Part I God's Plan for Love
Part II Putting Love Into Love
Part III Marriage: Its Graces and Its Stresses
Part IV Marriage and the Family in Society and in the Church
Appendix I
Appendix II
References

Part I God's Plan For Love

1. There are few things in life more beautiful and more exalting than the experience of love between man and woman. When a young man and woman are attracted to each other, their love arouses the deepest emotions, the highest expectations, they have ever known. For them, nothing seems to matter but their love. Nothing seems impossible to their love. For each of them, the other is "the only you there is".

2. Just to see a man and woman in love evokes happiness in others. Others share in some sense the happiness of a boy and girl in the bliss of their young love, when their whole world is irradiated by its glow and each of them finds a new purpose and a new joy in living because of the other. Weddings are among life's happiest experiences for all who are present. Even in an age when marriage is the scene of much unhappiness and instability, people never tire of looking at a bridal couple, bright with the promise of lifelong happiness. Happiness is evoked in all by seeing a husband and wife in the mature and settled happiness of the evening of their marriage, when they have "grown into" one another's personalities to a point where, as has been said, each one singly would be "much less than half of what the two of them have become together".

3. Love in marriage and in a home and family is one of the most important conditions for the initiation of young people into the knowledge of God. It is one of the best assurances for children of attaining personal maturity and growing into an adult faith. The circle of love which unites parents with one another and with their children is as necessary for the health and stability of children's personality as food and clothing are for their bodily health. To be deprived of love is a form of malnutrition. Because God Himself is Love, a lack of love in marriage and in the home can make it difficult for children to form a deep relationship with God, our loving Father.

4. In real life, alas, our need for love can bring disillusionment and heartbreak. Even within marriage, love can turn sour and make life a misery. The danger of this is all the greater because of romantic ideas about love and unrealistic expectations held about it. Children who grow up in a loveless home and a violent neighbourhood have difficulty in forming deep and stable love relationships in their own lives. The conditions in which the poor are forced to live are not favourable either to married love or to the love of parents for children. Yet the poor can be rich in the things of the spirit and their homes can be rich in love. There can be more spiritual poverty and more starvation from want of love in homes where there is too much wealth than in those where there is too little. The promises which love makes, therefore, are often contradicted by reality. Love needs protection against human weakness if it is to be true to its best self and realise its full potential.

5. It is necessary to examine the nature of love between men and women more deeply in order to try and understand both its light and its shadow. Especially we must turn to God's revelation and see what it teaches us about the true nature of love. Above all, we must see how a Christian community can help its members to discover the true grandeur of love as it comes from God, and to realise that grandeur in their own relationships.

6. Christians are called today to fix their minds and hearts on the ideal which God laid down for married love as it was "in the beginning". The Church invites them to seek to identify the forces and pressures, the allurements and deceptions, that masquerade as purveyors of the "good life", and to see them for what they really are harbingers of disillusionment and degradation of the person. Married happiness is so great a blessing for humanity that it is worth all the effort needed to attain it. This Pastoral Letter is an attempt by the Bishops of Ireland to reflect with their people on the mystery and the grandeur and the beauty of human love and sexuality and marriage. We invite our people to read it carefully and prayerfully and to try to translate its ideals into practice in daily life and in society. We begin this reflection in the name of God our Father, who "has let us know the mystery of His purpose, the hidden plan He so kindly laid in Christ from the beginning". (Ephesians 1:9)

7. A valuable insight into the meaning of sexual love comes from looking at sex as a means of communication, as a kind of language. We all know the importance of communication. We communicate with words; but we communicate also with our bodies. We say things without words, by our gestures; and sometimes gestures speak louder than words and say things better than words can say them. There are many ways of expressing love by bodily language: a warm handshake, an embrace, holding hands, a mother nursing her child, a father putting his body in danger to protect his child—all these are ways of saying, "I love you", by bodily language. All forms and expressions of love between husband and wife are forms of sexual love; but sexual union or genital love is a particularly intense manifestation of sexual love.

8. In many languages terms used for sexual relations are identical with the terms used for knowing and communicating. The usual term in the Bible for sexual union is the verb "to know". We speak of "conceiving" an idea, and we also speak of "conceiving" a baby. An older term for sexual union was the term "conversation". We still speak of sexual "intercourse".

9. Sexual union says, "I love you", in a very profound way. By sexual union, a man and woman say to each other: "I love you. There is nobody else in all the world I love in the way I love you. I love you just for being you. I want you to become even more wonderful than you are. I want to share my life and my world with you. I want you to share your life and your world with me. I want us to build a new life together, a future together, which will be our future. I need you. I can't live without you. I need you to love me, and to love me not just now but always. I will be faithful to you not just now but always. I will never let you down or walk out on you. I will never put anyone else in place of you. I will stay with you through thick and through thin. I will be responsible for you and I want you to be responsible for me, for us, no matter what happens".

10. Sexual union of its own deep nature is a way of saying all of these things, and it is felt to be true only if it says all of these things and means what it is saying. If one of the partners does not really mean what his sexual action is saying, then he or she is speaking an untruth and is deceiving the other. The body is "saying" one thing, while the mind is meaning another. There is deception when one partner does not intend to be faithful or is not in fact faithful to the other; for these words cannot be honestly and truthfully spoken to more partners than one. There is untruth when one or both partners intend the relationship to be casual or to be temporary; for the sexual union in itself speaks a love which is exclusive and forever. If either or both of the partners knows that the other is not meaning what the sexual action is saying, the sexual union in itself is experienced as superficial and deceitful. It does not give what it promises. It does not mean what it says. It unites bodies but leaves minds and lives separate, divided and alone.

11. We have not yet spelled out all that sexual union says. Sexual union speaks of a man's willingness or readiness to "give" a child to a woman as hers, and of a woman's readiness to bear or "have" a child "with him". It speaks of a man and a woman's readiness to openness to share their being in a child which will be "their child", the expression of their love, the bond of their shared life. It speaks of a man's and a woman's desire to "begin a new life together", both in the form of their child and in the form of their shared life around that child. It is not just the structure of the male and female bodies which says this; but also the deep feelings of the male and female personalities. Many psychologists today agree that teenage pregnancies often reflect the yearnings of young people to give meaning to their lives by an enduring love. Pregnancy can reflect a deep need for love, love of a partner, love of a baby. At one level, a girl may believe she never intended or wanted to become pregnant; while, at a deeper level, she did want to "hold on" to her partner and make sure of his love and lay claim to an enduring share in his life by having his child.

12. The two meanings of sexual union blend into each other. An act of sexual union which truly and honestly expresses total and life-long and exclusive union between a man and woman is also an act which is open to new life in a child. If the act is deliberately prevented from being open to new life, this can only be by the introduction of some barrier or separation into the life-giving act. But deliberately to introduce separation into an act which intends and says total union is a failure in truth.

13. There are other dimensions of meaning in the language of sexual union which are related to these basic meanings. Sexual union can express forgiveness, reconciliation, sorrow for selfishness, healing of hurts; it can convey consolation and reassurance; it speaks of a couple's thankfulness for each other, their peaceful contentment with each other; it gives renewed assurance of being wanted and offers the security of being loved. It carries the promise of seeing life through together with each other.

14. Sexual union is only one part of the total language of sexuality. Man and woman are sexual beings through and through. Their masculinity or femininity affects all of their modes of being and the whole of their relationships with one another. Sexual union should be a special moment in a whole conversation of love between husband and wife. This conversation is carried on by words, by letters, by signs and by silences. It is also carried on by acts of thoughtfulness, attentiveness, remembrance and concern. It includes gestures of tenderness and affection. Above all, it includes real commitment to sharing life together "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health". In the context of such continuing loving conversation, sexual union is a deep and powerful expression of the two-in-oneness of two lives, and itself develops and deepens that two-in-oneness. Sexual union without this context is flawed by doubt and uncertainty. It carries a lie at its heart.

15. It is a striking characteristic of human love that it spontaneously uses a religious kind of language. In all cultures, the language of human love and the language of prayer and of mysticism have been closely related. Even in a culture so secular as modern Western culture, the language of love, in literature, in poetry and in popular song, is still the language of worship, adoration, divinity, ecstasy, everlastingness, eternity. A further characteristic of love is that it is instinctively experienced as pure and as purifying, as ennobling those united by it. People in love feel that they are being brought close to God by their love. This remains true even when the love is objectively sinful and shameful. In some confused way even then the love is often experienced as uplifting. Wrongfulness in sexual relationships often, to quote the words of a modern writer, "starts from an innocence". This is a sign that love in its original nature, as it came from the loving heart of the Creator, was created good and pure and lovely; and that it still retains some trace of this holy origin even when it is spoiled by human sin. This is important to remember; because people sometimes say that their love must be holy because it feels holy. Instead, the truth is that we have a duty to keep love true to its original holiness by respecting God's law of love.

16. The greatest light on human love that history has ever known comes from God's revelation in Christ. Jesus shows us that human love has its source in God. It comes from the love of God the Father for His beloved Son in the communion of the Holy Spirit. Not only does love come from God; God himself is love. It is St. John, the beloved disciple of Jesus, who tells us: "God is love". These words sum up all that God reveals to us about Himself. Creation is God's love made visible to us. It was from love that He made the world. It is out of love that He continues to care for it. It is in love that God looks on all that he has made. The creation of man is a special act of God's love. God created man out of love. He created man for love. Everything that is in the world is there because God loves us and wants our love.

17. The story of salvation is a story of God's love for men. St. Paul calls it "the mystery of God's purpose", God's "hidden plan" (Ephesians 1:9). St. Paul marvels at "the breadth and length and height and depth" of God's love (Ephesians 3:18). The unimaginable love of God takes on a human body and a human face in Jesus Christ. Jesus is God's love made flesh and dwelling amongst us. He is God's infinite love "given up" for us in the foolishness of the Cross. If we ask, with Mother Julian of Norwich, what was God's meaning in creating and in redeeming the world, we can only answer with her: "Love was His meaning" .

18. Love is God's inner life in the mystery of the Three Persons of the Most Blessed Trinity. Love is God's power and activity, His plan and purpose in creating and redeeming the world. Because God is infinite He can keep pouring out love and compassion, mercy and forgiveness, without end and without limit, for ever and ever. No matter what we do, we cannot stop God loving us. There is no end to God's love for us. The truest picture we can have of it is Christ crucified: God's indomitable love for us spoken between agonising gasps and burning thirst on a cross.

19. The human person is made in God's image. We resemble God in our capacity to love. We humans differ from the animal creation in our capacity for love and our need to be loved. We exist because God is loving us into existence from moment to moment. We are made by God to be loved and to love. The human being needs love in order to be human. Our need for love is endless; and it can be satisfied only in God. It has been said that woman promises man and man promises woman what only God can give. The human heart can know no rest until it rests in God.

20. The human body is the expression of the human spirit: it too is made for the communication of love. Our bodies express loving reverence and adoration before God. Our hands express prayer, offering, worship, sorrow, entreaty, hunger and need before God. Our speech expresses praise, thanksgiving, love for God. The human body also expresses love for others and asks for the love of others. Our speech communicates love to others. Our hands are shaped for giving, for sharing, for helping and supporting, for healing, forgiving, for offering tenderness and affection; in other words, for showing love to others. It is true that our bodies, our speech, our hands, can also impart hurt and harm and hate; but deep down we know we are not made for that. Instinctively we recognise that such behaviour is inhumane, inhuman. We are not being truly human when we hate and hurt: instead we are "acting the brute".

