The Church today is in tatters. If one imagines the Church as a body (well, it is a body - the Mystical Body of Christ - but I mean if one were to represent it as a physical body) one would have to imagine this body with swaths of flesh flayed from the bones and hanging loose. One would have to imagine this body with bones showing through the ripped flesh. One would have to imagine this body as all but dead, with most of its life-blood in a puddle around it.
There is almost no teaching of the Church that large segments of those who identify as Catholic don't openly reject. There is no country on earth where the bishops, as a rule, are paragons of holiness and manliness. The term "bishop" is almost synonymous today with "effeminate coward." Indeed, it's all but openly acknowledged (certainly well known) that the majority of bishops in the world today are of homosexual bent. The current pope, far from being a principal of unity in the Church is a sign for internal division, controversy, and inconsistency. The modes of worship and practice that nurtured and gave rise to the Church in the crucible of persecution in the first four hundred years of its existence are all but outlawed, while a parade of sacrileges and clownish farces are imposed on the faithful by buffoonish priests and the bishops who support them.
Then there's the damage done to the Church's image and moral authority (not to mention the loss of souls) caused by the sexual—overwhelmingly homosexual—patterns of abuse and cover-up that have plagued the Church for the past three quarters of a century. Even among those who remain faithful, weekly Mass-attending Catholics, true to the Church' perennial teachings on all matters of faith and morals, there is a general sense that bishops are not to be trusted, nor should one look to them or specific moral guidance in navigating the challenges of the modern world.
The Vatican finances are a mess, as are those of many dioceses. Plagued by the awakening of Catholics to the dubious (and outright evil) ways the money they've been donating have been spent, dioceses and the Vatican alike are scrambling to find ways to replace the funds from faithful who have decided to support the propagation of the Faith and the material needs of priests in other ways than dropping money into the basket on Sunday or supporting the various bishops' and papal appeals and campaigns.
In some way or other, almost everything leading to the Church's deplorable state today is related to sins of the flesh.
Then there is the Synod on Synodality, which has not only highlighted all of the above in a big way, but has represented a doubling down by the Church hierarchy on the very actions that led the Church to the situation it's in now.
And make no mistake: Synodality is entirely about sins of the flesh. When it entertains softening the Church' stance against homosexuality, it's about sins of the flesh. When it examines the topic of the ordination of women, it's about sins of the flesh. When it entertains the possibility of women as non-ordained "deacons," it's about sins of the flesh. When it seeks to democratize the Church, it's about sins of the flesh. When it seeks to give doctrinal authority to conferences of bishops, it's about sins of the flesh.
To understand this seemingly counter-intuitive characterization, one needs to first understand why sins of the flesh are so problematic. We know they are problematic: Jesus Himself called out doers of sins of the flesh as excluded from the Kingdom. Saint Paul preached in no uncertain terms against sins of the flesh. Our Lady told the children at Fatima that more souls go to hell through sins of impurity than for any other sin. There's an argument that sins of the flesh aren't the worst sins that one can commit (and they certainly aren't) but just the most accessible for the masses, and therefore the most prominent in leading people into a habit of sin. But this fails to get at the whole matter.
"In His Own image He made them; male and female He created them." [Genesis]
The creation of the human race as male and female establishes the marital embrace as a mechanism by which humans participate in the work of creation. When animals procreate, they are not creating something new. Everything that becomes the new animal already existed, and when the animal dies there is nothing remaining that wasn't in the universe before. But when humans procreate, they also co-create. Each time a new human is conceived, an eternal soul comes into existence. This soul will never cease to be. Not after that human dies, not even after the end of all natural human life. That individual soul will continue to exist - either in the Kingdom of God or in the lake of fire - forever. This makes the procreative act a serious matter. One can easily conclude that one should take care regarding the circumstances in which one procreates.
But there's a deep way in which sins of the flesh go far beyond the flesh. If the only meaning of the marital union was the creation of new eternal souls, then it might make sense to develop a morality that focuses only on keeping that particular act within the context of a marriage. The idea is that the newly created soul should have the best opportunity to be brought up in the Kingdom of God. Such a morality wouldn't have much to say one way or the other about acts which, though resulting in the same (or similar) physical pleasures, carry no possibility of generating a new soul. While this seems to be the model of sexual morality that most of the Church' hierarchy want to teach today, the Church has never even hinted at this model. It's important to understand why.
God meant something by creating humans as men and women, and He meant something different by creating women than He meant by creating men. The right relationship between men and women is an expression of the relationship between God and humanity. This right relationship, expressed in the only pre-lapsarian institution to now be elevated to the dignity of a sacrament, is also an expression of the relationship between Christ and the Church: He is the bridegroom and she is the bride; He is her head and she is His body, as Saint Paul makes clear.
But within the Church, this head/body (and therefore male/female) dichotomy has another manifestation. The Church itself has a magisterial headship, fully vested in the Pope and to the extent they are in union with him, vested in the bishops. This headship is meant by God to discipline and teach the rest of the Church, the body, which are the laity. Although the entire Church is corporately feminine in relation to Christ, the laity are, corporately, a feminine part of the Church in relation to the episcopate and particularly the papacy. This reality is part of what God meant by creating them "male and female." This is why only men can participate in the magisterial headship of the Church.
