Defending love

I think this particular portion of the Holy Father's Christmas address to the Roman Curia is deserving of some attention, especially in light of my last post. Let His Holiness' words serve as the positive hypothesis that undergirds my critical comments about the California Attorney General's effort to negate a democratically enacted constitutional amendment. That we have a lot to do with regard to witnessing to the truth can be seen by an exchange that happened as the result of something I posted on Καθολικός διάκονος yesterday:

"Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Credo, the Church cannot and should not confine itself to passing on the message of salvation alone. It has a responsibility for the created order and ought to make this responsibility prevail, even in public. And in so doing, it ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself. What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense. When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term 'gender', results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him. But in this way he is living contrary to the truth, he is living contrary to the Spirit Creator. The tropical forests are deserving, yes, of our protection, but man merits no less than the creature, in which there is written a message which does not mean a contradiction of our liberty, but its condition. The great Scholastic theologians have characterised matrimony, the life-long bond between man and woman, as a sacrament of creation, instituted by the Creator himself and which Christ – without modifying the message of creation – has incorporated into the history of his covenant with mankind. This forms part of the message that the Church must recover the witness in favour of the Spirit Creator present in nature in its entirety and in a particular way in the nature of man, created in the image of God. Beginning from this perspective, it would be beneficial to read again the Encyclical Humanae Vitae: the intention of Pope Paul VI was to defend love against sexuality as a consumer entity, the future as opposed to the exclusive pretext of the present, and the nature of man against its manipulation."

A deep diaconal bow to Rocco over at Whispers for the English translation of the Holy Father's remarks and for the photograph.

The Inhumanity of the Megachurch Sex Marathon

Associated Press has a story on a pastor who challenged the married couples in his flock to a 7-day sex challenge (hat tip to the Ironic Catholic). While this phenomenon is not limited to megachurches, it has been a theme among some megachurches. Ralph Gardner Jr, writing for the New York Times, had an unforgettable quip. Commenting on a married couples who saw marathons as a way to improve their marriage, he writes: "That they thought a sex marathon would reinvigorate their marriages might say as much about the American penchant for exercise and goal-setting as it does about the state of romance."

To begin with, it is good that sex is affirmed as one of the goods of marriage. What's missing in these accounts, however, is the totality of the human experience. The most human way to affirm something is with awareness, consciousness. And if the affirmation is merely physical and quantitative, then it's not enough for the human person. For example, food is a good. Which way affirms the value of food more completely, more fully according the all the needs of human desire:

• to eat as much as possible and as often as possible OR
• to eat a good meal with friends?

Human beings need not merely sensory gratification and the satiation of instinct, but also need to understand the meaning, the value, the reason for their desire.

In the case of sex, intercourse is the form of the expression of love in which the husband and wife freely seek the happiness of the other, that is the whole happiness of the other, the destiny and total satisfaction of the other. And this happiness never remains alone but is oriented toward fecundity: including children, but also desiring a mutual fruitfulness in life.

If couples are seeking more satisfying sex, what they need is not necessarily more practice, but instead to begin to ask for more meaning, for a greater understanding of the significance of being instinctual creatures who enjoy each other sensorily and yet at the same time have an awareness of themselves and each other. Why is this given? Why are we made this way? If these questions are never asked, then frequent sex may lead to despair and a fear that desire is given in order to frustrate us.