Understanding Leo's Moral Framework
And a note on the evangelical counsels
Stating the obvious:
When a reporter on the papal plane returning from a trip to Africa asked him about a controversy over the blessing of gay couples by priests, Leo said: “We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue.”
His response dismayed and even infuriated many social conservatives, both Catholic and Protestant. But Leo was not forging some new doctrine. On the contrary, he was articulating an older tradition of placing justice above personal chastity. “This statement would have seemed perfectly banal to a theologian of the late 16th century,” Jean-Pascal Gay, professor of Christian history at Catholic University of Louvain, wrote in the Catholic newspaper La Croix. “In 2026, it has become almost subversive.”
The American Catholic obsession with sexual morality as the most important morality is a consequence of Catholicism’s adaptation to life in a culture defined by Puritanism and by a church whose history in America is largely dominated by a Jansenist Irish clergy. The Renaissance popes, needless to say, were not Puritans.1 But that doesn’t mean that the contemporary American popular thinking about Sex Positivity isn’t bonkers in the opposite direction. Eros is a profound mystery, and modern materialistic societies have homogenized it into what it homogenizes everything into, which is a commodity, an “entertainment”. What’s so bizarre about Sex Positivity is the way it is just as Puritan in its sanctimony as the the prudery of the original Puritans. They are two sides of the same coin, and neither has any understanding of or relationship with the god Eros.
I address this issue of sexuality and the Techno-Capitalist Matrix in the Cathedral Lectures where I talk about Marcuse’s ‘repressive de-sublimation’ and Deleuze and Guatarri’s ideas about ‘de-territorialization’ in Anti-Oedipus. But it boils down to this: the trivialization of human sexuality is one of the most damaging things that the Techno-Capitalist Matrix has inflicted on us, but it goes hand in hand with its trivialization of almost everything that is soulful and profound. It has killed all the gods, not just the Puritan Big Daddy in the sky.
And in doing so it killed Eros, the god of intimate connection with the Being of the world, the god that opens us up to the deep interconnection of all things. The TCM can’t have that. It wants us alienated and isolated, bored and distracted, enervated and foggy-minded, and so therefore helplessly divided and conquered.
The Catholic Church, whatever moral authority it might have had about human sexuality, lost it after its child molestation and cover-up scandals. If it is ever to recover any level of moral authority, it will be in its becoming a morally clear, sane voice of opposition to the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Leo seems to get that.
So first things first. Let’s deal the how the TCM dehumanizes everything it touches—including sexuality. Let’s first build a society that cares about Justice as a transcendental ideal, and then let the other things fall into place. When we grow something healthy and new, then we can be receptive to the wisdom Eros has to teach us about the education of desire in a way we are now incapable.
As a practicing Catholic, I revere what are traditionally called the evangelical counsels—the practice of obedience, chastity, and poverty. Their kenotic logic is not, if understood correctly, a form of moralistic, Puritan stricture whose practice is an end in itself, but rather a means to an end, i.e.,a path toward eudaemonia broadly understood.
There’s a lot to unpack there, but for now it’s enough to understand them as countercultural imperatives to resist the will to power, promiscuous appetite, and obsession with acquiring material wealth. The kenotic part is to make a dry space in our souls otherwise flooded with these impulses within which a light finds a place to ignite and stay lit. That’s the way you deal with the Jungian shadow—which is definitely a thing that comes for all of us with the Oedipus Complex. It’s something we mostly project onto other people, especially if we think ourselves virtuous. Both Left and Right in this country project their shadows onto the other. The role of the peacemaker is to live in the empty space between them without projecting. Not easy.
So how to deal with the Shadow? Rather than project it or repress it, which is the Puritan impulse, the goal is rather to bring its assorted cast of characters into the light, to recognize them, and win them over. It helps, first, to have a light to bring them into. You get one by creating the aforementioned dry space in the soul for the flame to burn and then by giving it enough oxygen to stay lit and to grow in luminosity. That’s what prayer and the sacraments are for—to feed, to oxygenate, the interior flame. It’s a lifelong project.
A monastic vocation is one way to practice these counsels, but any healthy human being, Catholic or anything else, with an awakened conscience lives them in ways that are adapted to their particular circumstances. The problem is that we no longer have any consensus about what it means to lead a healthy, good life. So there’s no collective wisdom about how to undertake such a project. Anything goes if it makes you happy. So the vacuum gets filled by leaders in the political and economic spheres who are admired precisely because they are prodigies of will to power, promiscuous appetite, and obsession with the acquisition of material wealth. That’s what makes them happy, and who are we to them they’re not?
And in such a society there are still people who expect that the constitution and the rule of law alone can be a bulwark against the power they’ve acquired to do what makes them happy?!