By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
Porn use begins potentially as early as the moment a child receives a cell phone or gains access to the Internet for the first time. Addiction to porn is beginning at earlier ages than ever before. Medical experts are choosing which diseases are the stars of the latest “pandemic,” but a real pandemic with devastating consequences goes largely undiagnosed and ignored. The pandemic of porn is a soul killer and a marriage killer.
Pornography use is sinful and an occasion of further sin. Priests, parents, and educators of all kinds must be alert to its ubiquity and be agents in the effort to turn back its widespread and toxic influence. Human dignity is violated by the objectification of the person and of the marital act. The human person is sacred. The words and actions of the person are called by God to always reflect that dignity.
“Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2354).
One manifestation of the pandemic at younger ages is the placement of pornographic materials in school books and in libraries. Parents are pushing back through lawsuits to have the illicit and sinful grooming tools removed from the unchaperoned access of their children.
A recent news report on a major network featured a grade-school aged young person who declared herself perverted. I forget which of the increasing number of varieties she claimed for herself. She professed outrage that the explicit description of her particular proclivity, or of other peversions in library books, was drawing pushback from parents seeking to protect their children. Her point of view was portrayed sympathetically by the network.
The insanity of the porn pandemic has an undoubted mental illness whereby parents forget that children styling themselves as transgressive don’t have the right to use libraries for recruiting fellow sexual nonconformists. Children are not running schools. It’s supposed to be the other way around.
The methods of grooming young people are various. Drag Queen Story Hours in libraries are not about books. They are about exposing young people to the perversion of men dressing like women. Confusing gender roles is a gateway activity to confusing the holy use of the marital act, which belongs only within the marriage of one man and one woman for the procreation and raising of children.
Recruitment also manifests itself in the movies, such as one which featured a 24-year-old man raping a 17-year-old boy — which film is then praised as a “masterpiece” of fine art. Purported Catholics, including Jesuits, cheered the film, Call Me By Your Name, a dressed-up recruitment film for pedophilia. Check the Twitter account of Joseph Sciambra for names and details. Sciambra is a converted Catholic former homosexual so scandalized by the grooming behavior and apostasy of bishops and clerics such as this that he may be leaving the Church, according to some reports.
Explicit books and movies are recruitment and training manuals in sodomy. Texas is right to ban such from school libraries. Those who distribute such illicit indecent material should be prosecuted. Parents are the only ones who can decide what their children see and read. Society is very far from God when the rights of parents to educate their own children come as a shock.
Porn is grooming. So is the idea that a family is founded on sodomy. The scandal is widespread and ubiquitous. Fr. Thomas Reese, according to Sciambra, is engaging in grooming behavior when he brings to the attention of bishops via Tweet the fact that two male penguins are nurturing a baby penguin at the zoo.
What’s his point, you ask? You’re supposed to unquestioningly accept the implication that it’s also perfectly acceptable for two men or two women to get together with children, however acquired, and claim the title of “family.” Reese demands that the Church get in line and obey the diktat of the big gay Comintern.
Reproductive nature is not vitiated by variations in nurture. Animals instinctively understand the necessity of feeding and protecting the young and fill in the role of the mother when she dies. Facts which would imperil the dominant social narrative are conveniently left out.
Even a child is capable of understanding that, tragically, parents sometimes die and others step in to raise the child perhaps even, if necessary, two men or women. That does not mean they are “married” or acting as such. One sign of the deep confusion and blindness of sin pervading even the Church is that it is now considered transgressive and obscene to say that children need, and have a right to, a mother and a father.
Porn addiction prior to marriage undermines and actively wars against the marriage vows of an exclusive relationship proper to matrimony. Contracting a marriage while in an active habit of porn addiction is contrary to the marital intention.
Young people preparing for marriage need to beat the addiction for at least six months before exchanging vows to make sure it’s really behind them. This must be accomplished by leaning heavily and trustingly on frequent Confession, the Eucharist, prayer, and healthy activities to replace heavy Internet usage. To walk right into marriage in a state of virtual fornication is deception and sacrilege.
Addicts of impure images and videos also seek to act out the virtual reality they are consuming within marriage. When it comes up in Confession I tell people that any intimate activity between spouses cannot replace the marital act. The husband and wife may at any time be at very different stages in the spiritual life and the universal call to holiness. Virtue is slow work, especially when there are two involved. Patience, gentleness, and mutual prayer are necessary.
Porn addiction is a marriage killer. In “How Pornography Impacts Marriage,” Focus on the Family delineates the ways in which impure images and videos eat away at the sacred bonds of matrimony. Intimacy is sacrificed, the real relationship of the spouses is forsaken for an imitation, and the true purpose of sex is twisted. The divorce epidemic has only increased with the growth in the incidence of porn addiction. No one wants a third party in the marriage with whom he or she cannot possibly compete because unnaturally modified by virtual reality to look flawless.
As a Church we must preach and teach about chastity at every stage of life, and the ways in which it is nurtured and strengthened. Internet use and habits must be subject to virtue as is true for everything to which we expose ourselves. Moderation in all things includes the Internet and our phones which, while doing so much to help make our lives easier, pose dangers to our immortal souls if carelessly indulged.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. apriestlife.blogspot.com
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