Sexual Morality, Pope Francis, and Ascetic Christianity
To the chagrin of many Catholics, Pope Francis’s pontificate has tended to deemphasize the gravity of sexual sins. The Pope has stated on more than one occasion that sexual sins or “sins of the flesh” are far less serious than other sins, especially “sins of the spirit.” His remarks are problematic because virtues like chastity and temperance matter a great deal in Catholic teaching and theology. As the sexual revolution advances, will it now face little protest or resistance from its major adversary, the Catholic Church?
The Eclipse of Traditional Sexual Morality
In a 2018 book-length interview, the Pope initially conveyed his convictions about the seriousness of sexual transgressions, stating:
There is a great danger for preachers, and it is that of condemning only the morality that is—pardon me—“below the belt.” But other sins that are more serious, hatred, envy, pride, vanity, killing another, taking a life . . . these are rarely mentioned.
He goes on to explain that “sins of the flesh are the lightest sins, because the flesh is weak.” On the other hand, the most dangerous sins are those of the spirit. “I’m talking about angelism,” the Pope explains. “Pride, vanity are sins of angelism.”
Pope Francis’s statements, however, are highly dubious. First, as he has done so often, the Pope constructs a convenient straw man: the impassioned Catholic preacher preoccupied with sexual sins who glibly dismisses many other moral transgressions. Yet Catholics rarely hear homilies that address sexual misbehavior or condemn sexual perversion. Second, and more importantly, the Pope’s remarks falsely minimize the gravity of sexual sin and sensual egoism. While he doesn’t deny that promiscuity, pornography, masturbation, or other deviant acts are sinful, he believes that we need not worry about them very much. The Pope highlights his admiration for a cardinal who confided to him that when someone confesses these sins “below the belt,” he immediately responds, “I understand, let’s move on.” In this way, the cardinal allows the penitent to perceive that “there are other mistakes that are much more important.”
More recently, during his 2023 visit to Portugal for World Youth Day, the Pope lamented that the Church still scrutinizes the “sins of the flesh” with a “magnifying glass” just as it has “done so long for the sixth commandment” (You shall not commit adultery). Other evils, such as the exploitation of workers, lying, and cheating, were minimized, while “sins below the waist were relevant.” Pope Francis went on to elaborate that these sins require sensitivity and creative pastoral care. Given their wide scope and complexity, there is no simple or uniform solution, especially if one considers the relevant cultural milieu. He implied the diminished authority of traditional virtues such as purity and chastity, which apparently are not efficacious in every moral context. These striking remarks were all the more disorienting because they were uttered in the shadow of Fatima, where the Blessed Mother told Jacinta that more souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason. If we want to heed Mary’s admonition, we must take these sins very seriously and treat them with a sense of urgency. Yet the Pope suggested that just the opposite is true.
The Pope’s relaxed attitude toward sexual sin is also reflected in papal documents such as the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia and the declaration Fiducia Supplicans, promulgated by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and approved by Pope Francis. Amoris Laetitia opens the door for those in adulterous second marriages to receive the Holy Eucharist, especially those individuals “not in a position” to “fully carry out the objective demands” of the divine prohibition against adultery. Fiducia Supplicans sanctions the blessing of same-sex couples, but avoids any mention of “grave sin” or the need for “conversion” when discussing their “irregular unions.” Nor is there any reference to how these sexual relations flout the natural language of the body. While the document itself explicitly refers to the blessing of same-sex couples and those in other irregular unions, the Pope later claimed that these blessings were to be conferred on individuals in the relationship. These contradictions have generated immense confusion, but the implicit logic of Fiducia Supplicans aligns perfectly with the Pope’s beliefs: if sexual disorder is not such a serious offense, what can be so improper about blessing irregular and same-sex unions that fail to live up to the ideal of indissoluble, monogamous marriage?
The “Flesh is Weak” Argument
To justify the gnostic belief that sins of the flesh are comparatively trivial next to sins of the spirit, the Pope relies on the premise that the “flesh is weak.” He clearly asserts in Amoris Laetitia that some of the faithful are virtually powerless to follow the commandments that pertain to sexual morality. The ultimate reason for this impotence is our fallen nature, which strikes at the ground of our being and disposes us to various forms of noetic and moral frailty. However, that frailty absolves no rational person, young or old, from moral responsibility. The person does not forfeit his or her properly formed conscience, which is the ground of all moral authenticity. Yet some people are content to blindly follow their sexual impulses and eventually find themselves immersed in a sinful morass. The urge to satisfy one’s libido can manifest itself in many ways, such as the consumption of pornography. But this errant impulse can quickly evolve into a crippling obsession that disrupts a person’s mature self-possession. Saint Augustine, no stranger to the struggle against concupiscence, describes how “lust served became a custom and custom not resisted became necessity” (Confessions, 8:5). Thus, is it really prudent to tell someone who confesses this sin to “move on” because the sin is not that important? Shouldn’t a good confessor warn the penitent of the possibility of addiction or other dangers when he habitually indulges his carnal energies in this manner?
