back - YOU TELL ME - 15/12/07

I’ve been a bad boy.

Someone has asked me (without any malice on his part, simply because he had been asked the question in a exam and was consulting me before answering), “What is the difference between having sex five minutes before the wedding and five minutes after?”

I’ve answered him: “Ten minutes.”

What a bad boy am I, aren’t I?

Well, you understand me.

I hope.

I’ve then added to my answer to that fine boy that the question he had been asked had been wrongly asked. Nobody has sex five minutes before the wedding or five minutes after. Such a way of speaking is frivolous, cynical, irresponsible. And when the question is wrongly framed, no answer can be expected. Whoever asked that question failed in their duty to be respectful and delicate in everything, and particularly in the matter of sex. No fooling with consciences, and no setting sacred things to ridicule.

The proper way to ask the question would be, What to thing about sex before marriage? Once it is thus framed, the answer to the question is easy: The Church forbids it, and the majority of young people have it. God manifests us his will through the Church’s teaching and through the consensus of the faithful (sensus fidelium in Latin), so that Vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God, again in Latin). With those principles, each one of the faithful forms their own conscience in freedom and responsibility and in consultation with their partner, and acts accordingly. God accepts that behaviour. The same applies, proportionately, to other situations in sexual ethics (masturbation, the pill, condoms, homosexuality, married people divorced and remarried). Always with the condition never to hurt anybody, which is the fundamental commandment, both in the teaching of the Church and in the sense of the faithful.

Am I still that bad?