Chastity

It seems to me that the Church is suffering from a crisis of chastity.

It is not just the sins, crimes, and stupidity of the ordained (though I do not want to minimize anything about these grotesque evils); the Church is also suffering from:

• priests and religious behaving unchastely;
• priests and religious abandoning the vowed life;
• the unchaste behavior of the unmarried;
• the conception and murder of unwanted children;
• the willingness to commit adultery with and without benefit of divorce;
• the use of artificial methods of contraception in marriage;
• adoption and promotion of the gay and lesbian agenda;
• indulgence in pornography and solitary sexual sins.

Although I think the call for a new Inquisition or the restoration of witch hunts is wrong-headed, those who condemn the sins of the ordained are at the very least upholding the principle of chastity: we can and should restrain our sexual impulses for the love of God, for the love of our neighbors, and for love of ourselves. It does not matter how strong the temptations were or how intense the urges were that the priests felt to abuse their victims; disordered desires can never justify sin. It is also laudable to see our critics' zeal to see justice done. Our culture could use a little more shame about our shameful behavior.

No one is going to get away with these crimes. God is a just judge!

The innocent will be rewarded and the guilty made to pay in full.

Lust weakens the nation and the Church

Lust is not a small sin.

It corrupts us from the inside out.

In the Church's understanding of society, it is families, not isolated individuals, that are the building blocks of the social order. Our culture of lust weakens family life and therefore erodes the foundations of civilization. What happens in private affects our public life. The government can't legislate purity of heart, but that is what democracy needs in order to keep from degenerating into mob rule.

It is in the family that a child is turned from a barbarian into a virtuous person who needs only the lightest touch on the rein to cooperate with the social order. As a general rule, children need both a mother and a father to be equipped for citizenship.

Many children raised outside an intact family cannot be restrained even with the heaviest sanctions of society. We cannot thrive if good behavior has to be enforced by fascist or totalitarian police.

Parents who contracept and who teach their children to do the same destroy the foundations of their own and their children's marriages:

Fr. Dwight Longenecker, "Contraception and Celibacy."

If sex isn’t about children, then it’s not necessarily about marriage either.

"If You Want Justice, Work for Chastity."

At the height of the counterculture of the late 1960s and the flower-power desire for peace, Pope Paul VI said "If you want peace, work for justice." It remains a popular bumper sticker even today. ...

Paul said, "If you want peace, work for justice." John Paul said, "If you want justice, work for chastity." ...

Justice is a habit of character that inclines a person to render what is due to each and to all. It is not an impersonal set of legal or economic policies. When Pope Paul counseled, "If you want peace, work for justice," he was not primarily advising that we work to change laws or reallocate material goods. He was seeking to build up justice as a virtue, as an acquired personal quality. If we want peace, we must become persons whose lives are characterized by the virtue of justice.

We need God's help

Prurience is make-believe chastity. We indulge in lust under cover of condemning it.

We need to be won to a vision of God's beauty. This is not will-power Christianity, though it does require our cooperation with grace.

The nature of love

A real "love life" is:

• chaste
• committed
• Christ-centered

All others are counterfeits or otherwise stunted versions of real love.

The God-given desire for sexual union between a man and a woman is necessary for a valid sacrament of marriage. That proper erotic desire is different from lust, which is ordered not to fulfillment of God's will in marriage but to self-centered satisfaction at the expense of the other.

Chastity preserves health and saves lives

No one becomes sick or dies from being chaste.

People do get sick and die from being unchaste. They may suffer from sexually-transmitted diseases and cause others to do the same. Many of the unchaste murder the children whom they have conceived through unchaste behavior.

Sins against Chastity

Pornography

We have a taste for equality and for independence. The struggle of the teen-age years to reach equality with our parents and to break away from them is one of the dominant themes in our culture. The fact that the awakening of sexual awareness and sexual appetite coincides with the time of gaining independence makes this a highly "photogenic" period in our lives--our culture is drenched with images of teenage sexuality tinged with adolescent rebellion. That is also a major theme of much of our popular music.

"Let's Blow the Whistle on Internet Porn."

In The Social Costs of Pornography, however, a wide variety of medical experts and social scientists studied the harmful effects of pornography, in particular, the ubiquity, realism, and addictiveness of internet pornography. Mary Anne Layden, the Director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania, explains that pornography can trigger a variety of negative behaviors and attitudes, including behaviors both illegal and pathological. Frequent users of porn report seeking out images that once appalled them, such as illegal and obscene images of S&M and bestiality. They have also reported following the slippery slope from adult porn to child porn.

This makes psychological sense. To receive the same pleasure from viewing pornography, one must resort to more and more explicit and varied images. Such range is readily available on the internet. And why is internet porn so addictive? By offering a near limitless variety of sexual objects, internet porn tends to hardwire the brain to desire more of it, more often.

Masturbation

C. S. Lewis.

"For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself. Do read Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell and study the character of Mr. Wentworth.

And it is not only the faculty of love which is thus sterilized, forced back on itself, but also the faculty of imagination. The true exercise of imagination in my view, is (a) to help us understand other people, (b) to respond to, and, some of us, to produce art. But it also has a bad use: to provide for us, in shadowy form, a substitute for virtues, successes, distinctions, etc. which ought to be sought outside in the real world – e.g., picturing all I’d do if I were rich instead of earning and saving. Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which is bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison."

Fornication

I believe that many women suffer from the belief that if they yield to a man's advances, they will convince him of their love and elicit a commitment from him. It seems to me that they are reasoning, "If I give him what he wants, he will give me what I want."

Instead of winning the man's assent to marriage, which is the authentic form of a "committed personal relationship," the women signal that the men do not need to make a commitment to them in order to enjoy sexual union with them.

Among men, this is expressed crudely by saying, "There is no need to buy the cow if you're getting all the milk you want." In fact, so long as the couple is unmarried, the pressure is on the woman to behave the way the man wants her to behave and to dance to his tune. Very often, when she tries to cash in on the bargain she thought she had made with her partner, the man disappears from her life.

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want.

He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).

Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.

Links

• "What's wrong with Masturbation?, Masturbation in the Bible Does Masturbation prevent Prostate Cancer? How to stop masturbating."
• Lust Recovery.
• Achieving Chastity in a Pornographic World.
• "How to Strengthen Your Marriage after Porn Addiction."
• Catholic Support Group for Sexual Addiction Recovery.
• Impurity Addiction Support Group.
• "Let's Blow the Whistle on Internet Porn."
• "New Strategies for Combating Internet Porn."
• Church of Christ Convert, Joe McClane."
• Dr. Monica Breaux, a Catholic therapist who deals with sexual addiction & appetite formation, pornography, Catholic sexual ethics.

For Wives

• Partners for Purity. For wives of those who are addicted to sexual sins (for women only).
• "Resources for Wives Whose Husbands are Addicted to Pornography.
• Shattered Vows: Hope and Healing for Women Who Have Been Sexually Betrayed.
• I Surrender All: Rebuilding a Marriage Broken by Pornography.
• My House Women's Group.

For Couples

• Retrouvaille: A program to help couples heal and renew their marriages.
• "A Just Response to Cohabitation."

For those attracted to the same sex

• Courage, an apostolate of the Catholic Church, ministers to persons with same-sex attractions and their loved ones.
• JONAH International: Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, is a non-profit international organization dedicated to educating the world-wide Jewish community about the social, cultural and emotional factors which lead to same-sex attractions.

Cultural Analysis

• "A Brief History of Sex Ed: How We Reached Today’s Madness."