The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology

Epilogue

Epilogue THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK we have argued that Catholic sexual morality is institutionalized within the confines of marriage and procreation, and we have examined the foundations of two principles that articulate the essence of that Catholic morality. The first principle states that ‘‘any human genital act whatsoever may be placed only within the confines of marriage’’;1 the second states that ‘‘each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.’’2 In contemporary Catholic moral theology, two approaches to understanding these principles demarcate two schools of Catholic moral theology. First, the classicist approach holds the principles as universal, permanent, and unchangeable; this approach defines what we have called the traditionalist school. Second, the empirical or historically conscious approach holds that the principles may be unchangeable and unchanged or may be in the process of development or resolution in the contemporary sociohistorical context; this approach defines what we have called the revisionist school. Throughout the book, we have intentionally opted for a historically conscious and revisionist approach. It is misleading, as we pointed out, to speak about reason and nature, as if they were two completely separate categories. They are not. Thinkers in the past, including sainted theologians, did not know the full reality of the human person as it has unfolded over the centuries, nor did they know the full reality of human biology and sexuality physiologically and psychologically. This restricted knowledge relates directly to the subject matter of this book—human anthropology in general and human sexuality specifically—and makes Josef Fuchs’s claim difficult to gainsay: ‘‘One cannot take what Augustine or the philosophers of the Middle Ages knew about sexuality as the exclusive basis of a moral reflection.’’3 Nor can one take the presumed facticity of nature as the exclusive basis for moral reflection, for ‘‘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.’’4 Put more directly, ‘‘nature’’ is a socially constructed category. To indicate and emphasize this socially constructed reality, throughout we have always placed the word ‘‘nature’’ in quotation marks. 259 260  Epilogue Intrachurch Dialogue Because theologians are essentially persons inculturated into a variety of human perspectives, only one of which is theology, this book has inevitably engaged in a twofold dialogue. The first dialogue is internal to theology and to the Catholic Church. It asks what a two-thousand-year ecclesial tradition has said theologically about human anthropology and sexuality and how that ancient tradition is to be mediated to, appropriated by, and transmitted onward in and by the contemporary Church. The young Joseph Ratzinger underscores why that internal dialogue must be pursued: ‘‘Not everything that exists in the Church must for that reason be also a legitimate tradition; in other words, not every tradition that arises in the Church is a true celebration of the mystery of Christ. There is a distorting, as well as a legitimate tradition . . . [and] . . . consequently tradition must not be considered only affirmatively but also critically.’’5 Three matters are crucial to both the critical consideration Ratzinger demands and the internal dialogue: the ‘‘nature’’ of Christian theology, the origin of sacred scripture, and the ‘‘nature’’ of the Church that claims its origin in the scriptures and seeks to mediate its meanings to each new Christian generation. For what has transpired in this book, the ‘‘nature’’ of the Church is, perhaps, the most pressing of these three, because how one conceives of the Church will determine how one conceives of another theological reality that is central to the internal dialogue, and to this book: sensus fidei, ‘‘the instinctive capacity of the whole Church to recognize the infallibility of the Spirit’s truth.’’6 Before we consider sensus fidei, however, we need to add another word about theology and theologians. Traditional Catholic theology before the Second Vatican Council was enclosed within a classicist-traditionalist framework; it was universal, permanent, objective, and only to be learned. It was above all ahistorical, which led to its categorization as ‘‘non-historical orthodoxy.’’7 That explains its evident lack of creativity. One of the achievements of Bernard Lonergan was to point the way beyond this classicist-traditionalist theology to an empirical, historically conscious, critical, and revisionist theology. Some continue to lament that ‘‘some recent Roman Catholic theology seems determined to live in a world that no longer exists,’’8 but we have eschewed that lamentation and have chosen the way forward...