Over the past one hundred years, Catholic sexual ethics has become more hospitable to sexual bonding as a good that is distinct from procreation. However, our increasing knowledge of women’s sexual pain disorders highlights ongoing problems with official Catholic sexual ethics. This essay argues that the Catholic Church still reproduces gendered social scripts that unwittingly encourage heterosexual women to ignore their sexual pain and continue to engage desperately in intercourse, out of an exacerbated concern to satisfy male partners. These are tactics that only prolong and deepen women’s sexual suffering. Further, insights about the various options for women’s healing from sexual pain concretely suggest more liberative sexual scripts: the importance of women’s non‐obligatory, embodied desire and the need to reject intercourse as the compulsory norm for all sexual activity. Ultimately, women’s experiences of having sexual pain and healing from it lead to revisions in Catholic sexual ethics at a fundamental level.

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID‐19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.

Though the Catholic Church has become more mindful of the role that mental illness, especially depression, often plays in suicide, this greater awareness needs development so that Catholic theology can de-stigmatize suicidal people without normalizing suicide. To this end, the article draws upon recent psychological work on suicide to highlight the deep suffering of suicidal people and to indicate that they are, generally, victims of severe mental illness. Furthermore, attention is drawn to a group who is especially stigmatized: those who have already died by suicide. In response, Johann Baptist Metz’s emphasis on anamnestic solidarity with the dead provides an important corrective to this forgetting. Lastly, this revised understanding of suicide decedents helps Catholics develop the doctrine of the communion of saints for today.

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