Note: We will bring this great work to you over the coming days, in five parts. A special thank-you to contributor Francesca Romana, whose translations are second to none, for the extensive work involved with this series:
By Don
Pietro Leone
A spiritu fornicationis
libera nos, Domine
(invocation from the Litany
of the Saints)
 |
A detail from the Ysenheimer Altar by Matthaeus Gruenewald represented
an androgyne demon storming a church
|
Sister Lucia of Fatima wrote to Cardinal Caffara that the final clash
between the Devil and the Church would be in the area of the family and
marriage. A dispassionate survey of recent Church history serves to assure us
that the clash has already begun, that is to say with the entry into the Church
of the Demon Asmodeus: the spirit of fornication.
The question that we wish to address in this
essay is how Holy Mother Church, Who has for 2,000 years resisted, been able to
overcome, and indeed been purged and exalted by, all the cruel and inhuman
violence of her persecutors and all the abstruse subtleties of the heretics, is
now succumbing to something as base and as primitive as the concupiscence of
the flesh.
To attempt to answer this question, we shall
briefly present:
1)
The Church’s traditional attitude to sexuality, in contrast to that of
the World;
2) The attitude to sexuality of the modern
Church (or rather of the modern Churchmen) from the time of the Second Vatican
Council to the accession of Pope Francis; and finally
3)
The attitude manifest in the encyclical Amoris Laetitia.
I
SEXUALITY IN THE EYES OF THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD
a)
The Nature of Sexuality
In the eyes of the Church, sexuality has a
finality: it is a faculty of the human person oriented to procreation. Since
procreation necessitates the existence of a marriage and a family for its
proper use, sexuality belongs within marriage and the family, and sexuality
thus falls within marital ethics.
In the eyes of the World, by contrast,
sexuality does not necessarily belong to marriage or fall within marital
ethics, but rather has its own ethics, that is to say sexual ethics. To the
Church the atomic cell is marriage; to the World it is sexuality.
To the World, again, sexuality does not
have a ‘finality’, or orientation, as such. Rather, as sense-love, it is an end
in itself and speaks for itself; it does not require justification, even if it
impels the agent to act counter to reason. Indeed the very concept of
‘finality’ is distasteful to the children of the World[1],
because their Weltanschauung is
essentially subjectivist and self-centered. In a word, they are interested only
in their own finality (or desires), and in not that of God, Who, according to
them, may very possibly not exist at all.
Their conception of sexuality ranges from
the superficial to the worldly-wise: from the conception simply of something
which brings pleasure, alone or with another irrespective of the other’s age,
sex, or marital status; to the conception of
love between two adults, male and female, but which is typically not
confined to marriage alone. Sexuality, according to them, has its own dynamic:
it grows, fades, dies, brings pleasure but also sadness; it attaches to one
person and then to another; it is as variable and as bittersweet as life
itself.
b)
The Evaluation of Sexuality
The Church teaches that sexuality, being a
sense faculty, is, in our fallen human nature, and as a consequence of Original
Sin, disordered. Like all the operations of the senses and the emotions, it
must therefore be controlled and kept in check by the cardinal virtue of
moderation, which in the area of sexuality is known as ‘chastity’. Marriage, in
providing the context for the proper use of sexuality, is termed ‘the remedy
for concupiscence’. For those who are married, chastity signifies moderation of
the use and pleasures of this faculty; for the unmarried it signifies total
abstinence.
Apart from chastity, there is another
virtue which the Church advocates in the sexual domain, and that is modesty, or
the sense of shame, pudor. This
virtue relates to demeanour, dress, and speech. Indeed sexuality is not
discussed by committed Catholics except with the utmost tact and discretion.
The World, by contrast, views sexuality as
good in an unqualified sense, inasmuch as it belongs to human nature, which it
also views as good in such a sense. ‘God made me that way’, they are wont to
say, about any desire that might afflict them.
The World is not interested in modesty. It
advocates complete license in the exercise of sexuality, in dress, and in
speech. It is open and candid when it comes to this, its favourite topic.
Jokes, double entendres, stories of
affairs, ‘conquests’, and scandals are merrily bandied about as though a sure
index of manliness and emancipation [2].
c) The Abuse of Sexuality
Inasmuch as it is ordered to procreation,
to the creation of beings after the image and likeness of God, for the
conservation of the human race and for the population of Heaven, sexuality is
ordered to a great good, and consequently its abuse is a great evil. For this
reason the Church teaches that all sexual sins, all sins against purity, are of
grave matter: whether alone or with another, whether both are single, or one or
both are married to another, whether they are of a different or of the same
sex, whether the sin is of the natural or unnatural order. If committed with
full knowledge and deliberate consent, such sins, if not confessed before
physical death, will merit the eternal death of Hell. Holy Communion in the
state of mortal sin is a further mortal sin: that of sacrilege.
The World, by contrast, views this vision
as exaggerated, puritanical, prudish, psychologically unenlightened, inhibited,
repressive, killjoy, moralizing, pharisaic, ‘only for nuns’, ‘positively
medieval’ and ‘hopelessly out of step with the times’. The Children of the
World defend themselves from the criticism of impurity by saying that they are
‘not harming any-one’. This they say because they subscribe to hedonism, which
constitutes the sum total of all their sexual ethics[3].
In conclusion, then, the Church teaches
that:
a) Sexuality has a finality and is ordained to procreation.
b) Sexuality is in itself disordered; in marriage it is permitted as the
‘remedy of concupiscence’; it must be moderated by asceticism: by chastity and
modesty.
c) Its abuse is gravely sinful.
The World teaches, by contrast, that:
a) Sexuality does not have a particular finality. Its use is pleasurable
and a means for expressing love between two persons, not necessarily married to
each other.
b) It is unqualifiedly good, and is to be used and talked about with
complete license.
c) Its morality is determined by the canons of hedonism.
e Part 2 to be posted, soon.
Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana
[1] as to Modern Philosophers in general
[2] whereas quite the opposite
is true: they are signs of effeminacy and self-indulgence: the incapacity to be
a man, to take courage and responsibility; the index of enslavement to lower
desires.
[3] we note here that hedonism is incoherent, since
self-indulgence brings sadness, while it is self-discipline (within the context
of the Christian virtues) that brings happiness
