Catholic Ethics in Tension: Sexuality and Social Justice
Rev. Charles Curran

Keynote address at the Tenth Anniversary Conference of Chicago Call to Action, Nov. 7, 1987

 

Thank you very much. It is a privilege to be part of Chicago Call to Action's 10th Anniversary Celebration. We "auslanders" in the rest of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States have always learned so much from what has happened through the creativity of the Church of Chicago. I think your efforts are continuing along the same line.

My topic this evening is very personal to me, but I think many of you share my concern. I feel very much a part of, and am very content to support, Catholic social teaching. I am convinced that the official teaching of the Catholic Church in areas of social and political ethics is a very credible and significant part of the Roman Catholic Church. But I find it very difficult to accept the sexual teaching of the Church.

What I want to discuss tonight is the significant difference between Catholic social teaching and Catholic sexual teaching with regard to the methodology behind the teaching. I will point out three significant methodological differences. These differences in methodology will also explain why I personally have much greater empathy with the social teaching than I have with the sexual.

I. Catholic Social Teaching

The official Catholic social teaching goes back to Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, and stretches down to the recent pastoral letters of the U.S. bishops on peace and on the economy. Let me make two preliminary points. First, we recognize this body of teaching today, but there are many other Catholic teachings, even social teachings, that we don't remember. This is because of an age-old concept in Catholic teaching: the role of reception by the total church. To a certain extent we have today a sort of "canon" of official Church teaching on social issues. Certain documents are in that canon, and many other documents are not. The documents that are included are there because the total church--not only the hierarchical teaching church, but the total church--has received and accepted them, and not others, as very important. So the total church has a role in understanding what Catholic teaching is.

Secondly, I will point out that there has been development within Catholic social teaching in all three methodological areas. Of course you will search in vain for any admission in any official document that its teaching is different from what went before.

There is a tendency to say we are always in agreement with "our predecessors of happy memory." But there is a lot more change and development in the teaching than we ourselves at times have been willing to admit.

The three methodological issues I will discuss are a) historical consciousness, b) the emphasis on the person--and the freedom, equality and participation of persons, and c) the shift from a law model to a relationality-responsibility model of ethics. On all three of these fronts, I will indicate how Catholic social teaching has evolved, from Leo XIII to the present.

Shift to historical consciousness.

There has been a shift from classicism to historical consciousness. Classicism tends to understand reality in terms of the eternal, the universal, and the unchanging; historical consciousness gives more importance to the particular, the contingent, the historical and the changing. Historical consciousness wants to hold on both to continuity and to discontinuity. It wants to avoid the immobilism of classicism, but also to avoid the anarchy of a sheer existentialism, which tends to see the present moment with no relationship to what went before or to what comes in the future, and with no binding relationships to human persons and communities at the present time.

The shift from classicism to historical consciousness also involves a change in theological and ethical methodology, a change from the deductive to the inductive. Most of us were brought up on the old deductive Catholic ethics. You always started with a definition, one which was always and everywhere true, "per omnia saecula saeculorum." And our first course in philosophy, logic, taught us to use the syllogism. State your major, then your minor, then deduce your conclusion. Classicism is connected with this deductive method. Historical consciousness is associated more with an inductive method.

Without a doubt there has been significant development toward historical consciousness in the body of official Catholic social teaching since 1891. Many of you probably cut your teeth on the famous encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI in 1931. It made an important contribution. But in it the Pope has one basic purpose: to propose a plan for the social reconstruction of the world. The very title for the English version was "On Reconstructing the Social Order." The letter proposed a plan for the whole world to follow, not a bad plan in many ways, but a highly deductive one. It began by saying we must recognize that we all live together as one organic whole: the danger today is groups fighting one another, such as labor fighting capital. So it proposed what it called moderate corporatism: labor, capital and consumers working together as one group in a particular industry. and setting prices, wages, and the amount of goods to be produced.

The plan had many good features, even if the Pope's view of the world was mainly confined to Europe. But this plan was highly deductive. That is one of the main reasons why it never worked. It was proposed as a plan for the whole world, but it didn't start with the grassroots at all. It didn't correspond to any existing historical reality.

