**1. Background introduction**

The official teaching of the Catholic Church on sexuality evolved significantly during the twentieth century. The Church encountered rapidly changing understandings of sexuality among both secular and religious groups. Church teachings, Charles Taylor observes, had been "connected with the denigration of sexuality, horror at the Dionysian, fixed gender roles" and involved an "unfortunate fusion of Christian sexual ethics with certain models of the 'natural.'"<sup>1</sup> From 1917 to 2000, the Church monumentally changed the foundations of its sexual and marital ethic.

<sup>1</sup> Charles Taylor, "Sex and Christianity: How has the Moral Landscape Changed?" *Commonweal* 134, no. 16 [September 18, 2007], 16. *Notes for Church documents at end.*

But it tried not to revise the specific norms based on those foundations. Painting with broad strokes, we can say that the "people of God" welcomed the change of foundations but did not accept many norms commonly taught as absolutes by the "Church." The result is the current disjunction between what the "Church" teaches and what the "pilgrim people of God" think and practice.<sup>2</sup>

There is a long, rather discontinuous pattern of changes in the sexual ethics of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) had an enormous amount of variations, many of which Christians no longer accept. The New Testament changed the ideal, mainly because Jesus was most likely celibate. Augustine, after a long sexually active history, again shifted to a more conservative restriction by legitimating procreative sex to be mainly a remedy for sin and a measure that would hasten the end of the world. Thomas Aquinas again took a less censorious approach, while Martin Luther revised significantly the meaning of matrimonial ethics. As the twentieth century approached, a shifting understanding of marriage led to the major changes the Catholic Church resisted and approved in its sexual ethic.

Jonathan Haidt's *The Righteous Mind* provides a hermeneutical key for understanding the changes in sexual ethics during the last century. First he offers (in an overstated way) psychological evidence that human beings typically start with their convictions and tend to find reasons to justify those convictions only when they encounter or anticipate challenge. The Church in the twentieth century began with many conclusions, for example, that women cannot be ordained. When challenged by culture and by scholars who showed that its older arguments against women's ordination were either weak or unjust, the Church did not change its normative position, but sought for new foundational justifications. Haidt demonstrates that this procedure is not unusual among human beings.3 Indeed, the habit for this kind of thinking is deeply ingrained in theological method. Church teaching often claims that it begins with the givens of Scripture and tradition and then theology explains and defends what those sources teach. *Fides quaerens intellectum*. In fact, theology often changes in response to new insights, as the Church's teachings on slavery or women indicate. The current question was whether new intuitions and changing arguments should change the Church's sexual norms.

Second, Haidt tested six loosely-drawn moral concerns that illuminate similarities and differences between so-called conservatives and liberals. Both tend to share a strong concern for compassion, a concern for fairness, and a concern for liberty. But conservatives tend also to be much more concerned about authority, loyalty, and sanctity.4

Debates over the Church's sexual teaching have greatly foundered due to these latter three concerns. Moral theologian, Richard McCormick, S.J., said that it seldom took more than five minutes after he gave public lectures on sexual matters before the topic turned to authority and loyalty to the Church. Criticism of Church teaching has often been felt as a rejection of God's authority. Loyalty and authority are important since their psychosocial functions is to bring people into cooperation, to highlight the binding quality of morality, and to provide group identity. Hence

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*Evolution of Catholic Marriage Morality in the Twentieth Century from a Baby-Making...*

from merely being matters of authority or communal loyalty.

practices that now seemed plausible in the new understanding.

II," *Josephinum Journal of Theology*, 18 no. 2 [Summer/Fall 2011]: 342.

on Human Love," *Josephinum Journal of Theology*, 18 no. 2 [Summer/Fall 2011]: 369.

moral disagreement is not only about a concern for truth, but also a concern for the identity and unity of the Body of Christ. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Church's marital ethic functioned analogously to its prohibition of meat on Friday in that it provided a distinctly Catholic identity. Still, as the comparison suggests, the basis for moral requirements proper to sexual activity must be different

Haidt's last concern, sanctity, is more directly relevant to Judaeo-Christian sexual morality. He describes sanctity as a need to be purified from stain and pollution. The Old Testament expresses great concern about sexual pollution. Sanctity refers to areas of life that are thought to be beyond touch or change. Through history, under the influence of the rubric of sanctity, descriptions of sexual activity commonly teeter between, on the one side, shame and dirt, and, on the other side,

who fail to follow the Church's sexual norms engage in mere selfish pleasure-seeking or base animal activity while those who follow the Church's sexual norms express a

beyond free human alteration. Any activity that does not conform to these absolutes

