Its okay to lust after your wife.

last updated 8 January 2015

Ireland

Editorial

The pope has awakened the Catholic Church to the joys of erotic love, said Dublin’s Irish Independent in an editorial. For hundreds of years, the church taught that “because of original sin, all bodily love, even that of married couples, was toxic.” The purpose of sex was to produce children, not pleasure. In fact, if a man took too much pleasure in his wife’s body, he effectively “turned her into a prostitute.” It wasn’t until the reign of Pius XII, in the 1940s, that Catholic married couples were permitted to have sex using the “rhythm method”—that is, during times when they are unlikely to conceive. But Pope Benedict XVI is not as prudish as his predecessors. In his first encyclical, the pope “speaks glowingly of bodily love as the prelude to spiritual love.” Sex between married people can be a way of showing, and sharing, God’s love. This is hardly a sexual revolution, of course. Contraception is still off-limits, as is any sex outside of marriage. But it’s a step forward. At last, the view of the “ideal sexual lover being as frigid as an icicle is being abandoned—slowly.”