Now let us trace subsequent developments. In 1963 John XXIII issued Pacem in Terris, "Peace on Earth". It still followed a generally deductive approach, but at the end of each of the four parts there is a very short section on "the signs of the times": the present historical, cultural reality! Then, in 1965, Vatican II issued Gaudium et Spes, the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, and began each section with "the signs of the times", a much more inductive, historically conscious approach. Finally, in 1971 Paul VI issued Octogesima Adveniens, the "Call to Action" document from which CTA takes its name:

"In the face of such widely varying situations it is difficult for us to utter a unified message and to put forward a solution which has universal validity. Such is not our ambition, nor is it our mission."

Forty years before, that was the ambition and the mission of his predecessor!

"It is up to the Christian communities themselves to analyze with objectivity the situation which is proper to their own country, to shed on it the light of the Gospel's unalterable words, and to draw principles of reflection, norms of judgment, and directives for action from the social teaching of the church... It is up to these Christian communities, with the help of the Holy Spirit, in communion with the bishops who hold responsibility and in dialogue with other Christian sisters and brothers and all people of good will, to discern the options and commitments which are called for in order to bring about the social, political, and economic changes seen in many cases to be urgently needed."

What a tremendous shift in methodology, from classicism to historical consciousness!

In fairness, I think it must be said that Pope John Paul II is not as prone to use historically conscious methodology. Compare for example his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, "On Human Work". Basically he starts with a phiIosophy of work which is true of all work, in all times, places and circumstances. Then he tends to deduce things from that philosophy. Part of that is due to his background as a philosopher. But I think part of it is also due to his fear of what will happen if you have all different sorts of people discussing things. Historical consciousness can be seen as somewhat of a threat to the unity and central authority in the church.

Shift to the person, (and the freedom, equality and participation of persons)

In the 19th century the Catholic Church tended to be strongly opposed to the freedom of persons, the equality of persons, and the participation of all persons in the life of society. Catholic thought tended to view freedom as very individualistic. Freedom was blamed for destroying people's relationships with God, their sense of belonging to a community, and their esteem for tradition. The great enemy was what the Church called liberalism. We said that religious liberalism started with Martin Luther who told people they could follow their conscience in religious matters, and broke the relationship 'with God. Then the philosophers came along and said human reason determines everything, so we don't need God. (interestingly, the 19th century Catholic Church also condemned capitalism, which it viewed as individualistic freedom gone wild! Two of the greatest opponents of capitalism in the last century were Karl Marx and Leo X1111!) So the Church was basically opposed to freedom, equality and participation. Pius IX, for example, wrote in Quanta Cura that freedom of worship is deliramentum, "a madness"! Writing about social matters Leo XIII was very fond of referring to the people as "the ignorant multitude." In fairness, we can admit that most people were illiterate at that time. But the Church's attitude was still that people had to be told what to do by the princes and rulers.

As the 20th century unfolded, the Church acquired a new enemy, or, as we say today, a new "dialogue partner:" totalitarian governments. In this context the same Church which had opposed freedom began to defend the freedom and dignity of the human person against the encroachments of totalitarianism. True. the Church was more vehement against totalitarianism of the left than totalitarianism of the right. But in theory the Church opposed all forms of totalitarianism. The new emphasis on the freedom and dignity of the individual developed little by little. Not until John XXIII's Pacem in Terris in 1963 did we have for the first time a full-blown treatment of human rights in official Catholic teaching. We were always afraid of rights, because rights sounded like "my rights, my freedom to do what I want," and raised the fear of excessive individualism. As most of us can recall, we were very strong on duties, and a little light on rights! Just two years before, in Mater et Magistra in 1961, John XXIII said the ideal social order rests on the three values of truth, justice, and love. Two years later he adds a fourth element: truth, justice, charity-and freedom.

At Vatican II in 1965, the Catholic Church finally accepted religious freedom. (Some of us are still trying to get it to accept academic freedom, but you take one thing at a time!) And in 1971 Paul VI devoted a long section of his famous "Call to Action" document to two new aspirations which he said had become more persistent and strong in the contemporary context: "the aspiration to equality and the aspiration to participation-two forms of human dignity and freedom." Not just a passing reference, but about a third of the document deals with these themes. Why? He says it is because of the contemporary context! He is acknowledging the importance of historical consciousness!

