§ 4. On Adultery

781. Definition. Adultery is copulation had with a married person.

Therefore the perfect malice of adultery is present when, by concubitus, either one's own marriage-bed or another's, or both at once, is violated. But imperfect malice of adultery is had if this violation happens through imperfect acts, for example touches, or through actions by which a married person illicitly disposes of his own body or of the body of his wife (see below n. 782).

Division. Adultery is either simple, when an unmarried man sins with a married woman, or a married man with an unmarried woman; or double, when a married man sins with a married woman.

Principles. I. Adultery is a grave sin against chastity and a most grave sin against justice, even if consent of the spouse is present. It is established: 1. From Scripture (Deut., 22, 22): If a man has slept with the wife of another, let each die, that is, the adulterer and the adulteress; and you shall take away the evil from Israel. And (1 Cor., 6, 9): Neither adulterers shall possess the kingdom of God. 2. From reason: for adultery injures, in a most grave matter, the right of the other spouse, harms the good of offspring, hurts the family, often begets scandals and quarrels, and generates innumerable other evils, as daily experience teaches.

We said: even if consent of the spouse is present, because such cession is null, since the right over the body of the spouse belonging to each spouse is exclusively proper and entirely inalienable, from the divine institution of matrimony and from the very law of nature. Hence this 50th proposition was proscribed by Innocent XI: "Copulation with a married woman, the husband consenting, is not adultery." Cf. Viva on this proposition; see what we established above, n. 723.

782. II. Adultery of a married man with a married woman includes in itself a double injustice distinct in number. The reason is evident; for the rights of each marriage-bed are violated. Hence, such a circumstance is to be disclosed in confession (cf. n. 330).

From these things conclude: 1. Adultery of an unmarried man with a married woman is, speaking of itself, a graver sin than that of a married man with an unmarried woman. The reason is that, in the first

case, copulation either harms generation (which not rarely happens), and then the husband is unjustly deprived of offspring; or it introduces false heirs into the family, or at least often begets uncertainty of offspring (III, 445). 2. He who knows his own wife sodomitically or onanistically, or is voluntarily polluted, according to the common opinion, more probably commits adultery; because such a crime is against the good of the faith given, and an injury against the body of the spouse (III, 446; Sanchez, de Matrim., l. IX, disp. 18, n. 5; Lehmkuhl, I, 1049; Berardi, II, n. 816). 3. He who has relations with another's betrothed does not commit true adultery. Indeed, on the part of the betrothed woman, there is a promise of her body, but the completed handing over of the body is lacking, as we already said n. 774.