21. God made man and woman in order that they might love. God's first and greatest commandment is: "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind". The second commandment, inseparable from the first, is: "You must love your neighbour as yourself" (Matthew 22: 37-39). This is the whole of our purpose in the world. It is the reason why we exist.

22. The Bible is through and through the story of God's unending love for men and women and of our vocation to love God and to love our fellow-men. Every page of the New Testament is the record of divine love in search of answering human love. The saints repeated it in every age: "Love is all"; "It is enough to love"; "In the evening of life we shall be judged on love"; "Oh, I do not regret, not for one moment do I regret, having given my life to love". Our judgement will be totally concerned with whether we have loved and how we have loved. Our whole vocation is to be true to the two-fold commandment of God, to love Him and to love others. The two commandments are never to be separated. We must love God in Himself. We must love God in others. We must love others in God. "On these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets also" (Matthew 22:40).

23. Sexual morality is not different in kind from morality in general. It is only a particular application of general moral principles to the sexual domain. Sins against chastity are invariably accompanied by sins against other virtues also, especially fidelity, truthfulness and justice. Especially, they are sins against charity. The virtue of chastity is the carrying out in one's sexual life and sexual relationships of God's greatest commandment of charity. St. Paul says: All the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and so on, are summed up in this single command: You must love your neighbour as yourself. (Romans 13:9) Churchmen have unfortunately at times concentrated on sexual sins more than on other forms of immorality, such as injustice and oppression, avarice and cruelty. Yet sexual morality is an inseparable part of the Church's proclamation of justice and charity and of the dignity and sacredness and rights of the human person.

24. The Church's whole moral teaching about sex is above all the application to sexuality of God's greatest commandment of charity. Pope John Paul II has called it a programme for "putting love into love". The mystery of sexuality is a particular instance of the mystery of God's eternal love. The wonder and the beauty of sexuality come from its origin in God's creative love and from its destiny to fulfil God's plan of love. The Christian teaching about love between the sexes has for its constant aim and purpose to protect the original beauty and holiness of sexual love and to prevent it from becoming spoiled by sin. This requires a constant effort of self-knowledge and of self control. If Christ's teaching about love came easily to flawed human nature, Christ would not have termed it a precept or command. Yet, to love as Christ taught us is true freedom and fulfilment for the human person. God is the loving Father who made our hearts for love, and who knows the kind of love which alone will satisfy our hearts.

25. The Bible's teaching about love reinforces all that human experience reveals about it. The first book of the Bible, Genesis, gives a profound revelation about the nature of human love in its two accounts of the creation of the first man and woman. In the first account, we read God said, "let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves...". God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. God blessed them, saying to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it..." God saw all he had made, and indeed it was very good. (Genesis 1:26-31) We note that the creation of male and female is described in verse. We could call this mankind's first love-song.

26. The other biblical account of the creation of man and woman describes how God made the man "out of the earth". In spite of all the splendour of the earth's vegetation and all the variety of its animal species, the man was without companionship, having no "helpmate suitable" for himself. So, out of his rib as he slept, God fashioned the woman; and God himself "brought her to the man". On seeing her, the man breaks into song: This at last is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh (Genesis 2:23)

This, the Bible goes on, is "why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife and they become one body" (Genesis 2:24). The narrative continues: "Both of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they felt no shame in front of each other" (Genesis 2:25).

27. These colourful accounts of creation may seem naive to modern ears, and suitable only to the mentality of a pastoral people; but these simple word-pictures convey profound theological truths. Indeed, until the coming of Christ, nothing more profound had ever been said about the relationships of man and woman to God and to one another. Both of the accounts found in Genesis stress the equality of man and woman. Only when woman is created does man find "a helpmate suitable" for himself; and it is the finding of an equal partner that evokes man's song of joy. Both man and woman are made in God's image in their whole being, not just in their soul, but also in their body. The male and the female body are, each in their characteristic way, made in the likeness of God. Man and woman are made for togetherness in married love. It is together, in the communion of marriage and the family, that they are given by God the task of dominating the universe. In communion with one another, they are given by God the blessing of fertility. The mission to bring children into life and to dominate the earth are a sharing by mankind in God's own work of creating and minding the earth.

28. The Bible teaches that sexuality is good; it comes from God; it reflects the image of God. It fills the world with song: in each of the two biblical accounts, the prose becomes song as soon as man and woman are introduced to each other; and it is by God Himself that they are introduced. God looks upon man and woman, and sees His image also in their sexuality; and it is then that the Bible says: "God saw all that He had made, and it was very good" (Genesis 1:31).

29. The human person, male or female, is made for companionship, for communion. We are made for companionship with others. A special form of companionship is marriage, which both gives companionship between equal partners, and gives the special delight of bodily union. According to the Bible, man and woman are each offered by God as a gift to the other. Man and woman are each offered by self as a gift to the other; and the mutual gifting is in view of union in the one flesh which is marriage. The union of marriage is designed and made and blessed by God. It is a union of one man with one woman, and is unbreakable. It forms a bond even closer than that between a man and his own parents. In this union, the man and his wife belong to each other in such close bodily and spiritual intimacy, and they share the rights of intimacy so totally, that there can be between them in their intimacy none of the sense of shame which would affect either of them in the presence of any stranger.

30. The Bible's account of the Fall describes how, through the sin of the first man and woman, the relationship of the sexes with one another is wounded in all of its dimensions. It is wounded in the dimension of equal and reciprocal communion by the introduction of male domination and of sexual discord. It is wounded in the dimension of intimacy by the introduction of shame and guilt. Nevertheless, even in this first book of the Bible, there is anticipation of the Good News of the Gospel. There seems already to be the indication that it is the woman who will be the instrument of restoration, and will be that instrument precisely through a woman's childbearing and the final victory of that woman's Offspring over the Serpent. (Genesis 3:1-16) Thus the story of the Fall and original sin can be called also the first Gospel, the promise of the Son of Mary who was to reverse the Fall by the Redemption.

31. Already, therefore, in the first book of the Bible, in the story of the first creation, we have the essential outline of the true relationship between men and women and of the nature of marriage. Indeed here we already have a biblical basis for genuine feminism. There is no foundation in the Bible for male domination of women or for female aggressiveness towards men.

32. The rest of the Bible is, in a sense, the story of that great restoration of mankind which is its redemption by Christ. First that restoration is promise and expectation. Then it is fulfilment of the promise and accomplishment of the restoration by Christ, in whom "God wanted all perfection to be found. .. and all things to be reconciled through him and for him" (Colossians 1:18-19).

33. All through the Bible, God's relationship with mankind is expressed in terms of a covenant, a solemn treaty of love and fidelity which God makes with His people. By this covenant, God pledges Himself irrevocably to love His people and never to desert them. They in turn are asked to pledge themselves to a covenant with Him; but no matter how they behave towards God, He will never change His love for them. Furthermore, this language of the covenant and the language of marriage are very closely related all through the Bible. It is as though God could find no language better than the human language of married love in order to tell human beings about how He loves them. He loves them with a love which has all the characteristics of married love, but immeasurably surpasses the most devoted married love. God loves mankind with a love which is faithful, dependable, unconditional, irrevocable; a love which is patient and full of pity; a love which is tender yet strong, passionate but constant; a love which forgives to the point of foolishness and never ceases to welcome home the unfaithful partner. The prophets, when they speak of God's covenant-marriage with His people, stress above all God's fidelity in love in spite of the repeated ingratitude and infidelity of Israel, His spouse.

34. The Prophet Hosea depicts God's people Israel as an unfaithful, adulterous, and indeed promiscuous wife. But God, so far from rejecting her, thinks only of stratagems for enticing her to come back to His love. He pledges to restore her one day to the blissful delights of Paradise as it was at the dawn of creation. He promises once more to make Israel's marriage with God as radiant and joyful as Adam's marriage with Eve before the Fall.

I am going to lure her and lead her out into the wilderness and speak to her heart...There she will respond to me as she did when she was young... (Hosea 2:16-17). I will betroth you to myself in faithfulness and you will come to know the Lord (Hosea 2:21-2).

35. Jeremiah too describes God's love for His people in terms of married love. This begins with the beauty and joy of young first love.

I remember the affection of your youth, the love of your bridal days. You followed me through the wilderness, through a land unsown. (Jeremiah 2:2)

But soon this idyll becomes a broken dream. The story of Israel becomes an unending tale of infidelities and of the disasters resulting from them. But God's only thought is to win back Israel's love and to rebuild the marriage with His people.

I have loved you with an everlasting love, so I am constant in my affection for you. I build you once more, you shall be rebuilt, virgin of Israel. (Jeremiah 31:3)

36. Ezekiel describes Israel's infidelity to God in terms of marriage betrayed and defiled by adultery and debauchery. But God's only response is to shame Israel into repentance by His forgiveness and tenderness and by the renewal of the marriage covenant with her. (Ezekiel 16)

37. Isaiah in his turn describes the tender pity of God for His fickle and deceiving bride. Do not be afraid, you will not be put to shame; do not be dismayed, you will not be disgraced; for you will forget the shame of your youth... For now your creator will be your husband... Does a man cast off the wife of his youth? says your God. I did forsake you for a brief moment, but with great love will I take you back... With everlasting love I have taken pity on you, says the Lord, your redeemer... For the mountains may depart, the hills be shaken, but my love for you will never leave you, and my covenant of peace with you will never be shaken, says the Lord, who takes pity on you. (Isaiah 54:4-10)

38. Through the Prophets, then, God reveals to us the nature of His covenant-love for men, by describing it in terms of human married love. At the same time, the revelation of God's covenant with His people ennobled the understanding of human marriage. The lesson of the prophets is that the divine covenant-marriage, on which human marriage is based, is irrevocable, no matter what human fickleness and infidelity it encounters. God promises to make a new covenant with men in the future, in which all the tragedies of the broken covenant will be abolished, and the blessed peace of the original covenant, the joyful innocence of the original creation, will be restored.

39. The Old Testament has many beautiful stories of marriage, all of them stressing that blend of steadfastness and tenderness which should characterise married love, as it characterises God's love for His people. Such are the espousals and marriage of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebekah, of Jacob and Rachel. The Book of Ruth describes, with touching simplicity, the marriage of Boaz and Ruth. The Book of Tobit has the charming story of "love at first sight" between Tobias and Sarah, and of their prayerful preparation for marriage and their married bliss. Tobias, we are told, "fell so deeply in love with Sarah that he could no longer call his heart his own" (Tobit 6:18). Tobias prays to God: Be kind enough to have pity on (Sara) and on me and bring us to old age together (Tobit 8:9).

40. The Song of Songs is one of the most celebrated love songs of all literature. It is a long lyrical celebration of the joy of the mutual love between a young man and a young woman; and yet it is simply an elaboration of the earliest love song which we find in Genesis, the song sung by Adam when he was first introduced to Eve. The stress laid in Genesis on the unbreakable union of the first man and woman in marriage is re-echoed in the Song of Songs: My beloved is mine and I am his. (Song of Songs 2:15)

Set me like a seal on your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is strong as Death, jealously relentless as Sheol. The flash of it is a flash of fire, a flame of the Lord himself. Love no flood can quench, no torrents drown. Were a man to offer all the wealth of his house to buy love, contempt is all he would purchase. (Song of Songs 8:6-7)

41. The Old Testament's promise of a new and everlasting covenant and of a restoration of humanity to the glory and perfection of its first beginning is fulfilled in Christ. As St. Paul says: "However many of the promises God made, the Yes to them all is in Christ" (2 Corinthians 1:20).

