Why Should You Trust Our Apostolate on Catholic Sexual Ethics?

With conflicting Catholic voices offering competing views on sexual morality within marriage, finding a trustworthy source can be difficult. This article explains how our Apostolate grounds its guidance in Church teaching, rigorous moral theology, and the wisdom of trusted Catholic moralists.

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With so many different Catholic voices peddling different opinions, especially when it comes to sexual morality within marriage, it can become quite a daunting task to even discern who among these voices are even trustworthy. Because of this, we at the Apostolate wanted to offer some words of assurance for why you should feel secure in finding us a trustworthy source for discussing Catholic sexual morality in marriage. 

At every turn, whenever we stake out a position on Catholic sexual ethics that may seem controversial or perhaps surprising, we always make sure that the positions we take are not only in harmony with the magisterial teachings of the Catholic Church, but are also echoed by eminent doctors of moral theology that have come before us, many of whose works remain inaccessible to the wider public. Since the close of the Second Vatican Council, there was an aggressive push to sideline the so-called “casuistic” approach with which these moralists addressed questions of virtue and vice and in turn there emerged a movement toward a more personalistic way of discussing moral questions. It was thought that the older approach was too legalistic and fixated on classifying sins which ran the risk of obscuring or lessening the importance of positively striving for virtue and deification. While these aims are admirable, it was sadly forgotten that moral theology is and will always remain a science because the objective moral law inscribed into the hearts of man is received from the creative act of the eternal Logos Himself. As a result of this, moral theology became much less precise and rigorous. Confessors are no longer equipped to answer practical and concrete questions about particular moral cases that do not fit neatly within the scope of what is plainly taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church or magisterial documents. This unfortunately leads to profoundly deleterious effects in the laity such as confusion, scrupulosity, moral guesswork, and even extremism. Those effects are bad enough, but when applied to questions of sexual ethics, especially within marriage, the consequences can be quite ruinous. 

I am not claiming that the answer to all of these problems lies solely in reviving the works of moralists from the past, that would be far too reductive. But I am saying that if we do seek greater clarity on more concrete or practical moral questions in the domain of marital sexuality so that we can properly educate our consciences amid the confusion, then providing clear answers to these questions with the backing of tried and true insights from the best doctors of Catholic moral theology serves a necessary ministerial need. 

This is one of many services that we strive to offer here at our Apostolate. We have, for example, done the hard work of translating so many of these seminal moral theology texts (which have formed seminarians and confessors for generations) into English so that we can provide the clearest and most rigorous orthodox answers to difficult moral questions. Our promise is that we will never stray from this rigor and from this commitment to sourcing all of our positions in this rich treasury of sound and trustworthy wisdom.