Sex and Catholic Social Teaching

As someone who has long labored in the service of the Catholic Church’s teachings on fraught sexual expression topics, I think I understand Pope Leo XIV’s recent remarks on Catholic sexual morality in response to a reporter’s question about a German bishop’s proposed same-sex couple blessings. On a recent in-flight press conference, the pope said:

We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue.¹

I understand because the world often reduces Catholicism to its sexual morality teachings, with no understanding of their origins or their relationship to everything else in Catholic life. And outside of these contexts, onlookers understandably find them incomprehensible or even harmful. They further focus on “the rules about sex” to the exclusion of everything else the faith contains, whether about justice, equality, freedom, or the very nature of Christian love. It’s important to push back on this.

But proposing a “ranking” of social teachings—remembering that all sexual expression teachings are also social teachings—doesn’t fix the problem. Because there is not a sliver of daylight between our teachings on sexual relations and those about other social relations, that is, relations with persons outside the family. All emerge from the Great Commandment to love God and our neighbor as ourselves, and all concern and conduce to justice, equality, and freedom. It is simply the case that the former teachings concern those persons strewn on one’s path Good Samaritan-parable-style in romantic and familial relations, while the latter concern those persons outside the family we encounter on the road of life.

The Irish bishops’ conference was spot on in their document Love is for Life when they characterized Christian sexual expression norms as an application of the Good Samaritan principle to our romantic interests and to our family.³ As was Pope Benedict XVI when in Deus Caritas Est, he characterized human love in familial and extra-familial contexts as “a single reality” including “love between man and woman, between family members, and love of neighbors outside the family.”¹ Both Catholics and non-Catholics need to grasp these truths, or run the risk of dismissing our sexual expression teachings as mere “moralism”—man-made rules—and our social justice principles as mere politics or ideology.

In what follows, I will consider the necessary interplay between Catholic sexual morality and our social teachings on equality, freedom, and justice in order to overcome these risks. I will first show how our social teachings concerning sexual and family relations grew out of the same religious commitments that grounded our teachings about extra-familial relations. Then I will point to the emergence of a broad and robust empirical literature confirming what the Church teaches—that Catholic teachings and practices concerning sex and family life are most likely to lead to justice, freedom, and equality, especially for the most vulnerable members of society. And finally, I will offer a comment about the “architectural” significance of the Church’s sex and family teachings, closely tied as they are to the identity of God, how He loves us, and how we are to love him and one another.

From its beginnings, Christianity was marked both by its “conspicuous chastity”⁴ and its conspicuous charity to those outside the family, because Christians understood both spheres of human relations to be subject to the Great Commandment to love God and one’s neighbor as one’s self. Through the life and words of Jesus, and the words of his Apostles, Christians came to understand love to be characterized at the very least by: radical self-emptying for the good of the other, most exemplified in Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice; respect for the sacredness of every other human person including his or her body, as indicated by Jesus’ taking on a human body, his care especially for suffering bodies, and St. Paul’s admonition that our bodies are “members of Christ” (1 Thessalonians 4:3); and attentiveness to the natural order God had ordained, as described by St. Paul in that part of his letter to the Romans rejecting same-sex relations, in part because of their divergence from this order: “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Romans 1:20).

In the sexual morality sphere, according to noted historians Kyle Harper and Rodney Stark,⁵ this led Christians to embrace a set of norms drastically distinct from those prevailing in their Roman environment. Roman honor-shame codes proposed different rules depending upon one’s sex and social status, that is, upon whether one was a man versus a woman, or a master versus a slave. Christian norms respecting romantic and familial relations, by contrast, applied equally to everyone because they emerged from an understanding of human beings’ obligation to love as God loves: faithfully, sacrificially, fruitfully, and in order to capacitate each person to be all that God calls and gifts them to be, not hindering or undermining this.

Thus, for Christians, there would be no killing of the unborn, no infanticide of ill or female newborns, no divorce, no adultery, no polygamy, and no same sex-relations—even if you were a man and a master. Interestingly, historians report that women and slaves were particularly grateful for these Christian innovations, given that these groups regularly suffered disproportionately from the loss of freedom, equality, and justice these practices entailed. In the marvelous words of classics’ scholar Sarah Ruden in her book Paul Among the People, Christianity offered a “new way of thinking that must have been quite exciting, a hope for something beyond exploitation, materialism, and violence – a plan not for competing in purity and the denial of life, but for the sharing of life in full. It offered a chance not to be treated as a thing.”⁶

This same understanding of love within the family setting grounded Christians’ treatment of persons outside the family setting, too. Whether in their “sell[ing] their property and possessions and divid[ing] them among all according to each one’s need” (Acts 2:45), or their taking up a collection to assist the suffering denizens of Jerusalem (see 1 Corinthians 16:1–4; Romans 15:25–31). Whether Christians were pioneering charitable efforts to buy burial land for the poor or to set up free shelters, food distribution, and medical treatment for the neediest in places such as St. Basil’s “Basilead.” In both spheres, Christian love sought to be radically for the other, and attentive to created nature and the sacred human body. In the words of eminent Christian historian Peter Brown, because of their understanding of Christ’s radical call and example, early Christians felt a

need to place in society itself a series of concrete, unmistakable – even shocking – “markers” that served to remind believers and outsiders of the unimaginably wide horizons opened up to humanity by the Christian message…. Indeed, the preachers, writers, and organizers who advocated most vehemently the care of the poor were often the same persons who spoke out most passionately in favor of virginity and celibacy. These palpable markers brought the “incommensurable” into society.⁷

Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has written similarly, saying that while early Christians’ code of conduct in every sphere might seem “hard and legalistic” to onlookers, it should not surprise us, given their conviction that Jesus must be the “norm” in every single relationship, whether inside or outside the family. And that this norm is radically loving beyond what human beings might imagine on their own.⁸

Just as the more vulnerable members of the Roman world benefited disproportionately from early Christian teachings on sex and marriage, more vulnerable members of today’s society would benefit disproportionately—in the realms of freedom, justice, and equality—were they treated with the respect such teachings require. For it is children and the poor in the United States, including racial and ethnic minority groups, who suffer the most from uncommitted sexual encounters, cohabitation, nonmarital pregnancies, father-absence, abortion, divorce, and same-sex relations. The poor, as well as black and Hispanic Americans, are less likely to marry, more likely to cohabit, more likely to have serial uncommitted sexual relationships, more likely to experience nonmarital pregnancies, more likely to grow up without a father, more likely to have abortions, and more likely to divorce.⁹

Children, too, also disproportionately suffer the consequences of adults’ sexual and familial choices. Obviously, every abortion denies a child equality, freedom, and justice when it denies him or her life itself. Children of divorce, those living in cohabiting households, and children reared in single-parent households also, on average, suffer reduced educational, emotional, financial, and familial outcomes as adults. In particular, children living with a mother’s new cohabiting male partner are drastically more likely to be abused or killed.¹⁰ And children reared in same-sex households suffer in every single case the absence of their natural mother or father, or both, as well as diminished outcomes, on average, across a host of emotional, educational, and relational categories.¹¹
In other words, Catholic sexual morality is a powerful force for achieving greater equality among human beings of every race, socioeconomic class, age, and sex and for achieving justice and freedom for some of the most vulnerable members of society. That it does this one adult or one couple or one child at a time does not make it less important than social justice practiced in relations with those many “neighbors” outside the family. For every single person is born into a family. Every person is deeply affected by what happens while growing up. It makes a great deal of difference not only to their happiness, but also to their achieving justice, freedom, and equality, whether they are aborted, adopted, or born, whether their parents are married, whether the marriage is faithful and permanent, whether they themselves experience stable marriage or rather a series of temporary sexual relations or cohabitations, and whether they cohabit, abort a child, or divorce.

This makes all the sense in the world considering Jesus’ admonition regarding “who is our neighbor” in the course of explaining the Good Samaritan parable. He says simply that it is the person strewn on our path of life in need of our help. For virtually all of us, those first neighbors we will encounter strewn on our path of life, and whom we will affect most deeply and indelibly, are family members. Of course, we each have an obligation to those in need outside our family whom we encounter on our path of life. Some of us will even take up such obligations as our primary work. But it is all too easy for many to forget that justice and love are required in that first society, of which every one of us is a member, and in which it can be hard to be loving every day on the way to the kitchen and to the bathroom.

A final observation concerning the importance of Catholic sexual morality in the context of our faith as a whole. It is not too much to claim that this area of teaching is “architectural to our faith” because one’s treatment of a romantic partner, a spouse, is such an important path to understanding the identity of God, how he loves us, and how we are to love him and one another.

This is because God himself, in the Old Testament and the New, refers to himself as bridegroom to our bride, inviting us to understand his identity in part by reference to our understanding of romantic and married love. The Old Testament refers to Israel’s rejection of God in favor of other gods from time to time as a form of adultery (see the Book of Hosea; Ezekiel 16; Jeremiah 2-3; Isaiah 54 and 62). And in his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul writes that marriage provides a glimpse of God’s relationship with his people (see Ephesians 5:25–32).

Furthermore, assuming that we are, as Genesis claims, made in God’s “image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26), then it is very important for understanding God to consider that he fashioned us as male and female, capacitated for complementary relations, which he also made procreative. That spouses long for, and promise one another, a permanent, faithful, until-death-do-us-part relationship. These experiences of the meaning and the dynamics of love provide us a glimpse of God’s identity as a never ending, Trinitarian community of love. No other relationship offers similar elements.

Clearly, Catholic social teaching encompasses much more than sexual and familial morality. Clearly, its vast body of teachings on relations with persons outside the family—whether respecting labor, the economy, or government—are crucially important to living the Catholic life and remaining in unity with the Church. But both sets of teachings are essential to promoting and protecting what Catholics understand as justice, freedom, and equality.

Endnotes:

(Editor’s note: This essay was posted originally on the “What We Need Now” site and is published here with kind permission.)