This shift to an emphasis on person, freedom and quality finds strong support in Pope John Paul II. For example, in Laborem Exercens, he goes so far as to say that the most important thing about human work is not what gets done but the person who does it.

Shift from a law model to a relationality-responsibility model of ethics.

The law model primarily understands morality in terms of law and obedience to law. In the Christian tradition that has been the generally accepted understanding Morality is obeying the Ten Commandments. It's a legal model. The relationality-responsibility model sees the human person in multiple relationships with God, world, neighbor and self, and my response in the midst of those relationships. (Actually there is also a third model of ethics: the teleological. Based on the Greek work "telos" meaning "end" or "goal", this model chooses your end, and judges as good whatever moves you toward your end, and bad whatever prevents your arrival at your end. It is interesting that the quintessential proponent of the teleological model in the Catholic tradition was Thomas Aquinas. We all invoke Aquinas, but we tend to use a law model and he did not!) As late as 1963 Pacem in Terris used the law model as the primary structural approach of the whole encyclical. It begins by insisting that peace on earth can be firmly established only if the order laid down by God be dutifully observed. An astounding order reigns in our world and the greatness of human beings is to understand that order. The creator of the world has imprinted on the human heart an order which conscience reveals and enjoins one to obey. In the introductory section which lays out the four areas to be treated in the encyclical's four parts, the law model of ethics could not be clearer:

"By these laws human beings are most admirably taught first of all how they should conduct their mutual dealings among themselves, then how the relationships between the citizens and the public authority of each state should be regulated, then how states should deal with one another, and finally how on the one hand individual human beings and states, and on the other hand the community of all peoples, should act toward each other, the establishment of such a community being urgently demanded today by the requirements of the universal common good."

Here again Call to Action comes to the rescue! The 1971 Call to Action document of Paul VI well illustrates the shift from a legal model to a relationality-responsibility model:

"It is with all its dynamism that the social teaching of the church accompanies human beings in their search."

Notice the language. There is no eternal, immutable law, but the dynamism of the teaching accompanies human beings in their search!

"If it does not intervene to authenticate a given structure or to propose a ready-made model, ...."

It admits it can't!

It does not thereby limit itself to recalling general principles. It develops through reflection applied to the changing situations of this world, under the driving force of the gospel as the source of renewal when its message is accepted in its totality and with all its demands. It also develops with a sensitivity proper to the church which is characterized by a disinterested will to serve and by attention to the poorest.

Also in this encyclical Paul VI appeals to utopias. Not to laws, to tell us what to do. For the first time in papal documents, he appeals to utopias.

"The appeal to a utopia is often a convenient excuse for those who wish to escape from concrete tasks to order to take refuge in an imaginary world. To live in a hypothetical future is a facile alibi for rejecting immediate responsibilities. But it must clearly be recognized that this kind of criticism of existing society often provokes the forward-looking imagination..."

See, not a law but forward-looking imagination!

"both to perceive in the present the discarded possibility hidden within it, and to direct itself toward a fresh future; it thus sustains social dynamism by the confidence that it gives to the inventive powers of the human mind and heart."

Not just obedience, but the inventive, creative powers of the mind and heart!

"The Spirit of God, who animates human beings renewed in Christ, continually breaks down the horizons within which one's understanding likes to find security and the limits to which one's activity would willingly restrict itself; there dwells within one a power which urges one to go beyond every system and every ideology. At the heart of the world there dwells the mystery of the human person discovering oneself to be God's child in the course of a historical and psychological process in which constraint and freedom as well as the weight of sin and the breath of the Spirit alternate and struggle for the upper hand."

The shift to a relationality-responsibility model is unmistakable. In fact, throughout that apostolic letter the most important word is "discern". We are to discern what we are to do, not just obey a law!

