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spaxx
Junior Member
205 Posts |
 Posted - 09/12/2009 : 13:15:20
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First Principles on Purity
By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Sins against purity
The question of purity should be dealt with clearly in an elevated language and in audiences where only persons of the same sex are present. Young men should know everything that it is necessary for them to know about it.
Therefore, I will address some reasons why one should be pure. What does the Catholic Church mean when she commands her children to keep purity? What is purity? Why should one be pure? Why is this something noble, holy and godly?
If we know the answers to these questions, we will be able to admire this virtue more. Admiring it, we will have more enthusiasm for it and be able to make a stronger decision to practice it.
There are two Commandments of the Law of God that address purity. They are the Sixth, “Thou shall not sin against chastity,” and the Ninth “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”
What is to sin against chastity?
Straightforwardly it is to practice the sexual act outside of marriage. By sexual act one understands here the sexual act with a person of the other sex. It is also understood that the sexual act inside marriage is not a sin, but is part of the plan of God who said, “Go, increase and multiply.” Therefore, inside marriage it is considered an honest, common act. Outside of the marriage one who practices it commits a sin.
Because of the far-reaching understanding of St. John, the evangelist, of the fruit of his purity, he was compared to the eagle. When this act is practiced with a person of the same sex, it is always a sin because this is against nature. Therefore, it is absolutely forbidden on any occasion or in any circumstance.
Also sinful and forbidden is what is called the solitary sin, i.e., when a person by his own action provokes a pleasure analogous to the sexual act. It is what is called masturbation and is also a sin.
These are the basic mortal sins against purity forbidden by the Sixth Commandment.
The Ninth Commandment forbids anyone to desire the wife of his neighbor. Included in this prohibition is any sexual act between a married person and anyone else except for his/her spouse. When one breaks this law he commits adultery.
Sins against these two commandments can be by thoughts, words and deeds. It is a sin by thought when a person voluntarily directs his attention to something immoral; it is a sin by words when a person speaks obscenely or talks with others about immoralities; it is a sin by action when he practices the sexual act.
Why are these things forbidden?
Now we should address the question of why these things are sins and why God forbade them when He gave us His Commandments.
Per se the sexual act is not sinful. It is a physiological act that is in accordance with a natural aptitude God gave to man and woman to fulfill the precept he gave our first parents in Genesis: “Increase and multiply.” Mankind increases and multiplies through the practice of the sexual act. Then, the practice of this act is not sinful in itself.
It is a glory not to practice it – as we will see later in this series – but it is not shameful to practice it. However, like any natural act, this one is only legitimate when it is practiced to reach the end established for it in nature. When it is practiced outside of this end, it becomes a sin.
According to the laws of nature, only through the act of procreation can mankind perpetuate itself. Thus, this act should be exercised in conditions that it will give an abundant and healthy offspring who are also well-raised. This is because the natural complement of paternity is the education of one’s children. Therefore, if the offspring is not abundant, healthy and well-raised, one arrives at the opposite of what is called for by nature. Now then, only inside of marriage can such offspring be raised. This is why marriage is the condition that legitimizes the sexual act.
Marriage, according to the Will of God, is an indissoluble matrimony, one single marriage without any other marriage and, therefore, without divorce. This is the only marriage that is in accordance with the natural function of the perpetuation of the species. Any thing outside this is NOT according to God's Holy Will.
Why this so, will be examined in the next article.
To be continued |
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spaxx
Junior Member
205 Posts |
Posted - 09/28/2009 : 12:50:40
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Series on Purity – Part II
Divorce, Free Love & Damaged Children
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
The countries that admit divorce live in face of a contradiction: first they admit divorce, but then they have to put limits on it, otherwise the family is completely dissolved and society enters into moral chaos.
Even with limits, divorce is always permitted in two cases: when one of the spouses commits adultery and when one spouse beats the other. Once the principle of divorce is accepted in society, there is no escape – these two cases have to be included.
In the case of adultery, one of the spouses – let us suppose the wife – appears before the judge and says: “My husband is committing adultery.” The judge calls the husband, who admits this is true. So, according to the rules of justice, by acknowledging the fact the husband becomes a defendant who pleaded guilty. With this, the judicial process closes. The judge pronounces the divorce and that marriage is ipso facto dissolved.
Since today a man who commits adultery faces no public censure – it is a grave moral error of the public, but this is the way it is – the husband does not lose face for being unfaithful to his wife. Divorce becomes almost a routine without any social censure.
