Leo, of course, defends teachings like the church’s stance against abortion, but he embeds it in a wider context, such as when he defended the decision of the Archdiocese of Chicago to give Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, an abortion-rights Catholic, an award for his long work on behalf of immigrants. Conservative Catholics were incensed, but Leo told reporters that it’s important to look at the entirety of a person’s views.
Leo was more explicit last month. 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 church’s emphasis on sexuality began in earnest in the 16th century as moral theologians started to codify various aspects of Catholic practice, including producing manuals for clerics to use in assessing the gravity of sins in the confessional. Various sexual sins, from adultery to masturbation, were favorites because they were easy to judge — you either had sex or you didn’t. Figuring out when a person has been greedy or insufficiently charitable is harder. As a result sexual sins became the gravest sins, a category unto themselves that assumed an outsized place in the venerable hierarchy of truths that ordered beliefs.
The legalistic approach to sex and sin became commonplace. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and the loosening of restrictions on abortion in the 1970s turbocharged the push to focus on sexual ethics and sideline social justice. The 1978 election of John Paul II added to that momentum. The Polish pope, while a strong proponent of Catholic social teaching, was an especially forceful moralist on sexual ethics. Catholic conservatives in America made that moralism a priority, forging common cause with the rising religious right.
