Transcript for:
Understanding Chastity and Related Offenses

In treating the Sixth Commandment, the Catechism speaks of offenses against chastity. The Catechism speaks about lust. Lust is a disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Disordered means seeing sexual pleasure for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purpose.

Masturbation is the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. The constant teaching of the Church is that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action. This is because sexual pleasure is sought outside the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.

To judge a subject's moral responsibility, one must take the following into consideration. The force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety, or other psychological or social factors that can lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability. Fornication is another violation against chastity. Fornication is carnal union between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman. It is contrary to human dignity and human sexuality, which is ordered toward unitive and procreative purposes.

It is a grave scandal when there is corruption of the young. Chastity is also violated through pornography and all that is associated with pornography. Pornography perverts the conjugal act.

by removing it from the intimacy of the partners. Each participant, actors, vendors, the public, is harmed gravely since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicitly profits from others. It is a grave offense.

Civil authority should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials. Another offense against chastity is prostitution. Prostitution sins gravely against the dignity of the person, reducing the prostitute to an instrument of sexual pleasure and defiling the body of the one who pays. Prostitution is a social scourge, and when children or adolescents are involved, the sin of scandal is attached.

The imputability of the offense can be attenuated by destitution, blackmail, or social pressure. And also as an offense against chastity, the Catechism speaks of rape, which of course is an offense against chastity and also an act of violence. Rape forcibly violates the sexual intimacy of another person. It does injury to justice and charity.

Rape deeply wounds the respect, freedom, and physical and moral integrity to which every person has a right. It causes grave damage that can mark the victim for life. It is always an intrinsically evil act. And of course, more grave is incest or the rape of children for those responsible for them. The Catechism speaks about the very delicate subject of chastity and homosexuality.

Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Scripture and tradition teach that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered because they violate natural law, they are closed to life, and they do not proceed from a genuine affective relationship. and sexual complementarity, and under no circumstance can they be approved."The Catechism speaks with great mercy when saying, the number of men and women with deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accorded respect. compassion and sensitivity and must not be discriminated against. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives, and if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's cross, the difficulties they may encounter from their condition. Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By growth in virtue, by the support of good friends, by prayer and the sacraments, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.