Some commentators on the texts of this server accuse me of being bitter and always judging situations and people I do not know, but “who do so much good to so many souls.”
I will not bother to refute that, but I will clarify that it is nothing personal against anyone; rather, it is about correcting the deviations and errors in the evangelization efforts of certain people who, instead of forming themselves, want to explain their own experiences and set themselves up as authorities on that basis, thereby confusing the many well-intentioned souls who listen to them. And this, amid social media and the vast neoconservative sector in the Church, has gotten out of hand even for the bishops, who ought to be watching over it (for that is what “bishop,” “epískopos,” means).
When the error is public, the correction must also be public.
A very clear case is that of a Catalan influencer, middle-aged, from Opus Dei, whose fame in the last 4 or 5 years has jumped from Instagram to filling halls across Spain and Latin America with couples of all ages, to whom he preaches tips on dating and marriage. Up to that point, everything is fine. It is necessary to encourage and help strengthen couples, to urge fiancés to marry and have children, and to guide them in living a healthy, Christian courtship.
The problem begins when he gets carried away and tries—whether to be funny or to leave unforgettable soundbites—and for months has been repeating a lapidary phrase everywhere: that, in marriage, sex is prayer. Videos circulate on social media that cause embarrassment and secondhand shame, in which he boasts of suggesting to his wife, “Let’s pray,” when he wants to have intimate relations with her.
Where have modesty, intimacy, and the sacredness of the sacrament of marriage gone? As we already said in another text a few months ago, the invention of an entire theology of sex by neoconservatives—supposedly based on St. John Paul II’s catecheses on the theology of the body—is turning into a sexual revolution (outdated, sixty years late) within the Catholic Church, with the usual complicity of the hierarchy. That one can speak this way about sexual relations in marriage implies a loss of the decency, shame, and modesty that have always characterized the Catholic Church.
To say that having sex within marriage is praying is not funny; it is vulgar. And it is not a Catholic way of speaking.
Alice von Hildebrand contextualizes how, since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has experienced a severe and multifaceted crisis: a crisis of faith, a crisis of authority, an intellectual crisis (there is widespread confusion), and a moral crisis. In the context of this crisis, the Theology of the Body has developed, from which all neoconservative influencers drink. Dr. von Hildebrand legitimately asks whether we are witnessing a development of doctrine or a “revolution”; because no revolution in the Catholic Church is legitimate; it cannot happen.
Traditionally, the Church chose its words with great care when referring to the mysteries of our faith or to things that are intimate and sacred. In contrast, the remarks about conjugal sex made by the influencer Borrell, though well-intentioned, border on blasphemy.
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski divides his work on marriage, Treasuring the Good of Marriage in a Throwaway Society, into four sections: “Marriage and Family,” “Living in Chastity”, “Virginity and Celibacy,” and “Contraception and Abortion.” Kwasniewski presents the witness of Scripture and the very words of Our Lord Jesus Christ about marriage, as well as the clear teachings of the Church, beginning with St. Paul.
In a statement that will surprise the neoconservative world—which seems to center its life of faith around dating, marriage, and sex—Kwasniewski, together with the Church of all times, argues that in Scripture (especially in St. Paul) and in tradition, marriage is not the supreme good. Consecrated life is considered superior to marriage, and virginity and celibacy are included in his analysis of marriage: the noble desire to marry, have children, and enjoy the support of a spouse must never become an end in itself. In this sense, marriage itself runs the risk of becoming an idol if it is not considered and lived as a path to eternal life with God.
St. Jerome and St. Augustine, two of the four Fathers of the Latin Church, were emphatic regarding conjugal sexuality, drawing on the testimony of Sacred Scripture and the tradition of the Church.
Speaking about the fasting required to receive Communion, St. Jerome considers it another form of fasting for married couples to abstain from conjugal relations for a set period before receiving the Eucharist, and he cites St. Paul, whom he believes suggests this when writing to the Corinthians: “Do not deprive each other, except perhaps by mutual consent for a time, to devote yourselves to prayer” (1 Cor 7:5). The conclusion that could be drawn from this—Jerome reflects—was that if they did so for the sake of prayer, they should do so even more to be united with Christ in the Eucharist. But what the Apostle merely hinted at, Jerome expressed explicitly.
The Apostle Paul is saying that when we unite with our wives, we cannot pray. If the conjugal act hinders the lesser good—that is, prayer—how much more does it hinder the greater good—that is, receiving the Body of Christ? Therefore, the first, irrefutable refutation of Borrell’s “thesis” comes from St. Paul, because it is the Word of God: prayer and conjugal sex are not the same.
Even before St. Jerome, other patristic figures had written extensively defending the superiority of virginity over marriage; in particular, Gregory of Nyssa and Ambrose. St. Jerome states that he repeats their arguments in his treatise against Jovinian and admits to having essentially summarized Ambrose’s reasoning, adding his own interpretation of 1 Cor 7:5: “I ask you: what good is that which hinders prayer, which does not allow me to receive the Body of Christ? When I fulfill the duty of a husband, I cannot fulfill that of a continent person.” The Apostle commands the same elsewhere: that we pray always (1 Thess 5:17). “If we are to pray always, the duty of marriage will never be fulfilled. For every time I pay the debt to my wife, I cannot pray. The reason I said this is clear, for I was interpreting that phrase of the Apostle: Do not deprive each other, except perhaps for a time by mutual consent, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer (1 Cor 7:5).
