The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity

Chapter 6. Humanae vitae, Sexual Ethics, and the Roman Catholic Church

99 in twentieth-Century doCuments on social, economic, and political matters, popes and the Second Vatican Council have spoken to the world with credibility and poignancy about the exploitation and oppression that fuel injustice for much of the world’s population.1 Addressing both contemporary socioeconomic configuration and the scientific worldview, the Roman Catholic Church has entered into dialogue with the modern world, contributing even research of its own scientists and the values of its social teaching. In many conciliar and papal documents, the world is dynamic and open, and truth is on the move in a constant formulation of insights and discoveries. In the church’s pronouncements on sexual ethics, however, this dynamic world disappears and the circumscribed one of neo-Scholasticism returns. Truth becomes permanent, absolute, and unchanging. Laws embedded in the intelligibility of the created order reveal the ends toward which the nature ChApter 6 Humanae vitae, Sexual Ethics, and the Roman Catholic Church Tatha Wiley ( ( 100 The Embrace of Eros of each species is oriented. These laws, expressions of God’s will for the universe, are known with certitude by the magisterium, the teaching office of the church. They are pronounced as normative to those who belong to the church. Emblematic of such teaching and instructive about the features and roots of its teaching have been Roman Catholic pronouncements on birth control. The preeminent example is the 1968 encyclical, Humanae vitae, “On the Regulation of Birth” (hereafter HV). There Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the church’s long-standing prohibition of any direct interference with the procreative capacity of sexual relations.2 This had been a theme of earlier encyclicals, notably Pope Leo’s encyclical on Christian marriage issued in 1880, Arcanum divinae sapientiae. Other twentieth-century encyclicals also specifically prohibited artificial birth control. Pius XI did so in Casti connubii , issued in 1930, which denounced it in the strongest of terms, calling contraception “intrinsically against nature” and a “sin against nature.” By deliberately frustrating the reproductive capacity of the conjugal act, he wrote, the couple commits “a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.”3 Papal documents were not the first to condemn contraception. In 1140 C.e., the influential moral theologian Gratian included a prohibition against contraception in his code of canon law, A Harmony of Conflicting Canons, known as the Decretum. He followed Augustine in emphasizing that marital sex is only to be used for procreation and not for pleasure, as did Pope Gregory IX in 1234 (the first pope to do so).4 Pope Sixtus called contraception homicide in 1588. In Humanae vitae—despite explicit rejections of its moral necessity by his own study commission, convened after Vatican II—Paul VI reaffirmed this longstanding prohibition against any interference with the procreative potentiality of sexual relations.5 John Paul II, who succeeded to the papacy in 1978, fully supported the presuppositions and method of HV during his long pontificate. This essay conducts a critical assessment of sexual ethics in HV in light of popular Roman Catholic dissent, criticisms by Roman Catholic moral theologians , and the broader history of patriarchy in the Christian tradition within which it must be situated. This assessment will demonstrate that the moral teaching on sex of the Roman Catholic Church presupposes a particular concept of the purpose of sex and marriage in the created order. This conception is connected with God’s intention, and there is no hint that this purpose could be any different than what the church teaches. Following this critical assessment, I propose an alternative Roman Catholic sexual ethics that, while drawing on the best of Catholic tradition, is more open and dynamic. Humanae vitae, Sexual Ethics, and the Roman Catholic Church 101 sExual EtHICs In HumanaE vItaE Citing the Second Vatican Council, HV stated that “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children” (#9). HV asserted that “procreative finality applies to the totality of married life” (#4). Indeed, these conceptions of sex and marriage taught by the magisterium are “established by God” and “written into the actual nature of man and of woman” (#12). In the end, Paul VI argued, man “has no dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source” (#13). The church’s sexual ethics makes biology absolute: procreative sex is moral, nonprocreative sex is immoral. The...