50 Years after Persona Humana - What the Church Teaches about Premarital Sex, Homosexual Acts, and Masturbation

Monday is the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics (Persona humana).  [https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19751229_persona-humana_en.html ]  It reaffirmed Catholic teaching on the immorality of premarital sexual acts, masturbation, and homosexual acts.

 Issued roughly seven years after Humanae vitae, Persona humana demonstrates the speed at which Catholic sexual ethics decays if you fail to affirm its core principle: that the nexus God has established between the procreative meaning and the unitive meaning of the conjugal act is such that its division by human beings is immoral.

That principle does not say sex is only for procreation, but it does say sex also always has to be open to procreation because that is an essential element of its purpose.  God, not man, is “Lord and giver of life,” as we say we believe every Sunday in the creed.  Being “Lord and giver of life” does not mean that what God has connected with the giving of life must first also gain my approval.

That principle also speaks of the “conjugal act.”  That is not just a nice Catholic euphemism for “sex.”  It means that, properly understood, sexual intercourse is an act between coniunges, “spouses,” and is degraded when occurring apart from a spousal union.  It’s not that the Church thinks sex is “bad.”  It is that the Church thinks sex is so important, its value so high, that it should not be used (and I pick that verb deliberately) by people not entitled to it.

Since 1975, the wisdom of Persona humana has been repeatedly verified, even at the level of human experience.  On fornication, or “premarital sex,” the Declaration warned against a cheapening of sex, a devaluation that, in the name of “testing compatibility” between prospective spouses, in fact resulted in the devaluation of marriage.  Today, the institution of marriage is under assault, in part because it is treated as just one of a variety of “choices” for relationships between two people whose sexual differentiation is no longer even deemed by the state essential to the nature of marriage.  Marriage competes with various forms of “cohabitation,” “civil pacts,” “living arrangements,” “hook-ups” and other – all de jure temporary or at least indefinite – arrangements.  The result, as we see, has been a spike in children deprived of two parents, the marginalization of fatherhood and the impoverishment of (“single”) motherhood, and attendant crime and social dislocation. 

Masturbation is hardly even mentioned these days, even though its frequency has probably increased with the ubiquity of pornography.  For the Church, masturbation fails to meet either purpose of conjugal intercourse.  It unites one with nobody.  And it has no life-giving purpose.  It essentially reduces sex to a moment of pleasurable sexual satisfaction, emptying the rich meaning of human sexuality into mere orgasm relief.  It is indeed bizarre and pastorally irresponsible that the Church has abandoned talking about the wrongness of masturbation because, in some sense, it is the “original sin” of sexual maladjustment.  It teaches the practitioner to subordinate sex both as uniting gift of self to other to one’s self and to disconnect sex – in one’s mind if not just in action – from its connection with parenthood and life.   In that sense, far from being a “passing stage,” as some theologians wanted to dismiss it, it becomes the fundamental orientation to a misshapen view of sexuality whose impact continues into other areas of one’s sexual life.

As for homosexual activity, this is clearly a point of contention in today’s Church among theologians who refuse to recognize it is “intrinsically disordered.”  But if intercourse has purposes – as Catholic teaching has always held it does – than any sexual act either conforms to that order … or doesn’t … and there is no “pastoral value” in pretending otherwise.  If sex has a procreative significance, then same-sex relations will never conform to that meaning because they will always be sterile.  A child can only become part of such a relationship through artificial reproduction, i.e., involving another person in the child’s production (because the very term ‘artificial reproduction’ includes that concept) who is then excluded from relationship with that child.  If sex has a unifying significance, then same-sex relations cannot meet the goal of unity because there is no unity-in-diversity, no complementarity here.  The Judaeo-Christian vision is that, in creating the human person, God made man sexually different (Gen 1:28) and, in giving man “an appropriate companion” (Gen 2:18-24)  sexual differentiation was constitutive of that appropriateness.  God gave Adam Eve, not Steve. 

My involvement with Persona humana goes back 44 years, because it was the subject of my final paper for an M.A. in theology.  Pace the loudest theologians of the late 1970s/early 1980s who attacked the document, it was increasingly clear to me that Persona humana represented a fundamental defense of personal values in conjugal acts, and I sought to apply the then-relatively new theology of then-relatively recently elected Pope John Paul II to these questions.  Persona humana protects persons in a particularly important, valuable, and intimate aspect of people’s lives: sex.  It protects persons from being used, whether as prospective spouses being “tested” as possible wives or husbands (usually the former) or as “partners” with whom complete partnership (which includes sharing in the giving of life) is impossible.  It also protects persons in the form of children unborn from being treated as products as well as potential children not yet conceived from the hubris of imaging that the right of anybody’s life to come into existence must depend on the approval of anybody other than God.  Finally, it protects the personal values of sex from being reduced to mere release of libido.

Persona humana represents critical values in human life that, when described in their full truth, no person would want honestly to admit should not compel or be binding on him.  And the values at stake are such that it is frankly not “pastoral” but in fact unpastoral not to speak them in their full clarion truth.  The Declaration certainly deserves far more attention on its golden jubilee.