42. Our Lord himself, in his teaching about marriage, appeals explicitly to the situation as it was "in the beginning", before the Fall. Christ restores marriage to that glorious condition from which it had miserably fallen through human "hardness of heart". We read in St. Matthew's Gospel: Some Pharisees approached him, and to test him they said, "Is it against the Law for a man to divorce his wife on any pretext whatever?" He answered, "Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning made them male and female and that he said: This is why a man must leave father and mother, and cling to his wife, and the two become one body? They are no longer two, therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide". They said to him, "Then why did Moses command that a writ of dismissal should be given in cases of divorce?". "It was because you were so unteachable", he said, "that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like this from the beginning" (Matthew 19:3-9)

43. This restoration of the original order which God laid down for marriage "in the beginning", is a constant element in the whole Christian tradition. Christ restores all things, bringing about a "new creation". We enter into that new creation by baptism. Indeed, baptism makes us members of the very body of Christ, which is the Church. It makes us sharers in Christ's very nature as Son of the Father; and Christ is, in his own person, the New Creation. He is "the first-born of all creation" (Colossians 1:15), the one who "makes the whole of creation new" (Apocalypse 21:5). As St. Paul says: For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here. It is all God's work. (2 Corinthians 5:17-18)

44. It is by baptism that we begin to live "in Christ" and in the Church, and therefore within the New Creation. The Church is the beginning of the making new of the whole creation. The sacrament of matrimony is part of the restoration of all things in Christ. The marriages of baptised persons were referred to by St. Paul as marriages "in the Lord" (cf. 1 Corinthians 7:39). Christian marriage was seen as marriage restored to its original condition, before the first sin. What the prophets promised about marriage is, for Christians, no longer a promise for a far-away future. In Christ, the promise is fulfilled. The Prophets presented the covenant in terms of marriage, and thus related marriage to the covenant, God being the Bridegroom, Israel the Bride. In the New Testament Christ is shown to be Himself the Bridegroom of whom the Prophets spoke. His Bride is the Church and all humanity, called to membership of his Church. Marriage is the sacrament which signifies Christ's love for mankind. The sacrament of matrimony reflects Christ's love to the world through the love of husband and wife.

45. The sacrament of marriage in the New Testament era has its prototype in the covenant-marriage between Christ and the Church. Christian marriages share in the reality of that covenant-marriage between Christ and his Church. It is St. Paul who develops this doctrine most fully and most beautifully. In his Letter to the Ephesians, he writes: Husbands should love their wives just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her sake to make her holy. He made her clean by washing her in water with a form of words, so that when he took her to himself she would be glorious, with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless. In the same way, husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies; for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself. A man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it; and that is the way Christ treats the Church, because it is his body and we are its living parts. For this reason, a man must leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one body (Genesis 2:24). This mystery has many implications; but I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church. (Ephesians 5:25-32).

46. Christian marriage is called by St. Paul a "great mystery"; and we remember that the word "mystery" is the earliest name for a sacrament. The sacrament of matrimony signifies the love of Christ for His Church, that is, the love whereby the Church exists, the love which the Church is. Matrimony contains within itself the love of Christ for the Church; indeed it contains within itself in miniature the Church itself. One of the early names for the Church was "the love". The Church exists to witness to Christ's love for humanity and to communicate Christ's love to men and women. The special vocation of married people, in virtue of their sacrament of matrimony, is to reveal to others the love which the Church is and to share with others the love which Christ gives them for one another. Marriage, the Vatican Council says, is "a community of love". Married love says to others: "this is how Christ loves his friends". In a special way, matrimony enables a couple and their family to be the Church. Early Christians called the home "the domestic Church", "the Church in the home".

47. Matrimony is a sacrament; Christ is at work in it, as in all the sacraments, operating the great works of his redemption through signs which both signify and effect his redeeming work. These signs point to the paschal mystery of Christ's Death and Resurrection, and each sacrament makes that paschal mystery present and powerful at a particular point in our lives. In the sacrament of marriage, the sign is the love between husband and wife, solemnly pledged and plighted in the exchange of marriage vows. The partners are themselves the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony. Their vowed love is the efficacious sign whereby they become ministers of Christ's grace for one another. The greatest gift they ever give to one another is the gift of Christ's grace. Husband and wife are only human beings, whose pledge is no stronger than their own weak humanity. Yet, through the sign of their love, Christ is there; and "power goes out" from him (cf. Mark 5:30) to the couple, as it went out to those he touched during his earthly life. Christ is ever present with them as they struggle, day by day, to stay faithful, to surmount crises together, to overcome temptations, to resist discouragements, to forgive one another as God has forgiven us, to love one another as Christ himself loved the Church. Christ loved supremely on the Cross. As Blessed Angela of Foligno said: "It was not in fun that Christ loved us". Christian marriage is marriage under the sign of the Cross. That means readiness for suffering; but it also means promise of the Resurrection. It means assurance of the ultimate triumph of love.

48. Married people have a special experience of the Cross in their lives. They experience its pain; for married people can and do inflict misunderstanding, hurt and wrong upon each other. They also experience the power and victory of the Cross; for they learn that love can grow through pain and suffering, and that married love can be deeper and more mature after forgiveness and reconciliation than it would have been if the forgiveness had never been necessary. It is because Christ's own death-conquering love dwells in their human love that a bridegroom and bride can have the courage to say to each other:

I take you as my wife (husband) and I give myself to you as your husband (wife) to love each other truly for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health till death do us part.

49. It is through the power of Christ's love, dwelling in theirs, that married people can have for each other that love of which St. Paul so beautifully speaks:

Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous, love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. Love does not come to an end... In short, there are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7,13)

50. It is significant that in this passage St. Paul, who is writing in Greek, uses a term for "love" which is different from the term used for human love by the Greeks of his time. The Old Testament had only one verb and noun for both human love and divine or religious love. But the New Testament writers found that the Greek word for love had become so debased and corrupted in the contemporary culture of their time that they could no longer use it as a term for Christian love. To name God's love for men and men's love for God and the love which Christ calls us to have for one another, the New Testament writers used the Greek word "agape", or love-charity. The question has been asked whether the term "love" is not once more becoming so debased in our own day that it almost needs some explanation or addition when we use it to name Christian love. So often nowadays, in popular song and speech, the word "love" means only physical sexual love ‹or even sexual lust.> This is why Pope John Paul can say that the Church's moral teaching about sex is a programme for "putting love into love". It is a call to make human love between man and woman, and specifically to make sexual love, an expression of love-charity. It is indeed none other than the New Commandment given us by Christ:

Love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another. (John 13:34)

51. The fundamental vocation of Christian married partners is to love one another as Christ has loved them. In the words of Lacordaire, they must each aim to be the other's "particular Christ". Their love, sealed by the sign of the Cross, looks to Christ on the Cross. Not only do they find here the model of the love they are called to have for one another; they are also made capable, by the crucified Christ himself, of having that love for each other, and of persevering in it through all difficulties and renewing it in spite of all failures. Their vocation is at the same time a wider one. Christ's love reaches out to all, and so the love of husband and wife reaches out to their children and beyond their children to their children's children and to the community. They become channels of Christ's love. The special vocation of married people is to show how the world can be made new by Christ's new commandment: "love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12).

52. The phrase "sexual revolution" has often been used in respect of the radical and rapid change of attitudes towards sexuality and sexual morality which has taken place in recent decades, particularly in Western countries. Beginning with the urban populations, and widely diffused through literature, the stage, the screen, music and song and the media, these changed attitudes now affect in greater or lesser degree every sector of society.

53. Some aspects of this modern "sexual revolution" are good and are to be welcomed. There is a new openness in discussion about sexuality, and an absence of unhealthy feelings of guilt or shame about our sexual nature. There is a more general acceptance of the need for education of the young in an understanding of their sexuality, even though the call for "sex education" does not always sufficiently stress the human and the spiritual dimensions of sexuality. It would be better to speak of "education for love", since the whole aim of a Christian and healthy sexuality is to put love, in its full and genuine meaning, into sexual relationships. Properly imparted, this knowledge can greatly help young people towards a mature and balanced and Christian understanding of sex.

54. In the Church itself, instead of exaggerated preoccupation with sex as a source of temptation or sin, there is a timely emphasis on the goodness and sacredness of sex in marriage and on marriage as a means to holiness. Harm was done in the past by some sermons, statements and attitudes which associated sex with fear and shame and guilt, instead of seeing it as a beautiful gift from God. There is also in modern times a timely movement towards equality between the sexes, and a greater and overdue recognition of the rights of women within marriage and the home, and also in society. There is a better understanding of marriage as a partnership between equal persons, in which each looks to the other for personal fulfilment, rather than for financial security. All this is positive and welcome progress.

55. Nevertheless it can hardly be denied that our contemporary Western society has seen a serious breakdown of hitherto universally accepted Christian moral standards in the sphere of sexuality. Some of the great non-Christian ethical traditions in non-Western countries would judge much of Western society as decadent in this respect. A great modern thinker said that "our whole civilisation is aphrodisiac". Modern culture in the Western world would in some respects seem to be reverting to a cult of sexuality not entirely dissimilar to the old cults of the "goddesses of love", Venus and Aphrodite, in the pagan culture in which Christianity was born. The challenge facing the Christian in today's world is quite similar to the one which confronted the very first Christians in New Testament times, the challenge to save sexuality from debasement and ennoble it by the standards of the Gospel.

56. St. Paul warned Christians that they could abuse the freedom Christ brought to them and allow themselves to become enslaved once more to sinful self-indulgence. He said: You were called, as you know, to liberty; but be careful, or this liberty will provide an opening for self-indulgence. (Galatians 5:13). In spite of the super-abundant grace brought into the world by Christ, sin continued to abound. Men by their sins continued to disfigure the beauty of the works of God's New Creation. Human love, even Christian married love, continued to be debased. In our own day many factors combine to make it difficult for sexual love to retain its full human and spiritual perfection. No statement on the Christian understanding of this area of human life can neglect to point out how and why certain forms of sexual behaviour violate the plan of God when He made human beings male and female and blessed their sexuality. All these forms of immorality are instances of disruption of the intrinsic unity and wholeness of sexuality. They are forms of untruthfulness in sexual relationships.

57. In each instance of sexual immorality, there is a failure to make sexual union a genuine act of love; that is to say, a bodily expression of a lifelong togetherness in love, open to shared life giving. In other words, there is a failure to make human love what God designed it to be, for the mutual fulfilment and happiness of men and women. In all sexual immorality there is a lie: the sexual body is saying one thing; the mind and will and intention are saying something else. In Pope John Paul's words, there is a failure to "put love into love".

58. Some people will say that, so far as a sexual relationship is concerned, all that matters is that two people be in love. The trouble is, however, that what seems like love often falls very far short of the true meaning of love. Everything that the Church has to say about sex is that it should be an expression of genuine love. Love is what the Bible is all about and what the Church is all about. Unless people understand what true love means, they cannot understand what sex means. They cannot use it as God planned it; for God meant sexuality to help people to grow in love and to show God's love to the world.

