Research Paper

April 6, 2010

 

One of the most well known (if not necessarily frequently followed) teachings of the Catholic Church is its injunction on sexual activity before marriage. Throughout much of the Church’s history, its clear position on sex was that it was appropriate to and should be reserved for the confines of marriage. Apologists from St. Paul to St. Thomas Aquinas spent considerable time explaining the Catholic position on the proper view and practice of sex.

 

But as societal changes made its message ever more counter-cultural and unpopular in popular culture, the clarity of the Church’s stance on preserving sexual activity for marriage was often called into question. Many began to disagree with its achievability or desirability, and modern philosophers and theologians called for a reexamination of some of the previously unquestioned elements of the Church’s teachings on sexuality. As technology, gender roles, and society went through unbelievable transformations, traditional teachings on contraception, divorce, and the very purpose of sex were questioned and often thrown aside, and today many Catholics have “voted with their feet,” ignoring the Church’s doctrine regarding sexual morality. (1)

 

Unsurprisingly, one of the areas in which new perspectives are often forcefully advocated and old ones ignored is in the realm of pre-marital sex.While some who called for a new approach to pre-marital sex thought the Church’s position to be weak by virtue of being outdated, many theologians sought to use the Christian tradition to build a convincing case for a more contemporary understanding of sexuality. One argument that deserves special attention is one that attempts to make a distinction between pre-marital sex and what they call pre-ceremonial sex – sex that occurs in a committed relationship but before the marriage is performed.

 

In Love, Reason, and God’s Story, David Cloutier defines this as an act between a couple who is “committed to marriage in the future, but for various reasons (economic, educational, etc.) cannot get married at the present time. In essence, the marital commitment is already there even if the ceremony has not yet happened.” (2) If this distinction is a valid one, the impact to the more traditional Catholic view of sexual morality would be clear and startling, demonstrating that the old view is, in fact, incomplete, and incapable of adapting to the realities of modern day society.

 

Writing in 1971, John Dedek gave a good summary of many of the theological arguments calling for a reexamination of the Church’s teaching on premarital sex in his book Contemporary Sexual Morality. He starts with a reinterpretation on the traditional Biblical injunction against porneia, which is often translated as “fornication.” In the Old Testament, he writes, we find “no general prescription of premarital coitus. This is not surprising, since even polygamy was tolerated…[Deuteronomy and Ecclesiastes] forbid sexual commerce with whores. But prostitution cannot be simply equated with sexual intimacy” between an unmarried couple. (3)

 

Likewise, in the New Testament, Dedek points to the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus calls being unfaithful in marriage a form of porneia. (4) Translating this as simply “fornication” is not accurate, argues Dedek, as “it is not clear that this word ever designates fornication. Its exact sense has to be derived from the immediate context.” (5) In this way, he attempts to claim the Biblical high ground for himself, or at least wipe out the advantage of other scholars who would point to Scripture as providing proof of the rightness of their stance against premarital sexual relations.

 

Paul Ramsey, who was a teacher of ethics at Princeton, takes another Biblical tack in his 1965 paper “A Christian Approach to the Question of Sexual Relations Outside of Marriage.” He argues that just as “the marriage of Adam and Eve had no attendants or witnesses… The vision inherent in human sexual passion, and in sexual intercourse as an act of love, is the re-creation of Adam and Eve in their marriage.” (6) By implication, he seems to say, that as long as the couple have made a serious commitment, they are as morally justified in their sexual intercourse as Adam and Eve were in their spiritual marriage.In addition to an updated understanding of scripture,

 

Dedek also seeks to cast traditional church teaching in a different light, saying that the traditional ban of pre-marital sexual behavior actually has more leeway for committed couples than first appears. Even Casti Connubi, Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical which was one of the first and strongest church teachings on marital sexuality in the modern era, can be disagreed with in clear conscience by Catholics who find themselves in opposition to the message from the Vatican, according to Dedek. (7) The pope’s statement on premarital sex “has nowhere near the solemnity of his pronouncement on artificial contraception…[It] appears almost as an incidental remark [and] certainly does not represent a definitive magisterial decision.” (8) He points to the long history of the Church’s long history of shifting focuses on the procreative and unitive aspects of sex, and says that a prohibition on sex between committed couples should not properly be considered Catholic doctrine. Especially in light of the acceptance of the practice of betrothal and other old practices of institutionalized pre-marital relations, he writes, “‘no preceremonial intercourse’ is not an absolute principle and never was considered one by Catholic moralists.” (9)

 

