When secular society represents marriage as if it justifies every sexual sin, it corrupts marriage to such a grave extent that the term pornification is fitting. When secular society approves of same-sex marriage, it thereby implicitly approves of unnatural sexual acts. The claim that two persons of the same gender can marry is a severe corruption of the truth about marriage and about sexual ethics. Again, the term pornification is apt.

But there is an important distinction to be made between true and false marriage. True marriage consists of two types, a merely natural marriage, such as prevailed before the Christian Sacraments were established by Christ, and the Sacrament of Marriage. Among natural marriages, the highest form is that among the Jews in Old Testament times, for they married without the Sacrament, but with an explicit acknowledgement of the law of God concerning marriage.

By comparison, false marriage is simply no marriage at all. A merely legal marriage may be nothing other than fornication, accompanied by a legal document that carries no weight before the eyes of God. It is impossible for same-sex marriage to be anything other than a false marriage, an empty claim, a mere legality that is contrary to natural law and the eternal moral law.

In sinful secular society, more and more marriages are of the false type, even among heterosexual couples. The man and woman do not acknowledge God, do not acknowledge that marriage is a binding lifelong commitment. They feel free to divorce and remarry, repeatedly, for any reason. It is not surprising then, that among such couples every form of grave sexual sin is accepted: pornography, unnatural sexual acts, natural intercourse with contraception, and all manner of other disorders in their bedroom. The pornification of such false marriages consists not only in watching pornography, but also in acting according to the behavior found in such material. A couple with a false marriage sins, for they have deliberately spurned true marriage. But they sin even more gravely as they continue to pursue mere pleasure in the bedroom, with no regard for morality, no regard for true love of God and one another. The end result, in the more severe cases, is a pornification of their marriage. They treat one another as sexual objects, and, if they ever had the state of grace, they lose it by the degradation of the good of human sexuality.

The same process can occur in a true marriage, of the natural kind. The married couple are truly married, but not as a Sacrament. This type of marriage still occurs today among unbaptized couples, and (in my understanding) in a marriage between a baptized person and an unbaptized person. (For in the latter example, the marriage can be annulled; but the true Sacrament of Marriage allows for no annulment.) However, two baptized Christians can only have the highest type of marriage: the Sacrament of holy Matrimony.

Pope Pius XI: “And since the valid matrimonial consent among the faithful was constituted by Christ as a sign of grace, the sacramental nature is so intimately bound up with Christian wedlock that there can be no true marriage between baptized persons ‘without it being by that very fact a sacrament.’ ” [Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, n. 39.]

But some of the worst examples of the pornification of marriage are found among spouses who have the Sacrament of Marriage, especially among Catholic spouses, despite having access to the full teaching of the Church to guide them. The influence of concupiscence, the ordinary temptation of the flesh that all fallen human persons experience, is not solely to blame. For they commit the same types of sexual sins as prevail in sinful secular society. And as the sins that prevail change from time to time, so also do their sins change. It could not be more clear that many Catholic spouses are behaving in the marital bedroom according to the sins of secular society, not according to the ethical teachings of the Church.

What percentage of married Catholic couples use contraception? The exact number is unknown, but it is evident from many sources that the percentage is alarmingly high. The vast majority of Catholic spouses use contraception, despite the constant teaching of the Church that contraception is intrinsically evil; it is always immoral and never justifiable.

This use of contraception is part of the pornification of marriage. For when spouses use contraception, they deliberately choose an act that is inherently directed at depriving sexual acts of the procreative meaning. The result is that marital sex is seen as a source of pleasure, an entertainment rather than a source of new life. The glorification of sex for pleasure within marriage, as found in the false versions of the theology of the body, is closely related to the use of contraception. The latter is the evil means and the former is the evil end. Seeking pleasure alone, for its own sake, is immoral even within marriage. And contraception is one of the main means used by society to deprive sex of its procreative meaning, and so distort its highest end toward a baser purpose.

This connection between contraception and the degradation of sexuality was noted in the well-known encyclical Humanae Vitae:

Pope Paul VI: “Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men’s baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities.” [Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, n. 22.]

