1.

HUMAN SEXUALITY IN A PERSONALIST PERSPECTIVE

 The interpretative contribution that comes to us from the sexual culture of our time is the
recognition of the personal values of human sexuality: its essential presence in the
development of the whole personality is the primary role it plays in growth in autonomy,
oblativity (altruism), and love.
 a dimension that totalizes and structures the person at all levels.
 Persona Humana I: In fact, it is from sex that the human person receives the
characteristics which, on the biological, psychological, and spiritual levels, make that
person a man or a woman, and thereby largely condition his or her progress towards
maturity and insertion into society.
 “Sexuality”, echoes the Congregation for Catholic Education, "is a fundamental
component of personality, one of its modes of being, of manifestation, of communicating
with others, of feeling, of expressing and of living human love…
 Sexuality touches the person to the deepest roots.

2. THE THEOLOGICAL MEANING OF SEXUALITY

 The principle, therefore, means “original manifestation” that is the pure transparency of
the divine plan for human sexuality which presides over its creative emergence from
nothingness by the will of God and which can make it possible at any moment to trace
the thread of meaning of it.
 John Paul II explains in his Catechesis on human love: [The principle] is the first
inheritance of every human being in the world, man and woman, the first attestation of
human identity according to the revealed word, the first source of the certainty of his or
her vocation as a person created in the image of God.

a. The Human Being as Being-for-Communion

 God created man in His own image and likeness: calling him to existence through love,
He called him at the same time for love. God is love and in Himself. He lives a mystery of
personal loving communion. Creating the human race in His own image and continually
keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and
thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the
fundamental and innate vocation of every human being (FC, 11).
 The human creature is created to reproduce in its own existence the divine way of being,
the way of communion and love.
 The first man is born to being as a loner; a loneliness that is precious because it founds or
makes possible his distinction from the animal world
 In the joyful acceptance of the woman, he discovers otherness as richness and value.
Adam, awakening as a man before a woman, enters into a fuller realization of his iconic
quality, which Gen 1 refers explicitly to Adam in his dual articulation of man and woman.
 The male-female articulation of the human being conceals an originally spousal sense
because sexual duality is in view of the constitution of the communion of persons in the
 image of divine communion, that is, in view of a communion of absolute, total and
mutual giving of love.
 it is not simply the giving of oneself that constitutes the way of realization of the human
being: it is rather the giving of oneself totally and to someone: every human being
intimately aspires to give himself to someone
 Whoever experiences being loved is as if reached by an intimate and penetrating
message: you are lovable, it is good that you live, the life you are and live is important, it
is precious.
 but implicitly contains the expectation of total, unique and true love, that of God.

b. The spousal meaning of male and female corporeality

 Corporeality is in some way the physical concretion of the divine project of two beings
made for the communion of persons.
 JP II: The sacrament, as a visible sign, is constituted with man as a body through his
visible masculinity and femininity.
 Man and woman are corporally spousal because from the beginning they are made for the
full communion of their persons, that is, for the spousality of their spiritual existence.
(GS #12)
 Man and woman are corporally spousal because from the beginning they are made for the
full communion of their persons, that is, for the spousality of their spiritual existence.
 This means that the body has in itself, from the beginning, the capacity to be the
linguistic medium of the first form of “communion of persons” (cf. Gaudium et spes 12).
 In fact, communion requires an exodus from the self in order to encounter the other, who
is the figure of the totally other.
 Constituting themselves as one, man and woman know each other (cf. Gen 4:1).
 The blessing is both the prospect of a task and the revealing of a constitutive
dimension of the meaning of sexuality, of the spatial and temporal reproduction of the
divine image through male-female communion.

c. The Transmission of Life as a Task-Blessing

 Mt. 19:5-6 - man abandons his family.

 It is an abandonment, in fact, that tends towards union with the woman, becoming
psychologically and socially one basar (flesh) with her.
 In that statement, the Lord further affirms that, by virtue of the abandonment and their
union, man and woman are joined by God's own design.
 The procreation of a new person occurs in the context of an intimate interpersonal
relationship as the fruit and sign of the mutual giving of the spouses, as an incarnation of
the “we” of the couple and, therefore, of the mutual self-transcendence of man and
woman.
 Procreation is an affirmation of the personal fecundity of the conjugal relationship
 The communion of man and woman, therefore, stems from a mysterious design: God
constitutes his family, almost as a way through which the communion of love of life,
which is the Trinity.
 God, thinking of the fruitful communion between man and woman
 God has thus united love and life in an original and constitutive way

3. CONJUGAL LOVE

 Conjugal love generates, constitutes, and expresses the dynamism of total and full
communion between man and woman.

