December 29th will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Persona humana, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s (CDF) “Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics.” Issued in 1975, the document reaffirmed Catholic teaching on the immorality of three practices—fornication, homosexual behavior, and masturbation—precisely at the moment when many theologians were already seeking to dismantle the whole of the Church’s sexual ethic.
Half a century later, it will be telling to see whether this anniversary is noted, even while its message is no less urgent now than it was in 1975.
It is worth revisiting why Persona humana arose, what it taught, and what has happened since.
The Context: Aftermath of the birth control commission
Persona humana appeared seven years after Humanae vitae. Its background lies in the progressive erosion of Catholic sexual ethics begun during the 1960s and early 1970s, a process accelerated by the famous papal birth control commission convoked under John XXIII.
The commission’s original mandate was narrow: determine whether the new anovulant drug—the “Pill”—constituted “contraception” as the Church had always understood that term. To us, that seems obvious, but it was not in 1963. Back then, contraception meant barriers that prevented gametes from meeting or chemicals that killed them. The Pill’s mechanism was different, almost unique. Its intended effect was to prevent ovulation altogether. By altering hormonal levels, the “Pill” tricked the body. Was suppressing ovulation—a preemptive action rather than an interference with a process already begun—the same kind of “contraceptive” act the Church had condemned? (I am unsure what awareness then existed of the Pill’s abortifacient nature.)
That was the question. In one sense, it was a technical question, but one that did not involve reconsidering whether contraception itself could be moral. In the early 1960s, even writers who supported contraception—including John Noonan, author of Contraception, a history of the subject—conceded that Christian witness against contraception was unanimous until 1930 (when the Anglican Lambeth Conference accepted it) and had remained unanimous in Catholicism up until that moment.
But the commission was quickly overtaken by theologians with broader ambitions. After John XXIII’s death, Paul VI continued the commission—an imprudent decision, in retrospect. The direction in which the commission’s theologians were heading was clear: allowing contraceptive intercourse. When their confidential report was submitted to the Pope in 1966, it was promptly leaked to the National Catholic Reporter.
There were two reports:
- A majority argued that the Church should change its teaching.
- A minority insisted that such a change was impossible, in part because doing so would undermine the entire structure of Catholic sexual ethics—including its teachings on masturbation and homosexual acts.
Two more years of papal indecision followed until Paul VI finally issued Humanae vitae (1968). In that document, the Pope reaffirmed the principle that grounds all Catholic sexual morality: the divinely established, inseparable connection between the unitive and procreative meanings of the marital act (#12). Human beings, he wrote, “may not break” what God Himself joined.
Because of the two-year delay, the encyclical immediately encountered organized opposition. In the United States, Fr. Charles Curran led the resistance. But it took until the late 1980s for CDF prefect Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to declare that Curran could not present himself as a Catholic theologian.
Between 1968 and 1975, dissenters expanded their rejection of Humanae vitae from promotion of “the Pill” into a broader assault on Catholic sexual ethics. Masturbation was dismissed as developmentally insignificant, and fornication became a lifestyle choice for the era’s “authenticity.” And although homosexual acts remained largely unmentionable, figures like Jesuit John J. McNeill were already pushing for results in the direction embraced by today’s theological revisionists (McNeill was expelled from the Society of Jesus, at the request of the Vatican, in 1987).
By 1975, the CDF saw the need for a clear restatement of Catholic doctrine on these three increasingly contested practices. Persona humana was the result.
What did Persona humana teach?
The Declaration began by acknowledging the (not just) then-pervasive confusion about sexuality and the need for “wholesome moral teaching.” It affirmed not only the centrality of sexuality in the human person but also its moral accountability before God. The meaning of sexuality is connected to human nature, which is not self-invented. Appeals to “conscience” cannot ignore objective moral reality in favor of private preference.
1. Fornication
The document confronted the claim—already widespread in the 1970s—that sexual relations before marriage could be moral, especially when a couple hoped or planned eventually to marry. Persona humana rejected this unequivocally.
Its reasons were straightforward:
- The unmarried are not married, and no “conjugal” meaning can be imputed to non-marital sex.
- Scripture presents marriage—not premarital trial unions—as God’s design.
- The experience of fornication often involves either children deprived of a stable home or a deliberate avoidance of children, undermining the unitive and procreative dimensions of sexuality.
2. Homosexual Acts
The Declaration noted that, even in 1975, some theologians treated homosexual activity “indulgently” or excused it entirely. Some distinguished between transient behavior and supposedly innate homosexual tendencies—arguing that the latter justified sexual expression. Others proposed relationships “analogous to marriage.”
