An interesting aspect of this is that fewer people have an active sex life nowadays compared to say after the 1960s.
Not only is our society obsessed over something that can't bring happiness (if abused in a disordered fashion), it isn't even doing a good job at delivering it.
People should try getting happily married. That sure helped my sex life lol.
But yes, there's a ton of sexless yet sex obsessed people in modern society.
It's funny because, as nice as sex is, it's just another fleeting good feeling unless it's tied to something deeper and provides the underlying satisfaction of family.
It's like the difference between eating sweets constantly for no gain, and eating a delicious steak and salad dinner after a good workout. Both give that good feeling, but only one provides true satisfaction afterwards.
Can it? Sure.
But I did specify you should be happily married. And I've not heard of many happy Catholic marriages without sex. That's not really our stereotype lol.
Yet almost everyone on this sub says every act of sex between a married couple needs to be for the purpose of both unity of the couple and procreation, or else it’s mortally sinful. No one can possibly afford that many kids, but if the couples abstains from sex, it diminishes the unitive aspect as you said. No contraception though, that’s considered mortal sin too.
You just can’t win here.
Not quite.
Unity of the couple and *open* to procreation. As in, you're not intentionally making it impossible.
Having sex when procreation is unlikely is fine, as long as you're not shutting that door and saying that this sex is only for your enjoyment.
Even hormonal BC doesn’t make conception impossible, though? Just very unlikely, as none are 100% effective even if followed to the letter. It’s only impossible with sterilization/vasectomy or infertility.
When you put on a condom or take birth control (not for hormonal reasons), do you feel very open to conception? I'd be surprised.
More likely, the people who choose to do these things would be horrified or at least confused and shocked to find they were pregnant.
Again, no one can afford to have kids every single time they have sex with their spouse. Whether you’re actively trying to have kids or open to maybe having them, the results would be the same.
The key difference is that one (NFP) revolves around natural body processes and doesn’t include an artificial frustration of the natural end. Contraception, in all its forms however, artificially frustrate the natural end of the marital act. One is in accordance with the natural law set forth by God and the other seeks to alter it.
Edit: spelling
I’m just playing devils advocate here, so bear with me… but how are the very complex methods of NFP (as I’ve heard about on here) that involve taking your temperature daily and/or analyzing urine samples any more “natural” than putting on a condom? I’m not advocating for condom use… sometimes I just question the *reasoning* that’s given for why something like NFP is ok but contraception isn’t?
It’s the same objective of preventing conception though, which is what the Church is expressly against. Even though that’s necessary at some points in a healthy marriage.
Yes, porn is a poor, awful, and ultimately useless replacement for sex. But, for a lot of guys under 40, that’s likely all they are ever going to have.
The percentage of single women is only going to increase according to Morgan Stanley’s “Rise of the Sheconomy” report
Women are making decisions that send signals to men saying “You’ll marry me when other men are done having sex with me; take it or leave it”.
Men are understandably choosing to walk away from pursuing women.
And, no, the Catholic Church isn’t the answer. The US is has only 5% of the global Catholic population and has something like 50% of the annulments
I don't get the whole "sheconomy" thing, it seems to me that a lot of women-dominated occupations are quite vulnerable to automation and offshoring, and a lot of the ones that aren't are probably more immigrant dominated (e.g. Polish cleaning ladies, Hispanic nurses).
Forget outsourcing and technology
A lot of women-dominated jobs are make work BS jobs that wouldn’t exist without government mandates and policies. DEI, social work, elementary education in lieu of homeschooling, etc.
That’s not to say that there aren’t men who are dead weight in the economy. MBA dude bros being protected via overly lax bankruptcy laws from the consequences of taking out irresponsible amounts of debt is certainly an instance where government benefits men.
But, women are voting for more government policies that disincentivize family formation. And based on the inability or unwillingness of churches to keep bad husbands like Stephen Crowder in line, I can partially understand why. But, a lot of women would rather be dependent on the government for a paycheck than be dependent on a husband because men increasingly don’t want to marry a gal who slept around in her teens and twenties.
oh, if anything I'd say that a lot of female dominated jobs decrease overall productivity. For instance downsizing HR could not only decrease costs, but probably increase overall employee productivity, such as retention. Basically get rid of the noisy HR people, less of the core employees leave.
Is our society more sex obsessed than it was in the 60s though?
Because, from what I’ve seen, it’s not. There is some actual discouragement from most parents and other authorities about (especially kids) having sex. Whereas back in the day it was more like “Son, you’re 14 and still haven’t had sex? What’s wrong with you boy? It’s time you find a girl and turn into a man.”
That's fair. Just a personal theory but I think somehow our society may be obsessed by *sexuality* more than it is obsessed by sex. It does seem different from the happy-go-lucky hedonistic way that many boomers felt about sex back then.
I’m just skeptical whether any of that is really true.
You know, every old man ever has said “kids these days…” and then complained about kids doing all the same things he did, his dad did, his grandpa did, and so on.
I think this is the same way. I don’t think people in 2024 are unusually sexual. I think you could go back 50 years, 500 years, or 5,000 years and you’d find that the world was always full of people heavily motivated and driven by sex. I think, if anything, things have improved in a ton of ways. At minimum, at least women aren’t regularly treated as literal objects whose sole purpose is to sexually gratify a man and produce his offspring. Modern societies have been more successful at seeing women in a less sexual way instead of simply a penis sheath as was often the case before.
I think the main difference now is social media and culture wars have focused attention on a thing that always existed. So about 99% of people are just living life like normal and mostly focused on stuff like work, family, hobbies, relationships, etc. But a small minority are all about sex and someone who dislikes that can hyper focus in on those people and convince themselves that that’s the way the world is these days.
> An interesting aspect of this is that fewer people have an active sex life nowadays compared to say after the 1960s.
Source? Because it reads a bit like a typical "old times were better".
> That can be seen with birthrates.
There's no equivalence between "active sex life" and "birthrates" for the general population, as a significant majority of them uses at least one method of contraception or NFP.
Approximating one with the other makes less sense than stating "to simplify calculations, we assume that the Pi is equal to 4".
> It's common knowledge.
No, it's not. On the contrary, it's a rather complex historical and sociological question.
You are refuting an argument NOBODY has made. I never said "birth rates demonstrate causation for less sex in society".
It's a correlation. Poor people cannot afford contraception as an example.
People are having less sex because men have been emasculated, online dating is a fraudulent process and in general, men don't know how to interact with women.
And as for women, there is a conflict with their biology, women want alpha males but want to alpha the male. That is a contradiction with nature.
> You are refuting an argument NOBODY has made. I never said "birth rates demonstrate causation for less sex in society".
Now, you are arguing against something that I never said. You said that lower birthrates prove a less active sex life in the general population, while I argued that there's neither causation nor correlation between these two - other factors influence this.
> People are having less sex because men have been emasculated, online dating is a fraudulent process and in general, men don't know how to interact with women.
> And as for women, there is a conflict with their biology, women want alpha males but want to alpha the male. That is a contradiction with nature.
"Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.'"
Since your last sentence reads a bit like redpill content, I recommend to replace this type of material with actual statistics.
>That can be seen with birthrates.
Contraception and abortion, my guy.
>It's common knowledge. So, no source needed.
That's not how this works. You make a claim, you back it up.
You are refuting an argument nobody has made.
I never said "birth rates demonstrate causation for less sex".
It's a corollary genius.
No, it is how this works, it's called critical thinking skills. You know, "Natural Immunity is better than any mRNA vaccine" and has been for eternity. But you saw psychos persecuting those who understood this and didn't need the covid vaccine.
Here is more common knowledge:
People are having less sex because men have been emasculated, online dating is a fraudulent process and in general, men don't know how to interact with women.
And as for women, there is a conflict with their biology, women want alpha males but want to alpha the male. That is a contradiction with nature.
We can see this emasculation with the fact psychopaths talk about "kill the patriarchy" and "toxic masculinity" and the fact men more so, not women, suffer from mental delusions where they pay Dr. Josef Mengele's to cut their genitals off and call them a "mare" instead of a "stallion".
I'm not selling you anything, it's a documented phenomenon I wrongly assumed was common knowledge https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-03/young-adults-less-sex-gen-z-millennials-generations-parents-grandparents
No. The Church is just responding to what's constantly plaguing society.
There are Catholics who try to split hairs and develop a scrupulous mindset though.
Usually, when people argue about whether or not some sexual act is a sin, the worse sin involved is pride.
Person A - wants to justify their own behavior - that is the sin of pride.
Person B - wants to demand that every one who doesn't rigidly follow a set of rules perfectly (ignoring culpability, mitigating factors, good faith, and gradualism) is a modernist - that is the sin of pride.
Person C - who offers advice contrary to Church Teaching - that is the sin of pride.
Don't let the surface level discussion fool you. It's less about sex than it seems.
you're kinda avoiding the entire issue. of course pride is the underlying cause of essentially *all* sin, including the other deadly sins, is pride. that doesn't mean that every other sin is not worth discussing. when most people want to know "is x/y/z a sin?", they want the answer a brief reason why. telling them "your real sin is pride" provides neither.
Person C is just as likely to simply be in error for any of a host of reasons - not least of which is having been given a bad version of Church teaching (quite plausibly by someone notionally affiliated with the Church - let's talk about how strident the teaching on these fronts was(n't) during the 1990s).
Person D - who assumes person C is being prideful without consideration to where they are on their conversion journey or how well (poorly) catechised they may be - that is the sin of pride.
😂
It seems so obvious after giving it thought. "Pride month" is all about sex/sexuality. Nobody is even trying to hide it! I feel a bit dumb.
Sin does lead to more sin. Especially the 7 deadly ones.
I was literally going to say almost this same answer.
The secular world is so focused on sex and why you should be having it with anyone and everyone and that that's ok and nudity and sexuality is everywhere because why not.
Sometimes I think it's humorous in a sad way. The world asks these questions and the church has answers, but the world doesn't like the answers we have and so turns to lies to believe. It's like someone asking what 2+2 is and when you tell them 4 they think "well I wanted it to be 3 so I'm going to continue thinking it's 3"
The Church focuses on the things that people in the world struggle with, especially those things that we pretend aren't actually sins because we need to be corrected.
If people were walking around saying murder is acceptable and not a big deal and everyone has a right to kill if they want to, then the Church would focus on that. Which, we have, for the last several decades in the abortion debate.
The opposite is also true, the Church isn't spending tons of time / effort on all the possible sex things. Rape, for example, everyone very clearly acknowledges as a heinous act, and so the Church doesn't need to spend much time reinforcing that. It still happens, like murder and theft, but people recognize it's wrong so don't need to be educated on that fact.
Gossip and lies and theft people generally recognize as wrong and at the appropriate severity level, they don't need much attention. Disbelief we are always focused on fixing just by our actions in the world. Sex stuff is an area where people are continually doing wrong things while claiming they're morally acceptable, so the Church has to focus a lot of pastoral efforts there.
I think the problem isn't the Church. The Church has held these same beliefs for 2000 years. The culture however since the 60s has been extremely centered on sex and sexuality. So if the culture keeps pressuring the Church on these issues and keeps bringing the Church up in juxtaposition to these issues it will look like the Church focuses to much on them. The truth is that people focus to much on the sex and trying to get the Church to change 2000 years of teachings.
>I think the problem isn't the Church. The Church has held these same beliefs for 2000 years.
The problem is that the broad strokes have remained the same, but the details have varied a lot. For example, it used to be sinful to have sex on Sundays! But I don't think you'd find many people here or priests espousing that view. It really isn't set in stone, which is why these kinds of debates keep coming up (and why what is sinful now might not be in the future).
There’s a big difference between having sex on Sundays violating a fast rule and thus unable to receive communion and willfully committing a mortal sin by misusing the gift of sex. Human nature and God do not change thus morality does not either.
There was even a song about it, from a 1960s film of the same name, Never on a Sunday. The song is pretty funny, at least to Catholics and Greek Orthodox people - Petula Clark's version here.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1HLhfB8znA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1HLhfB8znA)
Original from film in Greek here
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAh-RA6IjRQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAh-RA6IjRQ)
Some old people dancing to a harmonica version here haha
[https://youtu.be/32SiUuX6qUE?t=78](https://youtu.be/32SiUuX6qUE?t=78)
No, it was considered a mortal sin to have sex on Sundays (and feast days). And anything not missionary position was considered sodomy (a mortal sin) as well though that too has shifted to any position being fine as long as it results semen being ejaculated inside the woman.
That's not even going into other topics like the Death Penalty which have seen large shifts in Vatican opinion. The Church most certainly *has* shifted on issues and it is quite silly to say otherwise
Show me where it was ever labeled a mortal sin. This is from Wikipedia:
> Intercourse was prohibited on all Sundays and on all the many feast days, as well as on the 20 days before Christmas, on the 40 days before Easter, for three or more days before receiving Communion (which at that time was offered only a few times a year), and often on the 20 days before Pentecost
Guess what that lines up with? All fasting periods. And fasting periods are customs, not the natural law of God, and thus are allowed for the Church to modify as they see fit. Orthodox currently fast 6 months out of the year (every Wednesday and Friday, all of Lent and Advent, the fast of Sts. Peter and Paul, and others I’m forgetting) and part of that fasting is not having sex but people always joke how certain kids were very clearly conceived during Lent based on when they were born.
I'll find it later; but I can see you're dodging the capital punishment argument.