A slightly different argument for the acceptance of the idea of pre-ceremonial sex comes from Philip Keane, a Sulpician theologian. He makes the case that the idea of a “right to marriage” is a longstanding concept in the Christian tradition, and also that necessary principle is one that leads engaged couples to form the bonds necessary to prepare to share a life together. (10) In addition, he says, there are “some cases is which society does unreasonably impede people’s right to marry.” (11) He cites military service, graduate school, old age, and the pursuit of financial independence as situations in which contemporary society prevents a couple from being able to publicly proclaim their complete entrustment to each other when they feel they are ready to take that step. (12) These circumstances, in the case of a hypothetical couple who have whole-heatedly committed themselves to each other and who truly intend to marry at some time in the future, may make “their premarital intercourse an ontic evil but not a moral evil…[Therefore,] the intercourse’s lack of public proclamation is not due to any defect in the intention of the couple; it is due rather to certain problematic characteristics of modern society.” (13)

 

Ontic evil is defined by Vincent Genovesi as a “premoral” wrong, an act in which “the objective circumstances are such that they constitute or provide a proportionate or sufficient reason for the act’s occurrence.” (14) Keane would argue that in this case, a couple engaging in pre-marital sexual relations is less moral transgressors than victims of an unjust societal structure.

 

Of course, Keane and his theological companions make a very clear distinction between pre-ceremonial sex and its more generic cousin, pre-marital sex. Pre-marital sex is, by its very definition, sexual relations before the bonds of marriage have been forged. Many of the authors agree that sex entered into this state, without the intent to share a lifetime together, is a moral wrong, as the sexual act itself should be an act of total self-giving. Because a total giving of self must necessarily include not only one’s present self, but one’s future self as well, sex before a commitment to marriage is, in Dedek’s words, “a lie, a betrayal of the genuine meaning of the sign and a trivialization of the genuine meaning of human sexuality.” (15) But he goes on to say, “if it is not less, then it is what we mean when we say ‘marriage’” (16). Dedek is arguing that sex that is not a lie – that is, sex that is a complete and total gift of oneself – can be understood a type of marriage.

 

Because such couples are expressing their lifelong commitment in a physical way, they cannot be seen as acting in an objectively morally culpable manner. The hypothetical case of an engaged couple deciding to engage in intercourse the night before their wedding ceremony seems to be one of the strongest arguments against the Church’s demarcation of sex only being good inside an official marriage – Are we supposed to believe that the love and commitment between the couple is any less the night before the marriage than after the rings are exchanged?

 

Ramsey goes a step further: “If they mean now to express the fact that their lives are united and that they now are willing to accept all that is entailed in sexual intercourse…then it is simply impossible for them to engage in premarital sexual relations” (17). In other words, if a couple has entered into a sexual relationship where each partner has an authentic commitment and an understanding that the potential result of the act of sex (i.e., a child) will be accepted and shared, then in a sense they are already married, for they have already pledged their entire lives to each other. The physical expression of that self-giving is an expression of that commitment that has been made and will (eventually) be formalized, not a pre-mature anticipation of it.To traditionally minded Catholics, this is nothing but a creative way of bending the rules.

 

One of the strongest defenses of traditional Catholic sexual morality comes from a book published in 1985 by Ronald Lawler, Joseph Boyle, and William May entitled “Catholic Sexual Ethics.” In it, they spend some time discussing pre-marital sex, including the case of pre-ceremonial sex. Interestingly, they turn to the same passages from the Bible as Dedek does in his defense of pre-marital relations, but strongly disagree with the translation of that phrase, porneia, from which Dedek excludes pre-marital sex. They say it is more properly understood as describing the “kinds of sexual activity which…fail to honor the goods that sexual activity should always respect.” (18) They point to Matthew 15:19, when Jesus includes porneia (which, unsurprisingly, they say should be translated as “fornication”) in a list of activities which make a person unclean. From the standpoint of Church teaching, the times have changed since the height of the 1960s and 1970s. John Paul II’s teaching of the Theology of the Body placed a heavy emphasis on the sanctity of the human body and the sacredness of marital sex. Whatever the merits of Dedek’s argument, he can’t argue that the moral standing of pre-martial has been treated as “incidental” in recent Church writings. “By its very nature conjugal love requires the inviolable fidelity of the spouses. This is the consequence of the gift of themselves which they make to each other.” (19)

 

