It’s not uncommon for Catholics to hear that the Church is “obsessed with sexual sin.” And so, whether it’s answering modern seculars who claim that “love is love” or Protestants who think that chastity is fine, but only in moderation, Catholic apologists spend a lot of time defending the “pelvic issues.”
There’s a special urgency to this work today, as that charge is increasingly heard within the Church’s own borders. High-profile shepherds and influencers, along with persistent lay activists and emboldened progressivist academics, not only decry Catholicism’s “obsession” with sex, but also think they now have the means and the moment to fix it for good.
Over the last decade, enthusiasts for rewriting Catholic sexual doctrine have ascended in influence. Cracks in the monolith of Catholic moral teaching are multiplying and widening, leading many in the world, not unreasonably, to anticipate an imminent tectonic shift lurching the Church closer to the Spirit of the Age. Perhaps the Synod on Synodality for a Synodal Church, whose early working document teases the notion of a People of God yearning to be free from pelvic preoccupation, will be the instrument of a change that finally brings Rome up to date.
Since this is both a perennial issue and one straight from today’s headlines, let’s look at some reasons why the Church puts a high value on sex and chastity, and consequently recognizes abuses of sex and offenses against chastity as grave.
- God created us male and female.
Through the inspired author of Genesis, God revealed two things about human nature. We are made 1) in God’s image and likeness and 2) male and female.
The first pertains, at minimum, to our rational, immortal soul, which sets us apart from the other animals. The second tells us that we are, at the root, sexed beings. Our bodies’ sexual characteristics are not, as the modern gnostics want us to think, accidental to who and what we are, but essential. We can’t change what God created us to be—not by mutilating our flesh, not by donning different clothes, not through attempted conjugality with persons of our own sex. Our sex runs right to the core.
How we live out our sexed-ness, then, is not merely an animal pursuit for our bodies or merely a spiritual sense of how we feel deep inside. Rather, it is an integrated and central aspect of our flourishing and perfection as human beings. Our genitalia are not “junk”; they are physical signs of a spiritual reality. We don’t merely consume sex like junk food or play at it like a video game because sex, by its nature and ours, contains and communicates the fullness of our dignity.
- Marital union is the metaphor for Christ and the Church.
God also reveals in Scripture that his relationship with us is most like a marriage. He laid the foundation for this in the Old Testament. When the Jews were unfaithful to God by worshiping idols and false gods, it wasn’t merely disobedience to divine commands, but a kind of prostitution (Jer. 3:1, Hos. 4:15). The Song of Songs presented God’s love for Israel in the language of a sensual poem. But its traditional author, King Solomon, came to exemplify both sexual sin and idolatry with his immense number of pagan wives and concubines, leading to unfaithfulness that splintered the kingdom of Israel forever.
In contrast, Solomon’s descendant (through his earthly father, Joseph) Jesus loves his one spouse, the Church, with perfect fidelity, even giving his life for her (Eph. 5:25). We who are his bride are called to love him with equal fidelity and with obedience, making possible an intimate, marriage-like union with him, body and soul, that culminates in eternal life.
All of this informs our view of sexual sin because sex is at the heart of marriage. It consummates the vows, making a sacramental marriage indissoluble. Over the course of a marriage, it symbolizes and re-presents in a fleshly sign the mutual self-gift that husband and wife pledged to each other. Offenses against chastity are thus offenses against sex’s proper expression in marriage—meaning that they’re offenses against the principal sign by which God has chosen to reveal his relationship with us. This is no small thing!
- Sex makes us co-creators with God.
In marriage, sex not only expresses the self-gift between spouses, but also ordinarily brings about what has traditionally been called marriage’s primary “end”: procreation. In this wondrous arrangement, God allows us to participate in his own proper power.
God is love, and everything in the universe exists because he, in the boundless outpouring of his love, brought it into being from nothing and keeps it in being. He turns love into life, and through the gift of sex he allows us to do the same. We become his partners, his co-creators, in the act of marital love, calling down the divine spark of life and bringing into being new little images and likenesses of God. These new beings will never cease to exist, and they share the glorious destiny of intimate union with the faithful Bridegroom. We, too, get to turn love into life.
