The tremendous popularity of Shania Twain’s “From
This Moment” confirms that people can still be inspired by the grandeur of permanent,
monogamous marriage. Yet, have Catholics
and other Christians all-too-frequently instead succumbed to a base vision, inadvertently
blinding others from this awesome brilliance?
Even Planned Parenthood acknowledges that religious
affiliation lessens the likelihood of
extramarital sexual intercourse [i]. Yet,
this begs the question as to why any Christian
would engage in this sin. The ideal has
been proclaimed to us! Why do we seek what
is so incredibly less – to say the least – than the ideal?
Actual sexual relations
with someone other than one’s spouse is not the only way to commit
adultery! The internet has opened new
avenues for sins against marriage; human ramifications are now becoming
apparent: “At the 2003 meeting of the
American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of the 350 divorce lawyers
who attended said the Internet played a significant role in divorces in the
past year.[ii]”
Bishop Robert Finn offered sobering data about pornography in his February 2007 pastoral letter, “Blessed Are The Pure In Heart”:
- “U.S. porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC (6.2 billion). Porn revenue is larger than all combined revenues of all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises. The pornography industry, according to conservative estimates, brings in $57 billion per year, of which the United States is responsible for $12 billion.”
- “The Internet accounted for US $2.5 billion of the adult industry’s revenues.”
- “Cable pay per view amounted to $2.5 billion.”
- “Magazines accounted for $7.5 billion.”
- “There are 100 thousand websites offering illegal child pornography (U.S. Customs Service estimate).”
- “70% of 18 to 24 year old men visit pornographic sites in a typical month. 66% of men in their 20s and 30s also report being regular users of pornography.”
- “One out of three visitors to all adult web sites are women.”
- “In a survey reported in 2000, 21 percent of teens say they have looked at something on the Internet that they wouldn’t want their parents to know.”
- “90% of 8-16 year olds using the Internet have viewed pornography on line (most while doing homework).”
- “Eleven years old is the average age of first internet exposure to pornography.”
- “Child Pornography generates $3 billion annually.”
As per the U.S. State Department's Trafficking inPersons Report 2007, human trafficking “deprives people of their human rights
and freedoms, it increases global health risks, and it fuels the growth of
organized crime….[Each year,] approximately 800,000 people are trafficked
across national borders, which does not include millions trafficked within
their own countries. Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are
women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The majority of transnational
victims are females trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.”
As per Joe Parker, RN, "People used in the sex
industry often need medical care as a result of the ever-present violence. They
may need treatment for infectious diseases, including AIDS. Survivors
frequently need mental health care for post-traumatic stress disorder,
psychotic episodes and suicide attempts. About a third end up chronically
disabled and on Social Security. The sex trade plays an active role in
promoting alcohol and drug problems.... As many an old cop will say, 'Anyone
who thinks prostitution is a victimless crime, hasn't seen it up close.'"[iii]
Pope John Paul II reminds us that sins against marriage can also be committed within marriage, with one’s own spouse. In spite of the Church’s constant teaching against contraceptives, American Catholic married couples have been using contraceptives as frequently as non-Catholics - for the past half century.[iv] Have American Catholics somehow forgotten that these are serious sins?
- “You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5: 27 - 28).
Pope John Paul II looks at Christ’s
appeal to purity in the Sermon on the Mount.
The opening pages of Genesis gave us a phenomenal
look at God’s original plan for monogamous, lifelong spousal relationships – between one man and one woman – which
would be His platform for continuing His work of creation. While spousal relationships changed for the
worse after original sin, Christ calls us back to this “beginning.”
Throughout much of the Old Testament, “adultery” was
understood in a very limited, one-sided sense; i.e., as a man taking another
man’s wife (in the sense of stealing another’s property) but not as having
extra wives or concubines! Into such an
atmosphere, Christ proclaimed the necessity of purity of heart, reminding humanity
that the heart is where adultery can be committed – even with one’s lawful spouse!
Marriage is not a license for licentiousness. To treat one’s husband or one’s wife as a
mere means for sexual gratification – as
property, as an object, for example – is a far cry from what God intended
for sexual relations in marriage. To act
sexually in such a diminished manner – even
toward one’s own lawful spouse – is to commit adultery.
Life “according
to the Spirit” calls for living in a manner which proclaims the incredible
value of the human body and of sexual relations in marriage, according to God’s
original plan. The fact that we are
“temples of the Holy Spirit” makes reverence for the body and for sexual
relations in marriage all the more essential!