a. Human love between eros and agape

 Gaudium et spes 49 strongly affirms that such a love is far superior to “mere erotic
inclination.”
 Amor concupiscentiae - the lover “seizes the beloved as object in function of his or her
own well-being
 In the sexually connoted interhuman relationship, this attitude of desire is indicated by
the term eros.
 Benevolence is simply disinterestedness in love: “I do not long for you as a good,” but
“I long for your good,” “I long for what is good for you.”
 Amor amicitiae- is loved simply and for itself
 In the love of concupiscence, the subject seeks his own good
 What every human being seeks is a love that loves him for himself, not because he
possesses certain qualities, but simply because he is him, because he exists.
 Only God, who is superabundant wealth, can love with benevolent love without ever
desiring or asking for anything, because “God is love” he is “agape” and, therefore,
benevolent love is sometimes referred to as “agapic love.”
 “Only God, who is superabundant wealth, can love with benevolent love without ever
desiring or asking for anything, because “God is love” he is “agape” and, therefore,
benevolent love is sometimes referred to as “agapic love.”
 It is precisely conjugal love that shows how the two loves are not in contradiction,
because, after all, love is a single reality, albeit with different dimensions: amor
amicitiae and amor concupiscentiae recall each other.

b. The characteristics of conjugal love

 In conjugal love, there is full reciprocity of gift between man and woman.
 It is based on the “equal dignity” of man and woman and necessarily implies unity, since
a full reciprocal giving of the whole person
 , these actions promote mutual self-giving by which spouses enrich each other with a
joyful and a ready will. (GS 49)
 There are acts which, being proper to the conjugal condition, are authentic only in the
context of married life, since they are a physical expression of it (physical intimacy
expresses the intimacy of persons and lives) and are also the physical and joyful
experience of the unity constituted by that condition. (full effort) of the spousal unin
 Authentic growth in conjugal love necessarily leads to openness to the gift of life and
cooperation with God's creative love.

c. Conjugal Love and Virginity

Familiaris Consortio 11:

 Christian revelation recognizes two specific ways of realizing the vocation of the human
person in its entirety, to love: marriage and virginity or celibacy. Either one is, in its own
 proper form, an actuation of the most profound truth of man, of his being “created in the
image of God.”
 Christian revelation recognizes two specific ways of realizing the vocation of the human
person in its entirety, to love: marriage and virginity or celibacy. Either one is, in its own
proper form, an actuation of the most profound truth of man, of his being “created in the
image of God.” (FC)
 This idea is precious because it grasps the profound unity between virginal life and
conjugal life.
 The vocation to conjugal love, in fact, must not be considered a generic vocation, almost
as if it were a simple way of correctly transmitting human life.
 Every human person is called to existence in love, to actualize love and to enter into
communion with Love according to his or her own distinct vocation, his or her own way
of acting out the image.
 Conjugality is the sign of the love of Christ the Bridegroom, but it - like every
sacramental reality - is destined to decline in the new and definitive condition of the
coming Kingdom.
 Virginity anticipates, in the torment of the not-yet, the ecstasy of undivided love for the
Beloved in the future world and proclaims in the time of the Church the beginning of the
last times.

4. CONJUGAL LOVE AND MARRIAGE

a. Origin and Goods of Marriage in GS

 Conjugal love is embodied in a stable relational structure centered on the couple and their
mutual commitment to life, marriage
 The primary origin of marriage is in the Creator.
 One enters into this status through an act in which the man and the woman reciprocally
give and receive each other, freely, consciously, definitively.
 Gaudium et spes gives some new ideas in the perception of marriage: the idea of the
giving of persons, of intimacy, of personal communion.
 GS 48: consent is the reciprocal donation of persons in an irrevocable pact, a pact which
allows all the biblical richness of the idea of covenant to resound.
 Matrimonial consent is an act of will by which a man and a woman by an irrevocable
covenant mutually give and accept one another with the purpose of establishing a
marriage.

b. the essential properties of marriage.

 “The essential properties of marriage are unity and indissolubility; in Christian marriage
they acquire a distinctive firmness by reason of the sacrament.”
 UNITY: Unity means that marriage is the union of one man with one woman.
 Consequently, polygamy as well as polyandry, that is, every form of simultaneous
polygamy, are contradictory to the creaturely truth of marriage.
 Unity is also radically violated by every infidelity, which establishes with a third person a
relationship made up of elements proper to the conjugal relationship.
 Unity is not opposed to successive or serial polygamy.
  INDISSOLUBILITY: It means that marriage cannot be dissolved either by an
authority external to the spouses (extrinsic indissolubility) or by the spouses
themselves (intrinsic indissolubility).
 In the first place, indissolubility is placed in relation to the very character of conjugal
communion and the total donation that characterizes it. Total donation implies the
dimension of time, of the future: in the yes of marriage, the entire future with the other is
understood and accepted.
 Indissolubility is also certainly linked to the objective good of children.
 These are the two directions indicated by Gaudium et spes 48:
 “As a mutual gift of two persons, this intimate union and the good of the children impose
total fidelity on the spouses and argue for an unbreakable oneness between them.”