As for the case of violence, let us suppose an elderly couple where the accusation of adultery is less likely to be believed. The wife appears before the judge and says: “Every morning, my husband throws a shoe at me.” It is a thing an old man might do to an old woman. The judge calls the man and asks if he really does this, and he admits it. He says: “Yes, I do. I have been putting up with this woman, who is absolutely insupportable, for more than 30 years. I don’t want her around any longer, so I throw a shoe at her.”
The judge asks: “Then you confess your guilt.” The man replies: “I not only confess it, I proclaim it. And if I stay married to her, I’ll keep throwing a shoe every day at her.” The judge answers: “But she could be hurt.” The man: “I don’t care.” So, in the end the divorce is granted.
In other words, when a society admits divorce into its civil laws, it is granted almost every time a spouse requests it. After a divorce law is approved, the number of dissolution of marriages increases at a galloping speed. At first, the number is small, but it starts to accelerate quickly, heading toward a situation of a kind of free love. That is, for almost any reason one spouse can leave the other.
What are the results of this for the family size and formation of the offspring?
Divorce reduces the number of children
When a husband and wife know that they will stay together for their entire lives, they generally do not have any special worry about having many children. But if the spouses are not sure about the stability of their marriage, they want to have the least number of children possible because should a new marriage occur, the children of the previous marriage become an inconvenient leftover. They are viewed as a source of problems and expenses for the new union.
The indissoluable marriage produces large families and stable societies.
Let us imagine, for example, a couple where the husband is in his fourth marriage and the wife in also in her fourth – a situation not uncommon in countries with divorce. Let us suppose also for the purpose of this talk, that both of them followed natural law and had as many children as they should. What would be the psychological and moral state of the children from the first union?
They saw their mother going through all kinds of different husbands. With each change, they had to adapt to a new orientation of a different head of family. What often happens is that the children are sent to boarding schools and colleges to get them out of the way, or are juggled between the homes of the divided parents. After four marriages, this woman would have a strange mélange of children, each group with different physical characteristics.
When the birthday of one of them comes, she calls the child on the telephone and says: “Hello darling, how are you? I love you so much! You’re going to receive a wonderful present today that I bought for you! You see that your mother did not forget you. Now I’m sending you a big kiss. Good-bye.” This is the kind of maternal affection a child receives. In a certain way it is understandable, because if she were to visit each of her many children from previous marriages, she would spend a lot of time on the road. To avoid this sort of situation, the tendency of almost all women in a society with divorce is to practice birth control.
The father acts likewise. If the man is not wealthy, he has to work harder to pay for his many children from previous marriages. He makes the sacrifice, but often unwillingly since the children remind him of the bitter unions he made in the past. These children become a burden for him, making his situation terrible. So, normally a man will also practice birth control.
When divorce is legal in a country, the parents necessarily avoid their offspring.
Therefore, if it true that one, indissoluble marriage encourages procreation, so also is it true that marriage with divorce leads to a fewer number of the children.
This is why the countries that allow divorce have birth rates that are much lower than those of countries that forbid it.
Divorce and the formation of the children
Nothing is more favorable for the formation of the children than a stable home life, where the father and mother live together, have a mutual esteem for each other and support one another in the education of their children.
Nothing can be more harmful for a boy or a girl than to live in a boarding school and receive different orientations from his father and his mother regarding his formation. This breaks the paternal authority and the unity necessary for a good formation. Our Lord taught, “Every kingdom divided shall perish.” This applies here also. A formation without unity is precarious. Therefore, divorce propitiates the worst possible formation for the children.
How does divorce affect their mental state?
It is evident that a calm home – a home where harmony reigns – has an ambience favorable to the psychological health of the children. On the contrary, if a home is divided, a child at times will take the side of the father and at times, the side of the mother. Or if he is raised outside the home, he will have poor conditions to develop a healthy psychology and stable personality. The child of a broken home is likely to be a nervous or unstable person. It is another bad consequence of divorce.
Thus, birth control and the poor formation of children are the normal outcomes of divorce.
Free love and offspring
If these are the bad fruit of divorce, imagine the results of free love, which is officially supported by the State in communist countries.
Free love from the legal standpoint is a situation where in practice marriage does not exist. What is called a marriage in Russia according to the civil law is when a man and a woman appear before a civil clerk to declare that they are living together in the same place – nothing more than that. If they want to separate, they just need to file a new paper acknowledging that one of them changed domicile. It is understood that that union ended. That is all it takes. This is not much different than what happens in a chicken coop. If a roster and a hen could think, they would be married – according to communist law – until the moment that one was moved to another yard.
