The Vatican Denounces Polygamy, But Also Flips Centuries of Magisterial Teaching On Marital Sex

A celibate cleric waxing lyrical about the pleasures of conjugal love may be compared to a congenitally dumb man who miraculously starts speaking Mandarin and Malayalam, both at the same time. Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, Rome’s doctrinal rottweiler, is the epitome of such a miracle. When it comes to rhapsodising on the birds and bees, this prince of the church soars on the wings of an eagle.  

In 1995, the cardinal, who was consecrated to the deity Cupid, penned his own contribution to the anthology of erotica. He wrote a book titled  Heal Me With Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing. In a chapter on “Male and Female Orgasm,” the vestal virgin of Catholicism assesses male and female orgasm. In the chapter “The Road to Orgasm,” the high priest of Eros explains how the saints were inebriated by sexual ecstasy in their mystical union with God.  

Had Fernández become pope, he might have added the Kama Sutra and the Tirukkuṟaḷ to the canon of Sacred Scripture. But since Bobby Prevost bagged the bulk of the ballots, the Argentinian cardinal, who could have beaten Pfizer at peddling aphrodisiacs, has remained glued to his couch at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), dipping his quill into his inkpot and penning parchments on Catholic doctrine and ethics.  

His latest is a potboiler on polygamy. Given its amorous bibliography, Fernández, after taking off his toga, might have composed it in a steamy Roman sudatorium, which is Latin for sauna.  

Rome’s Panegyric to Monogamy 

In his document Una Caro: In Praise of Monogamy, Fernández, who earlier authored Fiducia Supplicans—the DDF diktat permitting non-liturgical blessings for same-sex couples and couples in adulterous combos—cracks down on the widespread practice of polygamy in Africa. The apostle of Aphrodite even succeeds in shocking his conservative Catholic critics by composing a protracted panegyric to monogamy.  

But then, halfway through the document, the libidinous spirit of Freud’s Id descends on him like fire from heaven. The cardinal’s Superego grows muscles like Popeye after downing a can of spinach. With the might of Hercules and the temper of Zeus, Fernández casts down centuries of puritanical Catholic magisterial teaching on marital chastity. Like King Josiah tearing down Asherah poles, the cardinal bulldozes tons of tomes of penitential manuals like the Irish Monks’ Guide to Hearing Confession from Catholic Couples Who Enjoyed Sex While Procreating.  

Let me sum up what Fernández is saying: “Sex isn’t only for procreation. Couples are meant to enjoy sex. Have fun!” The cardinal subsumes this teaching under the category of “conjugal charity.” He peppers his text with quotes from Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis.  

A conjugal relationship between husband and wife “does not imply a devaluation of sexual pleasure” because sex unites “spouses in a single friendship, which seeks the good of the other,” he notes. Sexuality, he writes, is seen as “a personal choice that expresses the totality of one’s person and accepts the other as a personal totality. This truth, rather than compromising the intensity of pleasure, can increase it, making it more intense, richer, and more fulfilling.”  

“All this does not take away from sexual union that ‘abundance of pleasure which is in the sexual act ordered according to reason’ and which ‘does not contradict the means of virtue.’” “Sexual union, as a way of expressing conjugal charity, must naturally remain open to the communication of life, even if this does not mean that this must be an explicit aim of every sexual act,” he elaborates.  

Quoting Pope John Paul II, Fernández argues that it is not necessary for a couple to “consciously seek a certain sexual act as a means of procreation.” He adds: “Wojtyła also says this, maintaining that a conjugal act, which ‘being in itself an act of love that unites two persons, may not necessarily be considered by them as a conscious and desired means of procreation.’”  

Vatican Document Riffs on Surrealist Nudism 

 The coupling of conjugal love with erotic pleasure is hardly controversial. The Song of Songs, which delights in the joy of sexual love, is part of the Hebrew Bible. Prudish Catholic interpretation allegorized it, but the Jews had no doubt sex was holy and must be enjoyed as the good gift of a good God. Rabbi Akiva went so far as describing the Song of Songs as the “holy of holies.” 

 Fernández is to be commended for his attempt to read Hebrew scripture on its own terms without a schoolmarmish Roman Catholic lens. But he doesn’t stop with the Song of Songs. In the document, Fernández quotes Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet famous for his surrealist and risqué love poetry. Here’s a sample from one of Neruda’s juicy poems, Cuerpo to Mujer:  

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, 

You look like a world, lying in surrender. 

