Introduction
“Since ‘time is greater than space’, I would make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium. Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it… Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs. For ‘cultures are in fact quite diverse and every general principle […] needs to be inculturated, if it is to be respected and applied’.”1
Love and Sexuality
According to Mounier,2 love transfigures the humblest features, as if it alone could discover the infinite riches that lie dormant even in the most wretched being.
True love requires legitimacy, purity and innocence, and sooner or later it deteriorates if there is guilt, resentment, remorse, shame or secrecy.
What man has rejected, and continues to reject in our time, in order to live sex more freely, becomes for him today, after passing through much destruction and pain, the cornerstone: only love can give meaning, direction and purpose to the sexual relationship.
In love there may also be these three levels: fascination, falling in love and passionate obsession, and also a fourth level, which has no negative counterpart: self-giving love, whose highest expression in history is the love of Jesus Christ; it is the gift and offering of oneself and is nourished not by selfish pleasure but by renunciation and sacrifice.
Peña y Lillo tells us: “Every higher form of love between a man and a woman implies a measure of asceticism and chastity and always presupposes purity, self-mastery and freedom.” Sex in the human being goes beyond biology: it is not an instinctive, reflex act but an overall behaviour of the psyche, with deep personal meaning. Human sexuality is not a mere reproductive drive nor an instinctive pursuit of pleasure, but a subtle and wonderful form of encounter and personal intimacy.
Sex, eroticism and love are the three successive steps of the human reproductive instinct, and each, at its own level, expresses the three basic dimensions of the person: body, psyche and spirit. Sexual energy, like everything biological, is in a certain sense neutral, and both its ethics and its personal meaning depend on the spirit, on its freedom. It can rise or fall, ennoble or degrade the individual.
Human love is much more than an instinctive appetite: it not only goes beyond biology but is, in its essence, irreducible to the organic and metabolic processes that underlie it and make it possible. Nor is it a psychophysical impulse, but a personal act: a direct and conflictual relationship between two freedoms, that of the man and that of the woman. Today’s hyper-eroticism is intrinsically bound up with values that exalt success, prestige and personal charm, which perhaps attempt to compensate for the emptiness, loneliness and threat in which modern man lives. Human sexual life is not merely an instinctive drive, and both its normal experience and its pathology, both its education and its therapy, require something more than the proper functioning of coital mechanisms or skill in erotic stimulation.
What is most specific to the human species lies in its mysterious capacity to transcend the limits of its biological constitution, ordering its life not from genetic impulses but from the higher values of moral conscience. Sexuality straddles two worlds, the biological and the personal.3
From a strictly biological point of view it is undoubtedly the most important function of the organism. From a personal point of view it is the behaviour that engages the human being in the twofold dimension of psychological and spiritual dignity.
The normal always implies the fullness of a function; and sexual normality —from this perspective— requires a responsible eroticism, which can only be sex incorporated into love.
The medieval myth that sex was moral and licit only as a reproductive act, instead of raising its dignity, lowered it to the level of the sexual life of animals. As is well known, female animals accept mating only when they are in heat, and only the woman is receptive to sexual love entirely independently of both ovulation and menopause. Puritanism sought love “without falling into the erotic”, and today’s “hyper-eroticism” seeks sex “without falling into love”.
The 1983 Code of Canon Law indicates that human sexuality has a procreative but also a recreative function. That the latter is also important can easily be inferred from the fact that a couple’s sterility is not grounds for canonical nullity, whereas impotence, frigidity or the refusal of one of the spouses to perform the sexual act are.4
The sexuality of man and woman, while complementary, is not equivalent, and there are deep and significant differences between them that are not merely fashions or cultural prejudices. Male sexuality is essentially imaginative and visual, female sexuality sensory and tactile. Male sexuality is immediate and in a certain sense reflex, awakened by fantasy or by the stimulating sight of a woman’s body. Female sexuality, by contrast, is more mediated and indirect and requires prior erotic stimulation (attitude, language, caresses, etc.). These differences are not learned but genetic, and have a deep biological root.