Persona humana rejected those innovations, appealing to the constant teaching of the Magisterium and the moral sense of the Christian people. It reiterated what the Catechism would later state in nearly identical language: homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and can never be approved.
3. Masturbation
The Declaration addressed the growing normalization of masturbation. While noting its frequency and acknowledging that psychological factors might mitigate personal moral guilt, it insisted that such factors do not alter the objective moral character of the act.
The CDF criticized attempts to treat masturbation as morally insignificant except when it becomes totally self-enclosed, because it is precisely in its separation of sexual pleasure from both unity and procreation that the practice becomes morally disordered.
4. Chastity and Mortal Sin
Persona humana concluded with a robust treatment of chastity—its meaning, its necessity in every state of life, and its role in shaping the human person. It also corrected the then-fashionable claim that mortal sin occurs only when one explicitly and consciously rejects God, not through individual acts. Grave matter in sexual morality, the document insisted, is not reducible to explicit apostasy. One can reject God through moral choices in serious matters without overtly averting to God.
What happened after 1975?
Predictably, the same theologians who rejected Humanae vitae dismissed Persona humana. Many accused the Church of “biologism” or “physicalism,” preferring a nebulous notion of “creativity” as the measure of sexual morality.
But the doctrinal story did not end there.
1. The John Paul II–Ratzinger Era
Three years after the Declaration, Karol Wojtyła became John Paul II. He had privately communicated with Paul VI when the latter was writing Humanae vitae and was its intellectual defender even before becoming pope. John Paul’s unwavering affirmation of the encyclical was matched by the development of his theology of the body, which offered a deeper anthropological foundation for sexual ethics.
His encyclicals Veritatis splendor and Evangelium vitae dismantled revisionist moral theories at their roots. Meanwhile, as prefect of the CDF, Joseph Ratzinger ensured that teaching which departed from the Catholic tradition was clearly identified as such.
Because Catholic sexual ethics had become something of a “hot potato” that revisionist theologians did not accept but did not want to get burned with, many simply abandoned writing about sexual ethics altogether rather than defend the tradition or confront the Magisterium.
2. Fornication and the Decline of Marriage
In the decades since 1975, the consequences of fornication have become impossible to ignore. On the one hand, non-marital childbearing—out-of-wedlock births—soared and only recently began to taper, likely due to contraception rather than a recovery of chastity. On the other hand, the intellectual separation of marriage and sex has created a mindset in which the natural progression of married life into parenthood is increasingly denied, especially among the current demographic of couples of childbearing age.
Premarital sex became “normal,” but marriage itself became marginal. Far from being the door to and institutional protection of sex and its consequences, marriage became just “another” venue within which intercourse might happen. Meanwhile, the idea that premarital sex tests “compatibility” remains in common mythology, even though it has been undermined by extensive sociological data showing that couples who cohabit or engage in premarital sexual relationships have higher rates of marital breakdown.
At the same time, marriage has become a class-based institution: declining among working-class Americans but relatively stable among the educated and affluent.
3. Homosexual Relationships and Synodal Revisionism
Of the three areas Persona humana addressed, homosexual behavior is the one where contemporary revisionism has been most aggressive and its consequences most far-reaching. Some theologians now reject the Church’s sexual anthropology altogether—denying the significance of sexual differentiation, treating “same-sex unions” as part of God’s creative plan. Sexual penetration, in that mindset, is disconnected from sexual differentiation and complementarity.
Civil societies have moved from “civil partnerships” to full “same-sex marriage.”
The Church has not gone there, although the “pastoral” provisions of Fiducia supplicans are difficult to reconcile with the clarity of Persona humana. In Germany and elsewhere, “synodal” processes openly entertain changes that the CDF explicitly rejected fifty years ago.
4. Masturbation and Pornography
Masturbation has all but disappeared from theological discussion. The silence is remarkable because the practice is strongly intertwined with the explosion of online pornography. Despite efforts to downplay masturbation’s gravity, it arguably represents a foundational distortion in the sexual sphere: the habituation of sexuality as pleasure divorced from unity and procreation. Once that separation is normalized in an individual’s mind, it is difficult to understand how one transitions toward morally ordered sexual behavior.
That is what those who played down the moral issues at stake in masturbation don’t explain but one should ask: if a person grows accustomed to seeing sex primarily or exclusively through the lens of pleasure, why would that perspective readily change to “self-giving communion” once a person of the other sex is involved? Why wouldn’t they just continue?