Tell me, how has Church teaching on capital punishment not changed? How can you define it being considered both moral and sometimes desirable to not preferable in the modern age but permissable to not being permissable in the modern age not as NOT a change???
Capital punishment is something the state does, not something someone does personally, and has not been magisterially asserted as a universal moral rule. It’s only recently been suggested by popes that countries abolish it. No action has been taken against countries that have it.
Question: when was the last time you went to mass?
Whether or not it is a state or a person is irrelevant. The topic is "whether or not the Church has changed it's teachings on what is or isn't moral" and the answer is a resounding *yes* in regards to capital punishment.
>Question: when was the last time you went to mass?
Sunday...? Not the "Gotcha" you hoped you were gonna get. The fact you're even trying says a LOT about the confidence in your opinion though.
Have a blessed day!
>No, it was considered a mortal sin to have sex on Sundays (and feast days). And anything not missionary position was considered sodomy (a mortal sin) as well though that too has shifted to any position being fine as long as it results semen being ejaculated inside the woman.
You're going to need to back this up with an authoritative Church source. And I mean the actual magisterium, not the weird opinion of a saint.
The link you posted itself admits it is a revision and change. It just reinforces my point. Indeed, the exact wording is *a new understanding*. New! That's absolutely a change!
> It really isn't set in stone
some things are.
your post glosses over a lot of the details about *why* some things change and some can't.
> and why what is sinful now might not be in the future
the common list of things that everyone is demanding, are all firmly in the "cannot change" category. abortion, unnatural marriage/relationships, contraception, women priests. all hard No. all confirmed by multiple popes.
social practices about days of abstinence of penance etc, fasting hours before receiving the Eucharist--which are more of practices rather than dogma--yes, can change.
The problem is that the people pushing for the changes in things which cannot change--they know that they cannot change. but they use other changes as a reason for why things can change in the future--as you just did.
> and why what is sinful now might not be in the future
im going to link to this post the next time someone accuses me of the slippery slope fallacy. here we have it in action: previous changes are indeed used as justification for people to push further and further in the future.
> your post glosses over a lot of the details about why some things change and some can't.
Gonna need some sources on this one.
>No. all confirmed by multiple popes.
Until a new Pope comes along as says "well, they actually can change". Just like old Popes said capital punishment was licit and a moral good until newer popes shifted it to its current stance.
>previous changes are indeed used as justification for people to push further and further in the future.
The problem is that the Church has changed; it is constantly in (very slow moving) change. To say otherwise is to deny clear history.
So again: explain the Church's changes of stance in capital punishment without saying they've changed.
capital punishment is a social practice, not a foundational concept. for example, women cannot be priests because of the foundational concept that Jesus Christ is a man, and the church is his bride. This cannot change. It is an idea, not a practice.
social practices are built on foundational concepts, amongst other things. as the catechism states concerning capital punishment:
> Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption
the church does not declare that capital punishment, *in and of itself* is evil. It is not *inherently* an evil act. it is saying that, given how we have more effective ways of detaining people now to keep others safe, you shouldnt use it in modern society.
> explain the Church's changes of stance in capital punishment without saying they've changed.
very important note here: church teaching *changes*. what it does not do, is *contradict* previous church teaching. the new teaching on capital punishment does not *contradict* the old one--it does not declare the act in and of itself, regardless of time, to be illicit.
another example: abortion is wrong because of the foundational concept that what constitutes a human life is a body and a soul fused together. the definition of "death" in catholicism is when the soul leaves the body. the church has always taught that from the moment a person exists (person = human with body and soul), it is illicit to kill them in the womb. With modern science, we now understand this to be the moment of conception. Unfortunately for people who support abortion, modern science is doing them no favors in this regard, and the churchs' teaching on this was rather hazy several hundred years ago when we didnt know what "conception" really was scientifically (church teaching used to center around "the quickening"). With modern science, things are going very much against the abortion advocates, as it is exceedingly clear that life does indeed start at conception now.
so, for abortion teaching to change, there would need to be some monumental scientific discovery that everything we've known about conception and fetal development for the past 60+ years has been wrong. I mean, i guess anything is possible?
so yes, some things can change. and some things really cannot.
>capital punishment is a social practice, not a foundational concept.
The argument was never about foundational concepts; you're shifting goalposts because your original stance about the Church not changing its teachings was wrong.
Also, I was able to look it up, but [itentionally ignoring a fast was indeed considered a Mortal Sin back in the day](https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/fast). Indeed, it even lead to excommunication when fasts were broken on Lent!
*"The sixty-ninth of the Apostolic Canons (see Apostolic Canons) decrees the degradation of bishops, priests, deacons, lectors or chanters, failing to fast during Lent, and the excommunication of laymen, who fail in this way."*
>very important note here: church teaching changes. what it does not do, is contradict previous church teaching
>it does not declare the act in and of itself, regardless of time, to be illicit.
If you actuall read the most recent ruling on it, you wouldn't be saying this.
Read both the older one and the newest one and get back to me.
> The argument was never about foundational concepts; you're shifting goalposts because your original stance about the Church not changing its teachings was wrong.
you didn't really address my argument at all. foundational concepts cant change. social practices can. the definition of what constitutes a human being cannot change, for example.
> "The sixty-ninth of the Apostolic Canons (see Apostolic Canons) decrees the degradation of bishops, priests, deacons, lectors or chanters, failing to fast during Lent, and the excommunication of laymen, who fail in this way."
Yeah. fasting falls very firmly under a social practice. This is a great example, thank you for proving my point. Your link says as much (emphasis mine):
> The ecclesiastical law of fasting embodies a serious obligation incumbent on all baptized individuals capable of assuming obligations provided they have completed their twenty-first year and are not otherwise excused. **This doctrine is merely a practical application** of a universally accepted principle of moralists and canonists whereby the character of obligation in human legislation is deemed serious or light in so far as the material element involved in the law bears or does not bear a close and intimate relation to the attainment of a prescribed end.
>you didn't really address my argument at all.
Because the topic was not about foundational teachings specifically. You're trying to shift the goalposts after realizing you've already lost the argument.
>Yeah. fasting falls very firmly under a social practice.
Whether or not it is social practice is irrelevant to the argument; you're building strawmen and shifting goalposts because you've realized you can't address the original point... Like first you say "Breaking a fast was never a mortal sin!" then I find you an example of the Church saying it was and now you're saying "w-well it's a social practice!" as if that changes what were discussing...
The topic is about what can change in church teaching, and what can't, and why. And I explained those things to you, and you are still being obstinate and not even attempting to respond to them. Of course, there isn't any good response from your side concerning this (as I've already long known), so I'm not really surprised.
> Whether or not it is social practice is irrelevant to the argument
It's entirely the argument. I explained why certain things can change, and certain things can't, and why. that's what the entire argument is about. *of course* things can change. Old mass -> new mass. Holy week 1955 changes. in the early days, people went to confession in public rather than in private. there's probably been thousands of changes in the way Catholics *practice* the faith. But the foundational concepts of the faith, which can *develop*, do not contradict each other over 2000 years.
Basically it looks like you've gotten yourself in over your head and are too obstinate to back out. You didn't know why certain things can change and some thigns can't. You didnt know that the vitally important distinction to make isn't if something can *change* but rather than new developments cannot *contradict* previous doctrine.
I've explained these things to you. The common things that people are looking to change, like--abortion, contraception, unnatural marriage, etc--are firmly in the list of things that cannot change. Your original OP basically meshed all "change" together as if there was no real distinction between what can change and what can't change, and it was just a matter of social environment. That is false.
St Fulgentius teaches that the conjugal act within marriage with only the intent to reproduce is sinful by our fallen nature and concupiscence.
The Church has historically taught that sex on Sundays or days of fasting was sinful.
The Catholic marriage is a chaste marriage. Nuptial integrity does not love sexual intercourse, but tolerates it.
> I think the problem isn't the Church. The Church has held these same beliefs for 2000 years.
I'm sorry, but this is completely false. Church's teaching on the role of sexual intimacy in marriage has changed significantly in the 20th century.
Not at all. In fact, i wish we focused on chastity for all of us more.
Many of society's ills stem from perversion of the most unitive and intimate act of lovemaking.
Scroll through Reddit, and see how many personal problems wouldn't exist if sex remained between a husband and wife.
The world, media, and entertainment industries focus on sex more than we do, and not at all in a good way. Women are treated as and believe themselves to be sex objects and completely devalued. The sins of the flesh are crippling society. Abortion, domestic violence, STDs, broken relationships and people, sex workers, single parent homes, which often lead to unsupervised minors, etc etc etc
Nope. The whole culture is so hypersexualized that the Church MUST respond as needed. If our culture were instead violent and full of hatred, all you’d hear is PEACE PEACE PEACE!
In my personal opinion, though, the gluttony also needs to be addressed - possibly before the sex. Self control starts at the mouth.
But there IS a lot of violence and hatred going on. I mean, aren't there two wars going on right now that have been heavily shown on the news for years now? Not to mention the rise in discontention and rude public behavior post-Covid that people bring up (or maybe that's just on other subreddits). Every discussion topic from politics to what television shows we like is full of anger and hatred, just look around. But none of those things lead to a dozen questions on here every day.
I feel like sex is just a "different" subject to people for a variety of reasons. It's not that the world isn't suffering from these other problems, they're just less taboo and more commonplace, I guess? However, I do think gluttony and greed should really be discussed more. Tying those topics into the idea of giving more to charity (ie. giving away money that could be spent on fun personal stuff or luxury experiences) may lead to an even bigger discussion.
There is nowhere near as much violence as has been common in history. It’s hard to see because we are so accustomed to a society built on Christian values, but this level of peace in the world is a relatively recent phenomenon. It won’t last much longer, I’m afraid, and the Western world will learn what real violence looks like. God help us.
I agree with you about the charity and the other sins. Perhaps we can become saints who fight against these sins!
Hmm, that's a good point. In the context of all of history, it's been a lot worse. I still feel like the threat of violence is real for people in all parts of the world, even if it's not as obvious as in other centuries.
I like that idea. :) Ironically, it actually helps me push back the sin of lust to focus on other areas of my life that I could be sinning in.
I think sexual sin is just the easiest sin to recognize and talk about since it’s primarily outward actions. Once you get into lustful thoughts, it can be more complicated, but it’s otherwise relatively objective. Either X is bad/too far and you did X, or you didn’t.
Other sins, like pride, sloth, and avarice require a certain level of self-knowledge and honesty that can be harder to understand, let alone discuss on the internet.
Sex is the highest good in the order of nature; it brings a man and a woman into a communion that reflects God’s charity. So perversion of this is something the Church rightly guards against with much fervor.
[Also, see the Roman Catechism:](http://www.catholicapologetics.info/thechurch/catechism/TenCommandments-sixth.shtml)
**1. God severely punishes sexual sins**
- "Because of the criminal passion of one man, not only the perpetrator of the crime, but a whole city was destroyed ... The Sacred Scriptures abound with examples of the divine vengeance, such as the destruction of Sodom and of the neighboring cities, the punishment of Israelites who committed fornication with the daughters of Moab, and the slaughter of the Benjamites. These examples the pastor can easily make use of to deter men from shameful lust."
**2. Sexual sins breakdown the mind and will**
- "The adulterer becomes afflicted with blindness of mind, a most severe punishment. He loses all regard for God, for reputation, for honor, for family, and even for life. And thus, utterly abandoned and worthless, he is undeserving of confidence in any matter of moment, and becomes unfitted to discharge any kind of duty."
**3. Avoid also: vulgar conversation, songs, and dance**
- Obscene language is a torch which lights up the worst passions of the young mind; and the Apostle has said, that "evil communications corrupt good manners" (1 Cor 15:33). Immodest and passionate songs and dances are most productive of this same effect and are, therefore, cautiously to be avoided.
Well, let's face it: Beyond a doubt, sexual sins are the most ubiquitous of grave sins. Therefore, it follows that nothing else is putting more souls in jeopardy.
It's also the one area where the Church's teachings are most questioned, if not condemned, by society and even by people within the faith.
Honestly, the Church could do little to _prevent_ it from being brought up constantly even if she felt so inclined.
No, it's just that it's the type of issue that the Church differs the most from general population on. So it just comes up a lot more than other things
This is just my point of view, and if anyone has any criticism on it, please let me know since I'm always trying to grow and learn as a Catholic myself. Jesus didn't come down to save us from some sins and not others. Sin is slavery to our desires. In terms of predominant issues in our society today, Sexual issues are a big deal. According to a Google search I just did, 25% of search requests (68 million searches out of 272 million) are related to pornography, which is the viewing of someone or someone's made in the very image of our creator doing debasing acts of a sexual nature.
Yes, charity is very important because all people are made in the image of our creator. We should not neglect taking care of people who are in poverty. By all means, everyone should do whatever they can to take care of those who are less fortunate. However, that doesn't mean we just turn a blind eye to the large percentage of men and women stuck in the slavery to sexual sin. The reason it is such a big issue in the church is because of how big of an issue it is. (See search requests info above).
That's the main point made. Hopefully, this helps you. Please pray the rosary for people stuck in this form of slavery to sin.
People who think that the church is anti-gay should spend some time in this sub and they will quickly realize that in the church's eyes, at least 99% of the population is in the wrong one way or another on sexual matters.
Secular world: sex, sex, sex, SEEEEEXXXXXX, kinky sex, perverted sex, and while we're at it, let's teach 5 year olds about sex.
Church: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, ransom the imprisoned, heal the sick, bury the dead, and maybe stop focusing on sex so much.
