404 CHASTE LOVE

YOUCAT Lesson 404

YOUCAT the catechism for Catholic youth

 404 What is chaste love?  Why should a Christian live a chaste life?

A chaste love is a love that defends itself against all the internal and external forces that might destroy it.  That person is chaste who has consciously accepted his sexuality and integrated it well into his personality.  Chastity and continence are not the same thing.  Someone who has an active sex life in marriage must be chaste, too.  A person acts chastely when his bodily activity is the expression of dependable, faithful love.  [2238]

Jesus in the house of his parents, by John Everett Millais. …..404

Chastity must not be confused with prudishness.  A person who lives chastely is not the plaything of his lusts but, rather, lives his sexuality deliberately, motivated by love, and as an expression of that love.  Unchaste behavior weakens love and obscures its meaning.  The Catholic Church advocates a holistic-ecological approach to sexuality.  This includes sexual pleasure, which is something good and beautiful; personal love; and fruitfulness, which means openness to having children.  It is the understanding of the Catholic Church that these three aspects of sexuality belong together.  Now if a man has one woman for sexual pleasure, a second to whom he writes love poetry, and a third with whom to have children, then he is exploiting all three and really loves none of them.

“Be sober, be watchful.  Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour.”  1 Peter 5:8

“Everything that makes a sexual encounter easy hastens at the same time its plunge into irrelevance.”  Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005 French philosopher)

Chastity (from Latin castus, clean, pure, temperate): the virtue by which a person who is capable of passion deliberately and resolutely reserves his erotic desires for love and resists the temptation to find lewd images in the media or to use others as a means of achieving his own satisfaction.

God is love and in Himself He lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion.   Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.—Pope St. John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, November 22, 1981

[2238]

II. THE VOCATION TO CHASTITY

The integrity of the person

2338 The chaste person maintains the integrity of the powers of life and love placed in him. This integrity ensures the unity of the person; it is opposed to any behavior that would impair it. It tolerates neither a double life nor duplicity in speech. (Compare Matthew 5:37.)¹²⁵ –Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition