Catholic Sexual Ethics and the Dignity of the Person: A Double Message

Abstract

R CATHOLIC literature of the last 50 years is marked by a developing tendency to view the morality of sexual behavior and marriage in relation to personalist values. This is true not only of revisionist theologians, who criticize the older focus on procreative finality as excessively biologistic, but also of magisterial and theological statements defending past teachings as still true to human nature fully understood. This essay will explore the origins and significance of personalist thought in Catholic sexual ethics. It will assess how a common language, alluding to personal dignity, is used by traditionalists and revisionists to advance quite different understandings of sexuality. The more established viewpoint is that to maintain the physical integrity of sexual acts is to respect the embodied nature of persons as procreative. The critical counterargument is essentially that physical acts and their outcomes can conflict with and may be subordinated to the needs of persons as subjects of bodily existence and to their responsibilities to others. The practical repercussions of these theoretical differences are all too clear; the internecine battle over artificial contraception has been the ecclesial equivalent in our century of the war to end all wars. Realizing that with this phrase Woodrow Wilson marked World War I as an event never to be repeated, one prays that challenges still arising on the Church's horizon—artificial reproduction, homosexuality, heterosexual expression outside marriage, canonical regulation of marriage and divorce, and most particularly the role of women in marriage, family, and church—will not become the functional equivalents of World War II. Greater understanding of a five-decade struggle to interpret human sexual relationships may enlighten present controversies and clarify productive future directions for sexual ethics in continuity with Catholic tradition. The significance of personalist thought, taking its lead in the 1930s pre-eminently from Herbert Doms, lies in its explicit turn to marital