SEDUZIONE. – In biblical language the term has various meanings. Sometimes it indicates any action directed toward leading others into error or sin: in this sense the devil is often called the “seducer,” and his work of leading people to evil, especially at the end of time, is precisely designated as s. (cf. II Thess. 2:10; II Io. 7, etc.). In particular, s. is the action of inducing someone to idolatry (cf. Deut. 7:4) and impurity (cf. Prov. 5:20; cf. also Gen. 34:1–31; II Sam. 13).
The Old Testament deals with s. in the last-mentioned sense in Ex. 22:16 ff. and Deut. 22:23 ff. In the first passage it says that “if a man seduces a virgin who is not yet betrothed, he shall provide her dowry and marry her; if the girl’s father does not wish to give her to him, he shall pay a sum of money according to the dowry customarily received by girls.” In the second it says that, in the case of the s. of a betrothed virgin occurring in a city, she and the seducer “shall be stoned: the girl because she did not cry out ... the man because he humbled his neighbor’s wife.” If this occurs in the countryside and with the use of violence, “the girl shall suffer nothing.” Only the death penalty for the seducer shall remain. If, moreover, the violated girl under such conditions is not betrothed, the seducer “shall give the girl’s father fifty silver shekels and shall have her as his wife, because he has humbled her, and he may not repudiate her for the whole of his life.” As can be seen, a distinction is always made between a betrothed and an unbetrothed virgin, between city and countryside, and there is never a lack of reference to force and therefore to violence. Once marriage takes place, the possibility of repudiation is excluded.
The prescriptions of the Old Testament had a considerable influence on canon legislation, which required the seducer of a virgin, in addition to taking her as his wife, also to provide her with a dowry, limiting the obligation to providing the dowry alone when she or her father did not consent to the marriage (I, X, 5, 16). Practice, however, increasingly moved toward a disjunctive interpretation: either marry the young woman or provide her with a dowry: “hodie contra stuprantes virgines sine vi, non est in usu alia poena, quam ut illas ducant in uxores, vel condecenter dotent” (I. Clarus, Practica criminalis de stup., n. 3, in Opera omnia, II, Venice 1614). Yet these provisions sometimes proved more an incentive than a deterrent to s.: girls and parents saw in them a means of obtaining the dowry or securing the marriage. For this reason, some legislators established that the rapist should be condemned to a penalty to be devoted to the benefit of the poor. Some even went so far as to remove every penalty and indeed the action itself.
Current Italian legislation recognizes the offense of s. “when carnal intercourse has taken place” (art. 526 of the Italian Penal Code) and establishes that “whoever, by promising marriage, seduces a woman who is a minor, leading her into error concerning his status as a married person, shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to two years”; the promise alone, therefore, is not a crime; for it to be one, the woman must be a minor and there must have been deception concerning the seducer’s marital status; consequently, there is no offense when the woman is of age or when the seducer is unmarried.
Current canon legislation does not provide for an offense of s. in the specific sense of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and the Italian Penal Code. Something akin to it is provided for in canons 2353 and 2354, in which, however, the aspects of violence and abduction are emphasized above all. The CIC often deals, however, with offenses that in a broader sense could be called offenses of s.: in particular, canon 904, concerning solicitation and turpia committed by a priest-confessor (v. SOLLICITAZIONE), and canon 2359, concerning violations of chastity committed by clerics, deserve mention.
From the moral point of view, s. is gravely condemned, both because of the sin that the seducer intends to commit and because of the sin to which he induces the person whom he wishes to seduce, and sometimes also because of the means by which he seeks to achieve s.; it thus combines within itself an offense against the virtue to which the object of the s. is opposed and an offense against the love of neighbor, whose good one must seek to promote, even at personal sacrifice.
Given the nature of the offense, s. also entails an obligation of reparation. For this to be real, however, there must actually have been harm; in practice, there must have been an impediment to marriage or to conception or birth. One point that has long attracted attention, and that still divides authors today, is whether reparation should take place through marriage. In this regard, it is rightly observed that marriage, especially within the present structure of marriage and the family, entails a considerable agreement in the way of viewing and conducting life; when this is lacking, it becomes not a good but an evil and an affliction; in such a case, adding marriage to s. would mean adding another, more serious evil to an evil.
Pastorally, therefore, caution and realism will be required at the same time, avoiding hasty, simplistic, and sentimental solutions. It need hardly be said that, from the pastoral point of view, considerable prudence will be required before pronouncing on the existence of s. and on its perpetrator.
For the meaning of s., understood in the sense of temptation, V. TENTAZIONE DELL'UOMO.
Giovanni Battista Guzzetti