ADULTRY is defined as carnal connection between a married person and one unmarried, or between a married person and the spouse of another. It is seen to differ from fornication in that it supposes the marriage of one or both of the agents. Nor is it necessary that this marriage be already consummated; it need only be what theologians call matrimonium ratum. Sexual commerce with one engaged to another does not, it is most generally held, constitute adultery. Again, adultery, as the definition declares, is committed in carnal intercourse. Nevertheless immodest actions indulged in between a married person and another not the lawful spouse, while not of the same degree of, guilt, are of the same character of malice as adultery (Sanchez, De Mat., L. IX. Disp. XLVI, n. 17). It must be added, however, that St. Alphonsus Liguori, with most theologians, declares that even between lawful man and wife adultery is committed when their intercourse takes the form of sodomy (S. Liguori L. III, n. 446).
I’m totally surprised Christopher West who works for Archbishop Chaput of Denver has the Archbishop’s imprimatur in his book, with the introduction written by His Excellency, where he states Sodomical acts (which are both oral and anal) are endorsed in a Catholic sanctified marriage between Man and wife.
An imprimatur (“let it be printed”) merely states that a certain work is found without doctrinal error (faith and morals), but it is not an infallible teaching to be held by either the universal/ordinary or extraordinary; but solely given exclusively by the Pope and supported by the Magisterium.
Christopher West; and his outspoken supporters claim that a handful of non-magisterial workers speak for orthodox Catholic doctrine, that doesn’t mean that they or the commentators represent orthodox Catholic doctrine on this point. No one within the Church has personal infallibility over faith and morals except for the Holy Father when he’s solemnly speaking to the Universal Church on matters of faith and morals. This is true even before Vatican II, that is, during the wake of the Modernist Crisis and the ongoing Sexual Revolution destroying many in the Church. I’m not saying that any of the commentators he cites are modernists. What I’m saying is that Catholics have to read things with a big grain of salt.
Saint Paul says that you will be held to that conscience, for it is the Law of God written on our hearts. Make no distinction between Gay and Straight people, Married or Single, we are all indefinitely held morally accountableto the same letter of the Law by God., even too as Romans Chapter 1 is written.
A growing number of new Catholics may conceive in there conscious that there was never an ex-Cathedra statement on the evils of Sodomy (aka Anal Sex) beyond that of Homosexual acts. There is no need to define such things, etc. Not everything needs to be or should be defined. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t important or that Catholic married couples can express themselves sexually in whatever manner they choose and desire.
The Catholic Church would be a joke if she started to describe in minute detail all the horrific evil sins people can do and then proceed to condemn a list of aberrant sexual behaviours one by one. That would be horrific. Usually, if people were concerned about illicit types of sexual behaviour in marriage, they would just ask their priest. Of course, now we live in very difficult times where the failing discipline of Catholic morality affects not only the laity but clergy as well. (Not just illicit sexual Homosexual acts but illicit Heterosexual sexual behaviours).
The Church expects us to use our reason. Sodomy (aka Anal Sex), is intrinsically evil and dishonest because of what one does, regardless of the intention one has, regardless of how it finishes. Just because those moral theologians leading up to the situation ethics era of Fuchs, et al., didn’t see this, doesn’t mean that their ignorance is to be canonized as traditional and orthodox Catholic doctrine. Far from it. It is just rubbish.
Sodomy (aka Anal Sex), is unequivocally condemned, if one is reasonable. The problem is that some people have dropped moral reason when they rejected how we, as human beings (with bodies!)Perceive with the senses, but only after they understood and gave in to the disillusioned popular rational of others in our humanistic society. They deliberately chose to ignore this moral way of knowing (which is the only way we have), in favour of a way of knowing, an epistemology, that is merely sense “knowledge”, a make-believe “knowledge” of phenomenology, upon which Theology of the Body rests, but which is nothing more than not-able-to-be-understood by perceptions of phenomena, perceptions which are, therefore, relativistic, and which, ultimately, cannot be subject to any of those… you know… strict moralistic rules, the reason being that commandments for everyone is not possible when everyone is perceiving things in their own individualistic, relativistic ways. This result is not what Pope John Paul II had in mind when he wrote The Theology of the Body. Not at all. But it is without a clear doubt where some commentators have led such radical thinking with their own interpretations of JP-II’s T.O.B.
The job now is not so much to get the Church to describe horrific evil things in detail and then condemn them (for we KNOW those things already), if we believe in Faith that the Holy Spirit writes such Morals on the walls of our heart. The important recognizance now is to undo the damage of a phenomenological epistemology given over to such relativism. The ends of marriage have to be demonstrated to be, and in this order: (1) procreation; (2) unity. Nevertheless; it is with great sadness that some disillusioned Catholics who would selfishly have everyone believe that sexual pleasures of the flesh, though blessed in marriage, comes before procreation and unity.