A decade ago, I noted that virtually nothing had been written on the subject; little has changed.
Why Persona humana still matters today
The 50th anniversary of Persona humana is not simply a commemoration. It is a measure of the crisis of sexual ethics in the Church today. Official doctrine has not changed. But the doctrines’ opponents have only grown more vehement, while many of their clerical critics have grown more silent.
This matters because, as then-Cardinal Wojtyła reminded Pope Paul VI only three months after the Declaration’s publication, documents like Humanae vitae and Persona humana were not merely about isolated sexual prohibitions. Their debates reflect something larger: a battle over the very dignity and meaning of the human person.
In 1983, my own MA thesis attempted to reconstruct Persona humana’s teaching in light of Wojtyła’s personalism. I maintained that the task was possible, and that it was possible to defend the Church’s teaching on these subjects precisely on grounds of Christian personalism. We need to continue that task today.
In 2025, the Church must once again articulate—not dilute—the anthropological and moral vision that makes sense of its teaching. Fifty years after Persona humana, the Church still needs both its clarity and the deeper renewal of sexual ethics that John Paul II envisioned. The battle for the dignity of man continues, even if the scope of the threat is larger.
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Almost three decades before “Persona humana,” Anglican dissenters from the 1930 Lambeth pronouncement had already told it like it is at Lambeth 1948:
“It is, to say the least, suspicious that the age in which contraception has won its way is not one which has been conspicuously successful in managing its sexual life. Is it possible that, by claiming the right to manipulate his physical processes in this manner, man may, without knowing it, be stepping over the boundary between the world of Christian marriage and what one might call the world of Aphrodite, the world of sterile eroticism?” (Cited in Wright, “Reflections on the Third Anniversary of a Controverted Encyclical,” St. Louis: Central Bureau Press, 1971).
A sad day when Catholic Church clericalists of today are conspicuously outdone by an early remnant of the now totally ruptured and dismembered Anglican ecclesial communion.
Good cite, thanks
“The experience of fornication often involves either children deprived of a stable home or a deliberate avoidance of children, undermining the unitive and procreative dimensions of sexuality.”
It’s even sadder when high prelates cannot make or unconsciously avoid making the rational link between sexual abuse and the extermination of the inconvenient unborn.
To make the link might impeach their public do nothing approach to personal morality while obsessing over plastic straws on the beach.
Welcome to “The Church of What’s Happening NOW”.
Some took the late Flip Wilson’s skit as a blueprint, not a parody.
Anglican dissenters against an Anglican Conference outdoing Catholic dissenters against perennial Church teaching is not actually that sad. Catholics can only really only expect to best the various denominations when we stick to the truth.
I recently attended a Knights of Columbus initiation ceremony (“Exemplification”) where the young man in question was living with his girlfriend. This seems to be at variance with the K of C’s support for Church teaching, but maybe not anymore.
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It has become the norm for the younger set (I mean Gen Z, but I assume Millennials do/did as well, and likely Gen X) to live together outside the bonds of even a civil ceremony. A Gen Z acquaintance of mine is living with her boyfriend, who desires to join the Catholic Church, and hopefully have a Church wedding in a year. Again, the practice of co-habitating is a non-issue, and presumably fornicating and some kind of contraceptive use is also a non-issue, not a sin.
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All these young men (and a few ladies) who are converting or re-verting to the Church: is anyone going to tell them that the prohibitions against fornication and contraception (and homosexual activity, which I assume they do not view as particularly sinful) still exist? Because I am thinking it has all been swept away like Embers Days.
The Gospels and the Old Testament have not been altered, as far as I know.
How frequently are we reminded about self control in a homily? Seems infrequent
I can understand why young men are hesitant to get married, due to the financial implications if their wife decides to leave, espc with young children in the mix.
You have to be a Catholic gentlemen in good standing to join, had always been my understanding.
Ah, but define “be a Catholic gentleman in good standing”
A fairly substantial part of the Millennial and Zoomer generation of Catholics might not have ever been told that cohabitation is not permitted… or only once and in an embarrassed fashion. Meanwhile society tells them it is fine on a regular basis. And when they marry, many are probably not told either, since they are now “making it right”, so why make them feel bad?
And yet, how can anyone expect the later generations to know, if no one tells them?
Rather like Ember Days
Amanda and Mrs. Hess,
I think many in the church prefer to keep the sheeple hopefully invincibly ignorant. This calculation is the devil’s calculus though and a coward’s bet. Pope Benedict the 16th condemn this ideation, most vociferously.
