Disambiguating Development in Moral Teaching: Slavery and Sex Contrasted

This essay refutes the claim that the Catholic Church’s historical development regarding slavery provides a legitimating precedent for revising its traditional sexual ethics. Drawing on the loci theologici of Melchor Cano and Joseph Ratzinger, the author highlights a fundamental disanalogy: While biblical and patristic teaching on slavery reflects an "ameliorative" trajectory sensitive to social context, its prohibition of same-sex acts is "univocal" and rooted in a context-transcendent anthropology. Ultimately, the shift toward abolition is presented as a modification of the ius gentium enabled by the rise of modern alternatives like centralized incarceration.