This language seems to very clearly imply that the couple needs to be in a position to offer their entire selves, their entire lives to the other, and that commitment can almost never come outside of the public commitment of their marriage.That very act of making a marriage commitment, in other words, is a large linchpin in the traditional Catholic view of premarital sexuality and the meaning of sex itself. Many Catholic scholars and, indeed, the tradition of the church itself, see marriage as really and truly a sacrament – making manifest what it signifies. (20) Those who argue for the traditional understanding of pre-marital sex say that the public nature of a vow taking for richer or poorer, for the rest of one’s life – is something that is intricately linked to the reality of living out a life together. (21)Lawler argues that an attempt to mimic that lifelong bond before the vow is taken is “highly suspect” compared to the true commitment sworn in front of a community. (22)

 

Richard McCormick, writing shortly after Ramsey, said, “Marriage as totally understood is an ecclesial and social reality. Hence intercourse performed with what the parties call “marriage consent” is premarital, I should think, in the fullest moral sense.” (23) Genovesi makes the analogy to a young man preparing for the priesthood: “All the good will and desire in the world do not make up for the empowerment to love which a couple receives through God’s grace in the sacrament of marriage, just a man's years of prayer, study, training and yearning must await the day of ordination before he is empowered to celebrate the Eucharist and to offer God’s forgiveness.” (24)Of course, one of the most common arguments for pre-ceremonial sex is made on a practical level – If my beloved and I are certain that we will be married in a year, or a month, or a week from now, why should we be forced to wait any longer before we can make real our life-long commitment through sexual intercourse?

 

But as James Burtchaell, among others, mentions, this way of phrasing the question gives the impression that the engagement process is one to endure, rather than experience.“Sex is not the only expression of love, nor the necessary one. It is not even the greatest…It does mean that your love for [your beloved] is of a specifically different sort. Sex is appropriate, not simply to exquisite love, but to a very special kind: pledged love.” (25)

 

When seen through this perspective, the engagement takes on a new meaning as a way to refine ones appetites out of love for the other – The engaged couple no longer looks at it as a marathon but a way to build an appreciation for non-sexual ways of communicating and also the gift of marital chastity, along the lines of what scripture calls for: “This is the will of God…that each of you know how to acquire a wife for himself in holiness and honor, not in lustful passion as do the Gentiles who do not know God.” (26) Lawler points to this passage as evidence that true Christians should see the engagement period as one of purification, not boundary-pushing. (27)

 

Without a degree in Biblical studies or ancient languages, it is hard to lend the advantage to Lawler or Dedek in their interpretation of the Biblical injunctions against porneia, and relying strictly on scripture leads us into an exegetical morass from which it is difficult to remove ourselves. But Ramsey’s use of Adam and Eve as justification for a private vow made in front of God seems unconvincing. Holding the first couple to the standard of witnessing their commitment publicly is a difficult line to draw when it would seem their surrounding community was quite literally non-existent. Using their truly unique situation as a justification for modern couples that wish to physically express their love seems to be, to put it mildly, a stretch.

 

That isn’t to say the more traditional Catholic authors chisel a unforgiving, uncompromising doctrine under which no two people could ever licitly engage in sex before a marriage before a priest and witnesses. “Could two persons who have already exchanged vows of marriage privately, under limited circumstances, licitly engage in the marital act and do so precisely because they are already married?” Lawler asks. “In very rare cases, an affirmative answer is appropriate.” (28) But these exceedingly rare exceptions are limited to cases in which, for example, the couple were to be living in a place where a priest could not be reasonably expected to be present for a long time, or in a society under which they could face grave danger for engaging in a Christian marriage. (29) But beyond rather implausible cases involving Auschwitz or Gilligan’s Island (presuming the Skipper was incapable of performing an authentic marriage ceremony,) these “consent to marriage” exceptions can be safely said to be few and far between. (30)

 

It can be argued, furthermore, that the very idea that these are rare exceptions lends substantial credence to the view that those who try to finesse a definition licit pre-ceremonial sex are splitting hairs to avoid dealing with a bleeding wound. The extreme case exceptions come from couples having already committed to a life together, having already married each other in a real sense, and are extraordinarily prevented from publicly recognizing that commitment. Given the opportunity, they would celebrate that public ceremony recognizing their life-long commitment immediately, but are kept from doing so by the threat of death or lack of opportunity within any reasonable expectation. In light of the long history in the Church of holy men and women sacrificing their lives in order to witness to what they see as truth, it seems to be a little unclear that a couple waiting on an advanced degree or financial stability is suffering from the same severity of obstacles. Even a contemporary Capulet and Montague pairing, who fear a public marriage for fear of family disapproval or loss of economic support, can in some circumstances pursue a secret marriage, with a priest and two witnesses, with the approval of the church. (31)

