Sexuality and Culture: Cross-Discipline, Synodal and Educational Perspectives
by Claudia Leal
Surely sexuality and culture are among the topics that engage us most as individuals; indeed, reason is not enough to tell us about our experiences and their meaning. The emotions, desires, wounds, and hopes we carry in our hearts are also intertwined. Aware of the many challenges related to these factors that we experience as a society and as a Church, we have decided to dedicate the Visiting Professors’ seminar 2023-2024 at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute in Rome precisely to the crucial questions surrounding “Sexuality and Culture” today.
To carry out this ambitious task, we have chosen two professors as interlocutors, a sociologist of kinship and the family and a moral theologian; the former is Jean-Hugues Déchaux, professor of Sociology at the University of Lyon, France, and a member of the Max Weber Center, while the theologian is Ronaldo Zacharias, professor of Moral Theology at the Salesian University of São Paulo, Brazil, and member of CTEWC. We asked them to show us how they read and interpret the relationship between sexuality and culture in their research, and how they develop it methodologically. To specify the reflection, we also defined five axes that intersect with the main topic and led us to focus successively on 5 working areas: cultural plurality, power and violence, education, kinship structures, and sexual diversity.
The reflection led us to observe the great metamorphoses that sexuality and culture make us see today; practices involving such dimensions as parenting, sexual initiation, filiation, and corporeality change rapidly because of the techno-scientific revolution and globalization. These changes must then be observed and experienced in the light of faith and the urgent questions of justice that arise from them.
For the 60 participants, each morning program included talks by both professors followed by team work, while in the afternoon the practical challenges were reflected upon in roundtable discussions that drew on the previous work. This proposal certainly represents a didactic stance, deliberately opening up spaces for dialogue and discussion, to bring forth debates that can nurture the theology of the family that we do. The John Paul II Pontifical Institute welcomes post-graduate and doctoral students from 45 countries, and each of them brings to the academic community unique cultural and family stories, and a great desire to be formed to serve families, particularly the most suffering ones. It is also noteworthy that – for some time now – we have been making use of the synodal method for our assemblies and team work, and we have gained not only familiarity with this method but also great confidence in the fruits it brings forth.
Making Professor Déchaux’s words our own, we can say that this intense week has been for all of us an “invitation to grasp this complexity thinking that presupposes the acceptance of uncertainty, the tentativeness of analysis and conclusions, the cautious approach of one who has assumptions and must be ready to revise them to take into account the facts and data of experience.” We have been challenged to pursue an approach that does not think of one’s own gain but is faithful to the vocation that inspires us, as delineated by Pope Francis in Summa Familiae Cura: “The good of the family is decisive for the future of the world and the Church. […] It is healthy to pay attention to concrete reality, because the Holy Spirit’s requests and calls also resonate in the very events of history, through which the Church can be guided to a deeper intelligence of the inexhaustible mystery of marriage and the family.”
During the Visiting professors’ seminar we have learnt so much about the topics we have studied. Not only from a content point of view, but also by observing what these topics solicit in us. We then identified challenges for our training that we will take up in the teaching proposal of the coming years, for example: the need for a closer look at postcolonial studies and their relationship to religious studies, as well as an in-depth look at the use of biblical sources in moral theology.
Finally, we thank all the people who made this wonderful experience possible, particularly the wonderful professors Déchaux and Zacharias, and we already turn our eyes to the preparation of next year’s Visiting professors’ seminar!
