Many moral theologians in the country agree with that assessment.

One of them said that re-formulating Church teaching on human sexuality is one of the most "urgent" and one of the most "difficult" challenges facing contemporary Catholicism.

The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), which recently published a shocking report on abuse cases in France over the past 70 years, agrees.

One of the recommendations it made in that report is to carefully examine "how the paradoxical excess of Catholic morality's fixation on sexual matters may have a counter-productive value in the fight against sexual abuse".

The CIASE report notes that the Church's persistent strictness on sexual issues has led to a paradoxical situation by which some Catholics, especially priests, have committed serious transgressions according to the idea that "if you don't respect all the law, then you don't respect anything at all".

Not all sins are equally serious

Added to this is confusion about the various "sins against the flesh", which Catholic tradition has grouped together under the umbrella of the sixth commandment: "Thou shall not commit adultery."

"The enumeration of acts without gradation of their seriousness is highly problematic because, for example, one cannot put masturbation and rape on the same level," deplored Marie-Jo Thiel, an award-winning Catholic ethicist who teaches theology at the University of Strasbourg.

Like others, she considers rape to be "a crime that kills another", which is actually a violation of the fifth commandment, rather than the fifth.

"Even today, anything that goes outside the framework promoted by the Church would be 'wrong'," says Dominican Sister Véronique Margron, president of the Conference of Men and Women Religious of France (Corref).

"We thus maintain confusion between wrong and failure, which all human beings encounter at one time or another in their emotional and sexual life. As a result, we don't know how to recognize what is really wrong, such as sexual violence, or perceiving the other person as an object," she said.

"Catholic sexual ethics remain very normative"

Catholicism's focus on sexuality and procreation has intensified since the 19th Century in proportion to its loss of socio-political influence. But that focus actually goes back to the beginnings of Christianity.

The contribution of Saint Augustine of Hippo is particularly "weighty" in this matter, according to Alain Thomasset SJ, professor at the Centre Sèvres, the Jesuit school of theology in Paris.

"For Saint Augustine, sexual desire remained an effect of original sin. It is only saved by the act of procreation within marriage," he said.

The Second Vatican Council certainly opened up sexuality to purposes other than procreation, such as communion between spouses.

But Thomasset believes there is still much work to be done to transcend the culture of merely "what's allowed and what's forbidden" and to broaden our view.

"Catholic sexual ethics remain very normative," the Jesuit pointed out.

"It is much more normative than the Church's social doctrine, which takes into account relationships, circumstances, intentions, the complexity of reality, etc. Relational anthropology, already present in social doctrine, would be welcome in sexual ethics," he argued.

A Church people are no longer listening to?

The 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae, with its prohibition of artificial contraception, did much to discredit the Church's discourse on sexuality.

Then the 2019 book, In the Closet of the Vatican, which alleged the widespread existence of homosexuality (and pedocriminality) among priests and bishops in Rome, seemed to further weaken the Church's voice on this issue.

Some Catholics regret this. They believe the Church is right to insist that our bodies are a gift of God that should not to abused or that sexual intimacy should not be trivialised at a time when pornography has never been so easily accessible.

So, is it conceivable that there can be an evolution Church teaching on human sexuality?

"First of all, we must keep in mind that a good part of the French episcopate remains marked by the heritage of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who defended a sexual morality with clear norms, in the name of human nature," emphasized Francine Charoy, a moral theologian who taught for twenty years at the Institut Catholique in Paris.

Moving beyond a "confrontation between two blocks"

Pope Francis has taken a different approach by encouraging more discernment in complex situations. But he has not changed Church doctrine on the substance of the matter.

This has left some theologians "disappointed".

They believe that the pope could make changes to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which, among other things, calls homosexual acts "intrinsically disordered"), as he did in 2018 concerning the death penalty.

Charoy, meanwhile, wants to see the Church move beyond a "confrontation between two blocs", progressive and conservative.

"We need to work in synodality among different theologians, to analyze together the denial regarding pedocriminality in which the institution has remained for so long," she argued.

The theologian said it would be a way to start dismantling the "culture of silence" highlighted by the CIASE report.

• Mélinée le Priol is a journalist for LA CROIX France. She has a particular interest in topics related to the Middle-East but also more widely religious news.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

I was an army chaplain at Puckapunyal preparing conscripts for Vietnam and, at the same time, an undergraduate at Melbourne University where the Vietnam War was taboo. Those two worlds were a universe apart.

As I drove into the university car park the car radio told me that Paul VI had reaffirmed the intrinsic immorality of contraception.

I was shocked.

His advisory group had advised differently.

We now know he went against most of the bishops he had chosen to consult.

Little did I know that this was just the start of a journey to sexual common sense for the whole church.

Five years later, I was parish priest of a brand-new parish full of baby boomers with growing families. They were enthusiastic Catholics who loved parish involvement. Life was full on.

As families grew, so did the parish school. Vatican II was the guiding charter. Liturgy was alive — the source and summit of the life of the parish.

