The Church’s teaching on virtuous sex and its reception

Abstract

The study analysed what people think about sex and whether what they think about sex conforms to the Catholic Church’s teachings that are primarily based on natural law. The literature review presents a brief history of how ideas about sexuality and sexual practices developed in the Catholic Church, in particular as grounded in natural law reasoning. Since teachings about sexuality are considered to be grounded “in reason”, the Church assumes that they are also communicable and credible to “all people of good will.” The actual doctrine of the Church on sexual matters is presented through a survey of its recent documents. Here, sexual practices and relations that the Church considers to be ‘irregular’ are discussed, in light of the core argument of the Church that “marriage” is the only legitimate context for sexual relations. A quantitative study using an online questionnaire was held to research the thesis question of whether the Church’s teachings about sexuality are today still considered to be reasonable or credible by people at large. The response rate was high enough that results could be compared across gender, age groups, country, religion and marital status. While there were responses from across the world a significant portion of respondents were Maltese which enabled a more thorough analysis of Maltese people’s views about sexuality and the church’s teachings on sexuality. Major findings include that while in Malta the Roman Catholic religion still shapes people’s morals, acceptance of artificial contraception is very common, irrespective of one’s religion, even if this might be related to another major finding, that people find the language used in Church’s official teachings to be hard to understand.