The Pope, Sex and Human Nature : Morality: His encyclical omits the scientific fact that men and women are programmed to bond, not just to procreate.

Despite what everyone expected--or feared--the new encyclical from Pope John Paul II is not about birth control; the subject is mentioned only once and almost in passing. Nor does he say anything about homosexuality, even though there have been demonstrations against him by gays around the country.

Rather, “Veritatis Splendor” (“The Splendor of Truth”), as the document is called, is about the nature of human nature and about moral actions that are evil in themselves because they do such violence to human nature.

I doubt that there are many who would seriously disagree that some of the actions the Pope lists (taken from a quote of the Second Vatican Council) are fundamentally evil: homicide, genocide, mutilation, physical and mental torture, arbitrary imprisonment, slavery, prostitution, trafficking in women and children, degrading conditions of work. You cannot commit genocide because you want to get rid of a people who oppose democracy. You cannot use torture to hunt down criminals. You cannot sell women into prostitution in order to make money for charity.

Not all would agree with other crimes on the council’s list--abortion, euthanasia, suicide--nor with John Paul’s addition of “contraceptive practices whereby the conjugal act is rendered infertile.”

The point is that most of us agree that some actions so violate the dignity of a human person that they are fundamentally wicked. The Pope’s concern in “Veritatis Splendor” is with certain forms of Catholic ethical reflection that seem to call into question the truth that some behavior is fundamentally wicked.

More to the point, it seems to me, is that John Paul’s list of intrinsically evil actions includes actions that previous Popes approved, such as torture, mutilation and slavery. There is, then, an implicit admission that we have grown in our understanding of the nature of human nature and the nature of human dignity. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that the church leaders have grown beyond the traditional Aristotelian models in their understanding of the nature of human sexuality.

My own feeling is that the church needs to grow in its understanding of human sexuality to take into account what the human sciences have learned in recent years. Church leaders and teachers pay a lot of lip-service to the human sciences, but I doubt that they bother to read them.

It is now beyond any reasonable doubt in such disciplines as evolutionary biology and comparative primatology that what is distinctive and unique about human sexuality in comparison to all other higher primates is its function as a bonding mechanism between man and woman. Unlike all other higher primates, the human infant requires the care and attention of adults for many years after birth (now it seems into the middle 20s!) before it can survive without them. Thus evolution selected for those characteristics that would bind the man and the woman permanently (or quasi-permanently).

Much of what is unique about human sexuality has no counterpart in other species--the secrecy of ovulation, lovemaking in private, secondary sexual characteristics (only in humans do breasts develop before the first birth), menopause, constant availability for and interest in sex, the duration of the sexual interlude, the intensity of the pleasure, intercourse after the end of fertility. None of these specifically human dimensions of sex are required for reproduction; all are required for bonding. Scientist Jared Diamond (in his book “The Third Chimpanzee”) sums it all up: “In no species besides humans has the purpose of copulation become so unrelated to conception.” Must not one say that it is natural and in most circumstances necessary for humans to make love often to sustain the bonding between them? Might not one go far as to say that it is a violation of nature and thus intrinsically evil to attempt to prevent such exchanges of marital love?

Church leaders and teachers either do not listen to those who are exploring the sexual nature of humans or contemptuously dismiss them as wrong. In the future, might not such arrogance be equated with the arrogance of the Galileo decision?