 

But I would make the claim for the vast majority of currently engaged couples, these rarest of exceptions do not apply, and they should spend some thought on the fact that even the strongest intent to marry is not, and cannot be, marriage.Before he became Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla wrote a book exploring the meaning of married love, and explored this very concept of marriage as a covenant that requires ratification in a societal sense before it can truly legitimize their sexual relationship. Without a lifelong commitment, sex is a lie, and even with a matching commitment couples would have no guarantee that the whispered promises made in the heat of the moment could be relied upon. (32) “An actual sexual relationship between a man and a woman demands the institution of marriage as its natural setting, for the institution legitimates the actuality above all in the minds of the partners to the sexual relationship themselves.” (33)

 

Without that solemn promise, couples seeking to follow God’s will would have no reliable method of discerning whether their sexual activity was truly pre-ceremonial or pre-marital. And in order for that pledge to be certain, it would need to be taken in front of witnesses – which, of course, is exactly what marriage is. By standing in front of one’s family, friends, and community, a couple can verbally proclaim what their physical action will intimately express later; namely, that they are pledging their entirety, their very lives, willing to give entirely of themselves and accept children or hardships together. This kind of solemn pledge is something that cannot be realized in the privacy of one’s bedroom. It requires a public declaration and promise before not only God but also a community.Just as there is a difference between a man planning to skydive from an airplane and one on the way down, there is a definitive, categorical major difference between a man and a woman who plan on getting married and a man and a woman who are actually married to each other.

 

With a solemn promise and an exchange of rings, a man and a woman stand before God, their community, and each other and pledge fidelity, love, and the desire to love each other for the rest of their lives. Once that promise has been given, they become not just signs, but actual conduits of God’s love in each other’s lives, and that all-encompassing self-giving is physically expressed by sexual intimacy. (34) But if that that same act is pursued outside of an eternal pledge that can be seen, heard, and experienced by the couple, it does, contra Dedek become less than a reflection of total self-giving. Whatever the emotions or rationale behind it, it is, at best, an incomplete analogy to the commitment and self-surrender present in marital love. For couples seeking to live their lives in the light of God’s love, engaging in pre-ceremonial sex seems to be an alluring but empty path, leading them away from the deep, mystical, often challenging, but rewarding reality of Christian marriage.

 

 

(1) “Catholics Similar to Mainstream on Abortion, Stem Cells,” Gallup Organization, March 30, 2009 < http://www.gallup.com/poll/117154/catholics-similar-mainstream-abortion-stem-cells.aspx>

(2) Cloutier, David. Love, Reason, and God's Story: An Introduction to Catholic Sexual Ethics (Winona, MN: Saint Mary's, 2008) 139.

(3) Dedek, John F. Contemporary Sexual Morality. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1971) 27.

(4) Matthew 5:32

(5) Dedek, 28.

(6) Ramsey, Paul. “A Christian Approach to the Question of Sexual Relations outside of Marriage.” The Journal of Religion. 45.2 (1965): 102.

(7) Dedek, 33.

(8) Ibid.

(9) Dedek, 42.

(10) Keane, Philip S. Sexual Morality: A Catholic Perspective (New York: Paulist, 1977) 105.

(11) Keane, 106.

(12) Ibid.

(13) Keane, 197.

(14) Genovesi, Vincent J. In Pursuit of Love: Catholic Morality and Human Sexuality. (Wilmington, Del: Glazier, 1987) 178.

(15) Keane, 107.

(16) Ibid.

(17) Ramsey, 103.

(18) Lawler, Ronald D., Joseph M. Boyle, and William E. May. Catholic Sexual Ethics: A Summary, Explanation & Defense. (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1985) 179.

(19) Catechism of the Catholic Church. (New York: Doubleday, 1995) §1646.

(20) Genovesi, 172.

(21) Ibid.

(22) Lawler, et al., 184.

(23) McCormick, Richard A. “Notes on Moral Theology.” Theological Studies. 26:4 (1965): 625.(24) Genovesi, 174.

(25) Burtchaell, James. Marriage Among Christians: A Curious Tradition. (Notre Dame:Ave Maria, 1977) 34.(26) 1 Thes. 4:3-5

(27) Lawler, et al., 181.

(28) Lawler, et al., 186.

(29) Lawler, et al., 187.

(30) Ibid.(31) Lawler, et al., 186.

(32) Wojtyla, Karol (Pope John Paul II). Love and Responsibility. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981) 218

(33) Wojtyla, 220.

(34) Genovesi, 172.