Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - The various experiences of “methodical doubt” which have followed one another in history and have ramifications down to the “weak thought” of the present day, can never make us doubt one primary evidence with which man is called to measure himself: the existence of one's own I. At the same time each of us experiences that this existence depends not on personal will, instead, it originates outside of himself. What ever the answer one gives to this twofold evidence, there remains the undeniable fact that we realise we are a gift which has its origins in Another.
The discovery of his own mystery enables man to decline in life the consequences of the divine love of which he is the object. Recalling that he is the result of an act of pure gratuitousness, helps the human person considerably to use his freedom in the often arduous attempt to avoid reducing everyone and everything to his own possession.
We are aware that this gratuitousness on God's part is objective and can only be experienced in life on the condition that educative and psycho-affective parental relations, with which the person is educated, foster the growth of the certainty of being wanted, loved and sustained.
Nevertheless the conditions for a truth to become reasonably testable for a person, depend precisely on experience rather than the truth itself. In other words, difficulty in experiencing the gratuitousness or the gift at the origin of one's existence, does not mean that it does not exist, but rather that it is necessary to labour in order to recognise it.
Man, able to look at himself and others in this manner, finds himself filled with wonder for the greatness of what he is and, consequently, the greatness of what others are. This wonder places him in a attitude of profound respect for his own person and that of others, respect which demands a space for contemplation.
Any attitude which, because of the objective fatigue and incapacity, thinks to reduce man, compared with his real nature, would be unable to take reality into account according to the totality of its factors and permanently disrespectful of human dignity.
Applying all this to chastity, it is clear that it is not divorced from the common experience of man, instead it is the authentic expression of freedom and sign of indispensable respect among persons. If it is not 'abnormal' to dominate one's instincts to prevent them from giving rise to immoral behaviour, then neither is living chastity as self control “abnormal”.
We do not underestimate certain currents of thought which hold that the inevitable frustration arising from the impossibility to satisfy human instincts, nor do we underestimate the partiality of their idea of man: it is unreasonable to reduce the person to a bundle of instincts, and, what is more, of psychosexual nature. We feel we can affirm that I is much more that his instincts and that eventual non correspondence between his desires and their fulfilment cannot be reduced to the mere psychosexual sphere, instead it is an unavoidable element and therefore constitutive of the human experience.
Christianity calls «limit» or «sin» this lack of full correspondence, highlighting the structural fragility of the human condition and at the same time tracing paths of real and gratifying liberation through mercy.
For those who have encountered Christ and discovered that their existence is loved and saved by God who became man, chastity, instead of a frustrating moral obligation, is a joyous response to a calling to live a life which is full, truly human, and in which relationships between persons are a reflection, pale but authentic, of the one relationship with the Mystery.
If apparently the experience of chastity may seem “inhuman” or, in any case, contrary to the full realisation of man, in actual fact it is “superhuman” or better, to use terminology more suited to the development of theological science, supernatural. This term, as unknown as it is criticised, serves to indicate a profoundly human reality, which reveals man to himself, and in which it is possible to trace an explicit action of the Divine collaborating with human freedom for a deeper realisation of the I. (Agenzia Fides 9/11/2007; righe 49, parole 653)
