Marital Intimacy is Worth the Risk

After Four Forced Abortions,

Ballerina Chooses Life!

by Susan Fox 

Oh she was lovely, the perfect ballerina. But her mother wanted her to stay that way.

So my dear young friend, danced and played and frolicked — with many men.

She got pregnant. Her mother forced her to have an abortion so that her perfect figure would not be marred.

She got pregnant again, and had another forced abortion.

She got pregnant again, and again. In all, she had four abortions, and then she slipped from her mother’s leash and married her dearly beloved Robert, a virgin. He adored her. He had lived a chaste life before marriage, waiting to meet her. When I knew her, we called her the one-armed bandit because she always had her baby daughter in one arm while her other arm was busy doing other things.

She loved her husband. I watched her straighten his tie with deep affection. But she was long past enjoying conjugal intimacy. She told me she was burned out sexually because of her promiscuous life before marriage. 

So she explained to me how they had relations. There are positions in sexual intercourse that are not uncomfortable, but which do not require the active participation of the female partner. The man is able to reach a climax, and his wife need not be involved in the conjugal act.

This story still makes me sad. Intimate relations that give pleasure to both married partners is a gift one spouse surrenders to the other. It is the gift of chastity. Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being, according to the Catholic Catechism. It’s worth fighting for. 

“Sexuality becomes personal and truly human when it is integrated into the relationship of one person to another, in the complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman.” (CCC 2337) The Catholic Church is not talking about faking a response.

Jane was cheating Robert out of something important — her female passion responding to his masculine initiative. They were not using contraception. They were married, in love, and wanted children. But Jane had previously used men and been an object of use by men, and now she was left with no enthusiasm for sex.Concerning Jane and Robert’s situation, Pope Saint John Paul II said “From the viewpoint of loving another person, from the position of

Pope Saint John Paul II

altruism, it must be required that the conjugal act should serve not merely to reach the climax of sexual arousal on one side, but happen in harmony, not at the other person’s expense, but with that person’s involvement.”

Strangely enough the Jewish founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, (1856-1939)  agreed with the Catholic Church on this one point: sexual intimacy should be altruistic. It should combine affection and desire, but a mature person will want, altruistically, the good of his or her partner. And that means both participate in the act. 

Sigmund Freud 

Freud and Pope Saint John Paul II said these things so that people like Jane and Robert would have a guideline on how to lead happy lives. St. Paul cared too, warning couples, “Do not torture your wife! Or your husband!” 

I'm joking. My marital chastity professor often speaks of historical figures who "tortured" their spouses by withholding sex because of scruples. The exact quote of St. Paul is this: “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.” (1Cor 7:3) I knew a priest who ran into a couple arguing about this issue in a restaurant. She wanted to stop having intimate relations so she could pursue her prayer life. The priest leaned over their table and told the wife she was wrong. 

Jane’s problem obviously stemmed from the poison in our culture . She rebelled against her

mother by engaging in relationships with multiple partners. Affectionate families are more likely to raise virgins. The poor little dancer did not receive love at home, only adoration for her outward appearance and her ability to perform. I think Robert could have and may have changed that little by little because he did love her. He didn't treat her as an object of use. He treated her as a beloved person,

with whom he intended to stay married exclusively until death. They were both open to new life. That is the Catholic definition of true marriage.

In his article on “Erotic Traps,” famous German sexologist Ulrich Clement  explains  that diminished desire in sexual intimacy is not a lack but a symptom. That’s true. We are talking about a pair of young newlyweds in which the bride does not enjoy sex because of her previous lack of chastity and multiple abortions. 

He also notes that partners fail to communicate about their differences in sexual desire to protect themselves against the risk of being hurt.  Did Jane tell Robert about her trick of not participating? It was something

Ulrich Clement 

she whispered to a female friend on the side. And would Robert, who never had sex before, know something was missing? Maybe with experience and maturity, he would recognise it. Men are thrilled by the noises their wives make when they are responsively involved in their lovemaking.

It’s interesting the way Clement begins his article: “Some people have often firm conceptions, such as the fact that sex must be or should be present in a relationship. But with these conceptions they are building traps, in which the desire is slowly misplaced.” Perhaps the trap in Jane’s relationship with Robert is that they did need a long chaste courtship before marriage. Sex was not immediately necessary. But given her past, it probably didn’t occur to her to insist on such a thing.