Two things were of interest.

• Nobody ever mentioned contraception.
• Very few went to confession.

Fifteen years later, the younger generation was courting and moving into partnerships.

First, they had sleepovers, then holiday trips together, then they moved in together. Their baby-boomer parents moved gradually from concern, to acceptance and, finally, approval.

The younger generation was re-educating the older.

Some saw this as an erosion of values; others saw it as the emergence of common sense, replacing a strongly ingrained pre-judgement that sex was bad and dangerous.

Then they started thinking.

• Was the pill a bad thing because it allowed license, or a good thing because it allowed greater freedom?
• Was vasectomy a violation of nature, or a newly available option for alleviating anxiety?

Were the tortuous arguments of Catholic moralists based on a prejudice that sex is somehow suspect, rather than an integral part of a fully human life?

John Paul II pre-occupied with sexual morality

The 80s were dominated by Pope John Paul II's fight back on the issue.

He had a hand in framing the original encyclical and seemed pre-occupied with sexual morality.

Over a five-year period, he lectured on his Theology of the Body at the Wednesday Papal Audiences. These cerebral, rationalistic talks moved the focus of discussion of sexuality from human experience to rules and regulations.

He was an old-time student of scholastic philosophy which he propounded in the Wednesday talks and in the two encyclicals "Veritatis Splendor" and "Fides et Ratio."

Human sexuality, as a wholistic human experience, got lost in this arid universe. Was he fighting his own inner demons?

Sexual ethics, a new Church industry

John Paul II's intense pre-occupation with sexual ethics emboldened the law and order wing of the Catholic Church and created a new industry.

In 1981 he established the Pontifical Council for the Family. Its chief focus was sexual morality, especially opposition to contraception.

Under the 18 years of the controversial Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo's presidency, it was renowned for opposition to family planning, use of condoms, even as AIDS prevention, gay marriage and embryological research.

Another spinoff was the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family.

It has developed a heavily ideological course program using the JP II Theology of the Body as its ideological bedrock.

Allied to established theology schools, it grants degrees under a moral theology or bioethics rubric. George Pell promoted this institute in Australia first under the leadership of Anthony Fisher and then Peter Elliott.

Moral theologians like Charles Curran, who argued a more nuanced view of Humanae Vitae, were blackballed by the pope.

During the 37 years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI a chasm grew between an ever more entrenched, Roman, anti-sex mentality and a Catholic faithful who had adapted to a more wholistic vision of sexuality in human life and love.

Official Church ossifies

The church at large was getting freer while church officialdom dug in and ossified.

The doubters were not just pleasure seekers.

They sensed that integral humanity was at the core of their conviction. A narrow, cerebral path of study had led officialdom away from God's reality.

Margaret Farley, a leading American moral theologian, backed up this intuitive sense with her book "Just Love." Justice is the top criterion for loving - including sexual love.

At the same time, something new was crystalizing in this cauldron of ideas.

The mind of the church is formulated by the teachers ("magisterium" in Latin), but it needed to be received by the church at large to receive its final endorsement.

Reception theology now had its day. Ask Father Ormond Rush, an Australian theologian in the forefront of this study. The common sense of the faithful was solidly founded after all.

Cat out of the bag

Paul VI was shocked by the response of the church at large to his encyclical. It caused turmoil for many and departure from the church for some, including priests.

But it prompted others to formulate their conscience for themselves.

No longer is the pope's or bishop's word law. Make the case or lose the argument.

So, Humanae Vitae turned out to be a watershed moment.

Paul VI meant to settle the matter but, instead, began a movement that put conscience, reception and sexual taboo under the microscope.

John Paul II laboured for 27 years to bag the cat again - but lost.

What a roller coaster ride it has been!

But the church is, consequently, better informed and wiser.

Continue reading

• Eric Hodgens was ordained a Catholic priest in 1960. In 1973 he graduated M.A. from Melbourne University Criminology Department in 1973. For seven years he was Director of Pastoral Formation of Clergy for the Archdiocese of Melbourne. In 1965 he was appointed an Australian Army chaplain part-time. He was heavily involved in the army's Character Guidence Course program during the Vietnam National Service conscription period. He held this appointment for 15 years. Eric now blogs at Catholic View. Reproduced with permission.
• Image: La-Croix International

One offers to track my ovulation and get me pregnant.

The other offers to do the same, but promising I won't find myself in the family way.

The latter seems to be winning the war, with quirky gifs and videos showing young women waking up and gleefully taking their temperature, inputting digits into their colourful app, and being told they can throw barrier contraception to the wind that day.

It's sold as being hyper-scientific, with the founders and developers formerly working at Cern, and "without a single side-effect": unless, of course you count unintended pregnancy as a side-effect.

The novelist Olivia Sudjic, writing for the Guardian, revealed her shock at getting pregnant within months of starting to use the Natural Cycles app, and found many other women had too.