59. Sexual morality is education in real loving. The purpose of sexual morality is not to condemn or prohibit, but to point the way to love, which is the heart of the Gospel of Christ. Sexual morality protects people from the hurt and the pain that loveless sex can bring to them. Sexual morality is a programme for helping people to distinguish true love from its counterfeits. It keeps love from being wasted. An old Irish phrase for sexual sin described it as 'making a spoiling of love'. In this respect sexual morality is not different from the rest of Christian morality. Moral laws are all of them statements of what is, in this or that situation, the truly loving thing to do, for others and for oneself. Christian teaching says no only to what is unloving. It says yes to love provided the love is truthful and honest. Wrong uses of sex are wrong because they are never the truly loving thing to do.

60. Speaking of marriage, Our Lord said: "What God has united, man must not divide". Something similar could be said about the other unities which God has sealed into sexual love: the unity between sex and faithful lifelong love; the unity between sex and life-giving; the unity between sex, life-giving and marriage. God has united these also, and man must not divide them. The great sins against God's plan for sexuality are each of them sins of separation. They separate sexual enjoyment from the wholeness of its meaning and the integrity of its God-given design. Sex is a language of love; but sexual sin suppresses one part or another of the truth of love. The tragedy of sexual sin is that it separates a part of loving from the rest and pretends that it is the whole of loving. It is a falsehood.

61. Love is a constant theme in modern culture. Modern song and music ceaselessly drum out the message of love. Theatre and cinema portray it. Newspapers, radio and television stories and features constantly have love for their theme. But invariably they deal with love in a mutilated sense. A selection is made from among the values of love. The values of fidelity, exclusiveness, dependability, stability, childbearing, founding of a family, love of children, are downgraded; while the values of sexual compatibility, erotic passion, emotional ecstasy, are given high rating. It is easy to pass to a notion of sexuality as merely an imperious, over-mastering physical urge, which it is natural to indulge and which it is perhaps dangerous to repress. Control of sexual inclination is made to seem unnecessary or impossible, or perhaps even harmful. The popular term, "sexually active", is a good illustration of this crude idea of sex.

62. It is worth noting that "making love" in modern speech has come to mean having sexual intercourse. Its value is measured in terms of erotic intensity and sexual climax. The very term leaves out of account all that is most important in the meaning of love. It ignores the task of the "making" of a love which is faithful unto death. The modern term "lovemaking" shows no concern to make sexual intercourse an expression of genuine giving of self and sharing of life. The term pays no attention to the building of a caring, faithful and lifelong relationship. Love is not understood in terms of unselfish self-giving, sincerity and fidelity. In short, love is not given its true meaning. The language of love is misused. In such cases, sex is divided from love. The sin of separation is manifest; the untruth about love is plain.

63. Sexual relations are sometimes engaged in thoughtlessly and on the mood and impulse of the moment. Not infrequently, they occur on occasions when people have taken too much drink. Indeed, sometimes girls are encouraged to drink in order that their resistance may be lowered. It would take only a little reflection to realise that casual sex excludes nearly everything that love means and denies what sex, as a language of true love, is intended to say. It is deplorable that the supreme expression of communion of body and spirit and life between a man and woman should be made into something casual and trivial. Sexual communion should be treasured as the climax to a gradual growing together in affection, in understanding of each other, in acceptance and forgiveness of each other, in sharing interests and secrets with each other, in praying with each other. Sexual intercourse should come only when the love has become so sure of itself that it can be solemnly pledged and sacramentally sealed in marriage Then and only then is the sexual expression of love honest and truthful, responsible, good and pure. Then and only then does sexual language truly say "I love you", and mean it, without qualification or reservation.

64. Until recently, Western culture, and indeed most of the great human cultures, almost universally recognised the natural and the moral link between sexuality and marriage. Popular fiction, speech and song, as well as literature and law, all recognised this link. Romance longed for and prepared for and culminated in marriage, and sexual union outside of marriage was recognised as wrong. We saw already that sexual union, in its deep nature, is a way whereby a couple say to each other: "I want to be one with you and I want you to be one with me for ever. I want our union to be for ever and ever. I want to share my life with you and only you always". In other words, sexual union speaks a love whose name is marriage.

65. Contemporary culture has witnessed a radical change of attitudes. Even the most casual attraction, even the most instant passion, would, in the eyes of some, seem to justify and almost require sexual relations as their normal and natural expression. Intercourse is seen in some circles, not so much as the giving of oneself exclusively and forever to another, but rather as the satisfaction of a feeling or impulse of the moment. The novel and the romantic fiction of today have to do much more with love-passion than with love-charity; and, when they treat of marriage, they usually treat much more of its problems than of its positive values. Sex is treated almost as a harmless pleasure, or else as an irresistible physical urge, instead of being the expression of a serious commitment to another person.

66. It is part of the nobility of human nature that we are capable of self-control where sexual expression is concerned. Apart from cases where freedom is excluded by assault or is diminished by involuntary causes, it is men and women who decide whether to have sexual relations or whether to place themselves in situations where the urge to sexual expression will become uncontrollable. In the modern world, Christians have the calling and the privilege of witnessing to chastity; and self-control in sexual matters is the basis of chastity. By the exercise of chastity. Christians are witnessing to the truth and beauty of love.

67. In much of modern culture, sexual relationships become temporary, experimental and disposable. If sex is trivialised, then love is trivialised; and there is nothing more damaging to persons than to make light of the love they desperately need. Only in marriage can sexual love be true to its own deepest meaning and need. The separation of sex from marriage is a violation of God's plan for human love. It marks a cheapening of love and a debasing of sexuality. There is no more appalling desecration and degradation of sex than the crime of incest. It is distressing that this repulsive transgression of the most sacred family relationship would seem to be on the increase.

68. God designed love between man and woman to be a permanent and exclusive partnership in tenderness and faithfulness, excluding any alien partner, making unfaithfulness to one's only loved one unthinkable, binding the couple by bonds of love to one another until death. God designed this love to be a pledged and life-lasting love, a married love. He designed it to be open to child bearing.

69. A baby, which is the fruit of married love, needs nourishment for its health and physical development; this it receives in the womb through its mother's bloodstream, and after birth from its mother's breast. The child needs nourishment no less for the development of a healthy personality; and the nourishment it needs for this is love. The love which surrounds a baby in infancy and childhood is as vital for its healthy psychological and spiritual development as the amniotic fluid by which it is surrounded in the womb is for its physical life- and is as vital for its healthy survival as are the clothes which protect it from the cold in infancy. Security in being loved by both its parents is vital for a child's growth to personal maturity. Children born outside of marriage carry added risks of emotional handicap in later life. Psychologists and sociologists agree that many of the psychological and social casualties among young people today can be traced back to the lack of love and security in childhood, and to insecurity in their parents' marriages. God's plan for love is both a protection for the couple themselves of the genuineness of their love, and a prescription for the mature development of their children. Any separation of physical sexual union from the fullness of its meaning which is found only in marriage, is a disruption of God's plan. It is a betrayal of love.

70. Sexuality touches the sources of human life. It concerns the family, the basic cell of the human community and the foundation of a stable society. Sex is not just a personal and private matter. It has a social and community aspect too. Sexual relationships have implications going far beyond the individuals concerned. There are consequences for families, for children, for the future of society. If broken marriages and homes result, society is burdened with the social casualties. There is the damage to health caused by sexually transmitted diseases, sometimes affecting innocent spouses of infected partners. The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases places added burdens on the health services. No society can be unconcerned about standards of sexual behaviour. No society has ever regarded sex as a merely private sphere. No state is without laws regulating marriage. In our age particularly, when claims are made for a universal and unqualified right to sexual activity, men and women have to remember their responsibilities to society in the use of sex.

71. The name which the whole of Christian tradition, following the Bible, has always given to acts of sexual infidelity against one's married partner is the term adultery. God's commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery", is as true and as binding today as ever it was. Christ reinforced it by forbidding also adultery of thought or desire. Adultery is a multiple sin; for it adds to the sin of unchastity the further sin of injustice inflicted on a married partner and on children.

72. When the male partner in a sexual relationship is a married man, possibly masquerading as single, a detestable note of betrayal and deceit is added to the other elements of untruth in the relationship. The girl is often tricked, deceived, exploited; and then abandoned. The man may go off to make new "conquests". For the girl, the experience can be deeply and lastingly wounding to her self-esteem and to her trust in men. She can even be affected in her relations with a future husband. The fault, however, does not by any means always lie with men. The guilt of adultery is shared. It is not infrequently women who invite and who initiate immoral relationships. The harm they thereby do to their husband, their home and their children is immense.

73. God's mercy, however, always awaits those caught up in adulterous relationships. We thank God for the wonders of repentance and forgiveness granted by God to many who turn to Him to be pardoned and to change their lives. We thank God for the marvellous graces of reconciliation and forgiveness which He gives to so many injured partners in such relationships, enabling them to rebuild their marriage in forgiving love.

74. There has undeniably been an increase in sexual relationships before marriage, as well as in casual sexual relationships and in pregnancies out of wedlock. All of these relationships, which separate sex from marriage, are against God's law of love. Acts of sexual intercourse before marriage are acts of fornication; and these, when freely and deliberately committed are in themselves always gravely sinful. Our Lord also clearly taught that fornication, even in thought and intention, is evil. This is still the clear and certain teaching of the Catholic Church today. The Church cannot change this teaching, because it is based on the word of God, which does not pass away. In her ministry of preaching and teaching, the Church must witness to the truth of Christ—but this is a truth that sets us free with the truest of all freedoms, freedom from sin.

75. At the same time, in her ministry of reconciliation in the sacrament of penance, the Church witnesses to the compassion of Christ, who always showed himself full of mercy and patience towards the sinner, while also gently but firmly asking them to turn away from sin. Where sexual sin is concerned, the Church fully realises the difficulties facing people, and particularly the young, in striving to remain chaste in today's world. She seeks to do everything possible to support them, while also reminding them constantly of the mercy and forgiveness of Christ. Like her Lord, the Church will always say to those who have sinned sexually: "Go in peace, your sins are forgiven". But, like her Lord, she must also add: "Go and sin no more". The daily struggle against sin and temptation is the test of our love of God and of our trust in him. It is the stuff of holiness. In the field of sexual love, the Church is not maintaining a "hard line". She is not showing insensitivity or hostility towards sex. On the contrary, she is saving love from trivialisation. She is protecting man's most precious resource and greatest need, which is love. She is thereby trying to save persons from pain and loss through the spoiling or wasting of love.

76. People nowadays are constantly surrounded by sexual stimuli. A whole "sex industry" has been set up, whose large profits depend on the arousal of sexual desire. Human nature is weak and passion is strong. Those who fall into sexual sin or into sinful sexual relationships should not be discouraged. Great saints have fallen into sins of the flesh. We need only recall St. Mary Magdalen and St. Augustine. Magdalen, a notorious public sinner, became one of the first to meet the risen Lord and was chosen as one of the first heralds of the resurrection. "Many sins (were) forgiven her", the Lord said, "because she loved much" (cf. Luke 7:36-50). The young Augustine had a mistress who bore him a child; yet he became one of the greatest saints and doctors of the Church. Charles de Foucauld, nearer our own time, led a profligate life before his conversion. There are countless instances in the Church 's past and present of prodigal sons and daughters whom the Father runs to welcome back, embracing them in his joy at their return and inviting them to celebrate their homecoming with him in the Eucharist.