Clement is right. If the couple does not bring the underlying problem to the surface and talk about it, it will have lamentable effects in the erotic context. But it need not destroy the marriage especially if the couple had children and practiced Natural Family Planning earlier in their marriage.  NFP has a honeymoon effect.  

What if Jane and Robert later tried Natural Family Planning to postpone a pregnancy after the baby was weaned? This might

have helped their sexual relationship. Jane needed a period of romantic abstinence. She needed courtship without sex. She needed to know she was loved for herself. 

Using NFP, one must abstain for a few days from intercourse during the woman’s fertile period and then one can engage in marital intimacy the rest of the cycle. Practicing NFP requires mutual decision making and deeper communication. Robert might have finally found the key to open Jane’s heart to loving sexual intimacy.

“If the couple does not change their sexual behavior pattern, then they will continue having problems involving sexuality. With certain painful, but nevertheless trusted discontent, the couple remains in the foreseeable comfort zone of their relationship,” Clement wrote. 

Certainly this is true for many couples. Suddenly, the husband of one my friends quit having relations with her and wouldn’t tell her why. Communication in the marriage deteriorated. It appeared they were headed for a divorce, not by her choice.  When a spouse suddenly stops having conjugal relations without explanation these questions arise “Do you still love me? Are we still together?” Many times the problem is a medical one, and the spouse with difficulty is unable to speak about it.

Clement writes about a routine quality in everyday sexuality. Couples who use NFP rarely feel sex is a duty. His viewpoint is the  product of the sexual revolution, pornography, the deadening of hearts, the depersonalisation of conjugal life. 

It is the breaking of the "nuptial bond between man and life" as outlined by Gabriel Marcel in the Mystery of the Family. In short, modern man is bored. Marcel wrote in 1942 about human

beings losing a sense of reverence and awe for life itself because of the dissolution of the family through divorce, contraception, abortion, promiscuity, unchastity, treating man as a machine whose sexuality can be fixed with a pill. Chaste married relations without contraception, open to new life, are rich with joy. Throughout the years of a long relationship, a thousand ways to delight one another will occur to the couple. And only a few of those involve actual sexual intimacy.

Sexologists are not trained to take this perspective. They realise conjugal intimacy happens between persons, but it is not their starting point. Sexual ethics cannot be sexology, a view of man and woman that posits the problem exclusively from the point of view of “body and sex,” wrote Pope Saint John Paul II in Love and Responsibility. “The only fully true view is the one that proceeds from a thorough analysis of 

the fact that a woman and a man are persons, and that their love is a reciprocal relation of persons.” Sexology, focusing on biology, medicine and the efficient climax, can only provide a partial view of the matter.

Many fear that communication about a problem of this nature will risk the relationship, according to Clement. But isn’t the reward of a lifelong happy marriage worth the risk? 

“From nothing, nothing comes. Without investment there is no result,” Clement admonished. I think it is well worthwhile to continue intimate relations throughout the entire marriage barring illness or the rare case when the mutual decision is made to live celibate for the glory of God.

In old age, the NFP couple will already be habituated to voluntary abstinence, so the necessity of living without sex in the midst of illness will not be an undue stress on the marriage. However, if one wants to continue that side of the marriage, the couple must take action. 

“The longer a relationship lasts, the more is eroticism a matter of decision and of active organisation. While with young sex the desire precedes the sexual acting, the decision for desire proceeds with mature sex,” Clement wrote, explaining that marital intimacy needs to be invited into long-term relationships. 

Take the risk.

Bibliography

Clement, Ulrich. “Erotic Traps.” Psychology Heute Journal, (2006)

Wojtyla, Karol. Love and Responsibility. Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2013.

Marcel, Gabriel. The Mystery of the Family.

     

I AM LOVED BY JESUS

Sermon by Fr. Joseph Mungai, FMH

4th Sunday of Lent, March 11, 2018

Hospital Chaplaincy, Long Island, New York

Pope Francis in pink vestments for Laetare Sunday in Lent

This is the fourth Sunday of Lent, Laetare Sunday. We are to rejoice! 