The sexuality of man and woman is biologically and psychologically distinct. Even cultural attitudes themselves, justified or not and by the mere fact of existing, become a kind of secondary foundation and a true “psychological jurisprudence”. Some years ago, for example, women were educated in a certain sense against sexuality, while men were required to give absurd proofs of their virility.
If love presides over the sexual act, both man and woman will strive to give themselves without reserve and will care more for the other than for themselves. They will be more attentive to what the other needs, feels and loves than to themselves. This experience, deeply spiritual in character, is far stronger, of far greater quality and fuller satisfaction than one governed by the selfishness of someone who thinks only of reaching satisfaction himself. There is a beyond of orgasm that justifies and ennobles it and, should it for some reason not occur, love itself covers it, giving the fact no importance: love is dialogical, not imposing; it always seeks the other’s view, that the other be comfortable and at ease.
The real sexual problem of young people is not pathology, but what to do with their normal sexuality. This conflictual situation, certainly crucial for the young, has a cultural rather than physiological origin. Indeed, modern life, mainly for socio-economic and cultural reasons, does not allow stable couple bonds to be established until after the age of 20 or 25. The problem is how to resolve the tension between a vigorous, urgent eroticism and the practical impossibility of its satisfactory fulfilment. While puberty is a strictly biological phenomenon, adolescence is largely a cultural fact. And while the former seems to have come earlier, the latter has been delayed and is delayed ever more. And it is here, at this point, that the following question becomes very important.
Can Human Sexuality Be Educated?
All that has been said so far points to the need for human freedom to be formed by love, as the only way for sexuality to acquire its meaning, direction and purpose, thus freeing itself from the degradation to which it would be subjected if it were left solely in the hands of instinct. The impoverishment of sexuality impoverishes the human being: degraded sexuality, degraded human being.
The mind, the will and their union with freedom are faculties that are not born educated in any of us. The Christian ascetic knows well how much it costs, throughout an entire life, to educate one’s mind, will and freedom! Either we form them with love, or we do not form them at all, or we simply deform them.5 Now, how much do the mind and imagination come into play in human sexuality, especially male sexuality? How much does the will’s desire come into play in the sexual act? Failing to educate these faculties makes the sexual relationship very difficult and complex: it becomes imposing, tries to do without dialogue, charity is broken and disrespect sets in.
Marriage
The word spouse (Spanish cónyuge) etymologically means “those who live bound under the same yoke”. Marriage, in any of its religious or cultural forms, makes possible a stable and responsible commitment of the human couple and allows a home to be built. Marriage, judging by historical experience, is the safest and most balanced nest for children, although, as in every field, there are exceptions.
If in civil marriage the union of the spouses is horizontal, in sacramental marriage, as both are united to Christ, it acquires a supernatural dimension: they are called to live above their own nature. The sacramental union asks them to love each other with the same love with which Christ is loving them both, that is, to love each other with divine love rather than with their own poor and imperfect human love. In their own flesh they fulfil Christ’s commandment: “love one another as I have loved you”.6
Christian conjugal love and civil marriage are not a mere pursuit of pleasure, but a deep interweaving of two lives woven together in a common destiny, with a shared sense of purpose and interests, both human and, above all, spiritual and religious. Where we recognise ourselves as persons is not precisely in our flesh, which undergoes so many transformations throughout life, but in our spirit.
Marriages formed by emotionally mature spouses value sexuality both in its sensual aspects and in those that go beyond its biological meaning, particularly feelings of tenderness and personal love, as well as mutual participation in procreation.
The sexual relationship is a matter of communication and, just as with words, some people express themselves better than others. Sexuality extends beyond mere bodily contact: a caress, an embrace and the tenderness expressed in language itself speak of sexuality without there necessarily being sex.
From a religious point of view, marriage is no longer an institution solely and exclusively destined for procreation; besides its recreative aspect, it also has —as a fundamental aim— that of reaching together the holiness of life to which the spouses have been destined by God. It is this shared aspiration to holiness that is the summit towards which all the other acts of that marriage, personal and common, are directed.
