By Nathan Schlueter, Public Discourse.
This background should prepare us for a more positive account of sexual morality that not only supports the right conclusions, but does so in a way that allows us to affirm the intrinsic goodness of sexual desire and sexual pleasure while connecting them to the great goods of marital friendship and procreation.
First published in 1960, Love and Responsibility by Karol Wojtyła (later Pope John Paul II) remains one of the best books ever written on human sexuality. It seems almost providential that the book was published in the same year the FDA approved the “the Pill,” which opened the floodgates to the cultural tsunami known as the sexual revolution and forced the Christian world to reexamine its traditional teachings on sexual morality.
In light of the fierce polemics that followed the sexual revolution and continue to this day, it is easy to miss how revolutionary Love and Responsibility really was. Eight years before Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed traditional Christian teaching against artificial contraception over considerable internal and external opposition, Wojtyła offered an original and powerful moral argument in support of that teaching.
But he also defended the unitive, and not just procreative, good of the conjugal act, the use of natural family planning (what he called “periodic continence”), and the legitimate role of sexual desire and pleasure in marital intercourse. Remarkably, none of these was simply a given in traditional Christian sexual ethics. Indeed, it seems possible that a contrary teaching, found in thinkers as diverse as St. Augustine and Immanuel Kant, was at least tacitly, if not explicitly, taught in seminary training, catechesis, and spiritual direction. This would help explain a common and persistent, although false, claim made by defenders of the sexual revolution, and reflected in the personal experience of many individuals, that Christianity is based on a negative view of the human body and sexuality.
From the beginning, Christianity has always defended the goodness of the body, marriage, and procreation, but the grounds for that defense have not always been clear or consistent. Moreover, how one understands those grounds can profoundly affect how these goods are experienced.