Life on the earth is full of difficulties. Life is challenging. We partake in many sufferings of Jesus. 

On this joyful Sunday, we are assured of God's love. No matter what I am going through as an individual, God knows all about it. He loves me so much no matter my history.

In the first reading (2Chron. 36:14-16,19-23), the Israelites and their leaders rebelled against God. He did not give up on them but he constantly sent His messengers to warn them. God did not give up give up on the Israelites but he continued watching over them.

Friends, we're very strong and safe when we

Joyous Fr. Joe Mungai

stay  in union with Jesus. The rebelliousness of the Israelites made them vulnerable; they were taken captive for seventy years because of their disobedience.  

However God still intervened, even after they suffered and learnt many lessons. God loves you so much that He came not to condemn, but to save us. You're worth the life of Christ the Lord!

We're often like Nicodemus (Jn 3: 14-21). Though we want to give ourselves to God, we do it, not fully but in bits. We are Nicodemus, when we know of God's love but we want  

revenge. We are Nicodemus when we acknowledge God's generosity but we're still stingy. When we are reluctant in matters of faith we become Nicodemus.  Today, Jesus comes to pull us into the fullness of faith. Let us cling to Jesus. Let's dive into the deep pool of Jesus' love. You will not swim alone. Cling cling to Jesus, He loves you, He is ready to save us.

Don't be cheated. God is a Friend, a Lover, the Beloved waiting and seeking us anytime -- day or night.

Don't be deceived. Go home carrying this message:

  

 I AM LOVED BY JESUS.

Fr. Joe has been relocated from Kenya to Long Island, New York. We wish him blessings in his new mission to the hospitals.

Make the Solution Mercy

Ireland, Save the 8th Amendment

by Susan Fox

Someone is missing. 

In 1969, a 22-year-old pregnant and

unmarried woman began a legal struggle that would culminate in the ignoble U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, legalising abortion. 

Claiming she was too poor to travel to any of the six states* where abortion was legal, Norma McCovey, aka Jane Roe, sought the right to terminate her third pregnancy. 

Norma never had an abortion, and her child — adopted in 1970 —  would be 48 years old today.

Norma McCorvey & her attorney after the 1973 decision

But since then, 60 million Americans have lost their lives to abortion. That is more than 46 times the number of lives lost in every U.S. War since the American Revolution (1.309 million). And what about their missing descendants?  Geneticists have found 800 million men living today descended from 11 Asian men, including Genghis Khan.

Someone is indeed missing.

In the United States in 2016 and 2017, money almost stopped changing hands. Money velocity is at its lowest level since the Great Depression.** Money needs people to move it around.  

But many are missing.

That’s why  U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan supported immigration in the bi-partisan budget signed into law Nov 2, 2015. American businesses need labor! Since 1973, 60 million potential labourers have been killed in the United States. 

People over 65 years are expected to outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history in the next two decades. This is a drag on the economy. Economic growth is a function of an expanding labor force and rising productivity. (Source: Wall Street Journal)

In 2016, we almost saw the collapse of the global economy as China’s one-child policy created plunging world commodity prices. China practiced forced abortion and sterilisation for 37 years! Workers in Africa, happy with their new found, middle-class-status, committed suicide when China stopped buying their country’s natural resources. There went the jobs! 

The good times rolled. Sure they did. In Africa, they rolled and then they rolled right on by.  

Face it, one nation’s abortion law affects the entire world. 

In 1983, the Irish saw that U.S. citizens were stripped of their right to life by their own courts. So — with great foresight — they passed the 8th Amendment.

It guarantees the equal right to life of the unborn child and its mother. “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

No court can overturn it. No elected legislature can change it. Tens of thousands of Irish citizens under the age of 45 are alive today thanks to the 8th Amendment. 

Now in May, Ireland is considering the overthrow of its own life protecting law. The inconvenience of traveling to England for an abortion is their excuse. Ireland is not a tolerant place for unwed mothers, they say, citing one extreme case where a young mother and child died in the street while she was giving birth. Irish Health Minister Simon Harris accuses Ireland of being “cold, uncaring, neglectful” because it prohibits abortion.