Abortion in Russia
Russian women who just aborted their children. The average rate of abortion in Russia is 4 per woman.
Now let us imagine the situation of a woman in Russia. If she follows natural law, in her age of fertility, she could become pregnant almost every year. That is, she would have to pass through all the inconveniences, risks and pains of a pregnancy every year. Would it be worthwhile to do this with every new “husband” that she has? What woman would want such a situation? It is not worth the trouble. The consequence is that in Russia women are very interested in avoiding having children.
The men, for similar reasons, also do not want this responsibility. In a communist State, a “husband” can change “wives” two or three times a year. Let us imagine a salesman who travels frequently from Moscow to Vladivostok. He may have a “wife” in each city where he stops to sell his goods. He could end by having 20 or 30 children, obliging him to have a special notebook just to keep track of them. Who wants a situation like this? The result is that he takes measures to prevent the birth of any child. Otherwise, his immoral life would lead him to untold problems and misery.
Hence another rule follows: if divorce tends toward limiting the number of offspring, free love tends toward not have any children at all.
I know that among some of the simple people of Russia, free love has not taken root. Even though the Schismatic Orthodox Church admits divorce, they still have a religious tradition that inclines them toward indissolubility of marriage. Notwithstanding, for the purpose of this talk what matters is the conclusion: that free love is opposed to procreation and an abundant offspring.
It is not necessary to demonstrate here that free love is contrary to the formation of the children. The children of free love are in much worse conditions than those of divorce. Likewise, in a regime where free love is implanted, the psychological balance of the children are almost always impaired.
Therefore, we can conclude that the only place where the sexual act effectively accomplishes the end for which it was intended by God is inside the one, indissoluble marriage. Divorce and free love prevent – partially or almost completely – the birth of children and their good formation. They are, therefore, against nature and against the will of God.
Divorce and free love are also censurable because, in the end, they are just legal disguises for the practice of impurity.
To be continued
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spaxx
Junior Member
205 Posts |
Posted - 10/10/2009 : 04:58:34
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Series on Purity – Part IIIPrejudices against Chastity and Virginity
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
As we have seen, the sexual act is legitimate, licit and honest inside an indissoluble marriage. When practiced outside marriage, however, it is illicit and dishonest, because it goes against the natural order established by God.
For this reason, a sin is committed when a single man practices this act, or a married man practices it with someone who is not his spouse. This latter case constitutes adultery because it is contrary to the natural order of things.
Some of you might raise this objection: “It seems to us that the act in itself is not against the natural order. Why, then, do you say that it is in the cases mentioned above?”
All of Catholic Morals is according to the natural order of things. Thus, it teaches that it is legitimate to kill an ox, but it is not legitimate to kill a man. Why? Because according to the natural order, the ox is an animal without a spiritual soul, made to serve man, but man has a spiritual soul and was made to serve God. Therefore, one man cannot kill another.
Why to lie is a sin? According to the natural order, the word was given to man to speak the truth. If he distorts the truth, he does not use the word in accordance with that order.
Why does a man who gets drunk go against the natural order? Because drinks were given to man to satisfy his thirst and provide him a moderate pleasure. When a man drinks beyond those limits and loses control of his reason, he goes against that order.
Once I was in a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro and a large, fat, red-faced man entered and was seated at a table. I normally have a good appetite myself and am also fat, so this is not the point of my critique. Shortly, several waiters came to serve him, which made me think that he was a regular customer who gave good tips.
Then, the man ordered an appetizer of paté. When the paté arrived, he looked at it with a kind of ferocious cupidity and began to eat it like a rabbit eating lettuce, without stopping and without appreciation. He ordered the same plate of paté several time. Then he ordered many other items on the menu.
As he ate, his red face increased in color, giving the impression that he could have a stroke at any moment. That is, he was putting a pressure on his system – he could well have been having stomach pains – only to enjoy the pleasure of eating. It was a disgusting spectacle to see because he was eating without any proportion, against the natural order of things.
For an analogous reason, the sexual act practiced outside marriage deserves censure and should cause revulsion because it is against the natural order, which is to procreate in a stable marriage. For this reason the Catholic Church is perfectly correct when she requires that a young man be chaste until marriage.