To re-iterate, these high realities are expressed by God in the earthy human reality of the distinction between men and woman and of their right relation. This right relation includes the use of their sexual faculty. The sexual act is an act of union and the purpose of that union is the creation of a new soul. This is not to say that every such union must result in a new soul, to be licit and moral. To be sure, in the immediate context of a particular act of the marital embrace, the exchange of love and pleasure is the purpose to which the couple most often (and rightly) direct themselves. But the purpose for which God provided the capability and drive for men and women to engage in the act is the creation of new souls. However, it is just as true that the reason God chose this particular way of creating new souls—the union of a man and a woman—is to express something about Himself: His love for mankind, and more particularly, Christ's love for the Church.
But God is pure in His love for mankind; Christ is pure in His love for the Church; and because marriage is an expression of that same love, God calls men to be equally pure in their love for their wives. This is the cardinal reality on which the whole of sexual morality hinges. This means the entirety of the gift of sexuality, even in its animality (especially in its animality), is not to be exercised other than for the sake of and in the context of marriage, that very institution through which God makes us into co-creators with Him.
Note, here, that by "sexuality" I'm referring specifically to the acts and pleasures related to procreation. I'm not talking about the gift of gender, which is more broadly that which defines a man and a woman. Priests and bishops should (and a few still do) exercise their manliness in the execution of their duties as priests and bishops. But they don't exercise their sexuality. They don't (if they're behaving well) make use of the potential they have, to engage the pleasures associated with acts of procreation. In a similar way, sisters (nuns) also exercise their femininity in living out the rules of their orders, even though they don't engage in sexual behavior.
To restate the point: This reality, that marriage itself is not merely a pragmatic convenience for the raising of children, but was established by God as an image of His Own love for us, is at the heart of the sexual morality taught by the Church. Saint Paul understood this and expressed it in his own writings, and the Church has been accordingly consistent in its teachings on sexual morality for two thousand years. Even before the Church, the Holy Spirit, in His inspiration of the sacred authors of the Old Testament, repeatedly compares the idolatrous infidelities of the Jews to marital infidelity. Because of this high view of marriage itself, as the only proper context for the procreative act, the Church has rightly taught that all acts of a sexually pleasing nature are reserved for the marital context, and that this even applies to those who are not married or who never will marry.
But for marriage to fit this mold, the ontological reality of men and women as distinct categories, and the asymmetry of their relation to each other, must obtain. If it doesn't, then marriage doesn't work as an expression of God's love for us, or His creation of us, or of any of the other realities that God meant when He established marriage. This is what makes feminism so insidious: It denies the fundamental ontological reality of God's creation of men and women as men and women. In denying that reality, one severs marriage from its deeper meaning and relegates it to a mere pragmatic institution. If marriage is not an expression of God's love for us, but is just a "good way" to raise children, then the theory mentioned earlier, concerned only with the context of procreation but not with the context of sexual pleasure per se, could obtain. The denial of the ontological distinction between men and women leads to a sexual morality that permits everything with the sole caveat "Don't make a baby out of wedlock."
But God doesn't permit that, and we can see how seriously He takes our obligation to be pure by reading some of the visionary saints' accounts of the Jesus' scourging at the pillar. It has been revealed that during His scourging, Jesus intended to make reparation to the Father for all the sins of the flesh that would be committed throughout history. The result was that His own flesh was left in tatters. Mary, speaking to one visionary, said that after the flogging she could see the bones of His ribs in some places. This is how seriously God takes sexual morality.
The project of synodalism in the Church seeks to reject not marriage itself, directly, but rather the very things God meant by establishing marriage between Adam and Eve. It seeks to change the Church from the Bride and Mystical Body of Christ to just the "people of God." It seeks to undermine the significance of the papacy as a sacrament specifically of headship (and therefore maleness) and relegate it to a "first among equals" in the college of bishops. It seeks to flatten the hierarchy, suppressing the distinction between the masculine teaching Church and the feminine disciple Church. It seeks to de-masculinize the Church in the world by (for all of its talk about "mission") by not doing anything to actually change the world. The synodal movement in the Church is just another form of feminism: Instead of feminism from the bottom, which seeks to deny the expression of God's order in the human creation of male and female, it's feminism from the top, seeking to deny God's order itself, so that there's nothing for God to express in the human creation of male and female. If God created men and women not as ontological categories, but only for mere mechanistic purposes of propagation, then the line in Genesis is a throw-away line. God didn't mean anything particular about creating them "male and female," and when it comes to urges of the flesh, anything goes as long as babies aren't created out of wedlock.
If Jesus' flesh was left in tatters after the flogging, it might not be too far off the mark to recognize that in the Church today, Jesus' Mystical Body, is equally in tatters, and for much the same reason. Jesus allowed His flesh to be torn to shreds in reparation for sins of the flesh. That seems all the more fitting (and horrifying) given that His Mystical Body today is in tatters and shreds over those very same sins.