Project Ireland 2040 plans for 1 million more people
Will they be Irish? 

Ireland actually has the best maternal healthcare and one of the lowest maternal death rates in the world.  “So abortion campaigners are focused on smashing Ireland’s laws because they know pro-lifers the world over can look to Ireland as a real, proven example of why abortion is never necessary,” Niamh Uí Bhriain,  a spokeswoman for the Life Institute in Ireland, told Breitbart News in an interview. 

U.S. billionaire George Soros, whose investment strategy is to destroy economies, societies and their currencies so he can profit in a downturn, has a well funded plan to legalise abortion in Ireland, according to documents leaked from his Open Society Foundations, according to Breitbart News. 

The leaked documents say that the Soros’ foundation created a three-year-program to “reverse the tide of fetal personhood laws and constitutional amendments” and to generate “a robust set of organisations advancing and defending sexual and reproductive rights.” 

These documents show that Soros viewed the legalisation of same sex marriage in Ireland in 2015  as providing an excellent opportunity to advance the pro-abortion agenda against Amendment 8. 

One hundred thousand Irish rallied to the cause against abortion on March 12, 2018. Uí Bhriain said that these crowds in Dublin city centre demonstrated that a sleeping giant has been awakened, according to LifeNews.com. "These huge numbers are a rising of the people against the media and political elites and against the powerful international abortion industry who have poured millions into a campaign attacking out pro-life laws. Ireland is at a defining point in our history, and we are challenging the people to reject the abortion industry and to demand a better answer for mothers and babies," she said. "Abortion has no place in a compassionate and progressive society." 

I strongly  sympathise with the plight of young girls and women caught in an unexpected pregnancy. I have looked into their sorrowful faces when they leave the abortion clinic. But isn’t the proper solution mercy? Should a child lose its life because we as a society are unwilling to show compassion to its mother? 

In the U.S., the abortion rate is declining. In part, it is because we have massively more crisis pregnancy centres than abortion clinics.*** As soon as I volunteered to witness outside an abortion clinic, I found out the crisis pregnancy centre — loaded with available resources for housing, jobs and medical care — was right across the street. 

Norma McCorvey regretted causing the death

"I am Roe no more," said Norma McCorvey, who converted to Catholicism in the late '90s

of 60 million Americans. She was in a medical waiting room, "When I noticed a fetal development poster. The progression was so obvious, the eyes were so sweet. It hurt my heart, just looking at them.  I kept seeing the picture of that tiny, 10-week-old embryo, and I said to myself, that's a baby! It's as if blinders just fell off my eyes. Abortion wasn't about 'products of conception.' It wasn't about 'missed periods.' It was about children being killed in their mother's wombs! All those years I was wrong.  Working in an abortion clinic, I was wrong. No more of this first trimester, second trimester, third trimester stuff. Abortion—at any point—was wrong. It was so clear. Painfully clear."

She became a fiery opponent of abortion in every case. 

“I am Roe no more,” she said. 

Norma realised somebody is missing.

Please vote to save the 8th Amendment.

*Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, and Washington

 **Money Velocity is the number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and services per unit of time. It is at 1.43 at the end of the fourth quarter of 2017. It bottomed out at 1.15 during the Great Depression.

*** We have 2,752 U.S. crisis pregnancy centres versus 1,793 abortion clinics, but only 704 stand alone abortion businesses. 

Heat the World with the Warmth of Virtue, the Splendour of Right Teaching

The Catholic Church Deeply Cares About Principled Philosophy

"If anyone loves righteousness, her labor are virtues; for she teaches self-control and prudence, justice and courage.”(Wisdom 8:7)

by Susan Fox

Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) had his finger on the pulse of modern civilisation when he wrote the Encyclical Aeterni Patris on the Restoration of Christian Philosophy in 1879. 

After the Protestant Reformation, philosophy dived into a host of “ism’s” based on nominalism, a doctrine that universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality; only particular objects exist. That made it impossible for the Catholic Church to forge a relationship with most secular philosophy.

