If Catholic morality in the past seemed so obsessed with preventing sexual sin that it ignored sins of injustice, today “we have gone to the opposite extreme,” seemingly concerned only with how people treat others, not with how they treat the gift of their bodies, the papal preacher said.
“In the past, morality empha-sised the sins of the flesh so unila-terally that it led to real neuroses at times, to the detriment of concern for the duties toward our neighbour and to the detriment of the virtue of purity itself,” Capu-chin Father Raniero Cantalame-ssa told Pope Francis and members of the Roman Curia.
On the March 23 of Lent and Advent, Father Cantalamessa leads reflections for the Pope and his aides in the Redemptoris Mater Chapel of the Apostolic Palace. For the final Lenten meditation of 2018, he spoke on March 23 about the virtue of purity.
“Every day, people tend to contrast sins against purity with sins against a neighbour and to consider just the sin against a neighbour a real sin,” he said.
But the two go together, the Capuchin insisted. “Purity and love of neighbour represent dominion over self and the gift of self to others. How can I give myself if I do not possess myself but am a slave to my passions?
“It inevitably ends in using brothers and sisters, just as one uses one’s body. Those who cannot say ‘no’ to themselves cannot say ‘yes’ to brothers and sisters.” But today, “we live in a society, in terms of morals, that has fallen back into full-blown paganism and full-blown idolatry of sex,” the 83-year-old preacher told the Pope and Curia officials.
