The human body as scientifically but no longer morally intelligible

"In a time when we are experiencing the agonizing of creation against man’s work and when the question of the limits and standards of creation upon our activity has become the central problem of our ethical responsibility, this fact must appear quite strange. Notwithstanding all this, it remains always a disagreeable fact that 'nature' should be viewed as a moral issue. An anxious and unreasonable reaction against technology is also closely associated with the inability to discern a spiritual message in the material world. Nature still appears as an irrational form even while evincing mathematical structures which we can study technically. That nature has a mathematical intelligibility is to state the obvious, the assertion that it also contains in itself a moral intelligibility, however, is rejected as metaphysical fantasy."

     Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "Difficulties confronting the faith in Europe today," Communio:  international Catholic review 38, no. 4 (Winter 2011):  732 (728-737), underscoring mine, and also here.  =L'Osservatore Romano, 24 July 1989.  Cf. pp. 730-731:

Where such thinking holds sway, the relationship of man to his body necessarily changes too. . . .  The body then comes to be considered as a possession which a person can make use of in whatever way seems to him most helpful in attaining 'quality of life.'  The body is something that one has and that one uses.  No longer does man expect to receive a message from his bodiliness as to who he is and what he should do, but definitely, on the basis of his reasonable deliberations and with complete independence, he expects to do with it as he wishes.  In consequence, there is indeed no difference whether the body be of the masculine or the feminine sex, the body no longer expresses being at all, on the contrary, it has become a piece of property. . . .  Likewise divested of every metaphysical symbolism is the distinction between man and woman [etc]. . . .