Hiding the truth is one of the most sinister forms of spiritual abuse and is voluntary spiritual homicide. The rage toward the prelate or presbyter who avoids teaching on cohabitation, contraception, wifely submission and dozens of other conjugal transgressions by the youth is completely justified.
The youth want truth and then know how to search for it. st. mediocre church in suburbia will die within 30 if the pastor is not teaching traditional Catholic morality and offering reverent liturgy.
Ave Maria and Merry Christmas!
The youth want to hear fornication, cohabitation, contraception is wrong? The younger ladies want to hear about wifely submission? Not in my experience. I was talking to an acquaintance, asking how she was going to handle if the priest/parish objected to living with her fiancé. Easy: she’ll just switch her mailing address back to mom and dad’s. No way is she moving out of the home she shares with her boyfriend/fiance because the Church said it was a “sin.”
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Two Gen Z family members (married to each other), cradle Catholics, scoffed at the idea of women “staying home and making babies.” The woman half of the couple has excelled in her academic career since Grade 1. No way is she wasting her education (soon to be PhD?) as a stay-at-home mother, and the husband half certainly doesn’t want her to do so.
yes, look at the reaction of Harrison Butker’s commencement address at Benedictine College – how dare he!
Never heard of Persona Humana.
Thanks for this account. So needed.
(6th last para. – “That is what . . . .” – 1st sentence needs a rewrite.)
rewritten – thanks
Let’s pray that the Vatican celebrates the fiftieth anniversary next week. We could pray for a “new year” of teaching on such important matters as relate to salvation, trusting after a Jubilee Year of Hope that the new Vicar of Christ will lead us to green pastures. Or we can omit our prayers and abandon hope in favor of cynicism. This article leads me to hope. Thanks to the author.
In this context I need to defend the term “seamless garment.” Before I first heard it, I had wondered why masturbation was sinful. No one was hurt by it and it didn’t start a new life. Once I thought about sexual ethics as seamless, everthing the Church said on this topic – as addressed in this essay – made sense. The only purpose of our sexual ability is procreation, everything else is just pleasure seeking while the intrinsic pleasure is only there so we procreate. The diluting of “seamless garment” into every possible dimension of life has been a disservice to its intent.
It’s not really about pleasure vs procreation, but rather the unitive aspect of binary and complementary sex and its procreative purpose, both, such that these can never be amputated from one another.
About the “seamless garment,” then, this term was marketed by Cardinal Bernadin who cheapened (?) fetal infanticide by elevating the social gospel on behalf of those permitted to survive into birth. But, now, the real “seamless garment” is surely the continuous fabric linking contraception to abortion, to self-abuse and then the homosexual lifestyle, to LGBTQ tribalism, to gender theory, and then to transgenderism with, lo, many dozens of court-imposed pronouns.
Procreation is NOT the ONLY purpose of conjugal love (and the Church does not teach that). Procreation AND MUTUAL SUPPORT are the purposeS of conjugal love. But procreation cannot be cut out of the equation: the purposes of conjugal love cannot be juxtaposed to each other. Otherwise, I like your “seamless garment” suggestion here.
Thanks. Didn’t know the mutual support aspect – being joined with procreation. Both within marriage, of course.
In regard to sinful sexual activity I find focusing on procreation as its only purpose is a way to avoid that behavior.
I said what you said.
Obsessing over other people’s sex lives is a pretty creepy thing to do. Like.. Epstein level creepy.
A stupid comment, Nicole. Surely you understand that writing about morality and ethics is different from pursuing sexual relations with underage women. If you don’t, please stay out of the comments.
‘Another stupid comment, Nicole.”
FIFY.
Bravo, Carl.
I don’t know, Nicole. The media seems to be obsessing quite a bit over Mr. Epstein’s private activities. Creepy- yes. But ethics & morality are a question there, too.
So there is nothing “creepy” about what leads to the mass slaughtering of lives resulting from illicit sex?
Providing moral guidance in sexual matters is not “obsessing.” It’s the failure to provide such moral guidance that gives us Jeffrey Epstein creepy. If Mr. Epstein followed Persona humana, you wouldn’t be hearing about his scandals.
Grondelski has written with extraordinary clarity the break with reality responsible for the sea of immorality in which Mankind is drowning. Once we break the natural nexus of sexual pleasure from the transmission of life, imaginative man can and will indulge that ecstatic venereal experience in all the bizarre, inhumanly perverted acts that continue to appear.
