ABSTRACT
The Christian community, no less than the whole human community in general, is caught up in the evolution of sexual mores and in the process of trying to understand and cope with those evolutions. The Catholic Christian community seems to suffer from a particular handicap in the business of sorting out sexual morality. While many other Christian Churches have relied upon an ethics that is paradoxically founded upon scripture yet still reflecting contemporary cultural mores, the Catholic theological enterprise has built up an elaborate moral code based primarily upon what it referred to as "natural law". An ethics of care is other-oriented rather than self-oriented. In place of a preoccupation with acts and rules, it begins with human experience and a sensitivity to the needs of real, historically and culturally situated, persons. It is hard to conceive of Catholic Christians developing anything other than a positive ethics when it is a question of remaining on the general or fundamental level.