77. In many countries today there is a growing acceptance of the practice of cohabitation without marriage. This means that a couple in a so-called "stable relationship" live together without marriage, usually with the idea of getting married eventually if it "works out" for them. It may be argued that they need to be "sexually experienced" or to have tested their "sexual compatibility" before they commit themselves finally to marriage. The argument is plausible, but it is fundamentally mistaken. A couple will not be "sexually compatible" unless they are compatible at deeper levels of personality, temperament, interests and values, life styles and spirituality. Premature sexual intercourse will deflect the relationship into one single dimension, the sexual one, long before the couple have had the time or the opportunity or the freedom of spirit to test the other dimensions of their relationship. But these other dimensions are even more important for their compatibility and for the durability of the relationship, and specifically for their sexual fulfilment in marriage, than is the physical dimension. Sexual intercourse in a courtship makes a couple sexual partners before they have come to trust one another enough to commit themselves totally and finally to each other. Successful marriage and successful sexual harmony in marriage depend on mature and faithful friendship more than on "sexual success". Sexual harmony in marriage is important, but it is by no means sufficient. If it is pursued as an end in itself, no matter by what techniques it is perfected, it will not make a marriage or save a marriage unless there is deep sharing of lives. One can be "sexually experienced", but be very far indeed from being experienced in love.

78. So-called "stable sexual relationships" outside marriage are in fact "let's pretend" situations. The couple live as if they were finally committed to one another; but they are not. They live as if they loved one another for life; yet each retains the freedom to "walk out" on the other. Their living together and their sexual "language" speak of pledged faithfulness; but yet they keep putting off the pledge and leave their options open on the faithfulness. Their relationship is hedged with reservations. They are in effect saying to each other: "I give my sexual body to you but not myself"; or "I want your body but I'm not sure if I want your self"; or "I will give myself to you, but not just yet, maybe later"; or "I give myself to you now but I may want to give myself to someone else after a while". A stable relationship cannot be built on or even prepared by such hedging and hesitation.

79. Once sexual intercourse becomes part of a relationship, the couple come to regard one another as if they were already a married couple; while all the time knowing that they are not. They are living a make-believe. They are acting out a pretence. Young people who embark on the experiment of "living together" before marriage do not realise how profoundly a sexual relationship affects one's life and what deep emotions and expectations it arouses. They do not know how traumatic the effects on them can be when the relationship is terminated. Sex is too profound and mysterious to be treated casually. In particular, a person's first experience of sex can be decisive for future attitudes to sexuality within marriage.

80. The truth of genuine marriage cannot be honestly prepared for by the make believe of a "trial" marriage. "Trial marriages", instead of being a preparation for successful marriage, are instead a psychological and moral preparation for instability in a future marriage. Having each experienced the other's readiness for one tentative "affair", a couple will find it more difficult to trust each other totally in a true marriage. They may even find it harder themselves to resist temptation to marital infidelity. There is no better foundation for trusting and trustworthy married love than for each partner to know that the other has had sexual relationships only with him or with her. Pre-marital chastity means being determined to keep the gift of oneself for the person one loves alone. It is a manifestation of true love.

81. Couples who have sincerely tried to see their love in the light of God's plan and to have a real sense of the beauty and grace of the sacrament of marriage, know that "sex before marriage" is gravely in conflict with God's plan for making human love a source of grace and holiness. They know that their love was designed to be such that God, looking on it, would bless it and would see that it was "very good". A sexual relationship outside of marriage is sinful; and in God's presence the couple cannot avoid feeling shame, rather than the peace of God's blessing and of a good conscience. This is itself a source of tension and prevents the tranquility of mind which married sexual union should confer. What is wrong in a moral and religious sense cannot lead to happiness on the human level.

82. The possibility of pregnancy is inseparable from an unmarried sexual relationship. This is not in itself a good reason for avoiding a wrong sexual relationship. The use of contraceptives in no way lessens the moral wrongness. Nevertheless, the possibility of pregnancy is always there. The ever-present risk introduces an element of fear and insecurity which flaws the relationship. The couple run the risk of getting married under the strain and the duress of a pregnancy; and can be prone afterwards to the suspicion that they should not have married and would not have married but for the pregnancy. Sexual intercourse and pregnancy sometimes occur at an early stage in the couple's relationship. If, as a result, the couple marry, they are faced with the problem of fitting the arrival of a child into their relationship before they have even consolidated their own relationship with one another. The resultant strains can be so great that the couple cannot cope with them.

83. The danger is particularly great in the case of teenage marriages. This is why all Irish dioceses now ask for adequate prior notice of an intended marriage; and this requirement is even stricter in the case of teenage couples. The purpose of this is not to create delays and difficulties. The purpose instead is to provide a caring service for couples intending marriage, by allowing sufficient time for serious preparation, through a pre-marriage course and through discussions with the priest and with marriage counsellors. When the bride-to-be is pregnant, it is often advisable to try to persuade the couple to have the marriage postponed at least until after the baby is born. This is because of the real danger that the existence of pregnancy may cause pressure to be put on the couple, either by their families or by one another; so that the decision to marry may not be entirely free and mature. It is also because of the Church's experience of the numbers of teenage marriages which run into difficulties or which even break up. Catholic marriage tribunals provide undeniable evidence of this sad fact. In cases where, from early in the courtship, the relationship has been based primarily on sex, it is notable how easily and how quickly the relationship can turn into resentment and estrangement.

84. When pregnancy does occur, it can come as a great shock and can cause panic, even though in all honesty the couple must admit that this was a possible consequence of the way in which they were freely acting. Yet now above all is the time for them to remember that there is no limit to God's mercy for those who admit their sin and ask His pardon. Sexual sin has elements of powerful passion, which cannot always be fully foreseen. There can be circumstances which lessen guilt. Priests will always be particularly compassionate towards people, especially young people, who have sinned sexually. Priests are ministers of God's forgiving love, not of human judgement or condemnation. Our Lord's gentle treatment of the adulterous woman will be their model. Parents also should show special love and compassion to their teenage daughter or son in such circumstances. Never do young people so much need parental love as in moments of shame and panic like this. To insist on marriage at once in order to save family reputation or to avoid scandal can be disastrous, especially in the case of teenage couples. Instead, both the young mother and the child should be accepted and should be lovingly helped through the pregnancy and the birth, so that a mature decision regarding marriage may then be made in calm and peace.

85. A pregnant unmarried girl can be put under strong pressure to have an abortion. The pressure can come from her partner or from relatives or companions. It is scarcely credible, and yet it is true, that the pressure sometimes comes even from parents. Pressure can come also from the unkind and condemnatory attitudes of neighbours and friends. We have set out the Church's teaching on abortion fully in our Pastoral, Human Life Is Sacred, in 1975; and we call this teaching to mind again now. As well as stressing the abhorrent evil of abortion, we called then for the development of all the services caring for the worried pregnant mother and her child. We set up the confidential telephone service, Cura, for this purpose. These services have developed admirably since then. There is no reason for anyone to say "I had no alternative to abortion".

86. Over and above these services, there is great need for a genuinely caring attitude on the part of the whole community. While recognising sin for what it truly is, we have no right to condemn the sinner. Our Lord himself has shown us how rejection of sin must be accompanied by love and understanding and compassion and practical help for the person who has strayed. Tragic happenings have brought home to us how desperate is the loneliness and the panic of some girlhood pregnancies. Such happenings must weigh on the consciences of us all. How have we failed these friendless and frightened young people? If a pregnancy ends tragically, it is not enough to give vent to moral outrage or to look for scapegoats. All sectors of society and all formers of opinion must engage in honest self-examination in order to see whether we are allowing our young people to be bombarded by sexual stimuli and influences and attitudes and example which virtually pressurise them into sexual relationships while they are still children.

87. Over recent years, there has been excessive publicity given to the unwed mother. Familiarity must not be allowed to lessen our sense of the great sadness of unmarried pregnancy. There is too little thought for the wrong that has been done to the child by its being deprived of its right to the faithful love of two parents and to the stable environment of a loving home. There is an unconscious sexual discrimination involved in focusing attention on the unwed mother. Rarely indeed is the public spotlight turned on the unwed father. He has usually walked anonymously away from his responsibilities, leaving a girl deeply emotionally hurt and leaving a child in danger of being emotionally scarred by lack of a father's love. There is a body of research which indicates that children's psychological development can be impaired by the absence of a father in their home. The great increase in the number of lone-mother families is, therefore, a grave problem for society.

88. The document, Familiaris Consortio, says: According to the plan of God, marriage is the foundation of the wider community of the family, since the very institution of marriage and conjugal love are ordained to the procreation and education of children, in whom they find their crowning. In its most profound reality, love is essentially a gift; and conjugal love. . . does not end with the couple, because it makes them capable of the greatest possible gift, the gift by which they become cooperators with God for giving life to a new human person. Thus the couple, while giving themselves to one another, give not just themselves but also the reality of children, who are a living reflection of their love, a permanent sign of conjugal unity and a living and inseparable synthesis of their being a father and mother. When they become parents, spouses receive from God the gift of a new responsibility. Their parental love is called to become for the children the visible sign of the very love of God, "from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" (Ephesians 3:15) (no.14).

89. The Vatican Council stressed the fact that married love must of its nature be open to the giving of new life. It then went on to describe the qualities of responsible parenthood, emphasising that this requires the "harmonizing (of) conjugal love with the responsible transmission of life". (See Appendix I.) In the encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI clarified the concept of "responsible parenthood", which, he said, "today is rightly much insisted upon, and which also must be exactly understood" (H. V. 10). It involves knowledge of and respect for "the biological laws which are part of the human person". It involves control by reason and will of innate drives and emotions. It involves, in the light of physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, a prudent and generous decision to have a large family; or, on the other hand, a decision, "made for serious reasons and with due respect for the moral law" to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth" (H. V. 10).

90. "Due respect for the moral law" means that decisions regarding family size must be based on genuine reasons and not on mere selfishness. It also means that the methods used to carry out the decision should, in the words of the Vatican Council, respect, reveal and protect "the integral meaning of conjugal love", and "preserve the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation". There are various forms of natural family planning and these respect these criteria. These methods are based upon insight into the Creator's design of the cycle of fertility. In sexual union, the partners, in giving themselves to each other, should at the same time become more aware of their masculine or feminine identity and become more fulfilled as male or as female. At the same time, each partner should accept the other fully as woman or fully as man. The more completely each partner understands the other and accepts the other in the partner's sexual otherness, the more deep and true their union will be. Everything that enables the man to understand and to accept the female nature, and vice versa, serves to make the union more complete. When the couple are aware of the complementarity and partnership of husband and wife in the procreation of life, when both of them have insight into the mysterious and marvellous feminine cycle of life-bearing, they can enter more profoundly into the wonder of their sexuality and their union with each other. Knowledge of the cycle of life enables the man to understand more fully the bodily and the emotional and the spiritual nature of the woman, and enables him to accept and to respect her in the trueness of her femininity.

91. The cycle of life-bearing itself provides times when nature 'rests' in its rhythmic task of setting up the conditions for new life. These times of 'rest' are themselves part of God's plan for human fertility. When married partners avail themselves of these times to express their love in sexual union, provided this is done with "a generous human and Christian sense of responsibility", they are loving one another in full peace with God, because they are respecting the divine plan "for human procreation in the context of true love".