The author knocks the remainder out of the ballpark. He lists masturbation/pornography in a list of causes, an easily met moral deathtrap that’s designed to recruit the young, the weak, anyone from child to cleric. It begins here with the multitude. It’s able to produce monsters like Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez [the Night Stalker]. Both Bundy and Ramirez attributed the initial source of their madness to pornography. And still they’re Catholic clergy who will brush off porn with penitents during confession as negligible, even a natural expression of sexuality. That kind of thought infects Vatican clergy who downplay masturbation in context of a conflated mitigation theorem, a true poison off the soul. With the morally deranged proposition that the more you indulge in an immoral practice the less you become responsible.
I’ve mentioned before, that theologians who defend the conflation can be asked, You mean father, that the man who masturbates and suddenly dies without recourse or desire for reparation goes to Hell, while the man who continues for years will go to heaven? There are mitigating conditions in instances, although the availability of grace and the sacraments, the ordinance to resist evil and responsibility to fight [fortitude] are also, determinately at play.
About the complexity of “mitigating conditions in instances,” but also the deadening of conscience, Pope Benedict XVI gives this broad overview:
“(First) I have been absolutely certain that there is something wrong with the theory of the justifying force of the subjective conscience . . . Hitler may have had none (guilt feelings); nor may Himmler or Stalin. Mafia bosses may have none, but it is more likely that they have merely suppressed their awareness of the skeletons in their closets. And the aborted guilt feelings . . . Everyone needs guilt feelings. (And second) The loss of the ability to see one’s guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas, is a more dangerous illness of the soul than guilt that is recognized as guilt (see Psalm 19:12) . . . To identify conscience with a superficial state of conviction is to equate it with a certainty that merely seems rational, a certainty woven from self-righteousness, conformism, and intellectual laziness. Conscience is degraded to a mechanism that produces excuses for one’s conduct, although in reality conscience is meant to make the subject transparent to the divine, thereby revealing man’s authentic dignity and greatness” (Pope Benedict XVI, Values in a Time of Upheaval, Crossroads Publishing, 2006).
Possible “mitigating conditions in instances,” but still the earlier responsibility for drifting into such a zone.
Habit persisted in may be a mitigating circumstance in terms of individual culpability (as opposed to objective morality), but the person still bears responsibility for having acquired a habit he knew to be wrong. He may not know how tightly its tentacles would engulf him, but he bears at least some responsibility for yielding to them. Beyond that, I leave the matter to his Judge.
I said what you said. Of tentacles that engulf, I’m reminded of a “Kids say the Darndest Things” interview where a small lad insisted to Art Linkletter that he had seen at an aquarium “an octopus with testicles eight feet long.”
“Clearly, situations can occur which are very complex and obscure from a psychological viewpoint, and which influence the sinner’s subjective imputability. But from a consideration of the psychological sphere one cannot proceed to create a theological category, which is precisely what the ‘fundamental option’ is, understanding it in such a way that it objectively changes or casts doubt upon the traditional concept of mortal sin” (Veritatis Splendor 117).
A fundamental option and mitigation are not distant in terms of presuming the sinner’s subjective imputability in such a way that it “objectively changes or casts doubt upon the traditional concept of mortal sin”.
Additionally, a priest is obliged in the confessional to address this now common issue of mitigating circumstances and persistent sinful behavior.
He cannot presume the role of a psychologist.
He cannot leave the penitent with the impression that he’s possibly free from serious sin. That God will make the final judgment. We as priest confessors must make a judgment in these cases that benefits the penitent and pleases God.
Additionally, a priest is obliged in the confessional to address this now common issue of mitigating conditions and persistent sinful behavior.
He cannot leave the penitent with the impression that he’s possibly free from serious sin and that God will make the final judgment.
We as priest confessors must make a judgment that in these cases that benefits the penitent and pleases God.
On the morally debased television show “The Big Bang Theory”, there was one moment where the promotion of deviance and insidious anti-Catholicism slipped, when “Raj”, who may have been the most socially awkward character-at least when it came to relating to women-lamented his lonely existence with a fear immersion in “increasingly shameful” pornography.
I knew a real life version of Raj, whose prowess with mathematics may have been the result of high functioning autism, a dysfunctional family and nihilism. Besides the math skills, he was socially awkward, obsessive and atheist-thinking he’d found the ultimate rhetorical device against the idea of an omnipotent god with cheap Sam Harris refrain’s such as “If there’s an all-powerful god, can god create a mountain so big he can’t move it”
He was definitely following that path and would offer to show me stuff he bookmarked. All I could say was “no thanks, that’s gross”. The only thing I don’t think he pursued was CSAM. We lost touch about 20 years ago and I hope he’s found some recovery and peace.
