Casto love is for anyone

Reflections by Dawn Eden Goldstein* Published on the blog Wherepeteris.com (United States) on March 18, 2021. Freely translated by Flavia Piepoli

The responsum of the congregation for the doctrine of faith to the question whether or not the Church has the power to bless the homosexual unions, and the reaction that followed after its publication, is a moment of reflection for Catholics. Even if the Catholic conception on sexuality will always arouse the opposition of many, we would not be faced with the level of protest that we have today if we had underlined that chastity is for anyone depending on their state of life.

In this sense, homosexual people have all the reasons to feel tested by the Church as if their behavior was dictated solely by sin. The pastoral problem of opposite sex pairs that do not know what marriage is, or do not want to accept it, is much more widespread than homosexual unions. He begins with the straight Catholic couples who marry without having received sufficient education on what the Church thinks. It is something that starts from them and then arrives outside, becoming a flow of wrong ideas and based on ignorance that upsets their children and, with them, the whole culture.

Have you ever heard in a homily to explain what marital love is? Have you ever heard someone explain what marital indissolubility is? Or what does a fruitful marriage mean and how is it not only physical but also spiritual (therefore possible also for sterile couples)? Have you ever heard in a homily to say that both marriage and "celibacy for the kingdom" are both vocations to holiness and that, as regards our final goal of paradise, are two paths aimed at the same purpose of perfection?

I remember that when the first edition of my book came out The Thrill of the Chaste ("The thrill of chastity"), I was asked to speak to a Legatus conference in Wilmington, Delawer. The book was aimed at young adults single, while the public was composed exclusively as married, so I thought they wanted to learn to speak to their university children. I kept my usual speech on what sexual attraction is, what is his role in helping us to learn to grow in the love of God and how chastity teaches us this. (Here is a more recent and in -depth version of the speech.)

Subsequently, one of the organizers of the meeting called me on the sidelines and reproached me for not mentioning the contraception. The lady said she knew that many of those couples made use of contraceptive methods, so in my speech I should have argued that it was a mistake. It was then that I realized that in the Catholic Church not being up to the divine law is always one problem of the other.

And that's why our catechesis is so in disarray. Let's talk about problems that we ourselves do not.
If, on the other hand, we began to talk about what love is and what is its purpose, we would discover that we are teachers of ourselves while we teach others. If we continue on this route we will still come to the point where we will have to explain the "difficult teachings" on homosexual acts, contraception and so on. But these teachings must be included in their right context: as part of a purgative but finally rewarding path towards holiness in which we are all involved, homosexual or not, married or celibates.

This basic catechesis on love is precisely what Pope Benedict XVI meant with the Deus Caritas Est. This encyclical was published at the height of Christopher West's trend that was promoting a hypersexualized interpretation of the theology of the body of John Paul II.

Later, West (which I publicly criticized in 2010) published a book entitled The Love That Satisfies ("Body theology for beginners. With John Paul II to rediscover the meaning of sexuality and marriage"), in which he tries to insert the encyclical of Benedetto in his narrative on the "Holy Sex".

But in the end the Deus Caritas Est He had a very short life for the West audience, because he did not speak of homosexuality or contraception. In reality, that of Pope Benedict XVI was a basic catechesis on love, thus laid the foundations not only for a more specific teaching on burning issues, but also for his subsequent encyclical Caritas in Veritate, who with the criticism of capitalism made the George Weigel in the world angry.

Benedetto knew that the Church had to teach the most important things first and then those of minor importance. He adopted this approach with the comment on the use of condoms by homosexual prostitutes as a "first step" towards morality, which caused him attacks similar to those received by Pope Francis for the phrase "Who am I to judge?"

Just as the US church did not welcome the Deus Caritas Est, in the same way he did not accept theAmoris Laetitia. And that's how we came to the point where we are today. The faithful practitioners do not understand the teaching of the Church on homosexual unions since they do not understand teaching about love. And it's a shame.

Catholics need to know that, regardless of how much our faith glorifies the union of a husband and a wife as an analogy of both the trinitarian fruitfulness and the divine alliance with the Church (and it is right, since the sacred scriptures speak of this "great mystery"), even the wedding is on the way to leave us dissatisfied.

No human being completes us. The children do not complete us. Only God completes us. We live and die trying to learn it and bringing Christ to others.

Almost nobody tells us this (noteworthy exceptions are Father Edward Dowling, Jesuit, with his registered talks, and the archbishop Fulton John Sheen in Three to get married, (Three to get married: Christ foundation of the Sponsal Union "), but true marriages involve falling in love, marriage and, sooner or later, to find an obstacle. And when you meet an obstacle, continue to love each other. And, as well as Tom Jones (not the Welsh singer) wrote in The Fantasticks, "The obstacle never disappears! The obstacle must remain! It is together with its own spouse who breaks it down, and then you meet another obstacle, and yet another, and another. "

Still, something happens. Over time you find yourself more and more to see God in your spouse. And you find yourself thinking and feeling and loving with a heart that is more similar to that of Christ. Since, even if you have abandoned the idea of ​​finding satisfaction, you approach you, even if you know that you will never be satisfied in this life. And this is good.

*Dawn Eden Goldstein is a Catholic theologian and canonist. He studied Julia Greley's life for her book The Sacred Heart: in Love for All Times (the Sacred Heart: a love for all time). Follow it on Bluesky @Dawnofmercy.

Original text: "Chaste love is for Everyone"