92. Natural family planning frees couples in the planning of their families from medication and from technology, with their known harmful side effects. It has the great merit of making responsible parenthood a joint responsibility of husband and wife together. Contraceptives, on the contrary, nearly always place the responsibility solely on the woman. It is deplorable that women who wish to use natural family planning are sometimes unable to do so because their husbands refuse to cooperate. Husbands and wives have equal duties in respect of responsible parenthood. This requires that husbands cooperate with their wives in making responsible parenthood possible through morally acceptable means. As Pope John Paul II put it in the document, "The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World", Familiaris Consortio: The choice of the natural rhythms involves accepting the cycle of the person, that is the woman, and thereby accepting dialogue, reciprocal respect, shared responsibility and self control. To accept the cycle and to enter into dialogue means to recognise both the spiritual and corporal character of conjugal communion and to live personal love with its requirement of fidelity. In this context, the couple comes to experience how conjugal communion is enriched with those values of tenderness and affection which constitute the inner soul of human sexuality, in its physical dimensions also. (No. 32)

93. Women who cannot practice natural family planning and couples who, in spite of their sincere efforts, find it is not effective for them, can feel driven to the use of contraceptives. Married couples in modern society are under many pressures to practise artificial contraception. There are housing problems, financial difficulties, unemployment, and many other factors causing severe strain in marriage and family life. There is lack of love and of communication and of mutual consideration in some marriages, and specifically in the sexual area of marriage. There is the fear of losing one another's affection by any avoidance of sexual relations. There is pressure from modern culture to accept contraception as a normal part of married life. There is also genuine confusion among some Catholics about the morality of artificial contraception. Such circumstances as these can diminish freedom and lessen guilt, and can at times remove them entirely. To quote Familiaris Consortio: As Mother, the Church is close to the many married couples who find themselves in difficulty over this important point of the moral life: she knows well their situation, which is often very arduous and at times truly tormented by difficulties of every kind, not only individual difficulties but social ones as well; she knows that many couples encounter difficulties not only in the concrete fulfilment of the moral norm but even in understanding its inherent values. (No. 33) The only way really to fail in this respect is to stop trying. It should be remembered that, as has been said, "the saint is only the sinner who wouldn't stop trying".

94. Nevertheless we have to say that the Catholic Church clearly teaches that artificial contraception is in itself always objectively wrong. Couples must, therefore, do all that is in their power to avoid or to give up this practice, relying on God's help to make possible what may sometimes seem humanly impossible. They must also have great trust in God's grace, ever present to them in the sacrament of marriage. What seems to them impossible can become possible by God's power and by the grace of the sacrament, and by their own persevering efforts. If they fail in their efforts, they must remember that God never fails in His mercy. His compassion and forgiveness are always available to them in the sacrament of penance or reconciliation. Here, no matter what has gone wrong, men and women can always find that peace of conscience without which there cannot be happiness in marriage.

95. Priests, when this problem is brought to them in the confessional, must indeed present the authentic teaching of the Church. As Pope Paul VI said: To diminish in no way the saving teaching of Christ constitutes an eminent form of charity for souls (H. V. 29 cited in F. C. 33). Priests must also have a compassionate pastoral understanding of the real difficulties facing many married people. They must do everything possible to make the experience of the sacrament of reconciliation an experience of Christ's compassion and healing and peace, an encounter with Christ's patient, understanding love. Priests will remember St. Paul's injunction to Timothy: Proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. . . But do all with patience and with the intention of teaching (2 Timothy 4:12). The Church's teaching about the wrongness of contraception is a prescription for happiness, not for tension. It is a programme for peace of conscience, not for anxiety and guilt. It is sad that some have given up the practice of confession because of what they experienced in the past as insensitivity on the part of some confessors in this domain. It has been truly said that many people throughout history have left the Church because they found in her too little compassion; but few have left her because they found her too forgiving.

96. One great factor in the contemporary revolution in sexual behaviour is the introduction of contraceptives and their constantly wider and freer availability. It is more than half a century now since Bertrand Russell declared that contraceptives call for a completely new ethic of sex. It has become clearer in recent times how radically "new" that ethic is, and how deeply it is in conflict with Christian tradition.

97. Contraceptives are in essence divisive of what God has united. Primarily and directly contraceptives separate sexual intercourse from its intrinsic openness to life-giving. Contraceptives also increase the propensity and the temptation to separate sex from fidelity, permanence and exclusive relationship. They facilitate the separation of sex from love. They make it easier to separate sex from marriage. Much of what nowadays is called "family planning" has no relevance either to marriage or the family.

98. It is by no means an accident that the spreading wave of contraceptives has everywhere been associated with an increase in pre-marital and extra-marital sex and of venereal disease. One undeniable effect of the wider and wider availability of contraceptives in other countries has been to encourage sexual permissiveness. In turn, the spread of sexual permissiveness calls for more and more contraception and sterilisation, with abortion as a "back-up" remedy for "contraceptive failure". Some widely used contraceptive pills and devices are in fact abortifacients under another name. Intra-uterine devices are admittedly abortifacient in their operation. The borderline between contraception and abortion tends to become blurred in these situations. Modern society, from this point of view, might well be said to be organised on the basis of sex without self-control.

99. It is a sad fact that sexual relationships between young people, even at school-going age, is becoming more common in Ireland. This is a cause of grave concern and great sadness to parents and to all who care about young people and about the quality of life in our society. We cannot be complacent about the problem or pretend that it does not exist. Some will argue that the obvious remedy is to make contraceptives more widely available, especially to young unmarried people. This view may be sincerely held, but it is nevertheless dangerously mistaken. In countries where contraceptives are universally available and free, and where large sums of public money are spent in officially promoting their use, the incidence of teenage pregnancy and the rate of births out of wedlock have remained at very high levels. The widespread use of abortion has obviously reduced the overall number of births, but it has not significantly affected the percentage of births out of wedlock. Thus in England and Wales, children born out of wedlock constituted 8.4 per cent of total births in 1971. The percentage increased to 14.99 per cent in 1983, in spite of the fact that 140,000 abortions were performed in that year. In Northern Ireland the figures were 3.8 per cent in 1971 and 8.7 per cent in 1983. In the Republic of Ireland, the corresponding figures were 2.7 per cent in 1971 and 6.8 per cent in 1983. The truth is that, the more contraceptives there are, and the more they are made available to young people, the more sexual indulgence there will be, and the more will irresponsible attitudes towards sex be encouraged. The more also will teenagers, and particularly teenage girls, be put under pressure to engage in sexual intercourse.

100. Much modern advice invites young people to believe, from their early teens, that intercourse with a boyfriend or girlfriend is quite normal and right so long as intercourse is not "unprotected". In the name of sexual freedom, young people in modern society are almost being denied the freedom to say no to sexual intercourse. A truly caring society would not allow its young people to be emotionally harassed in this way at an age when they are still only in the process of maturing emotionally and are vulnerable. Contraceptives are a false and facile solution to a problem which is fundamentally moral and spiritual in nature. The remedy must be sought at deeper levels of moral living and moral and spiritual formation of the young. There can be no way to sexual responsibility except through self-control and a truly Christian vision of sexuality in the community. The wide availability of contraceptives positively discourages self-control and trivialises sexual love. It leaves young people open to sad deception and leaves their innocence and their idealism open to heartless exploitation. It should also be remembered that young people sometimes turn to a sexual partner to find from him or her the love which they have not found at home, and to find escape from that loneliness into which a loveless society can relegate them.

101. The insight of Bertrand Russell was acute. His logic was accurate. The contraceptive mentality has fostered the wide acceptance of a new sexual ethic. But let it be stated clearly that it has not made that "new morality" right or true. What we have in modern society is not a new morality of sex but rather a radical rejection of the morality of the entire Christian tradition. The new patterns of sexual behaviour face all of us in the Church today with a formidable task, the task of bringing together again what God made one but man persists in dividing. Pope Paul called it a "great work of education, of progress and of love". Pope John Paul has recently spoken of "an education for love rooted in faith".

102. The intrinsic connection of sexual union with marriage, and its intrinsic connection with fertility, are clearly laid down in God's plan "in the beginning", as we find it in the Book of Genesis. Man and woman are called to "cleave" to one another "in one flesh", and thereby to "be fruitful and multiply". This plan of God is written also into the being of man and woman. It is imprinted in them, in body and in spirit, in instinct and emotion, in conscious thought and in unconscious need. Sexual love impels man and woman to give themselves completely to each other, to belong wholly to each other; to share life together; to be no longer two but one, and to be two-in-one not just in body but also in spirit, mind and will. The perfect embodiment of a man's and a woman's two-in-oneness is their child. The greatest expression of their shared life is when man and woman share together in creating new life, which is "flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone" of them both. A child is a man's and a woman's love for one another smiling back at both of them, in a face which unites the very features of them both.

103. When surgical sterilisation was practised in Nazi Germany some fifty years ago, it aroused general disgust and revulsion. It is surely a sign of moral decline that now the same operation is widely regarded as morally acceptable and even socially "progressive". It was of course predictable that the propaganda for contraceptives, and especially for the contraceptive pill, should lead to acceptance of sterilisation. A major effect of most contraceptive pills is to bring about temporary sterilisation. From this to surgical sterilisation is a short and logical path.

104. No Catholic should be in any doubt about the teaching of the Church in this matter. There is no uncertainty or ambiguity about the teaching. We stated it in our Pastoral Letter "Human Life Is Sacred", in 1975. The same teaching of the Church was reaffirmed, in that same year, by the Holy See, in specific reference to the responsibilities of Catholic hospitals and Catholic medical and paramedical personnel. This teaching declares that any form of sterilisation, whose direct and immediate and intended effect is to render the sexual faculty incapable of procreation, is direct sterilisation, and as such is absolutely forbidden according to the doctrine of the Church. Catholic hospitals may not provide facilities for such operations. Catholic medical personnel may not cooperate with them. As the document from the Holy See declares, such cooperation would be totally incompatible with the duty of Catholics to defend and to witness to the primacy of the moral order. There should be recognition in the Health Services of the right of doctors or nurses to refuse, on grounds of conscience, to participate in such operations. It is deplorable that in some countries sterilisation is offered after childbirth, as a routine procedure, to women who have already had one or two children. At a time when mothers may be emotionally very vulnerable and open to suggestion, they can be led to consent to an operation with which their conscience and their instincts will later reproach them bitterly.

105. Sterilisation creates serious risks for the psychological well-being of husband and wife. The sterilised wife can come to feel herself a "sexual object" for the use of her husband. The sterilised husband can come to feel himself as less than fully a man. Each can feel damaged in his or her personhood by permanent loss of the power of parenthood. A person who has sought sterilisation may at a later date have an intense longing to have a child. A sterilised spouse may become widowed and may contract a second marriage in which there is a strong desire for children. Often the regret and remorse following sterilisation are bitter and destructive.

106. In some modern societies there is widespread acceptance of the view that mentally handicapped persons and those likely to transmit hereditary handicap should be sterilised. Jean Vanier, who understands the emotional needs of the mentally handicapped as few men have ever done, totally rejects this view. He declares that sterilisation damages the handicapped in their self esteem, making them seem to themselves to be sexual objects, easily available for sex, but starved of the self-esteem and affection and love and security which are their deepest need Sterilisation leaves them ready for sexual exploitation by others, while at the same time reinforcing their own sense of being rejected and unwanted.