Additionally, I wish to openly praise Paul VI, a great defender of the Faith. That in reprobation to his many critics, who dismiss him, revile him because he was pontiff during the liturgical changes that followed, many of which were not approved by the Council
Being a cradle Catholic, and after eighteen years of formal Catholic education, and a long life in engineering, hard thinking, I have come to this.
I am impressed by the thousands of scholarly pages issued from various Catholic organizations on basic human conduct, which is strongly debated by a few but unread, ignored by most Catholics, practicing or “fallen away”. I note that we have train loads of virgin martyrs but not one saintly couple, a “legitimately “ married woman and man, with the possible exception of the Holy family. I say “possible” because Mary was/is an eternal virgin and Joseph was /is her most chaste spouse. Thus they did not consummate their union and according to church law, were never married.
Further according to some scholarly works, there is no need for sex after the woman finishes menopause. She can not conceive, the “primary” reason for sex. Mutual giving in marriage is secondary according some, all of whom are bachelors, with inherently questionable qualifications.
The above is never discussed in the library of books on the subject. I contend that God is a lot smarter than we are, and is the essence of love and forgiveness. We must define terms rationally, eg. “love” or I want my tuition money back.
One saintly couple, among others, is the parents of St. Therese of Lisieux…
I recall reading, somewhere, that they had been mutually agreed to live lives of shared celibacy, but later that they were instructed that their real vocation was quite otherwise. So, five daughters with more than one saint.
‘I note that we have train loads of virgin martyrs but not one saintly couple, a “legitimately “ married woman and man, with the possible exception of the Holy family.‘
Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin come immediately to mind.
” I note that we have train loads of virgin martyrs but not one saintly couple, a ‘legitimately “ married woman and man,’…”
I recommend that you seek out a copy of Married Saints and Blesseds Through the Centuries (Ignatius Press, 2002), by Ferdinand Holbock. It is over 500 pages long and contains about 140 or so such couples. Those interested can see the Table of Contents, listing all of the couples, via Google Books.
Thank you.
“Don’t tell God what to do.” I repeat excellent advice from a learned professor. All things are possible with God. Your referenced book states, of Mary and Joseph’s virginal marriage (St. Thomas Aquinas’ words from his Summa Theologica). The Old Testament knew nothing like it . The text continues. To be sure those who swear off sex, remain celebrant, while married are exceptional people, in an extremely rare and blessed state.
I confess I do not understand it but also readily admit this is among the infinites which I do not understand. I include partial differential equations of higher order with non constant coefficients. I have read the Summa and now reading St. Bonaventure, the Sepharic doctor, who disagreed with St. Thomas, his revered friend and colleague at the University of Paris, circa mid 1200s. To audit the debates between a gifted logician and a mystic would be mind numbing to this unstudied student.
So I question and think. God gave us a brain for that purpose. In a few days, we will celebrate the mystery of the Birth of God, the greatest event of all time, which I do not fully understand. I offer my Merry Christmas to all.
Celebrants should be celibate.
We read” I note that we have train loads of virgin martyrs but not one saintly couple…” But then there are those anonymous and non-canonized couples who are yet saintly…about whom, this:
Riding on a train and mocked by a Rationalist in the opposite and facing seat, the highly renowned Catholic scientist Louis Pasteur, while working his rosary beads, responded thusly: “I hope someday to have the piety of a French peasant…and eventually the holiness of a French peasant’s wife.”
“The above is never discussed in the library of books on the subject.”
Consider not faulting others for your lack of reading the shelves of books addressing the subjects you claim no one does address.
Neither are you entitled to a tuition refund for snide trivializations of an understanding that you never pursued.
I don’t believe my masters in engineering and my doctorate in physics confers any discipline of mind or right to a dishonest approach to what the Church teaches as you seem to assume it would.
You appear to not even be able to distinguish such obvious things as a committed celebate marriage as being different from a corrupted marital intent among those withholding themselves in love.
The Church does not hold that continent marriages are not valid. Rather, the Church holds that only consummated marriages are indissoluble. That is, the marriage exists, but the Pope can dissolve it if it has not been consummated. So the Church holds that the marriage between Mary and Joseph was fully valid, and while it was not indissoluble under canon law, it certainly was never dissolved.