Because of our fallen and finite nature, we are all burdened with the impediment of concupiscence. But we are not victims or helpless creatures determined in our actions by the imperatives of biology. Every rational, mature person has the power to resist lustful pleasures through a disciplined free will, especially with the help of the sacraments. To suggest otherwise is to manifest little confidence in the efficacy of those sacraments and the graces they provide. As St. John Paul II observes in Veritatis Splendor,
when we contemplate man’s capabilities, “of which man are we speaking? Of man dominated by lust or of man redeemed by Christ? This is what is at stake: the reality of Christ’s redemption. Christ has redeemed us. This means that he has given us the possibility of realizing the entire truth of our being; he has set our freedom free from the domination of concupiscence.
The true remedy for concupiscence and the avoidance of disordered sexuality is chastity. This great and belittled virtue demands absolute conjugal fidelity for married couples and abstinence for the unmarried. It is the obvious pathway to moral integrity and a proper order within one’s sexual life.
The Triumph of Secularism
The Pope’s polemic is also disconcerting because it signals a further retreat from “ascetic Christianity,” which gives proper recognition to the transcendent virtue of chastity. Decades ago, the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce foresaw how the tradition of ascetic Christianity would be replaced by a “secularized Christianity” that would sweep away the “passive and mortifying virtues” such as purity and chastity. In this way, the Church would be transformed into an extension of the corrupted secular culture. In The Crisis of Modernity, Del Noce explains how these “private” and passive virtues would soon become inferior to the “public” virtues of charity and justice that supposedly “advance the human condition.” With this division of the virtues in place, the Christian mission is reduced to “building a better world” instead of union with Christ through asceticism and self-sacrifice.
Moreover, insistence on the inferiority of these private virtues encourages the contemporary Christian to advance boldly into the shadowy light of a new sexual morality. According to Del Noce, if the battle against eroticism and pornography is no more than a flickering struggle against the darkness because the flesh is so weak, there is little ground for moral censure. Hence, there must be a new attitude toward sexuality, “a complete liberalization, and thus . . . a complete reversal of the traditional Catholic position.” This is precisely the direction intimated by Pope Francis’s unfortunate comments that signal a loosening of the Church’s moral standards.
This retreat from asceticism and the unity of the virtues certainly did not originate with the Francis pontificate. Its roots lie in the rejection of Humanae Vitae by the Catholic hierarchy and the clergy who did little to defend its embattled author, Pope Paul VI. This maligned encyclical sought in vain to reaffirm the generative purpose of marriage and resist the degeneration of the conjugal relationship into pure hedonism. But as the sexual revolution intensified, Church leaders became more reluctant to exhort Catholics to experience self-transcendence through self denial. While the Church has done a reasonably good job of affirming the absolute prohibition on abortion, it has failed to address the contraceptive mentality that has contributed to our contemporary abortion culture.
The Pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI strongly supported Humanae Vitae and reinforced the Church’s traditional doctrine on the gravity of sexual sin. But we know now that their witness and writings have had little effect on the current ecclesial hierarchy, formed as it was by the decadent moral theology of the 1970s. Hence many unreflective bishops and cardinals agree with Pope Francis’s heterodox views or seek to soften the Church’s teaching on sexual morality. Luxembourg’s Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, for example, has often argued that the Church’s doctrine on same-sex relations is woefully outdated. According to Hollerich, while some homosexual couples can live a chaste life, “calling others to chastity seems like speaking Egyptian to them.”
Ascetic Christianity, which firmly opposes our eroticized and therapeutic culture, is authentic Christianity. It does not divide the virtues but preserves their unity. There can be no justice without chastity because the unchaste person unjustly uses another or himself for sexual pleasure. At the same time, uncontrolled desire for sexual pleasure undermines the virtue of prudence. According to Aquinas, “pleasure above all corrupts the estimate of prudence, and chiefly sexual pleasure which absorbs the mind and draws it to sensible delight” (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 53, a. 6). The tradition of ascetic Christianity is also firmly anchored in the teaching of Jesus and the witness of the martyrs. Jesus praises the pure of heart and admonishes the man who looks lustfully at a woman because he “has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5: 27-8).
Lust is not trivial. It undermines the dignity of the human body and deprives sexuality of its profound meaning. In addition, Jesus’s instruction on adultery and the indissolubility of marriage could not be clearer: “Moses because of the hardness of hearts allowed divorce, but from the beginning it was not so; and I say that whoever puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery; and she, if she marries another, commits adultery too” (Matthew 19: 4-9).
Fidelity to the Gospel
Pope Francis seeks to lighten the burden of these emphatic and unambiguous teachings by invoking the “weakness of the flesh.” However, the apostles and their successors, and indeed the whole Church until several decades ago, firmly believed in the gravity of sexual perversion and the capability of “redeemed man” to resist the seductive attraction of concupiscence. To deny these truths is to deny fundamental teachings of the Gospel. According to the Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum, that Gospel, entrusted to the apostles, is “the source of all saving truth and all moral teaching.”
Image by Mapics and licensed via Adobe Stock.