Download PDF - Knights of Columbus, Supreme Council

INTRODUCTION
In some ways the teaching of the Catholic Church on sexual
ethics is well known. Most people know what the Church teaches.
Her basic teaching is this: one can rightly choose to exercise one’s
genital sexual powers only when one, as a spouse, freely chooses to
engage in the conjugal act and, in that act, chooses to respect fully
the goods of mutual self-giving and of human procreation. From
this it follows that it is never morally right to unite sexually outside
of marriage, i.e., to fornicate or commit adultery, or to masturbate
or commit sodomy, i.e., have oral or anal intercourse, whether with
a person of the opposite or of the same sex, nor ought one
intentionally to bring about or maintain sexual arousal unless in
preparation for the conjugal act.
Unfortunately, a great many people, including large numbers
of Catholics, do not know why the Church teaches this. Many
believe that her teaching is anti-sex, rigoristic and repressive,
completely unrealistic and indeed inhuman. Some, among them
influential Catholic theologians, charge that “official” Catholic
sexual teaching is based on an untenable, “physicalistic” view of
natural law, one that makes persons slaves to their biology and one
completely irreconcilable with a “personalistic” understanding of
the moral order.
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