Fr. Robert Araujo and others on the “Mirror of Justice” blog have been calling attention to an academic program to be held this fall entitled “More Than A Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church”.

Your humble Blog Goliard would be most interested in attending such an event. Not out of agreement with the conveners’ worldview and goals, mind you; but rather for the opportunity to try, through the promised dialogue, to finally comprehend exactly how such dissidents propose to construct and properly ground an alternate ethics of sexuality. This is something which he quite honestly has never been able to come close to comprehending, even after perusing various representative writings of such thinkers.

While dissenting from certain orthodox teachings, these theologians do not consciously place themselves outside the Catholic community and Christian tradition. Yet what they are positing makes an implicit case that all major monotheistic religions have been consistently wrong about the morality of sexual acts since the beginning of time.

That’s a big ask, to put it mildly.

So what arguments are they able to deploy, exactly, that support the idea that after thousands of years, this band of enlightened 20th/21st century dissenters are the ones who have finally gotten it right? Your humble Blog Goliard has thus far only managed to find a lot of soft-pedaling of Sacred Scripture, the teachings of modern Popes, and everything in between. True engagement with any of these authorities is then evaded by privileging “contemporary experience”, the autonomous and unguided conscience, and the claims of social and human “science” over all of them.

It would be enlightening and encouraging to learn that there is something deeper and more solid underlying all this; that despite appearances, the dissenters are in fact grounded in something more than the typical Boomer-style narcissism, willful wish-fulfillment, and disdain for Dead White European/Semitic Males.

Clarification of just what is to replace traditional sexual morality would also be most welcome. If there is a coherent alternate sexual ethic being proposed by anyone, to guide us as to what intimate acts are licit and what are illicit, it has somehow entirely escaped your humble Blog Goliard’s attention.

Or is to state it that way to miss the point? Is it instead the dissenters’ position that sexual acts are, in and of themselves, morally neutral? Or that the moral question depends so utterly on the specific persons and situations involved, and on individuals’ subjective judgments and soveriegn consciences, that making clear distinctions and moral judgments is impossible?

Dissenting theologians do not seem inclined to do much more than leave hints as to how we are all to behave once the old oppressive sexual teachings have been finally routed. One can only hope that this is more the byproduct of mere thoughtlessness than of active evasion.

Finally, there is a direct (and, truth be told, rather impolite) question that your humble Blog Goliard would love to be able to ask such an assembly, full as it promises to be of religious persons who favor radical redefinition of the sacrament of Marriage:

Precisely how do they propose to define, for purposes of unions of two men or of two women, the act of consummation?

The question is posed not in a spirit of provocation or prurience, but rather in hopes that the answer—as well as the manner in which it would be delivered—would prove highly instructive for all concerned.