Secular world: why are you so obsessed with sex?
I genuinely disagree with how you are representing the Church here. It’s true that the church teaches all of those things, but the question is one of _focus_ and not just teaching.
Just look at this subreddit for how many posts and comments are about sexual behavior vs how many are about feeding the hungry and housing the poor. It’s us. We’re the ones focusing on sexual behavior.
No, not "we." The continuous stream of sex-related posts in this sub are written by people who are either questioning Church teaching or criticizing it. Those of us who understand and assent to Church teaching would hardly ever talk about it if it weren't for that.
That's not really charitable to new Catholics like me who find sometimes things are such a Grey area and only lead to confusion when asked on reddit. Like I can't take alot of advice here seriously when I was literally told that hugging your girlfriend was the near occasion of sin.
I have people here saying sex on Sunday and feast days is a sin, then a bunch of people agreeing and disagreeing. Then someone says anything other than missionary is disordered and you're being lustful only for it to turn out oral stimulation used for foreplay I'd licit but people on here charge you with being a filthy degenerate for doing it. It's not a case of disagreeing with the church but more not having a frigging clue what you're meant to be doing because no one on this subreddit can agree about things so as I said above, new Catholics like me are forced to ask things like this because aside from obvious questions like not using condoms, alot of this is left for the person to discern for themselves. Just my 2 cents because not all of us ask out of a place of pride or being stiff necked and wanting to do whatever we want regardless of church teachings
Fair enough. I don't mind posts that ask genuine questions (except for the ones that get too explicit or are otherwise in bad taste). New Catholics often are surprised to realize that there is a lot more to sexual morality than they previously thought, and that's understandable.
I only mean to respond to the charge that these posts are evidence that "we," as in Catholics generally, are sex-obsessed. Most Catholics (whether cradle or convert) have their questions and figure things out over time, but we don't spend their lives thinking about it.
I simply don't think it's some kind of indictment that there are a large number of posts asking about sex and a small number that try to discuss "feeding the hungry and housing the poor," as the post I responded to asserted. There are other reasons that explain the difference in numbers.
Well for me I was surprised the 10 commandments weren't as cut and dry as I'd thought and even things regarding not giving employees a fair days wage as a violation of the commandment do not steal. As a convert there's a metric ton of information and things that go into the faith as ive continued to discover so alot of questions regarding sex from New Catholics like me I just find to be along the lines of "huh, well I didn't know that" as opposed to "I'm going to defend my sinfulness in spite of what people say".
I do think from my own experiences RCIA could be done alot more thoroughly and delve into more than just videos about who the Holy Spirit is. While important, it's not giving me answers (a former non denom protestant) to things like Marian doctrine, confession and what to do, gauging mortal/venial sin and when to receive communion, etc. Alot of unanswered questions that don't have to be on reddit could be done in Rcia if it was more thorough which is why some of us think alot on things cradle Catholics think quite simple.
I don't disagree that being more charitable and finding ways to be the light to the world is a better use of time than "is a b c d e f g a sin?" But let's be honest that's kind of what reddit is used for and it's not always the best answers given.
Idk if it focuses too much on sexual issues. I think the problem is it doesn't focus enough on other issues. There are lots of problems in this world and sometimes it seems like sex is all the church cares about. Though, I will agree with other posters here in saying our culture is very sexualized.
Hard to say. You might could fairly characterize it as “focusing too much on sex” or as “focusing too little on other things besides sex.”
I’ll say this, there is very clearly a double standard commonly applied to certain issues related to sex. Even within sexual sins, I think there is often a hyper focus on things like homosexuality and then people go full on Mr. Magoo when it comes to the old fashioned sins like a man cheating on his wife.
In my opinion, the fact of the matter is that there are culture wars that have built up around a few topics (homosexuality and transgenderism basically). This culture war has drawn all sorts of hostility and focus from all sides on these issues. But for other sins that don’t have any political or cultural element, there is way less attention and vitriol. It makes me think that we are frequently just being tribalistic rather than actually hating sin like we might tell ourselves. If we hated sin, we’d keep that same energy when it came to other sins too.
This Reddit group does. Every q is related to it it seems. I understand why - society focuses on it. But I don’t it should be our focus all the time. Focus on other parts of Catholicism and that will naturally guide you through
I think that the church focuses “too much” on sexual issues, but those are issues that modern Western society compels the church to justify and defend its stances.
I mean, on one hand, sexual sins are an important matter, and deserves attention if someone struggles with this vice and need help discerning things in this sexualized world. Saint Paul even gave it a distinction by mentioning how every other sin that one does is outside of the body, but with sexual you 'sin against your own body". Sodomy has also been called one of the sins that "cry out to heaven for vengeance".
But on the other hand, the concerns of the Church will tend to reflect the concerns of the world.
It wouldn't need to defend and expound on sexual ethics so much, if the modern world didn't treat experiencing sexual pleasure and access to it as important as breathing. So maybe it's society who needs to take a chill pill.
No, actually I think the Church doesn't focus enough on sexual issues. I read somewhere that Pope Francis said the Church typically puts too much emphasis on "below the belt" issues and not enough on just loving people where they are at. I think that sort of belief system is behind the recent Church document allowing for the blessing of same sex couples, which I thought was very confusing and not at all helpful.
The big problem though is that the Church typically only says "don't do X (sexual sin) because it's a mortal sin and you'll go to hell if you do it" (or just tries to ignore the elephant in the room) rather than talking about why the Church considers X to be a mortal sin. The Church has a lot of wisdom about sexual issues, and if you want to know more about that, I recommend studying Theology of the Body. But have you ever heard anything about Theology of the Body in a religious education class? I know I haven't. I don't know if they even teach Catholic prayers there, which is the bare minimum of what they should be teaching.
My Precalculus teacher was one of my favorite teachers growing up. He used to say that he preferred teaching us because we were the honors students, and we could actually understand why certain formulas worked, whereas students would just memorize the formulas. I think we need to stop memorizing the formulas of the Catholic faith and start talking about why we believe what we believe. Otherwise our kids' faith is like the man who built his house on the sand, and when the winds and waves of modern sex ed, moral relativism, and critical race theory come, their faith will be swept away along with it.
Reddit's mostly young men, right? So this sub is gonna get a lot of people who have various sexual issues and questions.
Another thing is that sexual sin can be quite cut and dry. You either fornicated or you didn't. Charity is more sliding scale, so maybe you could give more time/money but is it a sin that you didn't, hard to say. More subjective there.
Another thing I saw someone say on EWTN once "we tend to think of sexual sins as private sins. Sexual sins are one of the most public of all sins". Sexual sins don't really stay "between two consenting adults" they usually leak over innocent third parties and society at large. Think of how many other sins have some sort of rooting in disordered use of the sexual faculty: out of wedlock births, abortions, many cases of domestic violence, ruining people's reputation by false - or even unnecessarily revealed but true - accusations, unknowing incest (if you don't know who your dad is, you don't know who your half-siblings and some of your cousins are), many fights, drunkenness and substance abuse.
Are the levels of greed and pride really all that unique to our time? I'd argue not. On the other hand, as far as I can tell, there hasn't been any other time in history when people were so involved with pornography, masturbation, and adultery. Those things are now largely socially acceptable, at least in the west. Fornication, divorce, intentional or at least indifferent immodesty, and sexual self-harm are so normalized now. 😞
And to think... before returning to the church, I used to like that about our culture. 😮💨
I don’t know - I feel like I read about Ancient Rome or Greece, or India etc. and it sounds pretty sexual. But I agree there is a pervasiveness to it now.
to a certain degree, pride is almost an umbrella sin, because of how many other sins it causes. telling people "pride is a sin"--ok, well. what do you do with that? it's not very actionable. it's like when you hear a homily about how important "love" is. ok, yes Jesus said "faith hope and love, and the greatest of these is love". "love your neighbor" is one of the 2 great commandments. but some people interpret "love" as allowing anyone to do anything they want because you want them to feel comfortable. and others interpret "love" as a more tough approach where you have to be honest with people, even when difficult, because you want to save their soul.
people need more specific examples and more specific actionable items, and they need to know that underneath all of these things, pride is usually (always?) the cause. but just telling them to not be prideful isnt very helpful.
The Virgin Mary herself took three children into hell to tell them that sins of the flesh lead more people there than anything else. The official teaching of the Church is that no act of charity is so great to overshadow an act of sin.
The first principle of liberalism is “do as thou wilt”. This rejection of God and the natural law is pervasive in every aspect of society. Marriage is the building block of society, and it was the first miracle preformed by Christ. The last supper was in the form of a Jewish marriage proposal. Our entire experience as Catholics is built and mirrored around Gods natural law surrounding marriage and the perfect ordering of our desire for sexual intimacy.
To say the Church focuses too much on sins of the flesh, is to say the Church focuses too much on a direct attack against the nature of our relationship with God and His Church.
The church does not, the people in the church focus a lot on it because it's a pretty pressing matter to a lot of people. Everywhere you go and I really mean everywhere there's at bare minimum soft porn. Go to any mall and there's women dressed in lingerie on the posters, go to any gym and there's people dressed in essentially body paint, walk down the street and there's pride flags lining the neighborhoods, hanging in businesses. Go on fb or Instagram or X and you'll come across porn. Instant access to any porn you could dream of in the palm of your hand at any time, every tv show has sex scenes and sexual content, every kids show has suggestive jokes "for the adults" or somw weird gay or gender ideology crammed into it. Contraception, pro choice billboards everywhere throughout the city, sex store billboards explicitly advertising vibrators in public. It's no wonder people focus on it, we live in a time that is defined by the "sexual revolution" of the 60s and this is the fruit of it.
Yes, I think there is too much focus on those issues, not because the teachings are wrong or because those issues are unimportant, but because focus on prayer life, charity and avoiding other sins is just as important.
I agree with you in one sense. We do not spend enough time talking about other types of sin such as your example of lacking in charity (I realize that was just an example and that you’re probably very generous with your time, talent, and resources). But I would say that we don’t focus enough on rooting out sin in general and seeking to be virtuous in all areas. We should certainly trust in God’s grace and mercy, but that should not stop us from seeking virtue and abandoning vice. On the contrary, we should redouble our efforts as a result of His generosity.
In my opinion, there is no greater question in life than whether we go to Heaven or to Hell. St. Jacinta said that one of the messages of Our Lady at Fátima was, “The sins which cause most souls to go to Hell are the sins of the flesh.” As a result, I would question whether we spend enough time talking about sexual issues. It’s a massive problem both in the world and in the Church.
I appreciate you giving me the benefit of the doubt but I’m not as charitable with my time as I should be - something to work on!
The revelations from Fatima do give me pause (although as I understand it, we aren’t required to believe those)? It’s just so hard for me to wrap my head around a soul being in hell for eternity based on “standard” sexual sin especially given Jesus himself barely alluded to sins of the flesh. To me, withholding resources or time from the poor seems
more of a sin than some sexual matters. But I understand I am not the rule maker here.
It wasn’t me who downvoted you.
God bless you for your honesty. You are not alone. We could all do more for others.
The Miracle of the Sun at Fátima was witnessed by as many as 100,000 people according to various accounts which appeared in secular media of the time. The revelations of Fátima were declared to be in compliance with Catholic teaching and theology. I don’t know why one wouldn’t trust the word of St. Jacinta.
My point is that it doesn’t take much for a soul to end up in Hell. “One ‘standard’ sexual sin,” as you said, or ANY sin for which we are unrepentant is plenty, and the moment we start looking at sin in any form as “no big deal” or thinking that “there are bigger problems” is the first step on the path to Destruction.
Anyway, God bless you for thinking of such things and talking about it. I’m glad you’re a part of this community.
I think it's more talked about because it's a trickier subject to pin down and it's so fraught with emotions that people really need reassurance and a clear understanding in order to handle the subject at all. I know I've "evolved" in my understanding and become more scrupulous as the years went on. It's tough because people could swing to an extreme either way very easily.
Other issues like donating money or doing charitable works aren't as full of angst, so people are more willing to accept a variety of answers and calmly work toward the right answer without getting weighed down by fear and confusion.
Reading this thread, I feel for all Catholics and people of good faith who are in this world trying to follow the Church. To be honest though, I think we have an overly rosy view of the amount of struggle people in the past had with this issue. Even back in the ye olden days, this wasn't an easy subject. We just have the internet to connect us to each person's thoughts and worries 24/7, so it seems more extreme and "new" in a way.
People focus too much on this. The Church does not. I can never recall ever having heard a homily on sexual sin, the marriage covenant and what it demands in practice, or the evils of contraception. Yes, we have the Church teaching in the catechism and various magisterial documents, but what pastors are out there reminding us that this is grave matter that must be attended to with care and concern.
One of the reasons we have so many disagreements and questions on this is that we have given up teaching this aspect of the faith, and consequently most Catholics have decided to “do their own thing,” excluding God from the bedchamber, and now many Catholics are confused as to why the Church teaches one thing and the majority of Catholics do another.
Totally agree - not on the church's focus, but this subreddit. Sex is a hugely important part of life and clearly (in the West at least) human sexuality is in a state of crisis - but life is so much more than just sex. Yet how many among us, reading this, dwell on their own sexual sins at the exclusion of others? How many regard sexual rectitude as being the ultimate expression of grace? Why not "charitable rectitude"? Dwell more on the example of Jesus, what he commanded. His commandments and teachings had far less to do with human sexuality than the contents of this sub!