A scandalous error: for men all immoralities are permitted In our society we find a scandalous error, which affirms that all immoralities are permitted for a man, while censure is still made against immoral women (1). A woman who mounts the steps of the altar to marry without being a virgin is covered with shame. She still wears a white veil because she does not dare to say that she lost her virginity. On the contrary, current customs admit that a man may marry without shame after brazenly practicing countless sexual acts before marriage.
This is an injustice, because what is a sin for one sex is also a sin for the other. It is not only the woman who sins in a sexual act. It is not just the women who must follow the natural order while men are dispensed from it. This is an error and a scandalous prejudice that only a few priests combat. The Church turns a blind eye to the man’s lack of chastity, while she censures the woman. The Church should not have this complacence, because both acts – that of the man or of the woman – are mortal sins. The woman who marries having lost her virginity is as greatly dishonored as is the man who lost his. Similarly, the adultery of a married man is as shameful as that of the married woman.
In our society one speaks of an “adulterous woman,” as a horrible thing, and it is. But when it comes to the man, there is no censure. He just “had some adventures” and “had a good time.” How can this be considered consistent? According to this logic, a man could continue to have affairs after he marries. Then, marriage would be indissoluble only for the woman and not for the man. This is a violation of all the principles of justice and all the moral rules of the Catholic Church. It is a position that must be energetically rejected. We should censure a young man who practices an act against chastity in the same way that we censure a young woman who acts this way. There is no difference.
Chastity and virginity: states of life recommended by the ChurchEven when the Church approves and blesses those who marry, why does she reserve her highest eulogies for those who do not marry?
Let me remind you that Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted marriage as a sacrament, giving it a great dignity. There are numerous saints who were married. The married state is one that is according to Catholic Morals and that permits one to reach the apex of sanctity.
If this is so, why is it nobler not to marry? St. Paul used this expression that is applicable to both sexes: "I say to the unmarried and to the widows: it is good for them if they so continue, even as I. But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry; for it better to marry than to burn."(1 Cor 7:8-9)
In order to answer why it is better to not marry, let me first rectify another injustice. As our century is becoming increasingly tolerant toward the woman who sins against chastity, it is becoming increasingly intolerant toward the single woman. To be a single woman is seen as an almost shameful state of life. The single woman is viewed as a person to be scorned because no one wanted to marry her. Her fate is a useless life off in a corner. She is often pictured as a gossiper, a busybody, an intruder in other people's lives, with all kinds of complexes and defects.
While people have pity for a woman who falls into sin and wants to help her, they are rude to and scorn the single woman who maintains virginity for noble reasons. As if vice should produce compassion and virtue should be despised. This is a true aberration!
The Church considers that to be single is a better state than to be married for both the man and the woman. This judgment was always held by the Church as a tradition coming from Our Lord who established the evangelical counsels – chastity, obedience and poverty – as a way to live a perfect life. These are also called the counsels of perfection.
This tradition of chastity was formally approved by Pope Pius XII in his Encyclical Sacra Virginitas where he declared that virginity and perfect chastity are completely adequate for lay persons of both sexes. Even if they are not priests or nuns, should they want to live in the world a more elevated state, the right thing to do is to practice chastity.
Chastity is, therefore, a state of life not only approved but recommended by the Church for both sexes.
Prof. Plinio gave this talk in 1967 for young men in Brazil. Today, unfortunately, one does not see this shame falling upon women, either in Brazil or anywhere else, because they became as immoral as men were at that time. Besides being an expression of the perennial Catholic Morals on this topic, the comment remains as an interesting point of comparison to see how far and fast the Revolution in the civil sphere and Progressivism in the religious sphere have gone to corrupt the customs of women. How much further will the corruption go in another 40 years?
To be continued
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spaxx
Junior Member
205 Posts |
Posted - 10/21/2009 : 04:55:33
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Series on Purity – Part IV
Why Impurity Leads to a Materialist SpiritPlinio Corrêa de Oliveira
We have seen that the Catholic Church recommends to those who do not marry to maintain virginity and perfect chastity. This counsel applies not only to priests, but also – and this is my point in this series – to lay people living in the world, like you and me.
Why does the Church recommend this? Why is this state nobler?
As you know, man has five senses. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that the criterion to classify the senses is to see how they lead us to knowledge. The more noble a sense is, the more it leads us to a higher level of knowledge. Of our five senses, the most noble is the sight, because it the one that gives us a greater knowledge of the external reality.