In bare bones, the app is simply the Vatican-favoured rhythm method repackaged in shiny, Silicon Valley jargon and a slick interface.

And the rhythm method doesn't have the greatest reputation as a diecast means of preventing pregnancy: the Catholic church recommend it for married couples both trying to plan and delay pregnancy, but with the very clear message that couples employing it should be open to the possibility of new life.

Happy accidents can bring as much joy as planned babies - as a Catholic, I back the church's teaching that sex is about far more than pleasure, and also comes with responsibility and consequences for you and your family.

I could use the app to try to avoid pregnancy but would have to accept pregnancy as a possible outcome of any bedroom antics.

But other women are perfectly entitled to want a contraceptive less prone to chance and failure, and deserve the truth about the app sold as super accurate.

It's unreliable because our bodies are unreliable: fertility waxes and wanes with an assortment of biological factors, and tracking ovulation is never an exact science.

It's this fact that makes the marketing behind Natural Cycles so insidious: the science is pushed hard even though the founders are physicists, not gynaecologists.

I'd no more listen to a physicist's advice on my fertility than I would let a mechanic cut my hair.

To use the app correctly, women must record their temperature at the same time each morning, immediately upon waking, before sitting up.

Many things can throw off the accuracy: oversleeping, having a fever, being hung over, insomnia, taking your temperature shortly after waking, irregular periods and polycystic ovary syndrome.

According to these criteria I couldn't have recorded a single day accurately in the last week - I've had heat-induced insomnia, slept late, woken early, had a mild hangover, and woke one morning with a slight fever.

Trying to remember all of these conditions, when the app's marketing tells you it is reliable, gives some clue as to the reason why so many women are unhappy.

But it's not surprising that promises of natural birth control are so alluring.

The side-effects of most forms of contraception are maddening.

Friends on the pill have had their weight explode, their mental health suffer, and their skin return to teenage form, with migraines drastically worsened by daily hormones. Continue reading

• Dawn Foster is a Guardian columnist who writes on politics, social affairs and economics
• Image: Inside Housing

The encyclical is known for restating Church teaching against artificial contraception. But Humanae Vitae, whose 50th anniversary falls on July 25 this year, also helps us to answer the question: Who is man and what is his whole mission?

It was Humanae Vitae that succinctly described my dignity as a human being, that as a woman I was not a second-class citizen to man. The encyclical, which mentions early on "the dignity of woman and her place in society", stresses the reciprocity and complementarity of man and woman. A woman must be revered: artificial contraception encourages a man to "disregard…her physical and emotional equilibrium" and "reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires."

Paul VI's words told me that my body and mind, both together, were esteemed—that my reason and will are valuable. I learned that my entire being is a gift, and that "love is above all fully human, a compound of sense and spirit." And finally, the encyclical showed me the depth of the moral order and the necessity that it be respected even within marriage.

True, all Church teaching touches on the question of man and his mission in life. But during this historical period when people en masse have bought the world's lie about love, marriage, and sexuality, Catholic doctrine on these matters has a special ability to draw us out of the darkness and towards God. I know I am not the only convert who has discovered in Humanae Vitae a means of grace, capable of pricking the conscience of the self-absorbed.

My tears on reading the encyclical were, I think, a sign of the unitive physical and spiritual response to truth. Our inner being always knows when we encounter it; it is part of our nature. As St Paul explained:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power, and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse, for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.

We know the truth when we see it; and the truth can bring us to conversion. When I was a physics student, I was fascinated by "phase transitions": the process by which, say, water becomes ice. Phase transitions always have a critical point where there is a definitive change from one phase to another; they also have a coexistence curve - a two-phase region where the matter is in both forms. What has always intrigued me is what happens inside these kinds of systems at the most fundamental level.

Conversion requires a change, a turning, and in my phase transition to Catholicism, it was Humanae Vitae that took me from one state of darkness to a state of less darkness. Continue reading

The encyclical, written by Pope Paul VI and issued in July 1968, specifically deems artificial contraception as being "absolutely excluded" and "intrinsically wrong".

The British clergy have signed a statement endorsing the encyclical as its 50th anniversary nears.

They argue that Humanae Vitae was prophetic.

"[It] predicted that if artificial contraception became widespread and commonly accepted by society then we would lose our proper understanding of marriage, the family, the dignity of the child and of women, and even a proper appreciation of our bodies and the gift of male and female," they say.

The priests say many people rejected the encyclical's message and warnings when it was published, finding them "difficult to accept and challenging to proclaim.

"Fifty years later, so much has unfolded in our society that has been to the detriment of human life and love", so that "Many have come to appreciate again the wisdom of the Church's teaching," the priests say.

One of the priests commented: "We hope that the Church here will now recognise the importance of Humanae Vitae and place it at the forefront of our pastoral strategies and evangelisation. This marks an important moment for the Church in this country.

"It is hard to get 100 priests - the size of an average diocese - to do anything together but to get 500 is very significant indeed".

Source

• The Tablet
• Catholic Herald
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