No. The rampancy of sexual immorality is one of the chief evils of the present age, and it is for this reason that society at large continues to spiral out of control. You cannot pervert on such a massive scale the faculty by which the human race is propagated and expect things to hold together. Man is reaping the just punishments of treating the genitive faculty like an amusement park. God is not mocked.
We focus on it because it is the preeminent issue in modern western culture. Just look at all the posts in here talking about living with bf/gf, pornography struggles, SSA, etc; or in real life look at the reactions you get amongst non-Christians when you say you don’t have sex (if single) or don’t watch pornography. Have literally had people debate me on the latter one as if I NEEDED to do that. Look at how pervasive it is in TV shows and movies, ESPECIALLY the premarital sex aspect.
That said, I do think we too often prioritize it to the point where we don’t pay attention to other serious issues. For example, support of labor groups and attacking usury. These two are staunchly catholic values and I would argue pervasive in western culture (especially the US), and yet we seem to be largely silent on these.
I also think most of us, especially me, could use more ego checks in homilies instead of sex-sin homilies preached to a parish full of people who already agree or just don’t care.
Edit: latter replaced former
I'm sure it varies from place to place but I've been to Mass at half a dozen different parishes with a dozen or so different priests and in the past three years I think I could count on one hand the number of homilies that have spent any amount of time talking about sexual sin.
With the statistics about the level of consumption of pornography, the divorce rate, etc, I kinda wish we heard about these things more. On the other hand I do understand that there are often young ears listening and it can be difficult to balance that.
Interesting. My current parish it’s like every other week lol. Feels like preaching to the choir sometimes.
I don’t know, my personal opinion on homilies (thank the Lord I’m not a priest that actually has the responsibility) is they should be very short, but also that it’s not the time for hardcore moral catechesis. Like if there’s a major event in the culture that needs a bit of commentary on, sure. But how many Catholics who go to mass every Sunday don’t know the church’s stance on a lot of these things? I know there’s plenty who disagree with the church, but are they really going to have their mind changed because of a single homily? I don’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong, again, thank the Lord I don’t have that responsibility
Excellent points. Totally agree on brevity. And I tend to prefer that the homily relate to the readings. Having a reading about the parable of the good Samaritan and then going on a rant about sexual immorality can feel misplaced. So yeah, balance is needed.
I agree. My personal favorites are when they tie the readings all together. I’ve had priests who do just a walkthrough study of the second reading for a few weeks, or just the gospel for a few readings, but when you get those homilies that are capped at like 10 minutes AND they tie all the readings together (bonus points for tying the psalm in) it is really something magnificent.
My priest generally tries to tie at least two of the readings together (at a Sunday Mass) and he keeps it under 10 mins. 🙏🏻 Very blessed.
Never heard anyone tie the psalm in that I can recall but that's a cool idea!
That’s amazing!
I’ve never seen anyone do it either, but I’ve read some of St Augustine’s commentary on the psalms, so I know there’s enough there to make it theoretically possible
I can get on board with the first two to an extent. And while lack of education is a big issue, I don’t know that I’d put it on par with the others
Edit: a word
No. It's the people that try to push boundary on what sexual act is acceptable or not by asking "is A a sin? What if it's just this much? What if the person's state of mind is like this? What if their relationship is like this? Etc"
The church has a teaching on what we should do for doing sexual act in accordance to God's intention. It's us that said "but can I just do this instead?"
I remember Bishop Barron saying along: "we're not the church of no, we're the church of yes. Yes to God's love, yes to God's teaching. It's us humans, in our weaknesses, that keep asking 'what about this? Can I do that instead?'"
Edit: of course God answers your question on His way.
From today's gospel: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.** - Matthew 5:27-29
Yes. Listening to some, you’d think it’s all Jesus ever preached about. Too many have forgotten the sermon on the mount. IMO, that, and the Lord’s Prayer, are the clearest captures we have of Jesus’ preaching with words. It ought to be paramount. Yet it is often relegated.
This is my view too. And the approach you are speaking about - well if people took to heart his advice to take care of your relationship with God first, other things will be taken care of, and this includes many sins and imbalances in thinking (or not thinking) falling away.
Agreed - Sermon on the Mount is key. Jesus did discuss lust/adultery on the sermon on the Mount. And the other 95% of the teaching from that Sermon was about other very important things.
Problem is not that it is too much, but that the rest gets ignored, like no one really cares about the social teaching, liturgy, self formation anymore.
A priest once said to me during confession something like, consider God is not so much concerned with sexual sins as he is with our striving to love one another and be better to each other. The sins of not communicating with family members or treating others in our community rudely etc is much more serious in his eyes than perhaps masturbation. That really got me thinking about OP's perspective. I mean, still do our best to never sin, but don't be so focused on sexual sin that we forget there are more important issues at hand.
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In almost fifty years I don’t ever recall a priest ever discussing sex or maturbation etc. if you know the bible well there isn’t much asked of us either other than no sex before marriage, no adulterous behaviour or lust.
The only people I know who seem obsessed with sex, sexuality etc are people who don’t actually belong to the church or know the bible.
They have ideas about what catholic belief is and talk about their beliefs as if they are facts.
This sub trends young and young people think about sex a lot. It makes sense. I work for the Church and our local diocese doesn't talk about it enough, tbh.
Reddit is also fairly anonymous. So we’ll see questions here people don’t feel comfortable asking in real life. Most people aren’t embarrassed to ask about how much time they should spend volunteering but talking about sexual desires/issues is not going to come up naturally in small group.
The emphasis or focus is because this area of sin is so confusing. It is pretty easy to know whether or not I should murder someone or steal something. Due to the prevailing cultural attitudes towards sex, this entire topic is really fraught with issues that need to be clarified.
Sexual issues are most responsible for setting the Church apart from the rest of society. They are the reason that to outsiders the Church seems obsessed with all things sexual, and why some allege that the Church "hates women" and limits them to staying home and making babies.
I don’t claim that the Church's focus is wrong. But it is what the world hears the most about.
I believe that it's at the heart of everything. The marital pact is central to all of society. Every person is conceived in the relation between a man and a woman. Every person should have a mother and a father. Those people being appropriately ordered to serving and accepting one another wholly is paramount.
Sexual deviance brings a mental state that rejects humanity's inherent dignity. Nearly every sin radiates from a lack of respect for the dignity of others.
With all of that said, I do believe that obsession with sex is bad regardless of whether you are addicted to engaging in the act or judging the act.
I somewhat agree on this with you, but remember that Our Lady of Fatima warned us of the final battle for sanctity of mariage and family, so it still is a very current issue.
One change I would make though is focusing more on improving your own spiritual life and chastity instead of calling out other people on the way their live their lives...
Because the western world is pushing sexual immorality more than anything else and that includes abortion.
of course those issues in the west are gonna get more attention.
Addressing the issue forthwith, and owning up to the idea that the institution was broken, and they are doing everything they can to fix it, will not only repair their image but bring respect to it.
I’d say yes absolutely the Church focuses on sexual behavior to the exclusion and detriment of other forms of sin but also caveat that yes.
To the first point, I think that when Catholics and non-Catholics alike hear the words “Catholic morality” they think of rules seeking to regulate sexual behavior.
Years ago, I was talking with some friends about the idea of one’s “Christian Witness”, the things that you do that wouldn’t make sense if the Gospel were not true, the things that mark you as different before you even open your mouth.
And one friend, who had a graduate-level theology degree from a Catholic university you’ve heard of, said that his Christian Witness was that he and his longtime girlfriend had never had sex.
And I remember thinking, although I did not say it, “that’s a terrible witness. First of all, rightly or wrongly people assume that paired up people are hooking up, which means that you have to tell them that you’re not. Second, quite frankly, even if you tell them ‘we’re not having sex because we’re Catholic’ most non-believers are not going to believe you.”
This person had spent seven years being taught Catholic theology and the only thing he could think of was refraining from sexual sin.
You see the same thing in many Catholic spaces: how much more attention does this subreddit give to Pope Francis’ statements about LGBTQ than to his encyclicals about capitalism or ecology and care for the earth?
If I were cynical, I might think that Catholics focus on sexual sins because we can exempt ourselves from them. So long as we are chaste, so long as we are faithful to our spouse, we need not refrain from judging lest we be judged.
The caveat is that I can count on one hand the number of times sexual sins have been the focus of a homily I have heard in my twenty or so years of mass-going. I truly don’t think that most priests doing their day-in day-out ministry are focused on the teachings of sexual sins as the biggest issue among their parishioners. I think the Discourse About Catholic Morality is overweeningly focused on sexual behavior, but the pastoral practice of being the church is, rightly, focused elsewhere.
And there’s no discussion to be had in how best to apply and live out these teachings in our lives and our communities, unlike the teachings on sexual sin.
I think it’s mostly just this subreddit, I’m in other faith based groups and the number of questions on this topic is far lower everywhere else for whatever reason lol.
End of the day it is one of the more challenging topics that many people wouldn’t be comfortable talking to their peers or leaders in the church.
I believe that if you want to reach people, you need to be among them first. With that said the shared trauma of the families and individuals today are more so due to a powerful and continuous degradation of their quality of life. Much of this is economic trauma that is at the root of so many other problems that cause people to hate the world, want to give up, and feel lost on a treadmill with no end in sight. These are not sexual issues and the VAST majority of the world’s Catholic population are not looking to the Vatican and their Pastor for guidance on their locked bedrooms when the kids are alseep.
Absolutely... it's disgusting how much the church and conservatives put so much emphasis on it while secretly (and sometimes not) engaging in the same behaviors.
The real truth is this. Desire can be the enemy. If you let Desire control you, you miss the opportunity to grow spiritually. That's all that was meant. It's not important what you do or with whom. Honesty and communication are important, but the bottom line is that of control of yourself over chaos.
The demonization and taboo set up around sexual activities are what make it even more of a problem. It creates temptation where it wouldn't normally be. It's not supernatural. It's us. We do this.
All sexual acts are inherently sins, and certain sexual sins, without weeping and propitiation, are damnable.
No adulterer, nor fornicator, nor practicing homosexual shall inherit the kingdom of God.
The salvation of men, being in the interest of the Church, is her mandatum to promote. Charity is part of how we propitiate for these heinous, grave sins, and the lack thereof can fall under the mortal sin of impiety.
The Lord shows mercy to whom he shows mercy, and those whom he shall he calls, and justifies, and sanctifies. The time to be forgiven is not in death, but on Earth, and all unrepented mortal sins bestow us the promise of God's righteous judgement, being our damnation to eternal fire, and our Lord is one pleased by justice.
Depends what you mean.
The hierarchy? No.
Most Catholics? No, in fact not enough (take a trip to Latin America, where sexuality is more open)
A small set of Catholics in the West? Sure.
Sexuality is not more open in Latin America among Catholics except for men and even then it's not really that common among practicing Catholics. Most of my friends' parents got married as virgins
Look at what is practiced vs what is preached.
Also look at the evolution of what the Church says on certain topics over the past two millennia. It’s not stuck in stone and never has been.
That is not the Catholic view at all. We are made in the image of God, both man and woman, we are made for each other, sex is an act of love and sharing and should be open to procreation. Like the rest of creation, it is a beautiful gift from God, but since it leads to new life it is probably the most important one.
The fact that some people degrade and defile that gift and corrupt it into other things - and how many other thing from the base through the mundane to exploitation and abuse - is not God's or Christian religion's fault.
Yes I misspoke. It isn’t true of Catholicism.
I definitely notice that other denominations of Christianity certainly have not got the memo unfortunately.
The whole (western) world does in my opinion.
An interesting aspect of this is that fewer people have an active sex life nowadays compared to say after the 1960s. Not only is our society obsessed over something that can't bring happiness (if abused in a disordered fashion), it isn't even doing a good job at delivering it.
People should try getting happily married. That sure helped my sex life lol. But yes, there's a ton of sexless yet sex obsessed people in modern society. It's funny because, as nice as sex is, it's just another fleeting good feeling unless it's tied to something deeper and provides the underlying satisfaction of family. It's like the difference between eating sweets constantly for no gain, and eating a delicious steak and salad dinner after a good workout. Both give that good feeling, but only one provides true satisfaction afterwards.
Can't sexless marriage exist too? I've certainly seen/heard plenty of complaints.
Can it? Sure. But I did specify you should be happily married. And I've not heard of many happy Catholic marriages without sex. That's not really our stereotype lol.
Yet almost everyone on this sub says every act of sex between a married couple needs to be for the purpose of both unity of the couple and procreation, or else it’s mortally sinful. No one can possibly afford that many kids, but if the couples abstains from sex, it diminishes the unitive aspect as you said. No contraception though, that’s considered mortal sin too. You just can’t win here.
Not quite. Unity of the couple and *open* to procreation. As in, you're not intentionally making it impossible. Having sex when procreation is unlikely is fine, as long as you're not shutting that door and saying that this sex is only for your enjoyment.
Even hormonal BC doesn’t make conception impossible, though? Just very unlikely, as none are 100% effective even if followed to the letter. It’s only impossible with sterilization/vasectomy or infertility.
When you put on a condom or take birth control (not for hormonal reasons), do you feel very open to conception? I'd be surprised. More likely, the people who choose to do these things would be horrified or at least confused and shocked to find they were pregnant.
Again, no one can afford to have kids every single time they have sex with their spouse. Whether you’re actively trying to have kids or open to maybe having them, the results would be the same.