We can have an idea of the nobility of the sense of sight by contrast. No one commits suicide when he becomes mute, deaf or loses his smell. There are people, however, who commit suicide when they become blind. The man who becomes blind – brutally deprived of the sight that gives him knowledge of the external reality of life – suffers such a great loss that life becomes like death for him. Hence, some have a tendency to commit suicide.
To commit suicide is a very bad thing, but the loss of sight sometimes induces people to do so. This demonstrates how sight is the principal sense we have to know the external world.
If I cannot see the face of another person, how can I know his soul? How can I make a generalization about other men and analyze their spiritual lives if I do not know their faces? We see, then, that sight, which gives us conditions to know other men, allows us to make generalizations that apply to all mankind. So, sight is the most encompassing sense, the one that gives us a more noble knowledge.
The senses of smell, taste and hearingWhen we analyze the senses of smell and taste, we see that they provide us with data that allow us to know not only immediate things through physical contact, but also permit us to know some spiritual things by analogy.
Wine connoisseurs have a refined and well-cultivated taste. For example, a man who tastes a fine liqueur, a connoisseur who truly enjoys a good liqueur, does not drink a chalice of it as he would a glass of water. He takes each sip of the liquid as a precious thing. It is an intellectual pleasure. A man with an uncultivated taste could not appreciate that liqueur. A person needs to have formation, culture and education to enjoy the degustation of a good liqueur.
Similarly, a person cannot appreciate an exquisite, high quality perfume if he does not have a well-trained, accurate sense of smell. For a man with this appreciation, discerning the fragrance is a means to understand the human mind and its spiritual characteristics.
It is interesting to note that the Church uses the expression ‘odor of sanctity’ – “This person died in the odor of sanctity.” In this case odor does not necessarily indicate a physical smell, but rather an atmosphere of sanctity. It is an analogy that uses the sense of smell as its first pattern.
In a different application, the Church says that the theses of a theologian have the flavor of heresy. Again, flavor here is not the immediate taste, but an analogy made with the palate to express her thinking – that those theses do not have the healthy taste of sound Catholic doctrine.
Hearing can also allow a man to achieve more knowledge. It suffices to think about the pleasure of music, which is the great consolation for the blind, to understand that the ear can open the door to a comprehension that allows a man to know spiritual things by analogy. It is not difficult to understand this.
These analogies represent normal applications of how these three senses can bring us to higher levels of knowledge. So far, the hierarchy of the senses is: sigth, hearing, smell and taste.
Touch – the most revolted and dominant of the senses When we reach the sense of touch, we see that it is the sense that gives us less knowledge of spiritual things. Of the five senses, it is the one more closely linked to matter. Because it is the least spiritual and most material of the senses, it is the lowest. A man with only the sense of touch would be a kind of living corpse.
Since it is the most material of the senses, it is the one that became more corrupted by original sin. Before original sin, man had complete dominion over the sexual instinct. Man did not have the tendency to use it outside marriage because he was perfectly in order and balanced.
With original sin, all the senses suffered consequences. There are many bad uses a man can make of his sense of sight, hearing, smell and taste. There were also many deficiencies and tendencies toward deterioration introduced in them as consequences of original sin.
However, the most feral of the senses is that of touch. The sense that is most disruptively dominant is the one that is the least noble. The domain where it is most undisciplined is precisely that which involves purity. It is in this realm that the revolt of the sense of touch is most intense, heavy and awful.
A man who wants to be pure can be assaulted by all kinds of solicitations toward impurity throughout his day, because the sexual instinct follows him always and everywhere.
So, the lowest of the senses is the one that most easily dominates man and drags him to all kinds of disorders and illicit actions. Since it is the lowest, when a man delivers himself to it, it is the one that most keeps a man bound to the material level. With regard to matter and spirit, man becomes much more dependant on matter and the spirit loses part of its dominion.
Impurity imprisons a man in material things. Normally, his taste for study fades and his intelligence diminishes because his strength to concentrate on more elevated matters perishes. He loses the pleasure for abstract thought, which forms the basis for the life of the mind. The imagination runs out of control, fantasy begins to dominate his mind. The will becomes soft; the certainty of reason disappears, and it becomes insecure. The man’s spiritual nature wanes as matter increasingly communicates to the soul its animal influence. Then, the spirit deteriorates and fades.
One proof of this is that all the peoples who deliver themselves to immorality decay from the intellectual point of view.
