a situation, it is unsurprising that the question asked by many people today, especially young people, is, “Who am I?”{47} This is undoubtedly a factor in the tendency of many people to turn their desires—especially sexual desires—into identities.
There are significant numbers of people who experience unchosen sexual attraction to members of their own sex. The Catechism notes that the number of people who experience deep-seated attraction to members of their own sex is “not negligible” (CCC no. 2358). But to refer to same-sex attracted people or opposite-sex attracted people as if they are defined by their desires is reductive. This is why the Church generally refers to people as “homosexual persons” or “heterosexual persons,” not “homosexuals” or “heterosexuals” simpliciter. The dignity of human persons made in the image and likeness of God transcends their desires.
Further, it should be noted that the idea that sexual attraction constitutes a fixed and unchangeable “orientation” can be challenged on both philosophical and scientific grounds. Even if sexual attraction cannot be wholly redirected by choice or therapeutic intervention, the evidence shows that it can and does change over time in response to environment, choice, and behavior.{48} So-called “sexual orientation” can easily undermine the concept of human and Christian freedom for same-sex attracted persons and mask the presence of disordered sexual desires in opposite-sex attracted persons who hide their proclivities behind a veneer of “normal” sexuality.{49}
The Church teaches that these deep-seated inclinations constitute “an objective disorder” because they incline persons toward sexual activity that is itself disordered (CDF, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, no. 3). Sexual activity between persons of the same sex can neither be procreative nor unitive in the sense required by the Church’s theology of marriage and sexual teaching. Persons of the same sex are physiologically incapable of uniting in such a way that these meanings are realized. In that sense, sexual acts between them are contra naturam in that they fail to realize the Creator’s design for sexual self-gift. As with other unmarried persons, the Church calls people who experience same-sex attraction to live chastity in the form of continence (see CDF Letter, no. 12; CCC no. 2357).{50} It should further be noted that the Church teaches that same-sex attracted people “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” and that “every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided” (CCC no. 2358). While unchosen same-sex attraction can be a cross, such crosses can bear fruit in the beauty of chaste friendships and lives of deep holiness for people committed to following Christ.
An even more dramatic indication of the destabilization of identity rooted in the sexually differentiated body is the increase in the number of people struggling with various forms of gender discordance. Part of what is driving this rise is an ideology that seeks to sever the links between one’s self-perception, the reality of sexual difference, and the body.{51} In the words of Benedict XVI, gender ideology holds that
sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society . . . People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being . . . The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. ("Christmas Address to the Roman Curia," 2012)Freed from the constraints of the body and of human nature, gender becomes a self-chosen and self-articulated reality. From this, it follows that there are not two genders or three, but dozens and dozens—potentially as many as there are individuals.
Activists who promote this ideology hold that people—even children—should be allowed to “transition,” i.e., to change their “sex assigned at birth” by adopting the pronouns and dress of the opposite sex (social transitioning), chemically delaying puberty and using cross-sex hormones to change their body’s biochemistry and appearance (chemical transitioning), and undergoing cosmetic surgery to alter the appearance of their genitalia and bodies (surgical transitioning). There is considerable scientific evidence that these practices are harmful, especially the medical interventions. They destroy fertility, leave persons permanently medicalized, and often fail to actually treat the psychological pain of gender dysphoria. They attempt to use harsh medical interventions to treat what is better understood as a psychological disorder.{52} The Church sees medical transitioning procedures as a form of “mutilation,” making them morally illicit.{53} However, it should be noted, some of these same medical interventions could be licitly employed to treat an adult with an intersex condition who seeks to have his or her body more clearly express its God-given sex.{54}
VII. Conclusion
Considered in the light of human reason and Christian revelation, human sexual differentiation is ordered both to the continuation of the human species and to human sociality and friendship. Virtuous sexual union requires that the act be of the kind that is ordered to the generation of children as well as the expression of faithful love in marriage (cf. ST Suppl., q. 49, a. 2). When entered into by two baptized persons, the marriage covenant is a sacrament of the New Law and an icon that “represents the mystery of Christ’s union with the Church” (ST Suppl., q. 42, a. 2). Christian marriage and the family that flows from it is a communion of persons, reflecting the love of the Blessed Trinity in the world (see Familiaris consortio, no. 18; Gratissimam sane, no. 7). Chastity, empowered by the life of grace, gives married couples and families the interior freedom to live out this vocation of love.
This same virtue is lived in a different form by unmarried persons. They too are called to fulfillment through relationships of self-donating love but through the practice of continence. Consecrated virgins and celibate priests, who freely renounce the great good of marriage, give a unique form of witness to the fruitfulness of spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, representing the life-giving love of God (see Familiaris consortio, no. 25; Mulieris dignitatem, no. 21). They also point to and anticipate the eschatological fulfillment of the spousal meaning of the body in the union of the redeemed and God in the Beatific Vision (see John Paul II, General Audience of March 10, 1982; cf. Aquinas, ST II–II, q. 152, a. 4).
Catholic sexual ethics helps to identify specific principles that guide virtuous sexual behavior in every state of life. Chastity, nourished by the life of grace, provides the interior freedom and the power to translate these principles into action. In this way, men and women can discover the meaning and purpose of their own existence by freely making a gift of themselves in love (cf. John Paul II, General Audience of January 16, 1980).{55}