5. THE ETHICAL ATTITUDE OF CHRISTIANS IN THE FIELD OF SEXUALITY

 Man is seen as a dynamic subject of drives/desires/projects whose realization coincides

with the ability to satisfy these drives/desires/projects and whose fundamental right is the
right to happiness, that is, to self-fulfillment.
 In this vision, sexuality is the eminent place of the subjective search for happiness and is
in the function of it.
 Man is a being called to fulfill his own existence in the realization of love for God and for
his brothers and sisters, to build himself progressively as a being of communion and self-
giving, to become a faithful servant of good and truth.
 The task of realizing oneself in truth and authenticity is first of all entrusted to the
individual, to the responsibility for himself that he has before God.
 However, this task is also entrusted to those who have the task of educating the
individual, since the man cannot assume responsibility for his own life if not
progressively and through educational gestation.
 Finally, it is the task of the ecclesial community to help every member of the faithful to
grow in the truth of love by announcing the Gospel on sexuality and love and indicating
concrete strategies with which the perennial values of God's plan can be implemented in
the context of today's problems and sensitivities.

a. Chastity as an Ethical Attitude of Christians in the Field of Sexuality

 The ethical attitude in the field of sexuality is traditionally called chastity.

 Historically, the understanding of the contents of chastity depends on the becoming itself
of the understanding of sexuality because chastity is the attitude to live the truth of
sexuality.
 In general, chastity leads the person to progressively integrate the sexual, emotional, and
erotic energies into the existential project and direct them to authentic love.
 The virtue of chastity directs the path of each one toward a harmonious integration of
sexual energies, the capacity to love, experiences, desires in the unitary project of the
person.
 The virtue of chastity appears, in this way, as the virtue which allows each one to be
faithful to his own love and which indicates to the person the way of carrying out the
truth of love and in particular the truth of the spousal language of the body.
 “Chastity,” wrote K. Wojtyla, “is the transparency of interiority, without which love is
not love.”
 Familiaris consortio 33 states:
 In the Christian view, chastity by no means signifies rejection of human sexuality or lack
of esteem for it: rather it signifies spiritual energy capable of defending love from the
perils of selfishness and aggressiveness, and able to advance it towards its full
realization.

2. Regulatory Guidelines regarding Sexual Union

 From the normative point of view, there is no doubt that, according to the current
magisterium, the physical union, to which sexuality is bodily ordered, is good only
when it is an expression of the union of the lives of man and woman, of their total
reciprocal self-giving, or rather of their conjugal love in the double dimension of
unity and fecundity.
 An exemplary text, in this regard, is found in Persona humana 5, which reworks a
significant passage from Gaudium et spes 49:
 These [acts of sexual union], based on the nature of the human person and his acts,
preserve the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of
true love.

THREE GENERAL NORMS:

1. . Do not separate sexual union from marital love : The first normative indication is
the inseparability of sexual union (and therefore of the complete exercise of bodily
and in particular genital sexuality) from conjugal love. Marital love is the only
humanly significant context for sexual union.
 The man and the woman must not and cannot be reduced to a means, to an
instrument for pleasure, to a corporeal thing to be simply manipulated.
 They are more than ever protected here by the personalist principle: “It is
never permissible to treat the person as a means.” This principle has an
absolutely universal significance.
2. Do not separate the unitive and procreative meaning of the conjugal act: Every act
of sexual union, placing itself as an expressive language of conjugal love, must preserve
the character of total mutual acceptance-giving which is proper to conjugal love and
reflect its characteristics of unity and fruitfulness.
 Familiaris consortio 32 makes clear reference to this contradiction when it
judges the anthropological content of the contraceptive choice:
 Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband
and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory
language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to
a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of
conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality.
3. Do not separate procreation from sexual union: The conjugal act is only one of the
possible ways to generate a human creature and therefore appears increasingly
replaceable and not necessary (cf. Donum vitae II, B, 6 Dignitas personae, n. 12).
 The act of conjugal love that makes the human birth of man possible is precisely the
conjugal act, the bodily expression of conjugal love.
 Procreation is seen as a function not intrinsically but only contingently linked to the
union of love between man and woman. We read in Donum vitae II, B, 4:
 The same doctrine concerning the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and
between the goods of marriage throws light on the moral problem of homologous
artificial fertilization, since "it is never permitted to separate these different aspects
to such a degree as positively to exclude either the procreative intention or the
conjugal relation" (Pius XII).