More info here: https://canonlawmadeeasy.com/2013/12/19/canon-law-marriage-consummatum/
“after the woman finishes menopause” rather say: after the woman starts menopause
Mr. Beaulieu above (9:19 p.m.)
Yes. Lambeth 1930. Another anniversary coming up. Another chance for re-thinking.
More about 1930: January 13 was the first comic strip for Mickey Mouse, and March 16 was the very worst day for the New York Stock Exchange. Born in 1930–also the hundredth anniversary–we have Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery and Steve McQueen. And, born thirty years later on December 29, 1960–only the 70th anniversary–we have this different poster-child guy, Fr. James Martin SJ!
Continuing to disregard the the ends of love/sex/marriage, by the year 2125 we will be confronting what may be the practical end of human habitation in any way that we presently experience it. Just do thee math.
I saw a survey claiming that 28% of people interviewed claimed they’d had an “intimate relationship” with an AI bot. A Japanese woman recently “married” her AI boyfriend.
I receive surveys from a market research organization from time to time & the last one had questions about AI. My answers disqualified me from participating in the actual survey so I’m not sure what they were looking for. Surveys can target certain groups to achieve certain outcomes so you have to be cautious in putting too much confidence in their data.
oh boy, people have too much time on their hands
I don’t foresee the Vatican changing the official position on sexual morality. That said, neither do I foresee a major crackdown by the Bishops for two possible reasons. First, the Bishops do not want a fight and second, many Bishops do not personally believe strongly in the official version of sexual morality anyway. Thus, status quo for the near future.
Thus, a difference between theory and practice.
Thats my point: except for a few German theologians or maybe Charles Curran now down at Southern Methodist University, I do not expect much comment on the golden anniversary of Persona Humana. AND THAT’S THE PROBLEM: it’s not rescission of Catholic sexual ethics, it’s death by neglect.
William: Well, the Church can now breath a sigh of relief knowing that you grant God and His Church your permission to consider not canceling God’s unchanging immutable truth, of which you, like many reductionists, are fond of applying the silly label “official teaching.”
Truth is eternally unchanging. Many reject this idea. Thus, the atheistic premises and conclusions of many Catholics, clerics, and high prelates.
My statement is an observation. I don’t flatter myself to think that any Bishop or theologian cares what I say or think. I don’t give permission to anybody, as I have no authority. But as that great philosopher Lawrence Peter Berra, aka Yogi, opined “you can observe a lot by watching.”
You say truth is eternal. Well, the Church has changed its position on other moral issues, such as slavery over the centuries. A few centuries ago, the Church tolerated it. Today, it condemns it.
William, slavery, indenture due to financial restitution goes back millennia and still today persons are indebted to others – is a prudential issue rather than an intrinsic evil. Although slavery has been abused it wasn’t in all instances.
Saint Josephine Bakhita was purchased as a slave by an Italian diplomat in Sudan and brought to Italy for benevolent reasons. She eventually was freed and joined a religious community. St Benedict the Moor [the Black] was born to enslaved parents in Sicily made free at birth.
Whereas today slavery is condemned in context of its inhuman forms as we find throughout Islam, or when persons are retained for financial reasons and mistreated. Of itself it is not an intrinsic evil. Similarly the death penalty is not an intrinsic evil, and today falls under similar rationale.
Slavery is not an intrinsic evil? Did I read that right? In theory,if you had a kindly, religious master, that could possibly be true, but the actual situations are not benevolent. Please explain.
It’s not the institution called slavery that’s intrinsically evil, it’s the maltreatment and lifelong bondage that is intrinsically evil. Paying off a debt by indentured service was and is called slavery. Read St Paul’s letter to Philemon. A Christian. He had a slave, Onesimus, who was converted by Paul.
Paul appealed to Philemon to treat Onesimus as a brother Christian. He did not insist that Philemon release him from slavery, rather appealed that he treat Onesimus as a brother Christian. And that he would, if necessary, pay Philemon the debt owed by Onesimus.
Slavery—a complex and wretched history. Culturally tolerated, but never officially endorsed as a formal teaching of the Catholic Church. One is reminded of other examples which also never fit the definition of infallible teaching…
“What have excommunication and interdict to do with infallibility? Was St. Peter infallible on that occasion at Antioch when St. Paul withstood him? Was St. Victor infallible when he separated from his communion the Asiatic Churches? Or Liberius when in like manner he excommunicated Athanasius? And, to come to later times, was Gregory XIII, when he had a medal struck in honour of the Bartholomew massacre? Or Paul IV in his conduct towards Elizabeth? Or Sixtus V when he blessed the Armada? Or Urban VIII when he persecuted Galileo? No Catholic ever pretends that these Popes were infallible in these acts” (Vincent Blehl (ed.), “The Essential Newman” [New York: Mentor Omega, 1963]. 269).