My rough peasant’s body digs in you 

and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth. 

 The cardinal doesn’t go so far as including illustrations from the Kama Sutra, but he does cite the Thirukkural, authored by the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar (2nd-5th century BC). 

The third part of the collection is famous for its erotic aphorisms: 

Sexuality is sweeter than liquor, because when remembered, it creates a most rapturous delight.  

Even to think of one’s beloved gives one no pain. Sexuality, in any degree, is always delightful.  

O you rogue! Your breast is to me what liquor is to those who rejoice in it, though it only gives them an unpleasant disgrace. 

Even more oxymoronic is the cardinal’s use of the Hindu Bhagavata Purana. Fernández claims that it defends monogamy because “Lord Rāmachandra vowed to accept only one wife and to have no ties with other women.” But the same Hindu scripture also trumpets the fact that Krishna had eight principal wives and a total of 16,108 wives. 

 It is also puzzling why Fernández also quotes the Hindu canonical text Manusmṛti  in favour of monogamy. Does he not know that it is the most problematic of all Hindu scriptures, because it is the canonical text codifying caste, subordinating women, normalizing child brides, endorsing Brahmanical supremacism, and dooming the lowest castes and untouchables?  

Purgatory Declares Mass Amnesty for Naughty Catholic Couples 

 So, apart from quoting controversial Hindu texts and semi-smutty Neruda canticles, will Fernández’s document offer a mass amnesty for Catholic couples who were condemned to purgatory for enjoying the pleasures of conjugal love? In other words, how is the cardinal reversing centuries of Catholic magisterial teaching on conjugal relations?  

If you were a married Catholic living in the Middle Ages, you were instructed to have sex only when the storks went on strike, because sex, according to magisterial teaching, was strictly for procreation and not for the mutual pleasure of the married couple.  

According to Clement’s treatise “On Marriage,” Satan was the source of a couple’s desire for sexual delight (“alien pleasures”). Clement rejected as “vulgar and plebeian” any efforts to seek pleasure in the marital act. Echoing various church fathers, who imported an unhealthy cocktail of Gnosticism, Stoicism, Manicheanism, and Montanism into the Catholic Church, Pope Gregory the Great declared that if husband and wife experienced any pleasure “mixed” with their act of intercourse, they “transgressed the law of marriage.”   

Even if the couple intended to procreate in their act of marital intercourse, any experience of pleasure “befouled” the couple’s intercourse, Gregory declared. Pope Innocent III echoed Gregory: “Who does not know that conjugal intercourse is never committed without itching of the flesh, and heat and foul concupiscence, whence the conceived seeds are befouled and corrupted?”  

“It appears that the only sinless act of marital intercourse was one in which the husband and wife intended to conceive a child while managing to avoid feeling sexual pleasure,” writes Robert Obach in his book From St. Paul to Pope John Paul II: The Catholic Church on Marital Intercourse.  

“Whenever a spouse experienced sexual pleasure [without intending it], that spouse committed a light or venial sin. Whenever a spouse engaged in intercourse for the sake of experiencing sexual pleasure, he or she committed a mortal sin. That meant that if a spouse died before confessing the sin of seeking sexual pleasure in the marriage act, he or she would be condemned to hell,” Obach notes.  

No Sex Please, We’re Catholic 

Moreover, in the Middle Ages, the Church controlled your sex life so rigidly that you—husband and wife—were permitted to have conjugal relations with one another for approximately only 50 days during the whole year, depending on which penitential manuals your bishop and diocese were using to calculate the frequency of conjugal relations.  

Professor James Brundage, one of the most distinguished historians of medieval canon law, describes this in great detail in his book Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe.   

Married couples couldn’t have sex during Advent, Lent, or for weeks after Pentecost. Couples couldn’t make love on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays on feast days or on fast days. Or for that matter, when the wife had her periods, was pregnant, or was nursing a child.  

So Catholic couples had safe days and sinful days.  

Instead of preaching the Gospel, the celibate clergy were obsessing about the sex lives of their married flock. This was the equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. God’s gift of sex was treated as something dirty.  

Pope John Paul II finally corrected this teaching by insisting on both the unitive and the procreative aspects of marital sex.  

St. Paul offers us a God-given perspective on sexual relations in marriage. He writes in 1 Corinthians 7:  

But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.  

When God created Adam and Eve, he blessed them and made them one flesh. Rome is finally learning that what God has joined together not even celibate cardinals can rend asunder. 

Canon Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.