107. Sterilisation, however, can be an unavoidable side-effect of an operation or medical treatment for illness or disease. Then its moral character is completely different. We have been talking here of direct sterilisation, that is to say, sterilisation which is directly and intentionally brought about in order to prevent pregnancy. In such a case, the procedure deliberately sets out to make it impossible for the act of sex to be open to the gift of life. It separates what God has made one.

108. Women or men who have sought this operation, must not, however, feel excluded from God's love and forgiveness. There are circumstances in which people can feel driven to such expedients, almost in spite of themselves. There are stresses and difficulties which can diminish responsibility and guilt. St. John has the wonderfully consoling words: Whatever accusations (our conscience) may raise against us, . . . God is greater than our conscience, and he knows everything (1 John 3:20-21). The only way we can fail to receive God 's forgiveness is to fail to ask for it, above all in the sacrament of reconciliation, which he gave to his Church as an ever-present source of pardon and peace.

109 Human love is the theme which has inspired the world's greatest literature, painting and sculpture, music, drama and dance. Some of the best productions of the newer art forms, cinema and television, have also been devoted to this endlessly creative theme. Love has brought great beauty into human experience. Humanity is impoverished when this beauty is brutalised. Pornography is a form of brutalising of sex, portraying it as separated from love, from tenderness, from human nobility and dignity. When we compare the great artists' portrayal of sexuality with the pornographers', we realise how squalid and dehumanising pornography is.

110. Pornography has grown into a mammoth industry. Its huge profits are amassed out of the desecration of sexuality and the degradation of persons, notably the degradation of women. It is sadly the case that, when the greed for money can be allied with another powerful human passion, such as sex, the combination generates a mighty destructive force. Such also is the power and the prestige of money in modern society, that powerful, if not always public, pressure groups can be mobilised for the diffusion of propaganda protecting the interests and maximising the profits of the various divisions of the "sex industry". The godfathers of pornography have succeeded in presenting it as harmless, playful, perhaps even therapeutic, liberating and progressive. Innocent shorthand names for it have been popularised. Critics of pornography have been made objects of ridicule, called prudes and puritans. Attempts to prevent it are attacked as "censorship".

111. A loathsome department of the pornography industry is the production of specialised pornography for teenagers. The market researchers whose business it is to keep enlarging the market for this vile trade, are working successfully to build up a younger and younger readership for pornographic "comics" and videos. The various branches of the sex industry support each other, and are often directly linked. The publishers of pornography give much space in their productions to advertising or promotional features advocating contraceptives and abortion. The commercial motivation here is obviously strong. The more people there are who can be made "sexually active", and the younger they are, the more profits will return to the "sex industry" as a whole.

112 The context in which young people first encounter or experience sexuality is crucial for their future development. The ideas and associations formed in youth can have long-lasting effects. To think of sex as dissociated from love and from marriage, from fidelity, exclusiveness and permanence, can be the means of starting a young person on a career of casual and loveless sex. Pornography assists the trend towards a loveless and violent society. Not even children are spared by the pornographic industry. There are few more glaring signs of moral evil than the use of children in the preparation of pornographic photographs and films. In pornography generally, and specifically in pornography for children, violence occupies a growing place. So-called "video nasties" are among the ugliest blots upon our time.

113. Many European Bishops' Conferences have, in recent years, issued statements denouncing pornography as one of the great plagues of modern society. The Belgian Bishops spoke of it as a "black tide" of moral pollution on the shores of their country. Ireland is already seen by the merchants of pornography as a market with particularly tempting prospects for expansion.

114. It is depressing when ordinary newspapers and magazines compete with one another in the race for increased sales and profits by trying out how they can gradually venture closer and closer to the borderline of pornography. This trend professes to be "adult" and "mature". In fact, such displays are a form of "voyeurism" and encourage adults into becoming "peeping Toms". The use of obscene words has for some become almost a compulsive reflex. Sexual suggestiveness pervades much of the entertainment scene and has become a commonplace of everyday conversation. Some perfectly ordinary words have become loaded with sexual innuendo. These are signs of decadence in a culture. They are well-known phases of immature moral and psychological development.

115. A new type of explicitly pornographic product with almost unlimited possibilities for growth is the pornographic video-cassette. We believe that it is a matter of urgency in Ireland that this new form of commerce be brought under some appropriate form of legal control. We earnestly appeal to Christians who work in the fields of publication and printing, book and periodical marketing, audio-visual equipment, entertainment and media, to see pornography for the unqualified evil which it is Christians must not sell pornographic material They must regard resistance to pornography as their Christian duty. We ask parents to exercise care regarding the reading or the viewing material permitted in their homes. They should not only endeavour to forbid wrongful material to their children, but should try to show them why it is wrong. Above all, they should try to encourage good reading and viewing material.

116. Critics of pornography are often challenged by the question: "But what harm does it do?". Sociological and statistical evidence is brought forward to suggest that pornography has no demonstrable evil consequences. The response must be that pornography is wrong in itself. It tends to deprave and corrupt because it is itself corrupt It constitutes an assault on the dignity of the human person, on the respect due to the human body and the reverence due to sexuality. Pornography constitutes an assault on the dignity of the human person, on the respect personhood of women to the level of sexual objects for men's physical enjoyment. Never in pornographic material, and all too rarely in modern advertising, are women represented as persons to whom men might look for intelligent conversation or interesting ideas or equal companionship. For the pornographer, and too often for the advertiser, women are assumed to be of interest to males only as desirable sexual bodies, to be seized and possessed for male sexual pleasure. Women are used as bodies for selling products. They are treated as being ultimately themselves products for taking, just like any saleable object. Pornography turns sex into a consumer product and a perpetual occasion for the creation of new product needs. Pornography thus uses persons as means- it treats persons as things. This could stand as a definition of immorality. Pornography does harm because it is wrong in itself. It places sex in a context of lovelessness, of exploitation, of taking without giving, of pleasure without commitment. It associates sex with violence, cruelty, male domination of women,

117. The struggle against pornography requires that young people be provided with an appropriate programme of education in human love and relationships, to enable them to see sexuality in its true nobility and dignity and beauty, in its human and spiritual wholeness. It also requires that young people be introduced to an appreciation of what is noble and great in mankind's literary and artistic tradition, so that they can distinguish pornography from good literature and art. We must not be content to condemn bad reading and viewing. We must positively encourage good reading and viewing. Our country has obstacles to overcome in this regard. Abuse of censorship laws in the past banned as pornography works of serious literature. Injustice was thereby done to some of our best writers and artists. Harm was done to the community's aesthetic appreciation. We can only look back on these aberrations with embarrassment. But they must not be made an excuse now for capitulating before pornography. This would be still more certain to do injustice to serious writers and artists and to harm the community, not only morally and spiritually but aesthetically as well.

118 The sinfulness of separating sex from love is most clearly seen in the case of rape. The wrongfulness of rape is recognised universally; and virtually all are agreed about the reasons for its wrongfulness. Rape is infamous and is seen to be infamous, precisely because it is a brutal assault on the dignity of women and because it totally separates sex from love. Sex is a language which of its nature speaks of love. If instead it speaks of violence and humiliation, as it does in the case of rape, it becomes perverse. Rape is wrong also because sex is a loving exchange of self-giving. This implies partners who respect each other as equal in dignity and who freely consent to give and to be given to each other, to possess and to be possessed lovingly by each other. It is characteristic of rape that is expresses no, love but sheer physical lust combined with hatred and violence; it expresses, not respect for the other's feelings, but contempt; not the desire to give but the will to overpower and to humiliate and to dominate.

119. Rape is the most glaring example of the desecration of the mystery of sexuality. The increase of rape in modern society can be seen as a signal which warns of the special vulnerability of women in a society where Christian standards of sexual morality are breaking down. Meanwhile, a Christian society must examine itself honestly about the trends in that society which induce a lowering of reverence for sexuality. A Christian society must ask whether the frequent association of sex with violence in some media programmes, as well as in the cinema and the video cassette, may be correlated with the incidence of rape. Christians must ask whether tolerance of pornography and of near-pornographic advertising is not a constant invitation to that male attitude towards women which the rapist expresses in its grossest form. It has been said, with reason: "Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice". Christians must be vigilant against the double standards sometimes applied to the man and to the woman in cases of rape. We must expunge from our legal conventions and our social attitudes the surviving traces of male superiority and of the idea that sexual domination is a manifestation of true masculinity, or that women who are raped must be presumed to be secretly consenting. All this is only to recall in different words the basic precept of Christian sexual morality: "put love into sexuality", "put love-charity into love sexuality"; or, as Pope John Paul has put it: "put love into love".

120. The format for taking evidence from women who have been raped needs to be as little hurtful as possible to victims and should be extremely sensitive to the shock and suffering they have endured. There seems no reason why rape and sexual assault cases should be held in camera. A corps of police personnel should be specially trained to deal with cases of rape, and their training should include some familiarity with the psychological counseling of rape victims. Women police should be available for the questioning of women who have been assaulted. A panel of women doctors should be available for the medical examination for forensic evidence. There should be women on all rape trial juries. The complainant should have the right to be accompanied at the questioning and in court by a counsellor. Because of the special stress and suspense of women in such situations, court hearings should take place as soon as possible after the incident. The present' legal definition of rape technically limits it to sexual intercourse, thereby excluding other forms of perverse sexual violation. This should be reviewed. Drink should not be regarded as an extenuating factor in the case of rape, any more than in the case of traffic offences. Steps should be taken to secure more consistency in sentencing. The adversarial procedures for court hearings of rape cases need also to be reformed, so that rape victims are not made to re-live in public court the trauma of the rape itself and are not subjected to insensitive interrogation or hurtful insinuation of consent. Furthermore, in court hearings in general, ways could surely be found of protecting women from the prurient public exposure of the most intimate details of their lives. Recent examples of this have not enhanced public respect either for the judicial process or for the media. Rape is a most distressing experience for its victims. The psychological effects are traumatic and can be lasting. Those who provide counseling and support for rape victims are to be highly commended.

121. Following rape, immediate interventions to remove semen and prevent fertilisation are morally right. They are part of a woman's legitimate resistance to the rapist's attack. If, however, fertilisation were nevertheless to occur and pregnancy result following rape, there is a new and innocent human life present, whose right to life must be respected. Pills designed to prevent the implantation of a fertilised ovum and thus effect its expulsion would really be abortifacient; that is to say, their effect would be the early termination of a human life, which is in fact early abortion.

122. Sexual actions are actions which of their nature reach out to another and speak love of another and readiness to give and to share; but masturbation uses these actions instead to withdraw into self and to seek solitary satisfaction. There is aptness in the term, "self-abuse". Such actions, when they are consciously and deliberately and freely performed, are in themselves gravely sinful. Sometimes it is suggested that this kind of action is just a normal stage of development and that it need not, or perhaps even cannot, be resisted. This is not true. It is correct to say that force of habit may make resistance difficult and also that the physical urges can at times be almost overpoweringly strong. The freedom of the action may be much reduced. The subjective seriousness of fault may, consequently, be greatly lessened, and indeed sometimes removed. Morbid feelings of guilt about this practice can be damaging. It should be remembered that guilt feeling is not identical with Christian sorrow for sin Genuine sorrow is accompanied by trust in God's mercy and confidence in his desire to forgive. There must also be full conviction that, when one does one's best, God's grace is never lacking and his mercy never fails. Good habits can be acquired as well as bad ones. Good habits are acquired by continuous prayer and by repeated acts of self-control. Self-control in sexuality is a necessary preparation for self-giving in lawful sexual union.