St. Paul teaches in 1 Cor 7 that marriage is a sacred gift and a reflection of Christ’s love for the Church. He considers chastity as an interior order of the heart that frees love from selfishness. For those who do not have the gift of continence, marriage is the natural and blessed state to avoid falling into fornication.
St. Peter encourages abstinence: so that your prayers may not be hindered (1 Pet 3:7). Which is greater, to pray or to receive the Body of Christ? Certainly, to receive the Body of Christ.
“Let each one examine himself and so approach the Body of Christ,” says St. Jerome in the treatise Against Jovinian; “it is not that delaying Communion for a day or two makes the Christian holier, so that what he did not deserve today he may deserve tomorrow or the day after; but that, as the pain of not having communicated with the Body of Christ afflicts me, I may deny myself the embrace of my wife, so that I may prefer the love of Christ to the love of my spouse. ‘It is hard, unbearable,’ you will say. ‘What layperson can endure this?’ Let him endure it who can; let him who cannot manage as best he can. Our concern is not to declare WHAT EACH MAN IS CAPABLE OR WILLING TO DO, but what the Scriptures command.”
St. Bede the Venerable would later borrow Jerome’s words “quotiescumque uxori debitum reddo, orare non possum” in his commentary on 1 Peter 3:7, and then summarize the rest of Jerome’s argument to his Roman disciple Pammachius: “If, according to the words of another apostle, one must pray without ceasing, then I must never serve my wife, so that at no moment does she hinder the prayer in which I am always commanded to persevere” (cf. PL 93, 55).
José Miguel Arráiz offers an irrefutable systematic exposition on St. Augustine and conjugal sexuality, showing how the Saint of Hippo also addressed concupiscence in marriage, which for him was “that disobedience of the flesh” by which the human will “has lost even its proper dominion over its own members: that carnal appetite which compels man to seek sensations, for the pleasure they provide, whether the spirit consents to it or opposes it.”
Arráiz considers that few would likely have opposed St. Augustine if he had limited himself to citing fornication or adultery as examples of concupiscence. But he is speaking of concupiscence within marriage itself, in the exercise of conjugal relations. One of the ideas he often repeats is that even in the lawful use of marriage, an evil is present—an evil that chaste spouses use well.
Augustine has been accused of being a Manichean because of certain statements that are corrected by St. Thomas Aquinas, who clearly teaches that concupiscence remains in us as a defect (poena) accompanying our fallen state, and not as a moral fault (culpa). Therefore, the virtue of conjugal chastity redeems the disorder of concupiscence that, in our fallen state, accompanies the good of marriage.
In the words of José Miguel Arráiz, “what conjugal chastity means for Augustine is evident from his comments on the account—in the Book of Genesis—that tells of the behavior of Adam and Eve before and after the Fall. Before, they were naked and yet felt no shame (Gen 2:25). In that state of integral nature, Adam and Eve experienced nothing disordered—no element of selfishness—in their conjugal attraction to each other. ‘If no sin had preceded,’ says St. Augustine, ‘man would have been begotten by the generative organs, no less obedient than the other members to a tranquil and ordered will.’ St. Augustine emphasizes the reaction of our first parents when, after sinning, they discovered that sexual desire seemed to have detached itself from conjugality: shame made them cover their members; even though they were husband and wife and alone, shame appeared in their mutual relationship. A new element had emerged that threatened the purity they had experienced in their original relationship. As an effect of concupiscence, man and woman become too absorbed in the physical aspects of sexuality and in their external attraction, making it more difficult to attain, ‘see,’ and understand the inner meaning, the true substance, and the authentic value of sexual differences and complementarity.
In the reaction of Adam and Eve, we discover ‘pudicita conjugalis’: a certain modesty or reserve between husband and wife born of their vigilance against what does not honor the mystery of their reciprocal sexuality and does not act according to the laws that their reason discovers in it; a tendency that is the temptation to use, rather than respect, the other. Adam and Eve give a first example of conjugal chastity, taking precautions to preserve their mutual love from the selfishness of that instinct ‘which does not promptly obey the will, not even of chaste spouses.’
In a column published on a Catholic website in 2022, the late priest Pedro Trevijano echoed the same theme of conjugal sexuality in St. Augustine in a way that highlighted the changes in the Church that have broken with its two-thousand-year tradition on this subject in recent decades: Fr. Trevijano noted that St. Augustine, “with regard to the conjugal act, has a severe conception (…); he gives sex a pessimistic tone, for he finds meaning in it only in its procreative purpose (…). Today the sexual act is considered perfectly licit when well performed, even for pleasure, provided, of course, there is no abuse (…). Nor does he discover that the intrinsic meaning of the sexual act is to embody conjugal love, thus remaining with a poor and excessively biological conception of this act, which would give rise to a sexual morality that is too rigid and negative.”
Therefore, nothing less than the Word of God refutes Borrell’s “thesis.” So do, among others, St. Jerome and St. Augustine, two of the four Fathers of the Latin Church, who affirm exactly the opposite of what the influencer Borrell argues. Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, his contemporary, also affirms the opposite of the influencer. How is this possible? First, because the two Fathers transmit what they have read in Revelation and Tradition, while the influencer invents, tries to be funny, and speaks only from his own experience. Second, because it is clear that the Church has changed its approach to conjugal relations since the mid-twentieth century, as Fr. Trevijano’s words show and as we already discussed in the series of texts on sexual morality and the Theology of the Body.
Note: Articles published as Opinion express the views of their authors and do not necessarily represent the editorial line of Infovaticana, which offers this space as a forum for reflection and dialogue.