Antonio Zebedeo Abad
Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!
Gen 2:23
Adam was excited to see a woman Eve that God took out of man to be his helper. God gave us sexual attraction. God made sex as beautiful. But what happened?
God knows well that when you eat of [the tree of knowledge and wisdom] your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know* good and evil.” Gen 3:5. Who told you that you were naked? Gen 3:11.
Genesis 3
It is a very fine line that once we cross it, there is no turning back. That knowledge and experience, especially of significance, become indelible in the mind. For many, a first sexual encounter before marriage, especially initiated by someone higher in the pecking order of various forms, can be so devastating and haunt the person for life. There are mixed feelings of shock, remorse, violation, distrust, mixed with sexual euphoria that the overall experience vacillates the person’s feelings between atrocity and desire. The result is a sexual disorder that is relentlessly haunting.
In Lost Vegas, right across the street from the cathedral, you see so much pornography given away to entice you to more experiences. The mainstream Hollywood movies teach exactly the opposite of what Christ teaches in the Beatitude: Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God. Mt 5:8. They equate sex with love. Just some attraction advances the characters into sexual acts. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Leave it to man to deface them here below. In both of these examples, there would be no supply if there were no demand. It is the high demand that ranks these industries among the most significant gross sales year after year.
For God so loved the world that he gave* his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. Jn 3:16. But daily life is not so dramatic as that. In “Do You Love Me?” from the musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye asks, “But do you love me?” Golde replies, “Do I love you? For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, milked the cow. After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?”
All the baptized are called to chastity. The Christian has “put on Christ,” the model for all chastity. All Christ’s faithful are called to lead a chaste life in keeping with their particular states of life. At the moment of his Baptism, the Christian is pledged to lead his affective life in chastity.
CCC, #2348
Chastity is practiced according to one’s state of life, being married, blessed singleness, divorced, widowed, or consecrated, regardless of sexual preference.
Married people will do so by living conjugal chastity, in the exclusive and lifelong gift of husband and wife to each other, avoiding the unchastity of contraceptive sex, and sharing the marital embrace in openness to new life. [Conjugal comes from the Latin words, con – together, and jugum – yoke.]
Sexual Attractions and the Call to Chastity
Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being. Sexuality, in which man’s belonging to the bodily and biological world is expressed, becomes personal and truly human when it is integrated into the relationship of one person to another, in the complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman. The virtue of chastity, therefore, involves the integrity of the person and the integrality of the gift.
CCC, #2337
Impress upon the consciences of young people the genuine concept of liberty, true liberty, a liberty worthy of and proper to a creature made in the image of God. This liberty is quite another thing from dissolution and unrestraint. It is a proven fitness for good; it consists in deciding what one’s duty is and then doing it; it is the mastery of one’s own faculties and instincts, and of the situations in which one lives.
Pius XII, Allocution to Members of Italian Catholic Action, March 23, 1952
Be sober and vigilant. Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for [someone] to devour. 1 Pt 5:8. This is why we need men to be the man of the house. We need Knights who can stand up for the good and the truth. And it just so happened that my planned topic of chastity coincides with an event. This is why we hold the Catholic Men’s Conference each year. http://www.seattlemensconference.org/