This wasn’t the glory days of the Middle Ages when a Catholic realist, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), used the logic of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) to present revealed and created truth in a coherent manner. Such scholasticism reached its highest point under Aquinas, but it became closed in on itself. It could not address the hot new materialism that rose alongside the Reformation. Men wanted to take apart the universe and study it. They couldn’t do that with scholasticism.

"Whoso turns his attention to the bitter strifes of these days and seeks a reason for the troubles that vex public and private life must come to the conclusion that a fruitful case of the evils which now afflict…us lies in this: that false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses. For since it is in the very nature of man to follow the guide of reason in his actions, if his intellect sins at all, his will soon follows," Pope Leo wrote.

And in a very determined manner, Pope Leo recalled St. Thomas Aquinas, who “like the sun…heated the world with the warmth of his virtues and filled it with the splendour of his teaching.”

Pope Leo was right to be alarmed.

Pope Leo XIII

The word virtue was slipping from the English vocabulary. A search online shows that the use of the word “virtue” has declined dramatically since 1800 from 0.016 percent of English words used to 0.00279 percent in 2008, according to the Ngram Viewer.

And why should we care? “Be all that you can be!” we sing. But we rarely reflect what that requires — living virtuously. Virtue raises the level of existence of the human person. By living virtuously, man reaches his ultimate potential. “The virtuous person is in such a way that, from the innermost tendency of his being, he realises the good through his actions,” said Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in The Christian Idea of Man.

And so Pope Leo begged, cajoled and encouraged modern philosophers to a practical reform of philosophy, “aimed at restoring the renowned teaching of Thomas Aquinas and winning it back to its ancient beauty.”

One year after Pope Leo died, Pieper was born (1904-1997). He answered the call of the Holy Father, giving us a beautiful new Thomism. Among his great works were The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance; Living the Truth; and The Christian Idea of Man.

More recently, Rev. Dr. Francis John Selman gave us the thoughtful basic introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas in Aquinas 101.

Both men answer the question, which began with Aristotle, “What is virtue?”

Fr. Selman dives right in with Aquinas, who defines a virtue as an act consistent with reason. The habit of virtue that perfects the powers of the soul and disposes it to do good is acquired by repeatedly choosing a good action, according to St Thomas. Fr. Selman — mimicking Aquinas — addresses three kinds of virtue: moral (justice, temperance and fortitude); intellectual (prudence, understanding and wisdom); and theological (faith, hope and charity).

But it is Josef Pieper who restores Aquinas to his ancient beauty in a manner attractive to modern times using Scripture. He begins his description of virtue by describing the Christian exemplar for man with one word: “Christ.”

Original man created in God’s image lived original innocence before the Fall, but an even more beautiful image of man emerged from the dust and ashes of Original Sin, and that is the Face of Jesus Christ. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. In doing so, He endowed us with an unfailing moral compass, the Incarnate God, Jesus Christ Himself “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt 5:48)

But how many of us have seen and observed the actions of Our Heavenly Father, who is invisible? Jesus said, “My Father goes on working, and so do I.” (John 5:17) When have we seen the Father working? When has He come to the office carrying a briefcase, or tilled a field accompanied by angels?

But we know Him! We recognise His perfection in the life, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ.“The Son is

the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” (Col 1:15)

That is our moral compass. The norms of Christianity are contained in the four gospels especially in the Sermon on the Mount, which all describe the words, teaching, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is God’s thinking, not ours! The first will be last and the last first? Love your enemies? Pick up your cross? If you even look at a woman or man lustfully, you have already committed adultery in your heart? Marriage is an unbreakable bond? What, no divorce? From our perspective, God thinks like an alien. But that’s the way we are called to think and act as well. That is the redeemed image of man, and Pieper lays it out for us in seven theses.

Let’s categorise them according to steps on a staircase. Pieper begins with the theological virtues, which Fr Selman said, are for “reaching and uniting us with our last end, which is God.” Faith, hope and charity are the only virtues which cannot be acquired naturally. They need God’s grace.

A Christian, Pieper says, is a person, who in his faith is aware of the reality of the Trinity. We are created to know, love and serve God. Love begins with knowing. The next step is hope. We look forward in hope to embracing God in eternal life. The third step is love. We actually see and serve the Person of Jesus Christ in everyone we meet. This love for God and man offers us a supernatural form of seeing and is stronger than natural love. No virtue is possible without charity.