This is awesome to ponder: a God who empowers his creatures to do godlike things. And since godlike things deserve the highest respect, abuse of them is matter for the gravest evils.
- Scripture is always exhorting us to sexual morality.
The biblical data on sexual immorality are part of the revealed word of God and have to be reckoned with. They can’t simply be dismissed as an obsolete relic of a pre-“scientific” time.
The Sixth and Ninth Commandments and the old Law mandated sexual continence and punished, albeit imperfectly, transgressions like adultery and sodomy. We have noted how the Old Testament compared idolatry with sexual sin. It also provides case lessons in the harms of lust: for example, Solomon; his father David (2 Sam. 11), whose illicit desire for Bathsheba led him to murder and severe penance; the two elders who lusted after Susanna and paid the highest price for it (Dan. 13); and of course Sodom and Gomorrah, whose lustful mobs brought down God’s fiery judgment.
Jesus valued sexual purity so much that he expanded its scope, moving beyond just physical acts to our interior dispositions as well (Matt. 5:28). The commands and exhortations we find in St. Paul’s epistles, especially, always prominently include sexual morality (Rom. 13:13-14, 1 Cor. 6:13-20, 1 Thess. 4:3-7, Col. 3:5, Eph. 5:23, etc.). Likewise, when Paul lists vices that are opposed to holiness and the life of the spirit, sexual sins get pride of place (1 Cor. 6:9-10, Gal. 5:19).
This apostle and inspired author, the greatest evangelist and teacher of the Church age, did not worry about appearing “obsessed” with sex! We should imitate his example.
- Sexual sin has grave social consequences.
It’s a persistent fiction of the Sexual Revolution and a common talking point of libertines that sex is only about “what goes on in my bedroom” and thus isn’t a matter of the public good. How does my porn collection, or fornication, or adultery, or same-sex “marriage” affect you? It doesn’t, so shut up.
This is a shortsighted attitude, and somewhat ironically so, since those who argue for it are not infrequently the same people who will insist that your gas stove or habit of long showers is actually a contributor to slow-motion global catastrophe. When it comes to things like poverty and climate change, they have a keen sense of social consequences rippling out from private actions. We might ask them to consider the same principle applied to sexual sins. For example:
- Sex outside of marriage leads to the epidemic evils of abortion and fatherlessness, as countless “unintended” children are conceived and either killed or deprived of their right to be raised by a father and mother bound to each other in marriage.
- Fatherlessness is a known statistical predictor of poverty, crime, gun violence, gang membership, drug use, child abuse, and lower academic performance and life success.
- Adultery leads to divorce, which traumatizes children and does economic harm to everyone involved.
- Deviant sexual behavior—the rainbow spectrum of sodomy, transgenderism, “queerness,” every letter on the ever-growing acronym—is associated with a host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of depression, suicide, and drug abuse.
- Pornography traps men, especially, into vicious patterns of addiction. It conditions adolescents to have a utilitarian view of women and sex; it robs young people of the ability to build loving and healthy relationships; and in marriages, it destroys intimacy, trust, and tenderness (see “divorce” above).
And, since social patterns tend to repeat, the effects of sexual sin will echo in new generations of wounded persons. Sex is never private: it is relational, marital, societal, and generational in its consequences.
Don’t be cowed into silence by those who suggest that you, who hold fast to Catholic teaching on sex, are actually the one with the problem. And don’t let critics—outside the Church or within it—deflect from the core truths about sex and chastity by bringing up extreme examples of “obsession.”
It is possible to focus on chastity unduly, to the neglect of other important virtues that Christians must have. But true instances of this are far rarer than the laxity that most of us fallen humans like to afford ourselves for our pet vices. (And in practice, I think it happens that those who strive to be chaste also tend to be more just, more charitable, more peaceable, and so on—because virtuous habits flock together.) Most of the time, what they call obsession is really just our due regard for Catholic sexual morality and the hope and healing it offers to our broken world. And we must continue to proclaim it, in and out of season.