QUOTATION: Christian Teaching on Sexuality

The validity of Christian teaching on sexuality and marriage is demonstrated in the wounds of those who do not practice it.

--Cardinal George Pell, Test Everything, Hold Fast to What is Good

QUOTATION: Sexual Morality

All questions of sexual morality come down to one basic question: Is this act an authentic sign of God’s free, total faithful, fruitful love or is it not? Is it is not, then it is a counterfeit to the love we really desire. We must be courageous enough not to settle for counterfeit loves.

--Christopher West,  An Introduction to the Theology of the Body

QUOTATION: Sexual Freedom

Authentic sexual freedom is not freedom to indulge your compulsions but rather freedom from the compulsion to indulge.

--Christopher West

QUOTATION: Sexual Orientation

The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation. Every one living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but challenges to growth, strengths, talents and gifts as well. Today, the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a “heterosexual” or a “homosexual” and insists that every person has a fundamental Identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.

--Pope John Paul II

QUOTATION: Sex, Love and Procreation

To dissociate the child from love is, for our species, a methodological error: contraception, which is to make love without making a child; artificial (in vitro) fertilization, which is to make a child without making love; abortion, which is to unmake the child; and pornography, which is to unmake love: all these, to varying degrees, are incompatible with natural law.

--Jerome Lejeune

QUOTATION: Sexuality

The meaning and direction of sexuality is to bring about the union of man and woman and, in this way, to give humanity posterity, children, a future. This is the determination internal to the essence of sexuality. Everything else is against sexuality’s intrinsic meaning and direction. This is a point we need to hold firm, even if it is not pleasing to our age.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World, 2010

QUOTATION: The Nominal Christian

No decent person wants free love; no decent person wants race suicide. They live, therefore, not by principle but by a compromise between principles; they are in favour of divorce, but not of easy divorce, of small families but not of too small families. Consequently, they feel themselves responsible for the decision where exactly the line shall be drawn, within the generous limits which our legal system allows. They do not like the responsibility; who would? Who, in tampering with institutions so sacred as those of the family, would not like to feel that he had an authority behind him, a "warrant" from somewhere to ratify his behaviour? If only there were some great spiritual institution which would act, in these matters, as a sort of public conscience, guiding, from a higher point of vision, the moral choice made by the individual!

So, naturally, he feels; unfortunately, he does not feel that the views of any non-Catholic denomination are worth having, even if they are discoverable. He knows that the advice of an individual clergyman will be unofficial and inexpert. He knows, if he has followed the course of recent ecclesiastical deliberations, that representatives of Christian thought speak with an uncertain voice on such subjects. He respects our Church for having, at least, definite opinions and fixed rules. He respects it, although he disagrees with it. He thinks us far too severe in forbidding remarriage after divorce, in forbidding the artificial restriction of the family; but although he disagrees with us for the rules we have, he respects us for having rules. If only the people whom we value as advisers would give us the advice we want!

--Msgr Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, 1927

QUOTATION: Contraception

What Paul VI wanted to say, and what is still correct as a main vision, is that if we separate sexuality and fecundity from each other in principle, which is what the use of the pill does, then sexuality becomes arbitrary. Logically, ever form of sexuality is of equal value.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World, 2010

QUOTAION: Continence

I thought that continence was a matter of our own strength, and I knew that I had not the strength: for in my utter foolishness I did not know the word of Your Scripture that none can be continent unless You give it.

--St. Augustine, Confessions, 6:11

QUOTATION: Eros and Beatitude

An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in “ecstasy” towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, #4

QUOTATION: Church Doctrines on Sexuality

It is no secret that the Church's teaching on sexuality, marriage, and family is ignored by many Catholics and is derided by the world. This is not to say that the teaching is rejected, for to be rejected it must be understood, and to be understood it must be taught. All too frequently the Church's truth about marriage and the family is not taught-not confidently, not persistently, not winsomely, not with conviction.

--Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, 'To Propose The Truth'