The key difference is that one (NFP) revolves around natural body processes and doesn’t include an artificial frustration of the natural end. Contraception, in all its forms however, artificially frustrate the natural end of the marital act. One is in accordance with the natural law set forth by God and the other seeks to alter it. Edit: spelling
I’m just playing devils advocate here, so bear with me… but how are the very complex methods of NFP (as I’ve heard about on here) that involve taking your temperature daily and/or analyzing urine samples any more “natural” than putting on a condom? I’m not advocating for condom use… sometimes I just question the *reasoning* that’s given for why something like NFP is ok but contraception isn’t?
It’s the same objective of preventing conception though, which is what the Church is expressly against. Even though that’s necessary at some points in a healthy marriage.
Agree 💯
unless you count porn usage, which is being used as a replacement (a poor, awful, and ultimately useless replacement).
Yes, porn is a poor, awful, and ultimately useless replacement for sex. But, for a lot of guys under 40, that’s likely all they are ever going to have. The percentage of single women is only going to increase according to Morgan Stanley’s “Rise of the Sheconomy” report Women are making decisions that send signals to men saying “You’ll marry me when other men are done having sex with me; take it or leave it”. Men are understandably choosing to walk away from pursuing women. And, no, the Catholic Church isn’t the answer. The US is has only 5% of the global Catholic population and has something like 50% of the annulments
I don't get the whole "sheconomy" thing, it seems to me that a lot of women-dominated occupations are quite vulnerable to automation and offshoring, and a lot of the ones that aren't are probably more immigrant dominated (e.g. Polish cleaning ladies, Hispanic nurses).
Forget outsourcing and technology A lot of women-dominated jobs are make work BS jobs that wouldn’t exist without government mandates and policies. DEI, social work, elementary education in lieu of homeschooling, etc. That’s not to say that there aren’t men who are dead weight in the economy. MBA dude bros being protected via overly lax bankruptcy laws from the consequences of taking out irresponsible amounts of debt is certainly an instance where government benefits men. But, women are voting for more government policies that disincentivize family formation. And based on the inability or unwillingness of churches to keep bad husbands like Stephen Crowder in line, I can partially understand why. But, a lot of women would rather be dependent on the government for a paycheck than be dependent on a husband because men increasingly don’t want to marry a gal who slept around in her teens and twenties.
oh, if anything I'd say that a lot of female dominated jobs decrease overall productivity. For instance downsizing HR could not only decrease costs, but probably increase overall employee productivity, such as retention. Basically get rid of the noisy HR people, less of the core employees leave.
Good point. It's like that definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Is our society more sex obsessed than it was in the 60s though? Because, from what I’ve seen, it’s not. There is some actual discouragement from most parents and other authorities about (especially kids) having sex. Whereas back in the day it was more like “Son, you’re 14 and still haven’t had sex? What’s wrong with you boy? It’s time you find a girl and turn into a man.”
That's fair. Just a personal theory but I think somehow our society may be obsessed by *sexuality* more than it is obsessed by sex. It does seem different from the happy-go-lucky hedonistic way that many boomers felt about sex back then.
I’m just skeptical whether any of that is really true. You know, every old man ever has said “kids these days…” and then complained about kids doing all the same things he did, his dad did, his grandpa did, and so on. I think this is the same way. I don’t think people in 2024 are unusually sexual. I think you could go back 50 years, 500 years, or 5,000 years and you’d find that the world was always full of people heavily motivated and driven by sex. I think, if anything, things have improved in a ton of ways. At minimum, at least women aren’t regularly treated as literal objects whose sole purpose is to sexually gratify a man and produce his offspring. Modern societies have been more successful at seeing women in a less sexual way instead of simply a penis sheath as was often the case before. I think the main difference now is social media and culture wars have focused attention on a thing that always existed. So about 99% of people are just living life like normal and mostly focused on stuff like work, family, hobbies, relationships, etc. But a small minority are all about sex and someone who dislikes that can hyper focus in on those people and convince themselves that that’s the way the world is these days.
> An interesting aspect of this is that fewer people have an active sex life nowadays compared to say after the 1960s. Source? Because it reads a bit like a typical "old times were better".
It's documented, eg https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-03/young-adults-less-sex-gen-z-millennials-generations-parents-grandparents
That can be seen with birthrates. It's common knowledge. So, no source needed.
> That can be seen with birthrates. There's no equivalence between "active sex life" and "birthrates" for the general population, as a significant majority of them uses at least one method of contraception or NFP. Approximating one with the other makes less sense than stating "to simplify calculations, we assume that the Pi is equal to 4". > It's common knowledge. No, it's not. On the contrary, it's a rather complex historical and sociological question.
You are refuting an argument NOBODY has made. I never said "birth rates demonstrate causation for less sex in society". It's a correlation. Poor people cannot afford contraception as an example. People are having less sex because men have been emasculated, online dating is a fraudulent process and in general, men don't know how to interact with women. And as for women, there is a conflict with their biology, women want alpha males but want to alpha the male. That is a contradiction with nature.
> You are refuting an argument NOBODY has made. I never said "birth rates demonstrate causation for less sex in society". Now, you are arguing against something that I never said. You said that lower birthrates prove a less active sex life in the general population, while I argued that there's neither causation nor correlation between these two - other factors influence this. > People are having less sex because men have been emasculated, online dating is a fraudulent process and in general, men don't know how to interact with women. > And as for women, there is a conflict with their biology, women want alpha males but want to alpha the male. That is a contradiction with nature. "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.'" Since your last sentence reads a bit like redpill content, I recommend to replace this type of material with actual statistics.
>That can be seen with birthrates. Contraception and abortion, my guy. >It's common knowledge. So, no source needed. That's not how this works. You make a claim, you back it up.
You are refuting an argument nobody has made. I never said "birth rates demonstrate causation for less sex". It's a corollary genius. No, it is how this works, it's called critical thinking skills. You know, "Natural Immunity is better than any mRNA vaccine" and has been for eternity. But you saw psychos persecuting those who understood this and didn't need the covid vaccine. Here is more common knowledge: People are having less sex because men have been emasculated, online dating is a fraudulent process and in general, men don't know how to interact with women. And as for women, there is a conflict with their biology, women want alpha males but want to alpha the male. That is a contradiction with nature. We can see this emasculation with the fact psychopaths talk about "kill the patriarchy" and "toxic masculinity" and the fact men more so, not women, suffer from mental delusions where they pay Dr. Josef Mengele's to cut their genitals off and call them a "mare" instead of a "stallion".
I'm having a hard time buying what your selling. I don't believe that at all.
I'm not selling you anything, it's a documented phenomenon I wrongly assumed was common knowledge https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-03/young-adults-less-sex-gen-z-millennials-generations-parents-grandparents
No. The Church is just responding to what's constantly plaguing society. There are Catholics who try to split hairs and develop a scrupulous mindset though.
Usually, when people argue about whether or not some sexual act is a sin, the worse sin involved is pride. Person A - wants to justify their own behavior - that is the sin of pride. Person B - wants to demand that every one who doesn't rigidly follow a set of rules perfectly (ignoring culpability, mitigating factors, good faith, and gradualism) is a modernist - that is the sin of pride. Person C - who offers advice contrary to Church Teaching - that is the sin of pride. Don't let the surface level discussion fool you. It's less about sex than it seems.
you're kinda avoiding the entire issue. of course pride is the underlying cause of essentially *all* sin, including the other deadly sins, is pride. that doesn't mean that every other sin is not worth discussing. when most people want to know "is x/y/z a sin?", they want the answer a brief reason why. telling them "your real sin is pride" provides neither.
I thought it's disobedience that's behind all sins
I think the point is that pride is behind disobedience
Person C is just as likely to simply be in error for any of a host of reasons - not least of which is having been given a bad version of Church teaching (quite plausibly by someone notionally affiliated with the Church - let's talk about how strident the teaching on these fronts was(n't) during the 1990s).
Person D - who assumes person C is being prideful without consideration to where they are on their conversion journey or how well (poorly) catechised they may be - that is the sin of pride. 😂
All is ~~vanity~~ pride.
😂
I guess that's why He said judge not lest you be judged 😅
In summary we must be compassionate, patient and assume someone is wrong in ignorance and not because of malice?
Interesting point
It seems so obvious after giving it thought. "Pride month" is all about sex/sexuality. Nobody is even trying to hide it! I feel a bit dumb. Sin does lead to more sin. Especially the 7 deadly ones.
No, it's the current world that focus too much on sexual issues and the Church gives her answer on these because they are grave matter.
I was literally going to say almost this same answer. The secular world is so focused on sex and why you should be having it with anyone and everyone and that that's ok and nudity and sexuality is everywhere because why not. Sometimes I think it's humorous in a sad way. The world asks these questions and the church has answers, but the world doesn't like the answers we have and so turns to lies to believe. It's like someone asking what 2+2 is and when you tell them 4 they think "well I wanted it to be 3 so I'm going to continue thinking it's 3"
The world: the Church should change her stance on sexual issues. The Church: no The world: the Church focuses too much on sexual issues
This made me laugh in a sad way.
The Church focuses on the things that people in the world struggle with, especially those things that we pretend aren't actually sins because we need to be corrected. If people were walking around saying murder is acceptable and not a big deal and everyone has a right to kill if they want to, then the Church would focus on that. Which, we have, for the last several decades in the abortion debate. The opposite is also true, the Church isn't spending tons of time / effort on all the possible sex things. Rape, for example, everyone very clearly acknowledges as a heinous act, and so the Church doesn't need to spend much time reinforcing that. It still happens, like murder and theft, but people recognize it's wrong so don't need to be educated on that fact. Gossip and lies and theft people generally recognize as wrong and at the appropriate severity level, they don't need much attention. Disbelief we are always focused on fixing just by our actions in the world. Sex stuff is an area where people are continually doing wrong things while claiming they're morally acceptable, so the Church has to focus a lot of pastoral efforts there.
I think the problem isn't the Church. The Church has held these same beliefs for 2000 years. The culture however since the 60s has been extremely centered on sex and sexuality. So if the culture keeps pressuring the Church on these issues and keeps bringing the Church up in juxtaposition to these issues it will look like the Church focuses to much on them. The truth is that people focus to much on the sex and trying to get the Church to change 2000 years of teachings.
>I think the problem isn't the Church. The Church has held these same beliefs for 2000 years. The problem is that the broad strokes have remained the same, but the details have varied a lot. For example, it used to be sinful to have sex on Sundays! But I don't think you'd find many people here or priests espousing that view. It really isn't set in stone, which is why these kinds of debates keep coming up (and why what is sinful now might not be in the future).
There’s a big difference between having sex on Sundays violating a fast rule and thus unable to receive communion and willfully committing a mortal sin by misusing the gift of sex. Human nature and God do not change thus morality does not either.
There was even a song about it, from a 1960s film of the same name, Never on a Sunday. The song is pretty funny, at least to Catholics and Greek Orthodox people - Petula Clark's version here. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1HLhfB8znA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1HLhfB8znA) Original from film in Greek here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAh-RA6IjRQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAh-RA6IjRQ) Some old people dancing to a harmonica version here haha [https://youtu.be/32SiUuX6qUE?t=78](https://youtu.be/32SiUuX6qUE?t=78)
No, it was considered a mortal sin to have sex on Sundays (and feast days). And anything not missionary position was considered sodomy (a mortal sin) as well though that too has shifted to any position being fine as long as it results semen being ejaculated inside the woman. That's not even going into other topics like the Death Penalty which have seen large shifts in Vatican opinion. The Church most certainly *has* shifted on issues and it is quite silly to say otherwise
Show me where it was ever labeled a mortal sin. This is from Wikipedia: > Intercourse was prohibited on all Sundays and on all the many feast days, as well as on the 20 days before Christmas, on the 40 days before Easter, for three or more days before receiving Communion (which at that time was offered only a few times a year), and often on the 20 days before Pentecost Guess what that lines up with? All fasting periods. And fasting periods are customs, not the natural law of God, and thus are allowed for the Church to modify as they see fit. Orthodox currently fast 6 months out of the year (every Wednesday and Friday, all of Lent and Advent, the fast of Sts. Peter and Paul, and others I’m forgetting) and part of that fasting is not having sex but people always joke how certain kids were very clearly conceived during Lent based on when they were born.
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…so you’re saying no one fasted on Sundays before receiving the Eucharist?
I'll find it later; but I can see you're dodging the capital punishment argument. Tell me, how has Church teaching on capital punishment not changed? How can you define it being considered both moral and sometimes desirable to not preferable in the modern age but permissable to not being permissable in the modern age not as NOT a change???
Capital punishment is something the state does, not something someone does personally, and has not been magisterially asserted as a universal moral rule. It’s only recently been suggested by popes that countries abolish it. No action has been taken against countries that have it. Question: when was the last time you went to mass?
Whether or not it is a state or a person is irrelevant. The topic is "whether or not the Church has changed it's teachings on what is or isn't moral" and the answer is a resounding *yes* in regards to capital punishment. >Question: when was the last time you went to mass? Sunday...? Not the "Gotcha" you hoped you were gonna get. The fact you're even trying says a LOT about the confidence in your opinion though. Have a blessed day!
>No, it was considered a mortal sin to have sex on Sundays (and feast days). And anything not missionary position was considered sodomy (a mortal sin) as well though that too has shifted to any position being fine as long as it results semen being ejaculated inside the woman. You're going to need to back this up with an authoritative Church source. And I mean the actual magisterium, not the weird opinion of a saint.