The fourth step is prudence. The Christian lives in reality. He will not allow his will to dictate to him without reference to the truth of the situation. This is exactly what Pope Leo was talking about — modern man does not live like that. He tries to create his own truth, to be his own god. His life is turned inside out following every selfish whim. So we see people choosing to change their sex through surgery and hormone

Richard Hernandez, now as lizard goddess Tiamat

treatment, and using plastic surgery to turn themselves into an alien or a lizard goddess. These are imprudent actions, not based on the reality of who is man?

The fifth step is the virtue of justice, the Christian living in truth with the other. The practice of justice is required of people living in community. It can almost be said that the individual (though he is the only one who can be virtuous) is not responsible so much as the “we,” the social whole, the people.

In the sixth step of Pieper’s theses, the Christian is ready to suffer death — if necessary — for the truth and the

Fortitude by Raphael

realisation of justice for himself and the other. This is courage or fortitude. It is especially exemplified in the lives of the martyrs.

The seventh step is moderation, also known as temperance. The Christian does not allow his desire for pleasure, possessions and enjoyment to become destructive to his own person.

These seven steps, the three theological virtues, which unite us to God, and the four cardinal virtues, (prudence, justice,

Hope, Charity & Faith

temperance and fortitude), have actually faded from the mind and imagination of modern man, Pieper asserts. It is the same alarm sounded by Pope Leo in 1879.

Fr. Selman is more practical when writing about Aquinas. I am glad to have read his text as it is very precise, but Pieper is the one who speaks Vatican Two-ese. Before Vatican II, we had — dare I say boring? — official Church text in many of our documents. After Vatican II, everything was enriched by Scripture. Pieper seems to have adopted this practice.

Fr. Selman calls the cardinal virtues the hinges of the door. One enters the house by the door— by the four cardinal virtues. The theological virtues come at the end. They are the last step, leading us to our end, God Himself, in Fr. Selman’s exegesis.

But Pieper argues passionately that the “first and most distinctive virtue of the Christian is the supernatural love of God and neighbor.” And therefore the theological virtues are of a higher order than the four cardinal virtues, which are rooted in the theological virtues.

I like both approaches. Pieper enlarges my understanding. But Fr. Selman is coming at the issue from the point of view of spiritual direction. In dealing with a soul, a priest — like a good carpenter — might oil the hinges on the door before he enters the house, so he begins working with the cardinal virtues. But if his goal is to get the soul to heaven, he will have to tinker with the theological virtues, which unite us with God, our last end.

This characterises Fr. Selman’s approach:

As you come to Him, the living stone, rejected by men, but chosen and precious in God’s sight, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in Scripture: “See, I lay in Zion a stone, a chosen and precious cornerstone; and the one who believes in Him will never be put to shame.(1Peter 2:4-6)

Which is the most important virtue? One really can’t have any virtue at all without having them all. But prudence directs all the cardinal virtues. The good accords with reality. Prudence allows us to choose the good based on real contact with objective reality. A woman decides her unborn child is a “blob of cells.” This untruth allows her to commit an abortion, an action imprudent, unjust, cowardly and intemperate. She is not in contact with objective reality. Many women, who have had an abortion, have subsequently suffered mental health issues.

That makes Prudence critically important. Pieper found that

Prudence in the Nave of St. Peter's Basilica

psychology confirms the necessity of an objective viewpoint for a healthy mind.

"The idealist ethics of the last century has largely forgotten and denied the determination of morality by reality,” Pieper wrote in Living the Truth, “But ethical realism receives very significant corroboration from the fact that modern psychology, beginning from an entirely different starting point, and influenced especially by the discoveries of psychiatry, emphatically declares that objectivity is one of the most important prerequisites of psychic health."

However, prudence requires the other moral virtues because the passions can blind the judgement of reason. And there is no virtue without charity.

“Everything in moderation.” Unfortunately, moderation or temperance has become the characteristic Christian virtue in popular thinking, according to Pieper. Moderation implies that man’s lower powers rebel against his spirit because of original sin, but modern liberalism has hollowed out this virtue and made Christianity emblematic of only this most private virtue, moderation. So Pieper says that moderation as popularly understood is overvalued, has given a negative meaning to passion and sensuality and must be considered to be the last of the four cardinal virtues, not the first.