To be continued |
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spaxx
Junior Member
205 Posts |
Posted - 11/11/2009 : 08:49:28
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Series on Purity – Part IV
The Material Man vs. the Spiritual Man
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Someone could raise this objection: You stated that every people which surrenders to immorality deteriorates from the intellectual point of view [see Part IV]. Does this apply also to England? Are you telling us that the country that produced Shakespeare, the ceremonial of the Royal Court, the Tower of London and the Parliament building does not have spiritual gifts?
The answer is not difficult. From the moment England became Protestant, a stream of immorality began to flow into it. First, it was divorce; then, it opened the door to countless other kinds of immorality. Since England had many strong traditional values born in Catholic Civilization – the English Monarchy, solemn ceremonials, great universities and many other institutions with long histories – England’s spiritual life continued, fed by those factors. But the country’s energy and force were corroded by an incessantly growing immorality.
Today England is expressed much more by a youth like the Beatles than an old aristocrat attached to the Crown. This Beatle-type of youth finds his paradise in England. He is an asinine person, dirty, irrational, living from impulses and dominated by matter. He is a slave of his own nerves, a slave of matter. This translates as a man whose body imposes a tyranny over his soul. Preaching an anarchical liberty for the passions, the Beatles became idols of an entire generation
This explains the gigantic explosion of the Beatle phenomenon, which is taking over the new generation and will not leave one stone unturned in England.
Impurity, therefore, diminishes the influence of the spirit in man, making it slow to act, and gives priority to matter. Scripture calls this type of man, animalis homo, an animal-man. He acts more like a beast than a man; he has lost entirely the sense of the things of God.
In a classroom, the impure pupil does not pay attention to the lecture. He catches a fly and starts to play with it: He puts it in the ink bottle and makes it walk over a blank sheet of paper. He makes paper wads to throw at other students to tease or bother them.
I remember when I was a child, the moral behavior of the better pupils in class was good. The worse ones were those who were impure. They were the ones who remained seated at the end of the class, who ate or drank when the teacher was not watching them, who lacked any interest in the subject being taught. The only time these students became interested was at recess, when soccer would be played. Many of them were good at soccer. They were great at playing with their feet, poor at using their heads…
These are, unfortunately, the devastations of impurity. This is why when impurity dominates, civilizations are destroyed.
The strength of the spiritual man
The opposite happens with purity. It gives a strength of soul that makes a man love what is spiritual and its own dignity. The spirit has a dignity immensely superior to matter. Our likeness to angels comes through the spirit; we are related to the beasts through matter. This explains why the spirit is much more elevated than matter.
The spiritual man likes to think; his will delights in making decisions; both his intelligence and will like to fight and dominate matter. These attitudes characterize the spiritual man. Since he likes to dominate over matter and keep it within its proper boundaries, he likes to prevent the strong waves of impurity from overpowering him.
From this comes the strength of the spiritual man. He does not despise matter, because matter is good and was created by God. Therefore, he knows how to take care of his health and get the proper rest and nourishment necessary for “brother body” – as St. Francis of Assisi used to call it. He takes a reasonable pleasure in things.
But such pleasure has a limit, since he knows that he was conceived in original sin and that the body is always wanting things it should not have. Sometimes it wants to eat too much, other times to drink excessively, yet others, to sleep more than necessary, to listen to music without stop, to take too much pleasure in perfumes, and so on. At every moment the body asks for what is beyond the due measure. The spiritual man knows how to keep his body within its legitimate boundaries.
To achieve this goal, his primary fight is made against the lowest of the senses. Do not misunderstand me, please, I am not censuring the sense of touch per se. I am saying that it is necessary to fight against disorders that occur with this sense.
The best way for a man to win this fight is to maintain the state of perfect chastity. If a man remains entirely chaste, refusing any occasion to yield to impurity – never consenting to a bad thought or a bad look – he is in an excellent condition to make his spirit triumph over matter. Doing this, he deserves glory, the glory of a man who shines with a nobleness of spirit.
This is why the Catholic Church gives great importance to virginity. When someone says, “That lady is virgin,” what is he praising in her? He is commending how she has ordered her spirit and admiring how she tamed and dominated her unbridled tendencies. She became a spirit, so to speak, light and transparent.
In his pictures, Fra Angelico painted the virgins shining with a clarity that comes from within and illuminates the exterior. Why? Because the spirit is luminous, while matter is opaque. He wants to represent this radiating translucence of the spirit.
To be continued |
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The 6th and 9th Commandments