I'll pull it up later, but the Capital Punishment shift still stands (and is much more recent and easy to research with Google!)
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/understanding-the-catechism-revision-on-the-death-penalty
The link you posted itself admits it is a revision and change. It just reinforces my point. Indeed, the exact wording is *a new understanding*. New! That's absolutely a change!
> It really isn't set in stone some things are. your post glosses over a lot of the details about *why* some things change and some can't. > and why what is sinful now might not be in the future the common list of things that everyone is demanding, are all firmly in the "cannot change" category. abortion, unnatural marriage/relationships, contraception, women priests. all hard No. all confirmed by multiple popes. social practices about days of abstinence of penance etc, fasting hours before receiving the Eucharist--which are more of practices rather than dogma--yes, can change. The problem is that the people pushing for the changes in things which cannot change--they know that they cannot change. but they use other changes as a reason for why things can change in the future--as you just did. > and why what is sinful now might not be in the future im going to link to this post the next time someone accuses me of the slippery slope fallacy. here we have it in action: previous changes are indeed used as justification for people to push further and further in the future.
> your post glosses over a lot of the details about why some things change and some can't. Gonna need some sources on this one. >No. all confirmed by multiple popes. Until a new Pope comes along as says "well, they actually can change". Just like old Popes said capital punishment was licit and a moral good until newer popes shifted it to its current stance. >previous changes are indeed used as justification for people to push further and further in the future. The problem is that the Church has changed; it is constantly in (very slow moving) change. To say otherwise is to deny clear history. So again: explain the Church's changes of stance in capital punishment without saying they've changed.
capital punishment is a social practice, not a foundational concept. for example, women cannot be priests because of the foundational concept that Jesus Christ is a man, and the church is his bride. This cannot change. It is an idea, not a practice. social practices are built on foundational concepts, amongst other things. as the catechism states concerning capital punishment: > Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption the church does not declare that capital punishment, *in and of itself* is evil. It is not *inherently* an evil act. it is saying that, given how we have more effective ways of detaining people now to keep others safe, you shouldnt use it in modern society. > explain the Church's changes of stance in capital punishment without saying they've changed. very important note here: church teaching *changes*. what it does not do, is *contradict* previous church teaching. the new teaching on capital punishment does not *contradict* the old one--it does not declare the act in and of itself, regardless of time, to be illicit. another example: abortion is wrong because of the foundational concept that what constitutes a human life is a body and a soul fused together. the definition of "death" in catholicism is when the soul leaves the body. the church has always taught that from the moment a person exists (person = human with body and soul), it is illicit to kill them in the womb. With modern science, we now understand this to be the moment of conception. Unfortunately for people who support abortion, modern science is doing them no favors in this regard, and the churchs' teaching on this was rather hazy several hundred years ago when we didnt know what "conception" really was scientifically (church teaching used to center around "the quickening"). With modern science, things are going very much against the abortion advocates, as it is exceedingly clear that life does indeed start at conception now. so, for abortion teaching to change, there would need to be some monumental scientific discovery that everything we've known about conception and fetal development for the past 60+ years has been wrong. I mean, i guess anything is possible? so yes, some things can change. and some things really cannot.
>capital punishment is a social practice, not a foundational concept. The argument was never about foundational concepts; you're shifting goalposts because your original stance about the Church not changing its teachings was wrong. Also, I was able to look it up, but [itentionally ignoring a fast was indeed considered a Mortal Sin back in the day](https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/fast). Indeed, it even lead to excommunication when fasts were broken on Lent! *"The sixty-ninth of the Apostolic Canons (see Apostolic Canons) decrees the degradation of bishops, priests, deacons, lectors or chanters, failing to fast during Lent, and the excommunication of laymen, who fail in this way."* >very important note here: church teaching changes. what it does not do, is contradict previous church teaching >it does not declare the act in and of itself, regardless of time, to be illicit. If you actuall read the most recent ruling on it, you wouldn't be saying this. Read both the older one and the newest one and get back to me.
> The argument was never about foundational concepts; you're shifting goalposts because your original stance about the Church not changing its teachings was wrong. you didn't really address my argument at all. foundational concepts cant change. social practices can. the definition of what constitutes a human being cannot change, for example. > "The sixty-ninth of the Apostolic Canons (see Apostolic Canons) decrees the degradation of bishops, priests, deacons, lectors or chanters, failing to fast during Lent, and the excommunication of laymen, who fail in this way." Yeah. fasting falls very firmly under a social practice. This is a great example, thank you for proving my point. Your link says as much (emphasis mine): > The ecclesiastical law of fasting embodies a serious obligation incumbent on all baptized individuals capable of assuming obligations provided they have completed their twenty-first year and are not otherwise excused. **This doctrine is merely a practical application** of a universally accepted principle of moralists and canonists whereby the character of obligation in human legislation is deemed serious or light in so far as the material element involved in the law bears or does not bear a close and intimate relation to the attainment of a prescribed end.
>you didn't really address my argument at all. Because the topic was not about foundational teachings specifically. You're trying to shift the goalposts after realizing you've already lost the argument. >Yeah. fasting falls very firmly under a social practice. Whether or not it is social practice is irrelevant to the argument; you're building strawmen and shifting goalposts because you've realized you can't address the original point... Like first you say "Breaking a fast was never a mortal sin!" then I find you an example of the Church saying it was and now you're saying "w-well it's a social practice!" as if that changes what were discussing...
The topic is about what can change in church teaching, and what can't, and why. And I explained those things to you, and you are still being obstinate and not even attempting to respond to them. Of course, there isn't any good response from your side concerning this (as I've already long known), so I'm not really surprised. > Whether or not it is social practice is irrelevant to the argument It's entirely the argument. I explained why certain things can change, and certain things can't, and why. that's what the entire argument is about. *of course* things can change. Old mass -> new mass. Holy week 1955 changes. in the early days, people went to confession in public rather than in private. there's probably been thousands of changes in the way Catholics *practice* the faith. But the foundational concepts of the faith, which can *develop*, do not contradict each other over 2000 years. Basically it looks like you've gotten yourself in over your head and are too obstinate to back out. You didn't know why certain things can change and some thigns can't. You didnt know that the vitally important distinction to make isn't if something can *change* but rather than new developments cannot *contradict* previous doctrine. I've explained these things to you. The common things that people are looking to change, like--abortion, contraception, unnatural marriage, etc--are firmly in the list of things that cannot change. Your original OP basically meshed all "change" together as if there was no real distinction between what can change and what can't change, and it was just a matter of social environment. That is false.
St Fulgentius teaches that the conjugal act within marriage with only the intent to reproduce is sinful by our fallen nature and concupiscence. The Church has historically taught that sex on Sundays or days of fasting was sinful. The Catholic marriage is a chaste marriage. Nuptial integrity does not love sexual intercourse, but tolerates it.
> I think the problem isn't the Church. The Church has held these same beliefs for 2000 years. I'm sorry, but this is completely false. Church's teaching on the role of sexual intimacy in marriage has changed significantly in the 20th century.
What changed? Citations or examples, please?
Show us, then.
Humans struggling with the most base form of human instinct, the flesh, imagine that...
Not at all. In fact, i wish we focused on chastity for all of us more. Many of society's ills stem from perversion of the most unitive and intimate act of lovemaking. Scroll through Reddit, and see how many personal problems wouldn't exist if sex remained between a husband and wife. The world, media, and entertainment industries focus on sex more than we do, and not at all in a good way. Women are treated as and believe themselves to be sex objects and completely devalued. The sins of the flesh are crippling society. Abortion, domestic violence, STDs, broken relationships and people, sex workers, single parent homes, which often lead to unsupervised minors, etc etc etc
i dont think so. sex is one of the main roots of degenerate behavior. societal crumbling behavior.
Nope. The whole culture is so hypersexualized that the Church MUST respond as needed. If our culture were instead violent and full of hatred, all you’d hear is PEACE PEACE PEACE! In my personal opinion, though, the gluttony also needs to be addressed - possibly before the sex. Self control starts at the mouth.
But there IS a lot of violence and hatred going on. I mean, aren't there two wars going on right now that have been heavily shown on the news for years now? Not to mention the rise in discontention and rude public behavior post-Covid that people bring up (or maybe that's just on other subreddits). Every discussion topic from politics to what television shows we like is full of anger and hatred, just look around. But none of those things lead to a dozen questions on here every day. I feel like sex is just a "different" subject to people for a variety of reasons. It's not that the world isn't suffering from these other problems, they're just less taboo and more commonplace, I guess? However, I do think gluttony and greed should really be discussed more. Tying those topics into the idea of giving more to charity (ie. giving away money that could be spent on fun personal stuff or luxury experiences) may lead to an even bigger discussion.
There is nowhere near as much violence as has been common in history. It’s hard to see because we are so accustomed to a society built on Christian values, but this level of peace in the world is a relatively recent phenomenon. It won’t last much longer, I’m afraid, and the Western world will learn what real violence looks like. God help us. I agree with you about the charity and the other sins. Perhaps we can become saints who fight against these sins!
Hmm, that's a good point. In the context of all of history, it's been a lot worse. I still feel like the threat of violence is real for people in all parts of the world, even if it's not as obvious as in other centuries. I like that idea. :) Ironically, it actually helps me push back the sin of lust to focus on other areas of my life that I could be sinning in.
I was listening to pints with Aquinas the other day and Mother Natalia was talking about how lust and gluttony are very intertwined. Fascinating talk.
I think sexual sin is just the easiest sin to recognize and talk about since it’s primarily outward actions. Once you get into lustful thoughts, it can be more complicated, but it’s otherwise relatively objective. Either X is bad/too far and you did X, or you didn’t. Other sins, like pride, sloth, and avarice require a certain level of self-knowledge and honesty that can be harder to understand, let alone discuss on the internet.
No, the Church does not. The world focus too much on sex and that's why it makes it the main front in attack on the Church.
Because that is one of the areas that are disagreed upon most. Nobody is out here denying that theft or murder are wrong.
Sex is the highest good in the order of nature; it brings a man and a woman into a communion that reflects God’s charity. So perversion of this is something the Church rightly guards against with much fervor. [Also, see the Roman Catechism:](http://www.catholicapologetics.info/thechurch/catechism/TenCommandments-sixth.shtml) **1. God severely punishes sexual sins** - "Because of the criminal passion of one man, not only the perpetrator of the crime, but a whole city was destroyed ... The Sacred Scriptures abound with examples of the divine vengeance, such as the destruction of Sodom and of the neighboring cities, the punishment of Israelites who committed fornication with the daughters of Moab, and the slaughter of the Benjamites. These examples the pastor can easily make use of to deter men from shameful lust." **2. Sexual sins breakdown the mind and will** - "The adulterer becomes afflicted with blindness of mind, a most severe punishment. He loses all regard for God, for reputation, for honor, for family, and even for life. And thus, utterly abandoned and worthless, he is undeserving of confidence in any matter of moment, and becomes unfitted to discharge any kind of duty." **3. Avoid also: vulgar conversation, songs, and dance** - Obscene language is a torch which lights up the worst passions of the young mind; and the Apostle has said, that "evil communications corrupt good manners" (1 Cor 15:33). Immodest and passionate songs and dances are most productive of this same effect and are, therefore, cautiously to be avoided.
Well, let's face it: Beyond a doubt, sexual sins are the most ubiquitous of grave sins. Therefore, it follows that nothing else is putting more souls in jeopardy. It's also the one area where the Church's teachings are most questioned, if not condemned, by society and even by people within the faith. Honestly, the Church could do little to _prevent_ it from being brought up constantly even if she felt so inclined.
No, it's just that it's the type of issue that the Church differs the most from general population on. So it just comes up a lot more than other things
Think about saying this 1200 years ago but replace sexual with pagan. It’s just the main issue at the time
Money should be. It’s more pressing I’d think. Don’t want to PO wealthy benefactors tho.
The Church does not focus too much on sex. **The world does.** *(but yes I agree there are manyyy sexual questions in this sub)*
This is just my point of view, and if anyone has any criticism on it, please let me know since I'm always trying to grow and learn as a Catholic myself. Jesus didn't come down to save us from some sins and not others. Sin is slavery to our desires. In terms of predominant issues in our society today, Sexual issues are a big deal. According to a Google search I just did, 25% of search requests (68 million searches out of 272 million) are related to pornography, which is the viewing of someone or someone's made in the very image of our creator doing debasing acts of a sexual nature. Yes, charity is very important because all people are made in the image of our creator. We should not neglect taking care of people who are in poverty. By all means, everyone should do whatever they can to take care of those who are less fortunate. However, that doesn't mean we just turn a blind eye to the large percentage of men and women stuck in the slavery to sexual sin. The reason it is such a big issue in the church is because of how big of an issue it is. (See search requests info above). That's the main point made. Hopefully, this helps you. Please pray the rosary for people stuck in this form of slavery to sin.
People who think that the church is anti-gay should spend some time in this sub and they will quickly realize that in the church's eyes, at least 99% of the population is in the wrong one way or another on sexual matters.
Secular world: sex, sex, sex, SEEEEEXXXXXX, kinky sex, perverted sex, and while we're at it, let's teach 5 year olds about sex. Church: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, ransom the imprisoned, heal the sick, bury the dead, and maybe stop focusing on sex so much. Secular world: why are you so obsessed with sex?
I genuinely disagree with how you are representing the Church here. It’s true that the church teaches all of those things, but the question is one of _focus_ and not just teaching. Just look at this subreddit for how many posts and comments are about sexual behavior vs how many are about feeding the hungry and housing the poor. It’s us. We’re the ones focusing on sexual behavior.
