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Illustration: Archetypal lovers in Romeo and Juliet by Frank Dicksee, 1884
Pope Francis’ Cycle of Catechesis. Vices and Virtues. 4. Lust
Paul VI Audience Hall – Wednesday, 17 January 2024
“To love is to respect the other person,
to seek his or her happiness,
to cultivate empathy for his or her feelings,
to dispose oneself in regard to the knowledge of a body, a psychology,
and a soul that are not our own, and that must be contemplated for the beauty they bear”
Scripture Reading: 1st Letter to the Thessalonians (4:3-5)
For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust, like heathen who do not know God;
Brothers and sisters,
Let us continue our journey on the subject of vices and virtues.
The ancient Fathers teach us that, after gluttony, the second ‘demon’ – that is, vice – that is always crouching at the door of the heart is that of lust, called porneia in Greek.
While gluttony is an insatiable appetite for food, this second vice is a kind of ‘lust’ for another person.
It is, the poisoned bond that people have with each other, especially in the area of sexuality.
Be careful: in Christianity, there is no condemnation of the sexual instinct.
One book of the Bible, the Song of Songs, is a beautiful poem of love between two lovers.
However, this beautiful dimension, the sexual dimension, the dimension of love, of our humanity is not without its dangers, so much so that St Paul already had to del with it in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. St Paul writes: “It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among the pagans” (5:1).
The apostle’s accusation concerns precisely the unhealthy attitude of some Christians towards sexuality.
But let us look at the human experience, the experience of falling in love.
There are so many newlyweds here: you can talk about this. None of us know why this mystery happens, and why it is such a shattering experience in people’s lives, none of us know. One person falls in love with another, falling in love just happens. It is one of the most astonishing realities of existence.
Most of the songs you hear on the radio are about it: loves that shine, loves that are always sought and never achieved, loves that are full of joy, or that torment us to the point of tears.
If it is not polluted by vice, falling in love is one of the purest feelings.
A person in love becomes generous, likes to givev gifts, writes letters and poems.
He/she stops thinking of one’s self and concentrates entirely on the other person. This is beautiful.
And if you ask a person in love, “Why do you love?” they won’t have an answer: In so many ways their love is unconditional, without any reason.
You have to be patient if this love, which is so powerful, is also a little naive: lovers don’t really know the face of the other, they tend to idealise them, they are ready to make promises whose weight they don’t immediately grasp. This “garden”, where miracles multiply, is not safe from evil. It is polluted by the demon of lust, and this vice is particularly odious for at least two reasons. At least two.
First, because it destroys relationships between people.
Unfortunately, the daily news is enough to prove this reality. How many relationships that began in the best of ways have turned into poisonous ones, in which the other person is possessed, in which there is no respect and no sense of limits?
These are loves in which chastity has been missing: a virtue not to be confused with sexual abstinence – chastity is something different from sexual abstinence – but it must be linked to the will never to possess the other person.
To love is to respect the other person, to seek his or her happiness, to cultivate empathy for his or her feelings, to dispose oneself in regard to the knowledge of a body, a psychology, and a soul that are not our own, and that must be contemplated for the beauty they bear.
This is love, and love is beautiful. Lust, on the other hand, makes a mockery of all this: it plunders, it robs, it consumes in haste, it does not want to listen to the other, but only to its own needs and pleasures; it finds every courtship tedious, it does not seek that synthesis between reason, instinct and feeling which would help us to live our existence wisely. Lust seeks only shortcuts: it does not understand that the road to love must be taken slowly, and that this patience, far from being synonymous with boredom, allows us to make our loving relationships happy.
But there is a second reason why lust is a dangerous vice.
Among all human pleasures, sexuality has a powerful voice.
It involves all the senses; it dwells both in the body and in the psyche, and this is very beautiful;
but if it is not disciplined with patience, if it is not inscribed in a relationship and in which two individuals transform it into a loving dance, it becomes a chain that deprives man of his freedom.
Sexual pleasure which is a gift from God is undermined by pornography: satisfaction without relationship which can lead to forms of addiction.
We must defend love, the love of the heart, of the mind, of the body, pure love in the giving of oneself to the other. And this is the beauty of sexual intercourse.
Winning the battle against lust, against the “objectification” of the other, can be a lifelong endeavour. But the prize of this battle is the most important of all, because it is the preservation of that beauty which God wrote into his creation when He conceived of love between man and woman, as being for the purpose of using one another, but of loving one another.
This beauty that makes us believe that it is better to build a history together than to go looking for adventures. there are so many Don Juans out there; it is better to build a history together than to go looking for adventures; it is better to cultivate tenderness than to bow to the demon of possession – true love does not possess, it gives; it is better to serve than to conquer. For when there is no love, life is sad, it is sad loneliness.
