Recently, the Australian bishops issued a pastoral letter entitled, “Don’t Mess with Marriage.” After citing many examples of ideology against heterosexual marriage based on nature, they answered the unreasonable position of those who believe that marriage can exist between gay couples. They wrote, “ Businessmen, athletes, commentators, teachers, doctors and nurses, religious leaders and others in several countries who have spoken in support of traditional marriage have been vilified in the media, denied employment or business contracts, and threatened with prosecution.” How could it be that what was thought as an obvious norm of human behavior would become hate speech in calm discussion? How could it be that the new norm for conjugal union is simply sexual feelings expressed any way to anyone or that homosex and heterosex are essentially on an equal par and should have deserving equal conjugal rights?
If we go back to the 1960s, when it was popular for Catholic theologians and priests to dissent from Humanae Vitae because the old pope did not “read the signs of the times” and “get with it.” Having children is not always a blessing but a burden and sometimes a curse. “The times, they are a-changing” and the Church had to get “with it.” Human nature it was 
thought had progressed in its understanding of itself and many families did not need or want but a small number of children. Protestantism based on psychological and allegedly biblical reasons had begun falling away from the prohibition of intrinsic evils much earlier as manifested at the Lambeth Conference of 1932, while unbelievers had always upheld that sexual expression at any time with any one is an integral part of human fulfillment or happiness, the mantra of the old Roman Empire.
When Bl. Paul VI published his encyclical letter, it was paragraph 12 that became a great stumbling block to the morally blind:
That teaching (understood as against contraception of any kind), often set forth by the magisterium, is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning. Indeed, by its intimate structure, the conjugal act, while most closely uniting husband and wife, capacitates them for the generation of new lives, according to laws inscribed in the very being of man and of woman. By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its ordination toward man’s most high calling to parenthood. We believe that the men of our day are particularly capable of seizing the deeply reasonable and human character of this fundamental principle.
Unfortunately, the Holy Father thought that it was easily grasped by natural reason alone of a thinking person that the unitive and procreated meaning have to be joined together in marriage or otherwise all of sexual morality becomes undermined and meaningless if in principle the human person could separate them. So the morality of the Tradition became an evil to be avoided and a very old immorality became part of a new morality. As a result, babies could be made without sex or one could have sex with anyone on demand with mutual consent. And this became good.
Furthermore, what was not on the Pope’s inner radar was the pervasive sexual revolution that had continued from the 1920s to the 60s (and more so now in the present). As a result of the sexual rampage we are witnessing, culturally speaking the arts, literature, politics and families no longer know very much about what chastity is and why it is a kind of cement of any society. It has also followed that a deluge of parents does not communicate its value to their children. Wherefore, it has been very easy for many generations to follow their desire for sex pushing aside or diminishing the desire for God, truth, and justice by obeying Him. This naturally has resulted in blindness to the deleterious effects that the vice of lust has on the human person, leading to an unreasonable love of the goods of this world and concurrent withdrawal from the desire of the things of the next world.
Appealing to reason as the Holy Father did became an unreasonable demand because a large swath of people in the West and East no longer adhered to God the Creator of human nature with its intrinsic laws of flourishing. Because of the lack of chastity education and the failure to pass it on from generation to generation, this lack of insight and self-mastery made it seemingly impossible to understand what the Holy Father thought should have been be clearly persuasive to motivate people to strive for chastity. In other words, Bl. Paul was deeply reasonable, but his readers could not grasp this depth of moral truth because they already did not want to hear its teaching.
St. Thomas Aquinas taught:
… with an act of lust, chastity is intrinsically destroyed. (Comm. in II Sent., d. 42, q. 1, a. 2, ad 4).
The devil is said to rejoice chiefly in the sin of lust, because it is of the greatest adhesion, and man can with difficulty be withdrawn from it. “For the desire of pleasure is insatiable,” as the Philosopher states (Ethic. iii, 12) (ST I-II 75, 5 ad 2).
Why care about chastity when the pleasure of sex is so fulfilling? So, lust and its expression became once again natural and, therefore, normal.
Perhaps what is needed from the papal magisterium to save family life is a teaching and solid encyclical (not a mere letter, apostolic exhortation, or a homily, or a document of a dicastery) on how one teaches chastity, why this is important for truly fulfilling marriage, instead of a document that ambiguously teaches that perhaps many more divorced persons may be able to go to communion than was thought conceivable. If the ignorant people of God could have a clear and solid written word on the what and why of sexual self-mastery, and why it is difficult to achieve it, then it may be easier to see why the social teaching of the Church is “spot right on” regarding the many issues found in the bioethical, political, economic and social problems of our times. Avarice, lust, vainglory, and gluttony all have something to do with the way we treat the poor and the environment. Until we understand that all vice is unnatural, being disordered human acts, and that some acts are constitutionally unnatural, then the teaching on chastity will become good news not hate speech. Truth will no longer seem like “edicts from on high.”
Father Basil Cole, O.P. is currently a Professor of Moral and Spiritual Theology, Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. Father is also author of Music and Morals, The Hidden Enemies of the Priesthood and coauthor of Christian Totality; Theology of Consecrated Life. A native San Franciscan, Father has been a prior in the Western province of the Dominicans, a parish missionary and retreat master, and invited professor of moral and spiritual theology at the Angelicum in Rome.
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