Modern means of communication spreads obscenity and indecency, and this harms many human values, including chaste marriage. The rejection of limits on the mass media, “in the name of art or culture” or freedom is an absurd argument. For immorality is indefensible. Notice the connection that Pope Paul VI makes, in his encyclical against contraception, between “the modern means of social communication” and decreasing moral standards on sexual ethics. His observations were prophetic; he was proven correct by the degradation of sexual morals in subsequent decades. And as a result, the use of sexuality in marriage among many Catholics has gone from indecent to obscene to pornographic.

A Catholic marriage should be chaste, such that sexual expression occurs only in natural marital relations open to life, and such that the primary purpose intended by God — the threefold marital, unitive, and procreative meaning — is always first. Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical called ‘Chaste Marriage’ or Casti Connubii. And Pope Pius XII gave an address to physicians and midwives in which he offered the same teaching on chastity in marriage, namely, that pleasure is never first.

Pope Pius XII: “If nature had aimed exclusively, or at least in the first place, at a reciprocal gift and possession of the married couple in joy and delight, and if it had ordered that act only to make happy in the highest possible degree their personal experience, and not to stimulate them to the service of life, then the Creator would have adopted another plan in forming and constituting the natural act. Now, instead, all this is subordinated and ordered to that unique, great law of the ‘generatio et educatio prolis,’ [the generation and education of offspring] namely the accomplishment of the primary end of matrimony as the origin and source of life.” [Pope Pius XII, Address to Midwives, 29 October 1951.]

The holy Pontiff is not saying, nor am I, that pleasure in natural marital relations is sinful. But when pleasure as an end takes the place of the marital, unitive, and procreative meanings (which are a reflection of the virtues of faith, love, and hope), then even the natural act is sinful (by a bad intention, to put pleasure first). When pleasure is treated as the highest good, then the couple are easily led astray by false Catholic teachers, who justify all manner of unnatural sexual acts, on various flimsy excuses, in order to achieve pleasure.

Pope Pius XII: “Unfortunately, unceasing waves of hedonism invade the world and threaten to submerge in the swelling tide of thoughts, desires and acts the whole marital life, not without serious dangers and grave prejudice to the primary duty of husband and wife.” [Ibid.]

The Pontiff understood the influence of the hedonistic (pleasure-seeking) world on Catholic marriages. This influence threatens the highest purpose of marriage, procreation, by means of contraception, abortifacient contraception, and surgical abortions. This influence threatens the graces that should be part of the marriage relationship at all times, even in the marital bedroom. For the intrinsically evil acts that are encouraged by the secular world are grave sins; the more that these grave sins are accepted and practiced by Catholics, the further they move from the grace of God. Eventually, they may commit one actual mortal sin or another, whether of interior lust or exterior sinful acts. It is just as Mary said at Fatima, many marriages are sinful, and sins of the flesh are the primary reason that souls are sent to Hell.

Pope Pius XII: “No; the gravity and sanctity of the Christian moral law do not admit an unchecked satisfaction of the sexual instinct tending only to pleasure and enjoyment; they do not permit rational man to let himself be mastered to such an extent, neither as regards the substance nor the circumstances of the act.” [Ibid.]

The sins against “the substance” of the marital act are those sexual acts that are intrinsically evil. The moral substance (or moral nature, or moral species) of any act is determined by the inherent ordering of that act towards its moral object. Unnatural sexual acts are sinful due to the substance of the act.

The sins against “the circumstances” of the act, and we could add here sins of intention as well, are sin that are committed by making pleasure the highest goal, even in the natural act. The Pontiff condemns both types of sin. And notice that he does not justify unnatural sexual acts as foreplay, or because the unnatural acts occur in the context of one natural act. There is no such justification for these types of intrinsically evil sexual acts in any magisterial document. And yet many persons loudly proclaim that the Church permits, what She in fact condemns.

The above article is an excerpt from my Kindle book: Roman Catholic Marital Sexual Ethics

by
Ronald L. Conte Jr.
Roman Catholic theologian and
translator of the Catholic Public Domain Version of the Bible.