123. The truth of the language of sexuality is also missing in homosexual acts and sexual relationships between people of the same sex. It is vital, of course, to distinguish between a homosexual orientation and homosexual acts. A person with a homosexual orientation is not thereby a sinner. Homosexual tendencies, as distinct from homosexual actions, can be innate and can be irreversible.

124. Up to very recently, the whole of Christian tradition, and the unanimous consensus of all Christian Churches, following the clear teaching of both Old Testament and New Testament, affirmed the sinfulness of homosexual acts. Some confusion regarding this teaching may have crept in recently. The teaching of the Catholic Church stands clear; and it firmly declares that deliberate homosexual acts are objectively and gravely immoral. Between persons of the same sex, there cannot be sexual intercourse as God designed it. There cannot be complementarity of two sexually differentiated personalities in communion of body and spirit, with openness to the procreation of new life. There cannot be that truth and fullness and wholeness of sexual communion which constitute marriage as God designed it and blessed it.

125. There has been a vigorous campaign in recent years to vindicate the rights of homosexual persons. This campaign, if it limited itself to outlawing social discrimination against people of homosexual orientation, would be good and necessary. Unfortunately, however, the campaign in question often claims for homosexual acts complete social, legal and moral parity with heterosexual acts. Sometimes it even claims for homosexual relationships parity with lawful marriage. Such claims damage homosexual persons themselves, and can have the sad effect of encouraging people to accept definitive public classification of themselves as homosexuals. This undermines their motivation and their effort to control the expression of their sexuality. It can also encourage others, whose sexuality is not exclusively or irreversibly homosexual, to indulge in homosexual acts and habits, thereby reinforcing their homosexual orientation. There are young people whose sexual orientation may not as yet be finally determined; but they can be led by homosexual propaganda into paths destructive of their personality and of their moral integrity. The initiation of young people into homosexual activity is particularly detestable. Homosexual prostitution of children is one of the ugliest crimes of our age.

126. Persons with homosexual tendencies or habits need and deserve sympathetic, compassionate and patient pastoral care. Their personal suffering can be bitter, their struggle agonising, their sense of loneliness and exclusion intense. They need understanding. They need respect. It is unchristian to look on homosexuals with disgust or disdain, merely because they are of this personality type. Above all, there can be no condonation of violence against such persons. It is not a moral fault to have dispositions and tendencies. Each person has to observe the moral law and achieve his or her moral destiny within the personality structure and the sexual orientation which he or she has. Heterosexual persons too have to control sexual urges; and for some the struggle can be very much harder than for others. When the struggle is abnormally and over poweringly intense, the person's moral responsibility can be lessened, and in some cases, even removed. This applies to both heterosexuals and homosexuals. The contrast frequently drawn between them in this regard is not justified Both are equally called to chastity. Both have to struggle against temptation in order to be chaste. Homosexual men and women who maintain chastity through moral mastery of their sexuality can attain high moral virtue, just as heterosexuals can. Their struggle deserves admiration and support. Such homosexual persons can, no less than others, acquire real holiness of life. They should be supported by the Christian community, and especially by compassionate and enlightened guidance from priests, in their efforts to do so.

127. Pre-marital and extra-marital chastity is a demanding challenge for the Christian, especially the young Christian, in today's world. Yet our situation in the closing quarter of the twentieth century is not very different, in this respect, from the situation of the Greek and Roman world of the second half of the first century, in which the Gospel of Christ was first preached. Our contemporaries who advocate "free love" and "sex without guilt" would have felt completely at home in the Graeco-Roman culture of the time of St. Paul. Sex was then regarded as a divine power, personified in deities such as the goddesses Venus and Aphrodite. In these cults, sex was an object of religious worship; but popular attitudes to them were quite comparable with the modern cult of the body as a sex object. The art devoted to these deities quickly degenerated into the equivalent of modern pornography. Some of our terms for sexual excess come from the names of these two pagan deities.

128. In the permissive pagan culture of Greece, one city stood out as notorious for sexual licentiousness. This was the city of Corinth. The word "to Corinthise" had come to mean, "to live a life of debauchery". A loose-living girl was called a Corinthian girl". It was every bit as difficult for young men and girls, for adult men and women, to be chaste in Corinth then as it has become in our world today. Yet it is to the young men and girls, the men and women of Corinth that St. Paul stated the firm demands of chastity in the body for the Lord, at the same time depicting the beauty and the glory of sexuality transfigured by the Lord.

129. It is in his first Letter to the Corinthians that St. Paul deals most fully with the matter of chastity. We can detect in this chapter traces of the arguments and objections which some Christians in Corinth at the time brought up against St. Paul's teaching. The arguments which they put up are remarkably like those which are used today by defenders of the so-called "new morality". Some Corinthians argued- "For me, there are no forbidden things" (1 Corinthians 6:12). By this they meant that for them morality was not a matter of law. They would have called law mere "legalism", and would have held that it was opposed to the spirit of the Gospel. They would profess to live by the Spirit, not by the "letter of the law". They would presumably have said they were "following their conscience", not "mechanically obeying a law". The whole of their language would be very familiar to us from contemporary discussion and modern "liberal" arguments. The next of these slogans which St. Paul quotes is: "Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food" (1 Corinthians 6:13). The argument is that sex is just as natural as eating and should be just as free. It is an argument that is often used today by defenders of "sexual freedom". Bertrand Russell, one of the great pioneers of this "new morality", used this argument fifty years ago in a famous book, Marriage And Morals. "Sex", he wrote, "is a natural need, like food and drink".

130. St. Paul's reply goes immediately to the Christian point. Sex would be just a physical need, he grants, if man was only like the animals, a body that dies and then is no more. But no! Man's body is destined for the resurrection. It is redeemed, sanctified, consecrated by the Lord and for the Lord. "The body", he declares, "is not meant for fornication; it is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body" (1 Corinthians 6:13-14). This body, with the sexuality which so profoundly marks it as male or female, is to rise from the dead and be always with the Lord: God, who raised the Lord from the dead, will by his power raise us up too (1 Corinthians 6:14). 131. The fundamental truth about man is that in Christ he has become a totally new being. Through baptism, the Christian's body now, mysteriously but really, has been made one with the Body of Christ. To sin with one's body, to sin sexually, is, therefore, to desecrate the body of Christ. St. Paul says this quite clearly: You know, surely, that your bodies are members making up the body of Christ; do you think that I can take parts of Christ's body and join them to the body of a prostitute? Never! (1 Corinthians 6:15). St. Paul is recalling here the words of the Book of Genesis, repeated by Our Lord: "A man must cling to his wife and the two become one body". Fornication for a Christian would, therefore, be a matter of forcing the body of Christ into a sinful union.

132. By baptism, the Christian's whole body is anointed with the Holy Spirit, consecrated and sealed by the oil of chrism. Thereby, the whole being of the Christian is marked as sharing in the being of Christ. Chrismed, Christened, the Christian shares, body and soul, in the holiness of Christ. The use of his or her sexuality becomes a source and means of holiness. The only proper use of sexuality for the Christian is within the holy state of marriage; for only within marriage "in the Lord" are the body and the sex of the Christian used "for the Lord". The marriage of baptised persons is a reflection of Christ's love for the Church, his Bride. Only within marriage can sexual love share in the beauty and holiness of Christ's love and communicate that love of Christ to the world. As well as being a sin against God, sexual sin is a sin against the Church; for it prevents sexual union from being what Christ willed it to be, a sign of his love for the Church and for the world.

133. St. Paul says that to fornicate is unlike other sins because it is "to sin against your own body". We can never forget that our bodies are precisely not our own. Keep away from fornication. All the other sins are committed outside the body; but to fornicate is to sin against your own body. Your body, you know, is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you since you received him from God. You are not your own property; you have been bought and paid for. That is why you should use your body for the glory of God (1 Corinthians 6:18-20).

134. We know the reverence that is due to sacred places and to sacred things. Violation of this sacredness is sacrilege or profanation. Our body is sacred, the temple of God, the place where God dwells. Any degrading treatment of the human body is the profanation of a sacred thing. For Christians, unchastity too has about it something of the character of the sacrilegious.

135. God created our sexual being in His own image, created it for goodness and for loveliness. Christ redeemed it for grace and for gracefulness. The presence of grace in sexual love makes it, quite literally, "graceful". The absence of grace from sexual love makes it, quite literally, "disgraceful". Marriage is ordained by God to make sexual love graceful.

136. This is the meaning of chastity as St. Paul spelled it out for the Corinthians. That is how he would spell it out for Irish men and women were he speaking today: "Give glory to the Lord Jesus Christ in your body". That is what chastity does. It does not deny or downgrade sex. It is not ashamed of the body. On the contrary, chastity uplifts sex to its true nobility and dignity. It gives sex its true beauty and glory. Chastity enables us, through our sexuality, to give glory to Christ in our body. Chastity is a sharing by us in the mystery of Christ's Transfiguration. Chastity is already Christ's risen glory shining through our bodies in a real transfiguration of our sexuality. In the words of St. Paul, chastity ‹whether it be chastity before marriage, or chastity within marriage, chastity lived in the world by the unmarried, or chastity in those who have consecrated their chastity to Christ in religious life> is "Christ in us, our hope of glory". Our efforts to be chaste take their assurance from the promise of St. Paul: When Christ is revealed ‹and he is your life> you too will be revealed in all your glory with him. (Colossians 3:14). (16.2)

137. The virtue of chastity is much misunderstood in the modern world. In many circles it is no longer fashionable even to talk about it. Chastity is thought by some to be negative, telling us only what we must not do. It is thought to be connected with the idea that sexuality is in itself something impure or shameful. Undoubtedly, some preaching in the past did help to give that impression and did create wrongful guilt feelings about sexuality. The impression still remains with some that the Church's teaching associates sex only with fear, sin and guilt, or that sexual immorality is the only kind of immorality with which the Church is concerned. This present Pastoral Letter may be attacked on that very ground. This cannot be a reason for our failing now to present the Church's teaching in its challenging wholeness. We would fail our people if we did not do so. Now that the goodness and loveliness of sexuality can be better appreciated, we bishops and priests have all the greater obligation to present a positive and inspiring doctrine of sexuality to our people. Even the defective preaching sometimes found in the past usually came from a high appreciation of the sacredness of sex and of the grace-filled state of marriage. Essentially, the Church's teaching was always aimed at motivating men and women to preserve God's wonderful gift of sexuality for the sacramental state of marriage, because this alone expresses love in its fullest and deepest truth.

138. Chastity is the virtue by which we exercise self-control over our sexual life, so that it will not be wasted on make-believe loving but will be preserved for real pledged love. In the words of the poet, unchaste behaviour is the "expense of spirit in a waste of shame". Chastity is sexual self-control for the sake of true self-giving to the one true love of one's life. It is the way of "putting love into love". Through chastity, we accept sexuality from God with thankfulness, and use it as God intends for spreading His love in the world. Sexuality is a very strong passion; but it is not a blind instinct. It is under human control. Self-control is the very essence of freedom. So-called "free love" gives up the effort at sexual self control and makes sex the slave of passion. It is the opposite of freedom.

139. Chastity is a virtue to be practised by everyone, whatever their state in life. Sexual self control is necessary for priests and religious, for those preparing for marriage, for married people and for the single. All these categories are equally called to chastity, although it takes different forms for eac