In what follows, this essay will trace the development of official Catholic teaching throughout the twentieth century. It begins with the Code of Canon Law. The Code is an important marker against which the progress of the Church's subsequent teaching can be readily seen. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, moral theology textbooks used its ideas as the basis for their treatment of the sixth commandment. As will be seen, even after the Church changed its basic understanding of marriage, it returned to the ideas of this early Code in order to prohibit

The 1917 Code of Canon Law lays down the lineaments of the Church's traditional understanding of marriage. The Code makes several terse assertions about the abstract nature of marriage, almost all of which were challenged as the twentieth century zigzagged down the decades. The Code begins with the assertion that marriage is 1] a contract, 2] which Christ made a sacrament. The Code lists 3] one primary, but twofold end of marriage, namely, 3a] the procreation and 3b] the education of children. After that it lists 4] one secondary end, which

<sup>5</sup> Haidt, *Righteous Mind*, 146–47; Max Scheler, "Über Scham und Schamgefühl," *Schriften aus dem Nachlass*, vol. 1, 2nd ed. [Bern: Franke Verlag, 1957], 65–152; L. William Countryman, *Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and their Implications for Today* [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988]; Paul Ricoeur, "Wonder, Eroticism, and Enigma," *Sexuality and the Sacred*, ed. James Nelson & Sandra Longfellow [Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993], 80–84; also José Noriega, "*Eros* and *Agape* in Conjugal Life: The Mystery of Conjugal Charity," *Josephinum Journal of Theology*, 18 no. 2 [Summer/Fall 2011]: 357; Levio Melina, "The Body and its Vocation to Love in the Catechesis of John Paul

<sup>6</sup> For example, recently Livio Melina writes: "contraception introduces into the bodily act of the reciprocal gift between a man and a woman the poison of a lie, which intimately falsifies the act, making it a self-gift that does not give completely, a receiving that does not really accept. It can truly be said that the contraceptive act is no longer a conjugal act: its objective intentional structure is no different from forms of sexual activity aimed only at hedonistic individual satisfaction, incapable of building true personal communion." See, "From *Humanae Vitae* to *Deus Caritas Est*: Developments in the Theological Thought

In this vein, Church teaching often suggests that those

Put another way, sexual norms are absolute in the sense that they are

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95101*

reverence and sacredness.5

involves pollution and stain.

**2. Code of Canon Law**

supreme love.6

<sup>2</sup> In this essay, I use the term "Church" in its conventional (and not theological) sense simply as shorthand for the official teaching by the Vatican. I do not intend to imply a division between the hierarchy and "people of God." Like the term "the faithful," such a division unfortunately suggests that members of the hierarchy are not part of the people of God or are not faithful. Furthermore, there is hardly complete agreement on sexual matters by the individuals and groups who are part of the "people of God."

<sup>3</sup> Jonathan Haidt, *The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion* [New York: Pantheon, 2012], 74.

<sup>4</sup> Haidt, *Righteous Mind*, op. cit., 182–83.

#### *Evolution of Catholic Marriage Morality in the Twentieth Century from a Baby-Making... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95101*

moral disagreement is not only about a concern for truth, but also a concern for the identity and unity of the Body of Christ. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Church's marital ethic functioned analogously to its prohibition of meat on Friday in that it provided a distinctly Catholic identity. Still, as the comparison suggests, the basis for moral requirements proper to sexual activity must be different from merely being matters of authority or communal loyalty.

Haidt's last concern, sanctity, is more directly relevant to Judaeo-Christian sexual morality. He describes sanctity as a need to be purified from stain and pollution. The Old Testament expresses great concern about sexual pollution. Sanctity refers to areas of life that are thought to be beyond touch or change. Through history, under the influence of the rubric of sanctity, descriptions of sexual activity commonly teeter between, on the one side, shame and dirt, and, on the other side, reverence and sacredness.5 In this vein, Church teaching often suggests that those who fail to follow the Church's sexual norms engage in mere selfish pleasure-seeking or base animal activity while those who follow the Church's sexual norms express a supreme love.6 Put another way, sexual norms are absolute in the sense that they are beyond free human alteration. Any activity that does not conform to these absolutes involves pollution and stain.

In what follows, this essay will trace the development of official Catholic teaching throughout the twentieth century. It begins with the Code of Canon Law. The Code is an important marker against which the progress of the Church's subsequent teaching can be readily seen. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, moral theology textbooks used its ideas as the basis for their treatment of the sixth commandment. As will be seen, even after the Church changed its basic understanding of marriage, it returned to the ideas of this early Code in order to prohibit practices that now seemed plausible in the new understanding.
