Roman Catholic Marital Sexual Ethics. It is chapter 7, in its entirety, from that book.
But I am making the text available free online in order to counter the many
anonymous false teachers online who promote grave sexual sins within the
Catholic Sacrament of Marriage, as if these sins were good and holy.
There are many false teachers in the world today. These teachers will tell you that
various sexual sins are not sins at all. They will claim that contraception is not always immoral, or that it is not gravely immoral.
They will explain to you that abortion is justifiable in one circumstance or another.
They will claim that there are no sexual sins within the marital bedroom.
Why do they speak this way? It is because the sexual sins of humanity are among
the most popular sins in the present age. So there is no shortage of teachers who
quickly gain a large audience by claiming that these grave sins are not evil, but good.
Here is what the Holy Spirit says, in Sacred Scripture, about such persons:
{1:6} Certain persons, wandering away from these things, have been turned aside to
empty babbling,
{1:7} desiring to be teachers of the law, but understanding neither the things that they themselves are saying, nor what they are affirming about these things.
Concerning marital sexual ethics, there is also no shortage of teachers who will tell you
that a married couple may commit any type of sexual act in the marital bedroom.
Many of these false teachers will specifically claim that the Church has approved,
or that the Church allows, all manner of unnatural sexual acts, such as are committed
by the most sinful of unbelievers.
But when asked to provide a magisterial document or any source within the teaching of
the Church to support such a claim, they are unable to do so.
These false teachers tell their audience that "the Church permits" all manner of sinful behavior and unnatural acts in the marital bedroom, and their listeners accept this
answer without question, because sexual sins are very popular in the world today.
But such is not the truth.
In fact, the Magisterium has never approved or allowed or permitted or justified any
type of unnatural sexual act in the marital bedroom. Only natural marital relations open
to life is worthy of the Sacrament of holy Matrimony.
This type of sexual act alone is unitive and procreative and marital.
This type of sexual actalone is moral. Inherently immoral types of sexual acts
are not justified by being used as a type of foreplay,nor by being done in the context
of a moral act of natural marital relations open to life.
USCCB Catechism: "Each and every sexual act in a marriage needs to be open to the possibility of conceiving a child."[1]
The Magisterium has specifically, definitively, and repeatedly taught that, to be
moral, as Humanae Vitae phrased it, "each and every marital act must of necessity
retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life."[2] The Catechism of the Catholic Church and many other magisterial documents have taught that the morality
of human acts cannot be judged only by intentions and the circumstances that supply
their context.
Certain kinds of acts, including certain kinds of sexual acts, are always gravely illicit, regardless of intention or circumstances.[3] This less popular answer is supported by
many magisterial documents, as well as by the basic principles of ethics taught by the Church.
hen the moral object is deprived of a good required by the moral law, the act itself is intrinsically evil.
Non-marital sexual acts are intrinsically evil, because the moral object is deprived
of the marital meaning.
Non-unitive sexual acts are intrinsically evil, because the moral object is deprived
of the unitive meaning.
Non-procreative sexual acts are intrinsically evil, because the moral object is
deprived of the procreative meaning.
Without any exception at all, the moral object of each and every sexual act
must have all three meanings in order to be good.
The deprivation of any one or more of these three meanings makes the act itself
intrinsically evil and always gravely immoral.
Ronald L. Conte Jr., Roman Catholic theologian and Bible translator