Church must rethink its 'anachronistic' sexual ethic, priest says

ROME (CNS) — The Catholic Church’s “established, dogmatic models of the theological approach to sexuality have become anachronistic,” a moral theologian told a conference on sexuality and culture at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences in Rome.

Developing a new theological ethics of sexuality is “a task for the entire church community,” Salesian Father Ronaldo Zacharias, a professor of moral theology at the Salesian University of São Paulo, told the conference March 21.

“We cannot ignore that in recent decades there has been a remarkable evolution regarding terminologies, concepts and descriptions related to sexuality,” he said, noting the strong influence such developments have had on people’s conceptions of their own sexuality.

Salesian Father Ronaldo Zacharias, a professor of moral theology at the Salesian University of São Paulo, speaks at a conference on sexuality and culture at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences in Rome March 21, 2024 (CNS photo/Justin McLellan)

The church, therefore, “should not talk about sexuality without considering the understanding we have of it today,” he said, while also keeping in mind potential problems with modern understandings of sexuality.

Citing the Brazilian theologian Augustinian Sister Ivone Gebara, he said that the church’s “theology of binary sexuality is no longer able to understand the complexity that we discover in ourselves.”

According to Father Zacharias, Catholic theology has not helped people integrate their sexuality into their personhood — an issue that, among the church’s ordained ministers, has reared its head in the clerical sex abuse crisis.

“Sexuality is a constitutive dimension of each person, a central aspect in the life of human beings that characterizes who a person is to the point that it cannot be left out in the process of personal fulfillment,” he said.

Any person’s sexuality, regardless of their vocation, “has a legitimate role in all phases of their development,” and therefore it “cannot be confined to the context of marriage” or reduced to a means for procreation, he said.

The church, the priest said, must overcome “an essentially negative view of sexual desire, as if it were something to be repressed at every moment” and which suppresses a person’s desire for love.

“Self-control is self-control, it is not a virtue,” he said.

Sexuality, he said, “acquires its true human quality if it is oriented (toward), elevated and integrated into love.”

“Authentic love moves one toward self-transcendence, and makes sexuality a ‘place of reciprocity,’ a place of affirming the good of the other,” he said. “The integration of sexuality does not depend solely on the will of the person.”

Father Zacharias noted that a challenge for the church’s theology is to “affirm the meaning of sexuality in light of an eminently relational anthropology.”

Sex cannot be treated as a “separate entity, an object for ethical reflection,” but must be considered as part of “the whole of the relationships which it serves,” he said.