Human sexuality is a source of countless goods for spouses, or for the couple. Marriage is the most appropriate setting for an adequate and full sexual expression of man and woman. It is also true that spouses sometimes lack sufficient knowledge of the physiology of their own sexuality and of their partner’s, as well as of the dysfunctions or pathologies that present themselves as disorders of sexual activity. In these cases, because some of them may give rise to suspicions of infidelity, it becomes necessary to consult a specialist in human sexuality; one such case could be the malfunctioning of the Bartholin’s gland in women, but there are many more.
In chapter XIII of Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians a beautiful interpretation of love appears:
“Love is patient, affectionate, without envy; it is not presumptuous or vain, it is not violent, selfish or offensive. Love keeps no grudges and delights in the truth. It covers all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things… faith and hope will pass away, but love will not pass away.”7
Otto Dörr Z.8 says: “love is a feeling that pervades the whole individual and is characterised by the fact that the one who loves cannot conceive of a world in which the beloved is absent”. Needing another person merely for company means dependence, not love. In mature love, sensitivity to the other’s needs is constant, and one gives oneself unselfishly in order to enrich the other’s life. One rejoices more in the other’s successes than in one’s own.
Strictly speaking, there is no pathology that can be attributed to continence and sexual abstinence, and the well-known myth of illnesses that improve with marriage —which led to irresponsible recommendations of premature marriages and endorsed sexual promiscuity— is entirely unfounded. Man, “the ascetic of life”, according to Max Scheler’s beautiful metaphor, constantly transforms and transcends his impulses and channels “his latent energy towards the spirit that dwells within him”.9
Francis, Post-synodal Ap. Exhort. Amoris laetitia, 3, quoting: Discurso en la clausura de la XIV Asamblea General Ordinaria del Sínodo de los Obispos (24 October 2015): L’Osservatore Romano, weekly Spanish-language edition, 30 October 2015, p. 4; cf. Pontifical Biblical Commission, Fe y cultura a la luz de la Biblia. Actas de la Sesión plenaria 1979 de la Pontificia Comisión Bíblica, Turin 1981; Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Const. Gaudium et spes, on the Church in the Modern World, 44; John Paul II, Enc. Letter Redemptoris missio (7 December 1990), 52: AAS 83 (1991), 300; Ap. Exhort. Evangelii gaudium (24 November 2013), 69.117: AAS 105 (2013), 1049.1068-69. ↩︎
Cf. MOUNIER, E. El Personalismo. Ed. Cuadernos de Eudeba, Buenos Aires, nov. ed., 1972, p. 8. ↩︎
PEÑA Y LILLO, S. Amor y sexualidad (Sexo, erótica y amor). Ed. Universitaria, Chile, 1990. In this work Sergio Peña y Lillo analyses human sexuality and eroticism, integrating them within the higher framework of love, from a medical-anthropological, psychological and psychiatric perspective. He was Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Chile. ↩︎
Cf. Ibid. ↩︎
Cf. RIELO, F. Concepción mística de la antropología. Ed. Fundación F. Rielo, Madrid, 2012, pp. 119-123. ↩︎
Jn 13:34-35. ↩︎
1 Cor 13:1-12. ↩︎
Cf. DÖRR Z., O. Psiquiatría antropológica (Contribuciones a una psiquiatría de orientación fenomenológica-antropológica). Ed. Universitaria, Chile, 2017. A collection of essays spanning several decades that bring together science, psychopathology and literature, analysing authors such as Goethe, Rilke and Kierkegaard. ↩︎
Cf. RODRÍGUEZ GUERRO, A. Fenomenología en Max Scheler (El formalismo en la ética y la ética material de los valores). Doctoral thesis, Angelicum, Rome, 1982. ↩︎
How to cite this article
Angel Rodriguez Guerro PhD. (2026, October 30). Love and Sexuality. Rielo Institute for Integral Development. https://riidblog.org/post/30-10-2026/