Fr. James Keenan: Church Needs a Theology Where Sexuality Is a Gift, Not Curse

“The tradition on sexual ethics led us not to greatness but to negativity and minutiae,“ writes Fr. James Keenan, S.J. a leading Catholic ethicist. In National Catholic Reporter, Keenan traces the historical development of Catholic sexual ethics, showing how it has become increasingly restrictive and negative over time—an analysis with clear implications for LGBTQ+ issues.

Keenan’s historical perspective refutes conservative claims about the “consistency” of church teaching condemning non-heteronormative sexual activity. The priest, a professor at Boston College, describes in his essay how “a series of fairly negative accretions were added one upon another until, in the 17th century we have basically an absolutely negative estimation of sexual desires.”

The term “sin against nature,” coined in the 11th century, meant “to use the member for an illegitimate use”—put more bluntly, “that the semen went elsewhere than the ‘fit vessel’ [womb] and by going elsewhere the sin was ‘unnatural.’” This idea drew a firm line between potentially-procreative sex and every other type of sexual activity. Keenan explains the impact of this idea on the trajectory of sexual ethics:

“From Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas until the 20th century, the moral treatises distinguished between sexual sins ‘in accordance with nature’ and those ‘contrary to nature.’ While the former could include fornication, adultery, incest and even rape, in general the latter sins (solitary or mutual masturbation, contraception, anal or oral intercourse, bestiality) were considered more grievous, such was the obsession with the finality of semen and the ‘fit vessel.’ That masturbation was so long and consistently taught to be more grievous than rape might give us pause about the argument from consistency. And, it might also suggest how inadequately grievous rape was considered by the celibate theologians.”

Three centuries later, the notion of “intrinsic evil” appropriated this concept and built upon it, stating that any action against nature was “absolutely, always wrong regardless of circumstance.” Keenan writes that with this move, “All sexual acts against nature were now classified as intrinsically evil…No circumstances could mitigate their sinfulness.”

Keenan introduces one final important term, “parvity of matter,” which, by the 18th century, church authorities were using to cement sexual sins in a category of moral condemnation all their own. This idea “locked into place the teaching that all sexual desires and subsequent activity were always mortally sinful unless it was the conjugal action of spouses who assured that their ‘act’ was in itself left open to procreation.” The claim that no sexual sin could be simply a venial one singled out sexuality as a particularly grave sin. “Notably this position did not apply to any of the other commandments,” Keenan says, pointing to the special brand of negativity reserved for sexual sin within the Catholic moral tradition.

Keenan is quick to acknowledge that this negative view of sexuality arose from the personal experiences (or lack thereof) of those making the rules: “For the most part, the teachings derive from the concerns of celibate men who, while pursuing a life of holiness, found sexual desires to be obstacles rather than aids in that pursuit.” Early condemnations of masturbation, for example, applied only to monks and nuns who had taken vows of chastity. Only centuries later was this standard applied to all Christians, regardless of vocation. Keenan summarizes:

“In effect, just as the monk in the first millennium sought through ascetical practices to integrate himself body and soul but at the cost of dispensing with his own sexual desires, so too, in the second millennium […] celibate church theologians managed to take away from the laity any sense of the legitimacy of sexual love and any sense that those desires could ever lead to anything good except under certain very clear conditions for procreative marital relations.”

Keenan argues that as the church deals with the clergy sexual abuse crisis and the ill effects of its negative sexual ethics, it has a responsibility to “articulat[e] a theology of sexual ethics that sees sexuality as a gift and not a curse.” He concludes “Indeed, if anything is clear here, it is that the experiential wisdom of the laity needs to be fully engaged in the articulation of these much-needed teachings.”

One might add that the participation of LGBTQ+ laity is particularly important in this process of the church reevaluating its ideas and teachings about sexual ethics. Indeed, only with the representation of LGBTQ+ voices can the church hope to generate, in Keenan’s words “a Christian life-giving, love-oriented sexual ethics worthy of its name.”

—Ariell Watson Simon (she/her), New Ways Ministry, January 25, 2024