Satan appears to be having a grand old time!

At the close of the USCCB's National Marriage Week and the weekend of Saint Valentine's Day, Satan appears to be having a grand old time with the release of "50 Shades of Grey" - trying to debase what one famous Catholic said should be "the nearest thing to the beatific vision we can know" in this life. 

"How presumptuous it is to try to treat of such a subject in a short article, when great books (like Dietrich von Hildebrand's In Defense of Purity ) have been written on the subject....the marriage act purged of impurities is the nearest thing to the beatific vision we can know. The intense pleasure and delight of the act itself may be like a sword piercing the heart, but though momentary in itself, it colors the hours and days, people and events, before and after, so that one is apt to feel that one is seeing others as God sees them, loving them as God loves them.  These things cannot be described except by the saints who knew that sin is a turning from God and a turning to creatures, a perversion, and pleasure becomes pain and light a most heavy darkness, and delight a deep sadness of the heart....

"What is purity? According to my little desk dictionary, it is the state or quality of being clean; freedom from foreign or adulterating matter; innocence, virtue; freedom from evil or improper motives. And the word chastity is freedom from obscenity or depravity in life or thought; sexual purity....

"'The tracing of analogies holds an honored place in Catholic theology,' a priest writes to me. 'Outside of divine revelation itself, it is the only positive means we have for studying and contemplating God. By means of it theologians seek to fill the gaps left by revelation in our knowledge of God. And in this particular case, the analogy between sexual union and the union of love between God and the soul is at once affirmed by reason and pointed out by divine revelation itself'" (Dorothy Day, Chastity, 12/10/66)

Perversion - the mistreatment of God's great gift, intended for married couples and meant to be open to procreation - is abhorrent, disgusting, and vulgar.  While society is rightly appalled by the sexual abuse of children, sexual abuse does not happen in a vacuum! Advertising, film, music, print, and television industries are making hordes of money by promoting a culture in which human sexuality is just one more commodity.  And victims of human trafficking are frequently women and children, exploited by nefarious, commercial sexual exploitation.  In The Clash of Orthodoxies, the great Princeton Professor Robert George has said:

"'people who suppose that prostitution, adultery, fornication, and the like are morally innocent are profoundly mistaken....Laws against intrinsic evils such as prostitution, pornography, drug abuse, and the like, as well as those regulating gambling and alcohol, are justified, in part, by a concern to protect the public environment" (pp. 101 - 108)

"Pornography is far from victimless: 'images such as those offered to readers of Swank tend to corrupt and deprave by doing precisely what they are designed to do, namely arousing sexual desire that is utterly unintegrated with the procreative and unitive goods that give the sexual congress of men and women, as husbands and wives, its value, meaning, and significance.... pornography is degrading and dehumanizing for everyone, but I have no doubt that women and girls get the worst of it....Anyone who makes the stuff available...does an injustice....everybody has a stake in the moral ecology of the community that pornography degrades" (pp. 115 - 121).