II. Catholic Sexual Teaching

Now we turn to official Catholic teaching in the area of sexual morality. I want to look at three contemporary documents: the "Declaration on Sexual Ethics" issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1975; the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons", promulgated by the Congregation on Oct. 1, 1986; and the "Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation" issued by the same congregation on Feb. 22, 1987.

When we examine the methodology of these documents, we find that they differ sharply from contemporary documents on Catholic social teaching on all three of the methodological issues we have been discussing.

Classicist rather than historically conscious

The 1975 Declaration on Sexual Ethics shows very little historical consciousness. The very beginning of the document states:

"The fundamental principles which can be grasped by reason are contained in the divine law--eternal, objective and universal-whereby God orders, directs, and governs the entire universe and all the ways of the human community... Human beings have been made by God to participate in this law with the result that under the gentle disposition of divine providence they can come to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth."

The Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons in 1986 uses some of the same terminology. It bases its teaching on "the theology of creation", and "the creator's sexual design"--something that the creator wrote right into human nature-- and speaks of the "theocratic law". It is interesting that this document does admit a little historical-mindedness. It acknowledges that the bible was composed in many different epochs with great cultural and historical diversity and that today the church addresses the Gospel to a world which differs in many ways from ancient days. After this genuine recognition of historical consciousness, one is not prepared for the opening sentence of the next paragraph:

"What should be noticed is that, in the presence of such remarkable diversity, there is nevertheless a clear consistency within the scriptures themselves on the moral issue of homosexual practice."

So the document quickly returns to the classicist approach. The same approach is explicit in the 1987 Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin, which says that the unchangeable laws of human nature are "inscribed in the very being of man and of woman." It even describes its own methodology as deductive: "The moral criteria for medical intervention in procreation are deduced from the dignity of human persons, of their sexuality, and of their origins."

Emphasis on nature and faculties rather than on the person

The shift to personalism that has occurred in Catholic social teaching has not occurred here in the sexual teaching. Here the emphasis is not on the person but on the faculty, the nature of the sexual faculty. We say that the sexual faculty has been given by God for a twofold purpose--procreation and love union. Arid therefore we claim every single act must mirror the twofold purpose of human sexuality. You can never interfere with the act or with the faculty. If you accepted a more personalist approach, you could very readily say that for the good of the person which is larger than the faculty, you can interfere with the faculty! And for the good of the personal relationship of marriage, you can interfere with the faculty and with the act! But the traditional teaching strongly holds that the nature of the sexual faculty and of the sexual act, not the person, form the ultimate moral criterion. For example, the Declaration on Sexual Ethics points out that Catholic sexual teaching is based "on the finality of the sexual act and on the principal criterion of its morality: namely, it is respect for its finality that ensures the moral goodness of the act. " Sexual sins are described often in this document as "abuses of the sexual faculty."

The letter on homosexuality cites the earlier document to point out that homosexual acts are deprived of their essential and indispensable finality and are therefore intrinsically disordered. Now in fairness we should note that this letter does give more verbal attention to the word "person". Yet despite more frequent use of the word, the person does not really enter into the content of the argument.

The letter on bioethics is very similar in this regard. 'There are many more references to the person and the rights of persons than in earlier documents, but the change remains verbal and does not affect the substance of the teaching.

Ethical model

We saw earlier how much Catholic social teaching has shifted to the use of a relationality-responsibility model. (In fact, I forgot to mention that it is even reflected in the title of the U.S. Bishops' Pastoral on War and Peace. The title is "The Challenge of Peace: God's Gift and Our Response"--clearly a relational way of approaching the topic.) But the documents on sexual teaching leave no doubt that they still adhere to a thoroughly legal model of ethics. For example, the 1975 Declaration begins by asserting, about sexual ethics:

"In this domain there exist principles and norms which the church has always unhesitatingly transmitted as part of her teaching, however much the opinions and morals of the world may have been opposed to them. These principles and norms in no way owe their origin to a certain type of culture, but rather to knowledge of the divine law... They therefore cannot be considered as having become out of date or doubtful under the pretext that a new cultural situation has risen."

