Persona humana at Fifty: Why the Church’s sexual ethics still matter today

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: 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.