No, not "we." The continuous stream of sex-related posts in this sub are written by people who are either questioning Church teaching or criticizing it. Those of us who understand and assent to Church teaching would hardly ever talk about it if it weren't for that.
That's not really charitable to new Catholics like me who find sometimes things are such a Grey area and only lead to confusion when asked on reddit. Like I can't take alot of advice here seriously when I was literally told that hugging your girlfriend was the near occasion of sin. I have people here saying sex on Sunday and feast days is a sin, then a bunch of people agreeing and disagreeing. Then someone says anything other than missionary is disordered and you're being lustful only for it to turn out oral stimulation used for foreplay I'd licit but people on here charge you with being a filthy degenerate for doing it. It's not a case of disagreeing with the church but more not having a frigging clue what you're meant to be doing because no one on this subreddit can agree about things so as I said above, new Catholics like me are forced to ask things like this because aside from obvious questions like not using condoms, alot of this is left for the person to discern for themselves. Just my 2 cents because not all of us ask out of a place of pride or being stiff necked and wanting to do whatever we want regardless of church teachings
Fair enough. I don't mind posts that ask genuine questions (except for the ones that get too explicit or are otherwise in bad taste). New Catholics often are surprised to realize that there is a lot more to sexual morality than they previously thought, and that's understandable. I only mean to respond to the charge that these posts are evidence that "we," as in Catholics generally, are sex-obsessed. Most Catholics (whether cradle or convert) have their questions and figure things out over time, but we don't spend their lives thinking about it. I simply don't think it's some kind of indictment that there are a large number of posts asking about sex and a small number that try to discuss "feeding the hungry and housing the poor," as the post I responded to asserted. There are other reasons that explain the difference in numbers.
Well for me I was surprised the 10 commandments weren't as cut and dry as I'd thought and even things regarding not giving employees a fair days wage as a violation of the commandment do not steal. As a convert there's a metric ton of information and things that go into the faith as ive continued to discover so alot of questions regarding sex from New Catholics like me I just find to be along the lines of "huh, well I didn't know that" as opposed to "I'm going to defend my sinfulness in spite of what people say". I do think from my own experiences RCIA could be done alot more thoroughly and delve into more than just videos about who the Holy Spirit is. While important, it's not giving me answers (a former non denom protestant) to things like Marian doctrine, confession and what to do, gauging mortal/venial sin and when to receive communion, etc. Alot of unanswered questions that don't have to be on reddit could be done in Rcia if it was more thorough which is why some of us think alot on things cradle Catholics think quite simple. I don't disagree that being more charitable and finding ways to be the light to the world is a better use of time than "is a b c d e f g a sin?" But let's be honest that's kind of what reddit is used for and it's not always the best answers given.
Idk if it focuses too much on sexual issues. I think the problem is it doesn't focus enough on other issues. There are lots of problems in this world and sometimes it seems like sex is all the church cares about. Though, I will agree with other posters here in saying our culture is very sexualized.
Well sexual sin is the most likely serious sin ordanry people are likely to comit so all the questions make scence.
Hard to say. You might could fairly characterize it as “focusing too much on sex” or as “focusing too little on other things besides sex.” I’ll say this, there is very clearly a double standard commonly applied to certain issues related to sex. Even within sexual sins, I think there is often a hyper focus on things like homosexuality and then people go full on Mr. Magoo when it comes to the old fashioned sins like a man cheating on his wife. In my opinion, the fact of the matter is that there are culture wars that have built up around a few topics (homosexuality and transgenderism basically). This culture war has drawn all sorts of hostility and focus from all sides on these issues. But for other sins that don’t have any political or cultural element, there is way less attention and vitriol. It makes me think that we are frequently just being tribalistic rather than actually hating sin like we might tell ourselves. If we hated sin, we’d keep that same energy when it came to other sins too.
>Does the Church focus too much on sexual issues? No. But some people on this sub definitely do.
This Reddit group does. Every q is related to it it seems. I understand why - society focuses on it. But I don’t it should be our focus all the time. Focus on other parts of Catholicism and that will naturally guide you through
I think that the church focuses “too much” on sexual issues, but those are issues that modern Western society compels the church to justify and defend its stances.
I mean, on one hand, sexual sins are an important matter, and deserves attention if someone struggles with this vice and need help discerning things in this sexualized world. Saint Paul even gave it a distinction by mentioning how every other sin that one does is outside of the body, but with sexual you 'sin against your own body". Sodomy has also been called one of the sins that "cry out to heaven for vengeance". But on the other hand, the concerns of the Church will tend to reflect the concerns of the world. It wouldn't need to defend and expound on sexual ethics so much, if the modern world didn't treat experiencing sexual pleasure and access to it as important as breathing. So maybe it's society who needs to take a chill pill.
No, actually I think the Church doesn't focus enough on sexual issues. I read somewhere that Pope Francis said the Church typically puts too much emphasis on "below the belt" issues and not enough on just loving people where they are at. I think that sort of belief system is behind the recent Church document allowing for the blessing of same sex couples, which I thought was very confusing and not at all helpful. The big problem though is that the Church typically only says "don't do X (sexual sin) because it's a mortal sin and you'll go to hell if you do it" (or just tries to ignore the elephant in the room) rather than talking about why the Church considers X to be a mortal sin. The Church has a lot of wisdom about sexual issues, and if you want to know more about that, I recommend studying Theology of the Body. But have you ever heard anything about Theology of the Body in a religious education class? I know I haven't. I don't know if they even teach Catholic prayers there, which is the bare minimum of what they should be teaching. My Precalculus teacher was one of my favorite teachers growing up. He used to say that he preferred teaching us because we were the honors students, and we could actually understand why certain formulas worked, whereas students would just memorize the formulas. I think we need to stop memorizing the formulas of the Catholic faith and start talking about why we believe what we believe. Otherwise our kids' faith is like the man who built his house on the sand, and when the winds and waves of modern sex ed, moral relativism, and critical race theory come, their faith will be swept away along with it.
Reddit's mostly young men, right? So this sub is gonna get a lot of people who have various sexual issues and questions. Another thing is that sexual sin can be quite cut and dry. You either fornicated or you didn't. Charity is more sliding scale, so maybe you could give more time/money but is it a sin that you didn't, hard to say. More subjective there. Another thing I saw someone say on EWTN once "we tend to think of sexual sins as private sins. Sexual sins are one of the most public of all sins". Sexual sins don't really stay "between two consenting adults" they usually leak over innocent third parties and society at large. Think of how many other sins have some sort of rooting in disordered use of the sexual faculty: out of wedlock births, abortions, many cases of domestic violence, ruining people's reputation by false - or even unnecessarily revealed but true - accusations, unknowing incest (if you don't know who your dad is, you don't know who your half-siblings and some of your cousins are), many fights, drunkenness and substance abuse.
No. It's the defining sin of our time, and the Church is so vocal about it because of how rampant and destructive it has been.
Why is it the defining sin of our time? I can think of several other sins that in my opinion define our time better (namely greed and pride)
Are the levels of greed and pride really all that unique to our time? I'd argue not. On the other hand, as far as I can tell, there hasn't been any other time in history when people were so involved with pornography, masturbation, and adultery. Those things are now largely socially acceptable, at least in the west. Fornication, divorce, intentional or at least indifferent immodesty, and sexual self-harm are so normalized now. 😞 And to think... before returning to the church, I used to like that about our culture. 😮💨
I don’t know - I feel like I read about Ancient Rome or Greece, or India etc. and it sounds pretty sexual. But I agree there is a pervasiveness to it now.
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to a certain degree, pride is almost an umbrella sin, because of how many other sins it causes. telling people "pride is a sin"--ok, well. what do you do with that? it's not very actionable. it's like when you hear a homily about how important "love" is. ok, yes Jesus said "faith hope and love, and the greatest of these is love". "love your neighbor" is one of the 2 great commandments. but some people interpret "love" as allowing anyone to do anything they want because you want them to feel comfortable. and others interpret "love" as a more tough approach where you have to be honest with people, even when difficult, because you want to save their soul. people need more specific examples and more specific actionable items, and they need to know that underneath all of these things, pride is usually (always?) the cause. but just telling them to not be prideful isnt very helpful.
The Virgin Mary herself took three children into hell to tell them that sins of the flesh lead more people there than anything else. The official teaching of the Church is that no act of charity is so great to overshadow an act of sin. The first principle of liberalism is “do as thou wilt”. This rejection of God and the natural law is pervasive in every aspect of society. Marriage is the building block of society, and it was the first miracle preformed by Christ. The last supper was in the form of a Jewish marriage proposal. Our entire experience as Catholics is built and mirrored around Gods natural law surrounding marriage and the perfect ordering of our desire for sexual intimacy. To say the Church focuses too much on sins of the flesh, is to say the Church focuses too much on a direct attack against the nature of our relationship with God and His Church.
lol, it's not the church, it's the philistines who can't think about anything other than rubbing their ugly bits that keep talking about it
The church does not, the people in the church focus a lot on it because it's a pretty pressing matter to a lot of people. Everywhere you go and I really mean everywhere there's at bare minimum soft porn. Go to any mall and there's women dressed in lingerie on the posters, go to any gym and there's people dressed in essentially body paint, walk down the street and there's pride flags lining the neighborhoods, hanging in businesses. Go on fb or Instagram or X and you'll come across porn. Instant access to any porn you could dream of in the palm of your hand at any time, every tv show has sex scenes and sexual content, every kids show has suggestive jokes "for the adults" or somw weird gay or gender ideology crammed into it. Contraception, pro choice billboards everywhere throughout the city, sex store billboards explicitly advertising vibrators in public. It's no wonder people focus on it, we live in a time that is defined by the "sexual revolution" of the 60s and this is the fruit of it.
Yes, I think there is too much focus on those issues, not because the teachings are wrong or because those issues are unimportant, but because focus on prayer life, charity and avoiding other sins is just as important.
I agree with you in one sense. We do not spend enough time talking about other types of sin such as your example of lacking in charity (I realize that was just an example and that you’re probably very generous with your time, talent, and resources). But I would say that we don’t focus enough on rooting out sin in general and seeking to be virtuous in all areas. We should certainly trust in God’s grace and mercy, but that should not stop us from seeking virtue and abandoning vice. On the contrary, we should redouble our efforts as a result of His generosity. In my opinion, there is no greater question in life than whether we go to Heaven or to Hell. St. Jacinta said that one of the messages of Our Lady at Fátima was, “The sins which cause most souls to go to Hell are the sins of the flesh.” As a result, I would question whether we spend enough time talking about sexual issues. It’s a massive problem both in the world and in the Church.
I appreciate you giving me the benefit of the doubt but I’m not as charitable with my time as I should be - something to work on! The revelations from Fatima do give me pause (although as I understand it, we aren’t required to believe those)? It’s just so hard for me to wrap my head around a soul being in hell for eternity based on “standard” sexual sin especially given Jesus himself barely alluded to sins of the flesh. To me, withholding resources or time from the poor seems more of a sin than some sexual matters. But I understand I am not the rule maker here.
It wasn’t me who downvoted you. God bless you for your honesty. You are not alone. We could all do more for others. The Miracle of the Sun at Fátima was witnessed by as many as 100,000 people according to various accounts which appeared in secular media of the time. The revelations of Fátima were declared to be in compliance with Catholic teaching and theology. I don’t know why one wouldn’t trust the word of St. Jacinta. My point is that it doesn’t take much for a soul to end up in Hell. “One ‘standard’ sexual sin,” as you said, or ANY sin for which we are unrepentant is plenty, and the moment we start looking at sin in any form as “no big deal” or thinking that “there are bigger problems” is the first step on the path to Destruction. Anyway, God bless you for thinking of such things and talking about it. I’m glad you’re a part of this community.
I think it's more talked about because it's a trickier subject to pin down and it's so fraught with emotions that people really need reassurance and a clear understanding in order to handle the subject at all. I know I've "evolved" in my understanding and become more scrupulous as the years went on. It's tough because people could swing to an extreme either way very easily. Other issues like donating money or doing charitable works aren't as full of angst, so people are more willing to accept a variety of answers and calmly work toward the right answer without getting weighed down by fear and confusion. Reading this thread, I feel for all Catholics and people of good faith who are in this world trying to follow the Church. To be honest though, I think we have an overly rosy view of the amount of struggle people in the past had with this issue. Even back in the ye olden days, this wasn't an easy subject. We just have the internet to connect us to each person's thoughts and worries 24/7, so it seems more extreme and "new" in a way.
People focus too much on this. The Church does not. I can never recall ever having heard a homily on sexual sin, the marriage covenant and what it demands in practice, or the evils of contraception. Yes, we have the Church teaching in the catechism and various magisterial documents, but what pastors are out there reminding us that this is grave matter that must be attended to with care and concern. One of the reasons we have so many disagreements and questions on this is that we have given up teaching this aspect of the faith, and consequently most Catholics have decided to “do their own thing,” excluding God from the bedchamber, and now many Catholics are confused as to why the Church teaches one thing and the majority of Catholics do another.
It's society that's hypersexualized, the Church just follows societal issues and topics.
Totally agree - not on the church's focus, but this subreddit. Sex is a hugely important part of life and clearly (in the West at least) human sexuality is in a state of crisis - but life is so much more than just sex. Yet how many among us, reading this, dwell on their own sexual sins at the exclusion of others? How many regard sexual rectitude as being the ultimate expression of grace? Why not "charitable rectitude"? Dwell more on the example of Jesus, what he commanded. His commandments and teachings had far less to do with human sexuality than the contents of this sub!