About specifically about slavery, some patchy reading notes:
Slave importation to the colonies began in 1619, probably blown of course and then given a role alongside other “indentured servants”—who were working off the cost of their passage across the Atlantic and in exchange for three hots and a flop. Of all slaves brought to the New World (bought from Muslim and tribal slave traders in Africa), probably ten percent ended up in what is now the United States and predominantly southern plantations. Fortunes were also made by ship owners in New England and not in the South.
Church members were ambiguous and accepting of slavery as “not intrinsically wrong.” This attitude was based in part on a fear of liberal individualism and of triggering social disorder, and of the anti-Catholicism of many abolitionists (McGreevy, “Catholicism and American Freedom,” 2003; 52).
Historically, in 217 A.D., Pope Callistus I is said to have been a slave, as well as the earlier Popes Linus and Anacletus and Clement I. In 1453 Pope Eugene IV condemned slavery in the Canary Islands, and the later Pope Paul III condemned slavery in the New World.
In the 16th century Bartolome de las Casas protested the ecomienda system in Spanish held regions (a system of Spanish protection in exchange for tribute which degenerated into forced labor). St. Peter Claver began caring for slaves in the Columbia slave markets, beginning in 1610. Pope Gregory XVI condemned the slave trade in 1839. In the United States all northern states illegalized slavery by 1804, and importation anywhere was barred in 1808, but smuggling and domestic “breeding” continued.
A determinant of our perception of slavery is the American experience. Slavery from Africa to the Americas is of the most brutal, inhuman historical events. From Arab slave traders raiding villages, or purchasing with hashish humans, kept in dug pits at night in the journey to slave trading Atlantic ports, beaten and raped. Then boarding and packed in the holds of ships.
Arrival at Charleston SC [among arrival ports Charleston a major entry] they were displayed inside a high red brick building called the Old Slave Mart. Sold, chained, branded with the owner’s initial like cattle. This entire process was an intrinsic evil.
William, Okay, I responded poorly. I apologize. But to suggest that you do not foresee a change in doctrine implies you believe it is possible. It is not. Truth never changes. God has not abandoned us to a capricious understanding of how we ought to order our lives together. Moral truth is universal to time and place. Principles of how we ought to order our lives is not dependent on popular acceptance, culture, intellectual movements, or enshrinement in statutory law, but are inherent to the nature of being a decent human being. And this never changes.
If it wasn’t for the fact that with the election of St JPII this document would be promoted and stood by, then it’s detractors would have won. Sadly there are many I’ve no doubt working to undo this document that are in the curial offices today!
Mr. Grondelski above (2:06 p.m.) – As I’ve said, I had never heard of Persona Humana. I have now. All the attention and controversy are on Humanae Vitae (not that anyone understands or accepts it). You’ve done a very great service with this article. Maybe one or two bishops will read it. Or not. Didn’t I read somewhere that the laity will save the Church?
A form of slavery is still practiced in Haiti with the “restavik children” who are given by their parents to those the parents are in debt to & have no other way to repay.
I’ve read it worked that way in other societies, too. If you have no way to settle your debts you could sell yourself or members of your family into indentured labor.
Heartfelt thanks for Mr. Grondelski for writing this article. I have posted it on X, along with Persona Humana. Hopefully, more people will become aware of it. St. Pope Paul VI was a prophet (Humana Vitae). Persona Humana touches on the basics regarding sexual ethics. If everyone followed the teachings of the Church, we would pretty much be living in heavenly harmony. Hearing members of my own extended family advocating for masturbation makes me cringe. Whenever I speak about the revealed truth of God and the teachings of the Church, I am asked, with a pitying smile: “You don’t really believe that, do you?”. It is disheartening to witness the complete lack of morality that exists around me. Just about everyone I know is living “common-law”. Mariage is regarded as “old-style” and “backwards”. Today’s culture glorifies sex, homosexuality, abortion, and just about everything else which is contrary to God’s law. While my present book deals with Catholic answers to gender, abortion and relativism, my next book will deal with the virtue of hope in God as being the Christian’s response to the evil that surrounds us. Blessings to all.
Marie Brousseau, Author of Defending Human Dignity
mariebrousseau.com
Follow me on X: @MBrouseau28195