What if you are challenged with:
“The Church is obsessed with sex—premarital sex, divorce, contraception, homosexuality. Why can’t it shut up about it?”
What is your defense?
The Church isn’t obsessed with sex. Our culture is.
The Church has remained constant in its teachings on sexuality. It proposes the simple and beautiful understanding that God designed humans to express their sexuality in marriage—the lifelong partnership of man and woman, oriented to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of children.
But our culture has undergone dramatic changes. The last hundred years have seen a huge rise in divorces and unwed motherhood, the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, widespread use of contraception, abortion, the explosive growth of pornography due to the Internet, and homosexual “marriage.”
What changed was not the Church, but society, which became obsessed with sex and sexual license.
This would be a good reason for the Church to ramp up its discussion of sex—to speak about the problems of the day and help society find the healing it needs. Yet anyone who attends Catholic services knows one only rarely hears sex discussed from the pulpit. At most, there are only occasional brief comments and allusions.
This suggests the charge of the Church being “obsessed” is due to something else: the uneasy conscience of those taking sexual license.
Proverbs says the guilty “flee when no one pursues” (Prov. 28:1), and that is happening here. Those who engage in sexual sin know they are violating the Christian vision of human sexuality and suppose that in Church there must be constant, thunderous condemnations of what they are doing.
This is not the case. The Church’s message is far broader, but this one area can seem disproportionately emphasized if it is where a person is in conflict with the Christian vision. This creates a risk of missing the Church’s message altogether..
By Jimmy Akin
All mental preoccupations use up a lot of energy that can otherwise be used to better our world and ourselves. Sex is one of the things that easily lends itself to preoccupation. This is why it is given more attention than other things; although worry, anger, and unforgiveness are also major preoccupations for many people.
I think that we all want to have better control of our thoughts and inclinations. It starts with the understanding that we can’t do it without God. This is why we are told to trust in the Lord with all our hearts and lean not on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5-6), and to cast all of our care on Him (1Peter 5:6-7).
All mental preoccupations use up a lot of energy that can otherwise be used to better our world and ourselves. Sex is one of the things that easily lends itself to preoccupation. This is why it is given more attention than other things; although worry, anger, and unforgiveness are also major preoccupations for many people.
I think that we all want to have better control of our thoughts and inclinations. It starts with the understanding that we can’t do it without God. This is why we are told to trust in the Lord with all our hearts and lean not on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5-6), and to cast all of our care on Him (1Peter 5:6-7).