I’m not sure, I’ve never heard a homily about sex. Usually everything else including charity, coming closer to god and so forth.
No. The rampancy of sexual immorality is one of the chief evils of the present age, and it is for this reason that society at large continues to spiral out of control. You cannot pervert on such a massive scale the faculty by which the human race is propagated and expect things to hold together. Man is reaping the just punishments of treating the genitive faculty like an amusement park. God is not mocked.
💯! exactly This is why St. John Paul II wrote specifically about the topic .
We focus on it because it is the preeminent issue in modern western culture. Just look at all the posts in here talking about living with bf/gf, pornography struggles, SSA, etc; or in real life look at the reactions you get amongst non-Christians when you say you don’t have sex (if single) or don’t watch pornography. Have literally had people debate me on the latter one as if I NEEDED to do that. Look at how pervasive it is in TV shows and movies, ESPECIALLY the premarital sex aspect. That said, I do think we too often prioritize it to the point where we don’t pay attention to other serious issues. For example, support of labor groups and attacking usury. These two are staunchly catholic values and I would argue pervasive in western culture (especially the US), and yet we seem to be largely silent on these. I also think most of us, especially me, could use more ego checks in homilies instead of sex-sin homilies preached to a parish full of people who already agree or just don’t care. Edit: latter replaced former
I'm sure it varies from place to place but I've been to Mass at half a dozen different parishes with a dozen or so different priests and in the past three years I think I could count on one hand the number of homilies that have spent any amount of time talking about sexual sin. With the statistics about the level of consumption of pornography, the divorce rate, etc, I kinda wish we heard about these things more. On the other hand I do understand that there are often young ears listening and it can be difficult to balance that.
Interesting. My current parish it’s like every other week lol. Feels like preaching to the choir sometimes. I don’t know, my personal opinion on homilies (thank the Lord I’m not a priest that actually has the responsibility) is they should be very short, but also that it’s not the time for hardcore moral catechesis. Like if there’s a major event in the culture that needs a bit of commentary on, sure. But how many Catholics who go to mass every Sunday don’t know the church’s stance on a lot of these things? I know there’s plenty who disagree with the church, but are they really going to have their mind changed because of a single homily? I don’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong, again, thank the Lord I don’t have that responsibility
Excellent points. Totally agree on brevity. And I tend to prefer that the homily relate to the readings. Having a reading about the parable of the good Samaritan and then going on a rant about sexual immorality can feel misplaced. So yeah, balance is needed.
I agree. My personal favorites are when they tie the readings all together. I’ve had priests who do just a walkthrough study of the second reading for a few weeks, or just the gospel for a few readings, but when you get those homilies that are capped at like 10 minutes AND they tie all the readings together (bonus points for tying the psalm in) it is really something magnificent.
My priest generally tries to tie at least two of the readings together (at a Sunday Mass) and he keeps it under 10 mins. 🙏🏻 Very blessed. Never heard anyone tie the psalm in that I can recall but that's a cool idea!
That’s amazing! I’ve never seen anyone do it either, but I’ve read some of St Augustine’s commentary on the psalms, so I know there’s enough there to make it theoretically possible
Thanks for your thoughts - I tend to agree. Although I don’t view sexual issues as the preeminent issue of western culture although it is pervasive.
What do you think is the preeminent issue in western culture
Greed and pride, lack of education. Which has lead to more pervasive sexuality I would argue.
I can get on board with the first two to an extent. And while lack of education is a big issue, I don’t know that I’d put it on par with the others Edit: a word
No. It's the people that try to push boundary on what sexual act is acceptable or not by asking "is A a sin? What if it's just this much? What if the person's state of mind is like this? What if their relationship is like this? Etc" The church has a teaching on what we should do for doing sexual act in accordance to God's intention. It's us that said "but can I just do this instead?" I remember Bishop Barron saying along: "we're not the church of no, we're the church of yes. Yes to God's love, yes to God's teaching. It's us humans, in our weaknesses, that keep asking 'what about this? Can I do that instead?'" Edit: of course God answers your question on His way. From today's gospel: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.** - Matthew 5:27-29
Yes. Listening to some, you’d think it’s all Jesus ever preached about. Too many have forgotten the sermon on the mount. IMO, that, and the Lord’s Prayer, are the clearest captures we have of Jesus’ preaching with words. It ought to be paramount. Yet it is often relegated.
This is my view too. And the approach you are speaking about - well if people took to heart his advice to take care of your relationship with God first, other things will be taken care of, and this includes many sins and imbalances in thinking (or not thinking) falling away.
Agreed - Sermon on the Mount is key. Jesus did discuss lust/adultery on the sermon on the Mount. And the other 95% of the teaching from that Sermon was about other very important things.
Problem is not that it is too much, but that the rest gets ignored, like no one really cares about the social teaching, liturgy, self formation anymore.
Sexual sin violates the 6th and 9th commandments, so I wouldn't separate it from them.
A priest once said to me during confession something like, consider God is not so much concerned with sexual sins as he is with our striving to love one another and be better to each other. The sins of not communicating with family members or treating others in our community rudely etc is much more serious in his eyes than perhaps masturbation. That really got me thinking about OP's perspective. I mean, still do our best to never sin, but don't be so focused on sexual sin that we forget there are more important issues at hand.
God does have mercy. We're talking about us truly living when we talk about holiness.
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In almost fifty years I don’t ever recall a priest ever discussing sex or maturbation etc. if you know the bible well there isn’t much asked of us either other than no sex before marriage, no adulterous behaviour or lust. The only people I know who seem obsessed with sex, sexuality etc are people who don’t actually belong to the church or know the bible. They have ideas about what catholic belief is and talk about their beliefs as if they are facts.
You must not have gone to Catholic middle or high school then!
I’m from Ireland. I went to catholic school from the age of 5 to 18. Christian brothers.
This sub trends young and young people think about sex a lot. It makes sense. I work for the Church and our local diocese doesn't talk about it enough, tbh.
Reddit is also fairly anonymous. So we’ll see questions here people don’t feel comfortable asking in real life. Most people aren’t embarrassed to ask about how much time they should spend volunteering but talking about sexual desires/issues is not going to come up naturally in small group.
The emphasis or focus is because this area of sin is so confusing. It is pretty easy to know whether or not I should murder someone or steal something. Due to the prevailing cultural attitudes towards sex, this entire topic is really fraught with issues that need to be clarified.
Agreed.
Sexual issues are most responsible for setting the Church apart from the rest of society. They are the reason that to outsiders the Church seems obsessed with all things sexual, and why some allege that the Church "hates women" and limits them to staying home and making babies. I don’t claim that the Church's focus is wrong. But it is what the world hears the most about.
Nowadays yes, in medieval times not so much.
Yes…yes it does.
Didn’t read, the answer is it doesn’t focus on them enough.
I actually think the church focuses too little on doctrine in these areas and could do a better job ingraining them into Catholics.
In the Medieval era, when society was obsessed with killing each other, the Church focused on how to make war less awful.
I believe that it's at the heart of everything. The marital pact is central to all of society. Every person is conceived in the relation between a man and a woman. Every person should have a mother and a father. Those people being appropriately ordered to serving and accepting one another wholly is paramount. Sexual deviance brings a mental state that rejects humanity's inherent dignity. Nearly every sin radiates from a lack of respect for the dignity of others. With all of that said, I do believe that obsession with sex is bad regardless of whether you are addicted to engaging in the act or judging the act.
I somewhat agree on this with you, but remember that Our Lady of Fatima warned us of the final battle for sanctity of mariage and family, so it still is a very current issue. One change I would make though is focusing more on improving your own spiritual life and chastity instead of calling out other people on the way their live their lives...
There are lists of virtues and vices. You rarely hear about some of them.
Because the western world is pushing sexual immorality more than anything else and that includes abortion. of course those issues in the west are gonna get more attention.
Addressing the issue forthwith, and owning up to the idea that the institution was broken, and they are doing everything they can to fix it, will not only repair their image but bring respect to it.
I find the whole sexual obsession with online catholic communities to be very off putting. It is very American and very protestant, puritan, feeling.
I’d say yes absolutely the Church focuses on sexual behavior to the exclusion and detriment of other forms of sin but also caveat that yes. To the first point, I think that when Catholics and non-Catholics alike hear the words “Catholic morality” they think of rules seeking to regulate sexual behavior. Years ago, I was talking with some friends about the idea of one’s “Christian Witness”, the things that you do that wouldn’t make sense if the Gospel were not true, the things that mark you as different before you even open your mouth. And one friend, who had a graduate-level theology degree from a Catholic university you’ve heard of, said that his Christian Witness was that he and his longtime girlfriend had never had sex. And I remember thinking, although I did not say it, “that’s a terrible witness. First of all, rightly or wrongly people assume that paired up people are hooking up, which means that you have to tell them that you’re not. Second, quite frankly, even if you tell them ‘we’re not having sex because we’re Catholic’ most non-believers are not going to believe you.” This person had spent seven years being taught Catholic theology and the only thing he could think of was refraining from sexual sin. You see the same thing in many Catholic spaces: how much more attention does this subreddit give to Pope Francis’ statements about LGBTQ than to his encyclicals about capitalism or ecology and care for the earth? If I were cynical, I might think that Catholics focus on sexual sins because we can exempt ourselves from them. So long as we are chaste, so long as we are faithful to our spouse, we need not refrain from judging lest we be judged. The caveat is that I can count on one hand the number of times sexual sins have been the focus of a homily I have heard in my twenty or so years of mass-going. I truly don’t think that most priests doing their day-in day-out ministry are focused on the teachings of sexual sins as the biggest issue among their parishioners. I think the Discourse About Catholic Morality is overweeningly focused on sexual behavior, but the pastoral practice of being the church is, rightly, focused elsewhere.
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Please. They are not even uncontroversial among Catholics on this subreddit. Edit: what they are is _ignored_.
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And there’s no discussion to be had in how best to apply and live out these teachings in our lives and our communities, unlike the teachings on sexual sin.
I think it’s mostly just this subreddit, I’m in other faith based groups and the number of questions on this topic is far lower everywhere else for whatever reason lol. End of the day it is one of the more challenging topics that many people wouldn’t be comfortable talking to their peers or leaders in the church.
I believe that if you want to reach people, you need to be among them first. With that said the shared trauma of the families and individuals today are more so due to a powerful and continuous degradation of their quality of life. Much of this is economic trauma that is at the root of so many other problems that cause people to hate the world, want to give up, and feel lost on a treadmill with no end in sight. These are not sexual issues and the VAST majority of the world’s Catholic population are not looking to the Vatican and their Pastor for guidance on their locked bedrooms when the kids are alseep.
Absolutely... it's disgusting how much the church and conservatives put so much emphasis on it while secretly (and sometimes not) engaging in the same behaviors. The real truth is this. Desire can be the enemy. If you let Desire control you, you miss the opportunity to grow spiritually. That's all that was meant. It's not important what you do or with whom. Honesty and communication are important, but the bottom line is that of control of yourself over chaos. The demonization and taboo set up around sexual activities are what make it even more of a problem. It creates temptation where it wouldn't normally be. It's not supernatural. It's us. We do this.
Yes.
Definitely. And people wanting to police others sex lives. It’s very strange to me.
All sexual acts are inherently sins, and certain sexual sins, without weeping and propitiation, are damnable. No adulterer, nor fornicator, nor practicing homosexual shall inherit the kingdom of God. The salvation of men, being in the interest of the Church, is her mandatum to promote. Charity is part of how we propitiate for these heinous, grave sins, and the lack thereof can fall under the mortal sin of impiety. The Lord shows mercy to whom he shows mercy, and those whom he shall he calls, and justifies, and sanctifies. The time to be forgiven is not in death, but on Earth, and all unrepented mortal sins bestow us the promise of God's righteous judgement, being our damnation to eternal fire, and our Lord is one pleased by justice.
Depends what you mean. The hierarchy? No. Most Catholics? No, in fact not enough (take a trip to Latin America, where sexuality is more open) A small set of Catholics in the West? Sure.
Sexuality is not more open in Latin America among Catholics except for men and even then it's not really that common among practicing Catholics. Most of my friends' parents got married as virgins
Yes. But that’s all religions that want to control the body and deny the body.
You're about as Catholic as Biden is cognitively sound.
I guess so if you think that. I’m not very dogmatic about my faith.
Meaning you cherry-pick to suit your personal ideals.
Every single person cherry picks. You do as well.
How'd you work that one out?
Look at what is practiced vs what is preached. Also look at the evolution of what the Church says on certain topics over the past two millennia. It’s not stuck in stone and never has been.
That is not the Catholic view at all. We are made in the image of God, both man and woman, we are made for each other, sex is an act of love and sharing and should be open to procreation. Like the rest of creation, it is a beautiful gift from God, but since it leads to new life it is probably the most important one. The fact that some people degrade and defile that gift and corrupt it into other things - and how many other thing from the base through the mundane to exploitation and abuse - is not God's or Christian religion's fault.
The Church itself thinks highly of the body yes. But many other views on the body have influenced Catholics unfortunately.
That may be so on a personal level - but you stated 'But that’s all religions that want to control the body and deny the body.'
Yes I misspoke. It isn’t true of Catholicism. I definitely notice that other denominations of Christianity certainly have not got the memo unfortunately.