Lovely.
The following is an excerpt from His Excellency's speech given at the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy, in Hanceville Alabama, July 8-11, 2014.
You can listen to his full speech here.
You can listen to his full speech here.
Marriage as the Key to the New Evangelization
The virtue of chastity is absolutely necessary for persevering in any vocation, no matter what your vocation may be, because it is necessary in order to arrive at true love, in which one makes a gift of oneself to the other, and so attains the true happiness that God created us for; this is living the way God designed it to work.
For married couples, this is lived out by the spirituality of responsible parenthood, the complete, unreserved gift of each one to the other, in conformity to God's design for marriage, all the way to the most intimate dimension of the marital relationship. The point of all this, though, is not only for the good of the couple themselves; it goes far beyond that.
How does an individual grow into a person capable of this great of love? The obvious answer, as challenging as it is in the times in which we're living, is chastity. Today's world sees this as a negative, as a deprivation, as a suppression of the sexual appetite. Chastity, though, essentially means living according to the personalistic norm in our relationships.
If you think about it, the formula is quite simple and clear: healthy societies are built on healthy, united families; healthy, united families are based on healthy, happy, harmonious marriages; and at the heart of marriage is the spiritual-sexual relationship between husband and wife. It all really comes down to that. The whole point is the plan of God for our happiness: it is clear that in the plan of God marriage is meant to be a faithful, fruitful, life-long union between a man and a woman.
The virtue of chastity is absolutely necessary for persevering in any vocation, no matter what your vocation may be, because it is necessary in order to arrive at true love, in which one makes a gift of oneself to the other, and so attains the true happiness that God created us for; this is living the way God designed it to work.
For married couples, this is lived out by the spirituality of responsible parenthood, the complete, unreserved gift of each one to the other, in conformity to God's design for marriage, all the way to the most intimate dimension of the marital relationship. The point of all this, though, is not only for the good of the couple themselves; it goes far beyond that.
How does an individual grow into a person capable of this great of love? The obvious answer, as challenging as it is in the times in which we're living, is chastity. Today's world sees this as a negative, as a deprivation, as a suppression of the sexual appetite. Chastity, though, essentially means living according to the personalistic norm in our relationships.
If you think about it, the formula is quite simple and clear: healthy societies are built on healthy, united families; healthy, united families are based on healthy, happy, harmonious marriages; and at the heart of marriage is the spiritual-sexual relationship between husband and wife. It all really comes down to that. The whole point is the plan of God for our happiness: it is clear that in the plan of God marriage is meant to be a faithful, fruitful, life-long union between a man and a woman.
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