Similarly, the document on bioethics leaves no doubt that it is following a legal ethical model:

"Thus the Church once more puts forward the divine law in order to accomplish the work of truth and liberation. For it is out of goodness--in order to indicate the path of life--that God gives human beings his commandments and the grace to observe them... The natural moral law expresses and lays down the purposes, rights, and duties which are based upon the bodily and spiritual nature of the human person."

There is a significant practical difference between using a law model and a relationality-responsibility model. If you use a legal model, then for all practical purposes all moral reality is divided into two parts: what's forbidden and what's permitted. If there's a law against it, it's wrong. Otherwise it's all right. Interestingly enough, there's little or no gray area. And if you read that recent document on bioethics, indeed there is very little gray area. You might wish they would admit once in a while, "Well, we're not sure. Maybe it's wrong, and maybe it's not." But no. Either there's a law, or there isn't one. Now compare that with recent social documents where they have admitted a great deal of gray area. They are bound to recognize gray areas because they are employing a relationality-responsibility model. For example, the U.S. bishops say it is their firm moral belief that the first use of even the smallest nuclear weapon would be always and everywhere wrong. But they admit that some people within the Church might disagree with them, and that this is a legitimate option. We never say that about any of the sexual questions, because of the different ethical methodology at work.

So why be Catholic?

In conclusion, I want to say that the difference I have been discussing between Catholic social teaching and Catholic sexual teaching is something that could be changed! There is an unmistakable difference in methodology. If we set out to apply to sexual teachings the same methodology that has evolved in social teaching, we would inevitably bring about change in those sexual teachings.

This talk well illustrates that there are tensions within the Roman Catholic community today. Now I don't mind tensions. If there were no tension, we'd be dead. But I do think that the tensions are more exacerbated than they should be. All of us who feel this way should make an effort to bring about change in the Church, to do as you have done--accepting your "Call to Action", to make sure that the Gospel of Jesus is lived, appropriated and practiced in the light of the social and cultural conditions of our own time.

Even in the midst of these tensions, I believe that the Catholic tradition in its basic self-understanding still makes sense, and for three reasons. First of all, it is the Catholic tradition that has always accepted and recognized both Scripture and tradition. Granted. we misunderstood it at times, but we avoided saying, "The Scriptures alone." Fundamentally what we said is that the Scriptures must always be appropriated, lived and understood in the light of the ongoing historical and cultural realities of the present. The greatest theologian in the history of the Catholic Church was Thomas Aquinas. And the glory of Aquinas was his unwillingness to simply repeat what people before him had said. He took the new Aristotelian thought that was coming into the European universities in his time. He used Aristotle, a pagan philosopher who didn't know Jesus and probably didn't believe in God, to better understand and to explain the Christian mysteries. He did so to be faithful to our tradition of understanding the Scriptures in the light of the ongoing cultural realities of his day.

Secondly, it is the Catholic tradition that has clung to the insight of the great medievalists that faith and reason can never contradict one another. That is not only a great statement of faith in faith. It is also a great statement of faith in reason! In the past many of our problems in the Catholic Church came about when we lost the nerve of those medievalists. Faith has nothing to fear from human reason! In fact, most of the Catholic teaching we have discussed tonight is based, not primarily on faith in Jesus Christ and the Scriptures, but on human reason. Sure, faith transcends reason. But nevertheless we can boldly assert that faith and reason can never contradict one another. That is the Catholic tradition.

Thirdly, despite all our current tensions with Church authority, our Catholic tradition still asks, with Aquinas: Is something good because it is commanded, or is it commanded because it is good? The fundamental answer of Aquinas, and with him the best of the Catholic tradition, was to say: Something is commanded because it is good! The ultimate reality is truth or goodness, and authority must always conform itself to the true and the good.

Yes, we have tensions in the Church today. Yes, we are badly in need of change and development in our sexual teaching. At times one wonders what the future holds. Nevertheless, when I look at the Catholic tradition it makes sense to me. It reminds us that we need creative fidelity to the word of Jesus. It reminds us that Scripture must always be understood and appropriated in the light of the present circumstances, that faith has nothing to fear from human reason, and that in the last analysis, the function of authority is to conform itself to the Spirit, the good, and the true.

Thank you very much.