In a 2010 article in The New York Times, David Gibson stated that, “by allowing for exceptions for condom use . . . the pope was not, as many of his unsettled allies on the Catholic right feared, capitulating to the very moral relativism that he himself has long decried. Instead, he was only espousing a tradition of Catholic moral reasoning based on ethical categories like the lesser evil and the principle of the double-effect, which says that you can undertake a ‘good’ act even if it has a secondary ‘evil’ but unintended effect. Such formulations are associated with casuistry, or ‘case-based’ moral thinking that Catholic philosophers elaborated in the 17th century to help believers make the best decision when faced with vexing options. This kind of thinking was often linked to highly educated priests of the influential Jesuit order and helped coin ‘Jesuitical’ as a pejorative term for a brainy ethics that critics saw as a way to find loopholes to justify immoral actions” (27 November 2010).
One of these early modern Jesuit casuists (especially well-known in Spanish historiography) was Tomás Sánchez (1550–1610) of Andalusian Cordova. He composed a three-volume Disputes over the sacrament of marriage (Disputationes de sancto matrimonii sacramento) published at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Fernanda Alfieri, here analyzes and contextualizes the most controversial part of Sánchez's moral treatise, entitled “On the conjugal debt.” The case-based moral thinking of the Spanish Jesuit was inherited from the Catholic late-medieval and early modern tradition of casuistry, especially the probabilistic tradition of the Dominican School of Salamanca, which — in my opinion — had developed independently from the Council of Trent and Counter-Reformation. Because of the role the early Jesuits assigned in their soteriological vision to the consolation of the faithful and thus to their ministry of frequent sacramental confession, casuistry became an inescapable means of training priests to be good confessors, as the enormous proliferation of Jesuit manuals — by Polanco, Loarte, Henriques, Sá, and Azor, and especially Francisco de Toledo — for confessors and for students of the new discipline of moral theology prove. As in the current dispute over Pope Benedict's opinion on the use of condoms, some churchmen had a bone to pick with Sánchez. Although some auctoritates, like the Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (known more for the Galileo case) backed Sánchez's solutions, pointing out the Jesuit casuist's place in the Catholic tradition, others, including the Jesuit Superior General Claudio Acquaviva, contrasted them as potentially subversive to morality, not necessarily limited to that of spouses. Of course, to the Jansenists and their allies on the Catholic right a half-century later, Sánchez would represent the essence of moral perversity of the Jesuitical casuistry, as portrayed in Pascal's The Provincial Letters (1657) and, consequently, in a number of writings of the French Enlightenment.
Different were the sexual sensitivities of the seventeenth century and what stirred controversy was not Sánchez's opinion on the use of condoms but his view on the relation between sin and pleasure. Far from exemplifying the alleged change in post-Trent Catholic theology that would refuse the pessimistic vision of the flesh of the Augustinian-Lutheran matrix, Sánchez argued that it is an approvable opinion claiming that if little pleasure (i.e., without unintended effect of ejaculation) was experienced in touching, the genitals included, and in kissing even between persons who were unmarried, there was no serious sin committed because of the little importance of such act (parvitas materiae). This view was contrary to the tradition of Catholic moral theology, endorsed officially by the Jesuit General in 1612, which argued that there are no insignificant sins where sex is concerned. In other words, all sins concerning sex, regardless of circumstance, are serious or deadly.
Sánchez was eager to analyze all possible sexual situations with casuistic pedantry not because he desired to write a kind of Jesuit Kama Sutra, as the historian Adriano Prosperi described it, but because he was concerned, as he explained to his superiors, about the eternal salvation of the faithful, which could not be achieved in the Church's view without sacramental absolution. The importance of Sánchez's learned and informative, if often misogynist, reflection on what circumstances made sexual acts more or less sinful that Alfieri's book examines with much precision, lies not so much in offering a revolutionary opinion on the subject but in giving early modern Catholic penitents a possibility of a more responsible and subjective evaluation of their moral decisions. According to the probabilistic casuistry system that Sánchez and most Jesuits of his time espoused, penitents were left free to follow even that opinion that seemed less authoritative to them. Yet, their acting upon that authoritative opinion would not be considered licit if they were unsure in their consciences that the opinion they decided to follow was authoritative. They could do so even against the opinion of their confessor, who did not have as much power as the Council of Trent would have wanted, describing him as the judge of his penitents’ consciences. Alfieri's book, like other recent books on early modern casuistry, including Fleming's on Caramuel-Lebkowitz's Probabilism and Kallendorf's on casuistry in the Spanish theater production, are very timely. They show not only the pluralism of Catholic approaches to moral issues but also highlight the significance of the early modern system of case-based moral reasoning to the discussion of contemporary vexing ethical questions.