While I personally find temperance (moderation) important on the road to holy happiness, the fact is that the world has minimalized Christianity to such an extent that we do need to emphasise more “manly” virtues like courage, perhaps by writing about the lives of the martyrs.

Passion is actually a neutral concept. It is neither evil nor good. Fr. Selman has a beautiful passage on passion, which he defines as emotion. He says when the body is moved by the soul in any strong emotion, we speak of being white with fear or radiant with joy. “The emotions are movements of our sensitive appetites when we apprehend things as good or evil.” A normal person is repulsed by evil, and attracted by good. Many philosophies in the world, like Stoicism and Buddhism, have sought to control the emotions by achieving a state of invulnerability. But Catholicism asks us to sanctify our senses and passions, not to deny them.

In 2001, as my mother lay dying of kidney failure and sepsis, she lost her sight. To the hospital, I brought a bouquet of herbs from my garden —rosemary, thyme, parsley, chive flowers, basil. Her sense of smell was still acute, and while blind for the first time in her 82 years, she did not fail to deeply appreciate the scent of those greens. She had lived a good Catholic life, and had deeply appreciated all that life offered. She did not deny her senses, she let God purify them. At the end of her life I watched her deep appreciation of living herbs when she could not even see them. It didn’t matter.

Pieper says the words “sensuality,” “passion,” “drive,” “desire” now have negative connotations because of the overvaluation of the virtue of moderation in the modern world. St. Thomas understands them to be all the stirrings of our faculty of sense and desire: i.e. love, hate, desire, pleasure, sadness, fear, anger. The Church Doctor — interested in everything — offers us remedies against pain and sadness. There are many kinds of pleasure (a form of rest from sadness) — tears, the sympathy of friends, contemplating the truth, having a good nap and taking a hot bath.

I have tried all these remedies, but I remember one sadness I had consistently for three days, which seemed to have no cause. I went grocery shopping across the street from a Catholic Church. As I loaded my groceries into the car, I looked up at the Church, and I said (to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist), “Hi, Jesus!” Suddenly my sadness ended. I was at peace.

It is comforting to think that St. Thomas found nothing intrinsically wrong in the emotions. They are only good or bad as they come under reason and the command of the human will in an act of virtue, Fr. Selman said. Without the reins of reason, the emotions can become a runaway wild horse. When not directed by reason (prudence), they cause disturbance. But in St. Thomas’ view we cannot have virtue without emotion because we are joyful when we act well and sorrowful when we do wrong.

The greatest evil is not physical pain, Fr. Selman said. It is guilt. What harms the soul is worse than what harms the body. “Thus not to think that evil is evil is a greater evil than any sorrow or pain, because this springs from a lack of judgement and right reason. To be deprived of these is an evil, because rationality constitutes the good of human nature. Thus repentance, like pity, is always a good sorrow,” Fr. Selman said.

And that is why Pope Leo was so insistently alarmed by the direction secular philosophy was taking. Besides losing the focus on objective reality as a basis for virtue, modern philosophy has almost erased discussion of the virtues. People realise their full potential made in the image and likeness of God by practicing virtue. Virtue is to imitate the beauty of the Incarnate God, who lived on earth 33 years and gave us His Church to lead us to Him in faith, hope and charity.

By grace enkindling these theological virtues, we are made sharers of Divine Nature, Fr. Selman reminds us, as wood shares in fire when it is set alight.

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." (Philippians 4:8)

If you enjoyed this, you might also like Truth or Consequences? A Dark Churning Blindness Engulfed Humanity. It was Called Nominalism

Bibliography

Pope Leo XIII. Aeterni Patris. August 4, 1879. http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html, 2.

Google Books, Ngram Viewer, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=7&case_insensitive=on&content=virtue&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cvirtue%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bvirtue%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BVirtue%3B%2Cc0

Pieper, Josef. The Christian Idea of Man. Translated by Dan Farrelly. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011.

Pieper, Josef. Living the Truth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. 

Selman, Francis. Aquinas101. Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 2007.