This is an enormously far cry – a polar opposite – from the “Manichean”
notion of the body as inherently inferior or evil.
John Paul II concludes this section by reflecting on
the role of culture in general – and media in particular:
- “the relationship of reciprocal gift which existed between them in the state of original innocence, changed after original sin into a relationship of reciprocal appropriation ….The word of Genesis 3:16 seem to suggest that this happens more at the woman’s expense and that in any case she feels it worse than the man….the man ought to have been ‘from the beginning’ the guardian of the reciprocity of the gift and of its true balance….the man has a special responsibility, as if it depended more on him whether the balance is kept or violated or even – if it has already been violated - reestablished” (7/30/80)
- “By adultery one understood only the possession of another’s wife, but not the possession of other women as wives, next to the first one. The whole tradition of the Old Covenant indicates that the essential and indispensable implication of the commandment ‘You shall not commit adultery’ never reached the consciousness and ethos of the later generations of the Chosen People….adultery is not understood, by contrast, as it appears from the point of view of the monogamy established by the Creator. We know already that Christ appealed to the ‘beginning’ precisely concerning this matter (see Mt 19: 8)” (8/13/80).
- “It is perhaps useful to add that in the interpretation of the Old Testament, while the prohibition of adultery is marked – one might say – by a compromise with the concupiscence of the body, the opposition to sexual deviations is clearly defined….the marriage law of the Old Testament places the procreative end of marriage in the foreground” (8/20/80)
- “the prophets reveal a different meaning of adultery than the legislative tradition gives it. Adultery is sin because it is the breaking of the personal covenant between the man and the woman” (8/27/80).
- “‘you have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you: Whoever looks at a woman to desire her [in a reductive way] has already committed adultery with her in his heart’…. Adultery ‘in the heart’ is not committed only because the man ‘looks’ in this way at a woman who is not his wife, but precisely because he looks in this way at a woman. Even if he were to look in this way at the woman who is his wife, he would commit the same adultery ‘in the heart’”
- “We have pointed out earlier that the legislation of the Old Testament, although it contained many harsh punishments, did not contribute toward ‘fulfilling the law,’ because its casuistry was marked by many compromises with the concupiscence of the flesh….Christ by contrast teaches that one fulfills the commandment by ‘purity of heart,’ in which human beings cannot share without firmness in facing everything that has its origin in concupiscence of the flesh. ‘Purity of heart’ is gained by the one who knows how to be consistently demanding toward his ‘heart’: toward his ‘heart’ and toward his ‘body’”(10/8/80)
- “the Christian ethos is characterized by a transformation of the human person’s conscience and attitudes…such as to express and realize the value of the body and of sex according to the Creator’s original plan, placed as they are at the service of the ‘communion of persons,’ which is the deepest substratum of human ethics and culture. While for the Manichean mentality, the body and sexuality constitute, so to speak, an ‘anti-value,’ for Christianity, on the contrary, they always remain ‘a value not sufficiently appreciated’” (10/22/80)
- “purity – purity of heart, about which Christ speaks in the Sermon on the Mount – is realized precisely in life ‘according to the Spirit’”(12/10/80)
- “according to him [St. Paul], a sin against the body is also a ‘profaning of the temple….The fact that we ‘were bought at a great price’ (1 Cor 6:20), the price of Christ’s act of redemption, makes precisely a new special commitment spring forth, namely, the duty of ‘keeping one’s own body with holiness and reverence’” (2/11/81).
- “Purity as a virtue or ability of ‘keeping one’s body with holiness and reverence,’ allied with the gift of piety as a fruit of the Holy Spirit’s dwelling in the ‘temple’ of the body, causes in the body such a fullness of dignity in interpersonal relations that God himself is thereby glorified” (3/18/81)
- “the words of Christ to which we have devoted a lengthy analysis had no other goal than the appreciation of the dignity of marriage and family” (4/8/81)
- “Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae underlines the necessity of ‘creating a climate favorable to education in chastity” (5/6/81).
[i] Zelee E. Hill,
John Cleland and Mohamed M. Ali, Religious Affiliation
and Extramarital Sex Among Men in Brazil, International
Family Planning Perspectives, March 2004
[ii] Pamela Paul, The Porn Factor. Time Magazine:
January 19, 2004).
[iii] Joe Parker, RN,
How Prostitution Works, Prostitution
Research and Education, August 4, 1998
[iv] Dr. Ronald
Freedman et al, Catholics and
Contraception. Time Magazine, July 4, 1960
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